Rough Beginnings

Rough Beginnings is a small early-game survival overhaul that combines heavily modified early-stage progression with a change that stops trees from being punched down by hand. It changes how a new world begins: grass gives plant fiber when punched, leaves can be broken by hand, and a few early items are gated behind rocks and knapping instead of a crafting table. Servers that run it need every player to install it too. Two hard dependencies are named by the mod, and they are pure compatibility patches that only activate when the mod is present.

The mod is built for players who want the first thirty minutes of a world to be more deliberate, and for server owners who want an early game with a slower pace. Finer control is available through the breakable block tag and the canbreak item tag, and sieve drops are defined per block in a data pack, so a server can add its own drops without touching the jar. The full breakdown of which code came from where is kept in the ATTRIBUTIONS file. Files are published for NeoForge only, for 1.21.1, with V1.0.0 as the latest file from 2026-05-04. The code is under the MIT License and is open source.