Overview of AlmostVanilla

AlmostVanilla strives to preserve the core gameplay elements of Vanilla Survival, while make small improvements (especially for multiplayer servers) where possible.

Packs

Death Location (tell coords of death location)

Ender XP Storage (players can store XP in Ender Chests)

Insomnia (allow players to opt-out of sleep)

Leather Smelting (smelt leather armor into rabbit hide)

Loot Recipes (provide recipes for crafting dungeon loot)

Mob Drops (adjusted mob loot tables)

More Recipes (more convenient recipes)

Score Display (show health and levels to other players)

Silk Touch Spawners (pick up spawners with silk touch)

Goals

✅ DO

Reduce scarcity of certain items in relation to number/activity of players

As more players spend more time on a server, loot (from temples, one-time-spawn mobs, ruins, etc) because more-and-more difficult to find, and players are forced to continuously expand the world and spend more-and-more time simply traversing terrain to get to unexplored areas. AlmostVanilla aims to make servers still accessible and rewarding for new players, even if other players have already discovered a lot of the world.

Introduce already-existing but unused features

There are a lot of features that exist in minecraft without any way of using them in survival. AlmostVanilla aims to bring these features into survival in an intuitive and fair way.

Include ‘wait I thought that was already part of the game’-style features

Wait, can’t you mine a mob spawner with silk touch? I thought that the dragon dropped a dragon head when it died. Oh, you can’t craft saddles?

These are some of the kinds of things AlmostVanilla aims to bring into the game; things that make sense to many players and yet just aren’t a part of vanilla survival.

🚫 DON’T

Create “overpowered” or “post-game” content

AlmostVanilla is not attempting to change players’ goals nor their aspirations for what to create. While these datapacks may make some previously-impossible things possible, things that could be considered “game-breaking” are avoided.

Add player commands

Players don’t need to know any commands to play regular vanilla survival minecraft, so they shouldn’t need to learn any to play AlmostVanilla.

Add complex systems for players to learn

Similarly, this is not a modpack that introduces a lot of new blocks and tutorials; the features in AlmostVanilla should not be more-complicated than the regular features in vanilla.

Planned Features

Multiplayer

• Easier coordinate sharing

Gameplay

• Armor Stands with arms
• Better Iron Golem spawning

Items

• Alternative method for obtaining shulker shells
• More totems
• Horse whistle
• Turrets
• Way to obtain player heads