Better Difficulty

Rather than only raising the vanilla difficulty slider, the mod introduces a Game Stage system with three tiers. A world moves forward through the stages automatically when a player reaches key milestones, such as entering the Nether or defeating the Ender Dragon, which sets the Master stage. Server operators can also set the stage by hand with the betterdifficulty stage set command. Progress is saved and persists across server restarts, and the state includes whether a Blood Moon has already rolled that night.

Over 21 gameplay features can be toggled individually in the config, and each one scales with the current stage. Mobs spawn with bonus health and damage, Creepers can spawn charged, Endermen teleport aggressively, and Pillagers and Evokers carry new gear. Hostile spawn pressure on the surface doubles, and players cannot sleep until dawn. Stages can also be tracked for each player, so individual players on one server can face different difficulty levels.

The mod is distributed for Fabric and NeoForge, and it runs on client and server, so both the server and every player need it. Builds target 1.21.1 only, and the code is released under the MIT License, but the project is not open source.