Aquatic Craft

Now in the Overworld! (For versions 1.16.5 and 1.20.1!)

Description:

This mod adds an expansive, fleshed-out aquatic dimension with unique biomes, challenging bosses, lengthy series of progression, and overall difficulty curve extending far beyond the scope of vanilla. It's designed to be playable from scratch - with everything you need being obtainable within the dimension - and it can be quickly accessed depending on the player's luck finding a heart of the sea.

Like many of us, before Minecraft's Aquatic Update was released, I felt that Minecraft oceans could use an overhaul. Ideas that I initially had back in 2014 slowly built up over time, and after discovering MCreator I tried to begin working on this mod in 2016. Some things fell through, however; I felt like I didn't have enough to work with, and I later abandoned the project.
I came back to it in early 2020 and thought I'd give it another shot. After a lot of brainstorming- and inspiration from the Aquatic Update itself, I felt like I was finally prepared. And now, two and a half years of on-and-off development, I present Aquatic Craft!

Please note that Minecraft 1.18+'s terrain generation results in unintentional and seemingly uncontrollable terrain within the Aquatic Dimension. (Mob animations also broke.) The mod was balanced around prior generation settings and is best played in 1.16. If you want to experience the mod as it was intended, I highly suggest the most recent 1.16 version!

Features:

This mod consists of two new dimensions, which themselves contain:

• 10 unique biomes, as well as 3 sub-biomes
• A sea level of y=128,
• 90+ blocks - including stairs, slabs, and walls for 3 different stone variants,
• 450+ items - including 90 status effect fish (counting both raw and cooked),
• 18 armor sets - each with a set bonus,
• 13 weapon/tool sets - most come pre-enchanted,
• 20 ranged weapons - including 8 tiers of tridents,
• 25 off-hand "trinkets" - which provide a variety of effects when held,
• 9 fishing rods - along with a whole new fishing system! (details below),
• 135+ mobs (excluding those aforementioned fish - which aren't mobs),
• 20 bosses - 4 being minibosses,
• 8 new status effects, (details below)
• And environmental hazards! (details below)

More internally speaking, there are also:

• 430+ procedures,
• 680+ recipes - including 175+ recipes for craftable spawn eggs and 135 recipes for different ways of cooking all those fish!
• 180+ advancements,
• And a whopping 2,200+ total mod elements!

(I do intentionally want to be a little stingy on details regarding exactly what all is in the mod, since I'd like to give players the joy of discovering things for themselves.
If there are any questions, however, I will be happy to answer them.
I tried to keep things pretty intuitive, but I will also describe anything important that you may want to know before getting your feet wet, in the "Good to know" section below.
By all means play how you want, but I highly suggest playing through the mod in survival mode before playing around with things in creative!)

Getting there:

The portal to the aquatic dimension consists of just a single block, which when right-clicked will transport you between dimensions.

All you need to craft this portal is some iron, glass, prismarine crystals, and a heart of the sea. Acquiring a bucket of water will start a short series of advancements to guide you towards creating a portal and will grant you the recipe to craft one.

In order to make things a little more beginner-friendly, there are "prismarine fish" that spawn in the Overworld at depths of y=45 or below. Locating these will require finding a deeper ocean or some underwater caves, but should prove more convenient than seeking out and defeating guardians.

Lastly, while I haven't made the process of acquiring a heart of the sea any simpler, if you weren't aware, you are able to feed dolphins raw fish and they'll lead you towards the nearest underwater chest - if there are any within their detection range. This feature can help immensely when searching for a treasure map!

...Or if you just can't wait to dive in... "/give @s aquaticcraft:aq_portal_block"

Good to know:

General:

• In the 1.16 version, due to the increased height of sea level within the dimension, having clouds enabled makes things look really bizarre. I highly suggest disabling clouds in your video settings!
• As of the 1.16.5 version, the biome generation got a little funky. I tried re-creating the original look of each biome, but there still a few issues – including biomes within the dimensions generating the same size, shape, and placement in every world save.
• The vast majority of items have tooltips. Many of them are helpful and hint at the items use, some are just for flavor.
• The mod has its own advancements tab that guides you through the mod and rewards you with recipes when you collect certain items.
• Many pieces of equipment have their own built-in enchantments. However, most equipment only gains its enchantments when it is crafted. Meaning that you cannot see their enchantments in the creative menu, and if you were to pull them out of the creative menu, they won't be enchanted! Crafting two of the same item together will cause them to become enchanted, however.
• This mod adds scute to the turtle drop table. Turtle shell helmets grant the wearer 10 seconds of water breathing each time they dive underwater. Hunting down turtles for enough scute to craft a helmet will greatly help in early game progression!
• Shark leather armor earns a notable mention as it grants the Dolphin's Grace effect as its set bonus. It isn't very durable, though, and thus isn't suited for combat, but it's your definite go-to for exploring!
• Each biome has its own boss, and boss progression goes through the mod's biomes as follows: Tranquil Archipelago, Commonwaters, Kelp Forest, Bright Reef, Sea Mount, Algid Brine, Thermal Ridge, Unrelenting Expanse, Abyssal Depths. This isn't to necessarily mean that you should avoid later biomes in the early game, however, as they each offer a variety of resources. The mod's advancements are also displayed in the intended order of progression. They're there to refer to and serve as a guide in case you're not sure what to do next.
• Recipes for boss summoning items are unlocked as you collect their key ingredients - which are dropped from the rarer, larger, and more powerful mobs of each biome. A fishing rod of Aquamarine tier or higher is also required to catch several of the fish needed to craft boss summons. So I highly recommend using the first Aquamarine Gem you find to craft a rod!
• In terms of difficulty, I tested the first couple of bosses with Shark Mail armor (comparable to chain mail) and an iron sword, and the last bosses will require near-endgame equipment.
  Be warned, however, that bosses are designed to be challenging and you may need to think outside the box a little in order to defeat them!

Status Effects:

The mod adds 7-8 new status effects, depending on technicality: Blood Loss, Crushing Depths, Pulled Down, Cooldown, Disease, Catlike, Vampiric Strike, and Hallucinating.

• Blood Loss is essentially the same as Wither. While I definitely took some fun, creative liberties with things (e.g. an Ice Skate mob) I wanted to keep some things closer to realism. Most sharks will not be immediately aggressive toward the player. However, if you are low on health, or bleeding, then they will be!
  Higher levels of this effect will increase the rate that the target takes damage.
• Crushing Depths is one of the environmental hazards in the aquatic dimension (see more below), that involves players taking pressure damage if they dive too deep without having a sufficient armor rating. It behaves similarly to Blood Loss and will deal increased damage at higher levels.
• The Pulled Down effect causes the target to be forcefully dragged downwards whilst they're in water. At lower levels players will still be able to outswim the effect, but higher levels can make surfacing impossible.
• The Cooldown effect was created simply as a way to measure the passing of time without needing to constantly add to- or subtract from- a variable, or telling procedures to wait so many ticks and then perform an action. Many things make use of the Cooldown effect to determine when or when not to perform their own action.
• Disease further inflicts a variety of negative effects on its victim, poisoning, slowing, starving, and at higher levels, weakening them too. Mobs affected by Disease are able to infect others by close proximity, although the level of the effect that the target receives is one less than the mob they contracted it from. Mobs that are considered undead won't be afflicted by the negative effects of Disease and thus won't be weakened or slowed by it, but they can still carry Disease and infect others!
• The Catlike effect combines the wonders of being a cat: such as increased speed and agility, immunity to fall damage, night vision in the dark, scaring away creepers, and... meowing? This effect forces the player to wear a tiny invisible cat - thus allowing them to scare away creepers. Meowing was an unintentional, but welcome side-effect.
• Vampiric Strike is as its name implies: a way to heal oneself through harming others. Each level of Vampiric Strike will heal the attacker one lifepoint per attack - with a short cooldown after restoring health - preventing spammable healing.
• Lastly, Hallucination... Being afflicted with Hallucination, players will start to see and hear things that aren't really there...or are they?

Environmental Hazards:

To make things both a little more challenging and interesting, I decided to add several environmental hazards to my dimensions:

• Poison: A few mobs, including a motionless "algae" mob, are able to poison players (and in most cases, other mobs too) that get too close to them. Beware the box jellyfish! Brine, a white fluid that replaces water in the deepest, darkest regions of the world, (or just the Aquatic Void dimension as of 1.16.5) will also inflict poison unless appropriate equipment is worn.
• Pressure: At certain depth increments, players need higher armor values to prevent taking pressure damage while they're in water. This effect functions similarly to suffocation.
  The player must have an armor rating of 5+ at depths of 90 or below, 10+ at depths of 70 or below, 15+ at depths of 50 or below, and 20+ at depths of 30 or below, to prevent taking pressure damage.
  Once you begin taking damage you will receive the Crushing Depths status effect (see above) and receive a warning message briefly explaining what's happening. For every 5 armor rating, the level of the effect will decrease by one. For example: if you wear a full set of chain mail armor at depths between 30 and 50, you will be inflicted with Crushing Depths I, rather than Crushing Depths III.
• Blindness: At depths of 30 or below, players will be inflicted with a constant blindness status effect - regardless of whether they're in water or not. This effect is also prevalent throughout the whole of the Aquatic Void dimension.
  Note that blindness prevents sprinting, as well as "swimming", thus hindering underwater movement. This effect can be prevented with the right equipment.
  Being underwater in the Abyssal Depths biome will also function similarly to blindness without actually inflicting it, due to the blackened water color.
• Cold: The Algid Brine biome will inflict slowness on players who swim there. This effect can be countered by wearing a piece of Thermal armor.
  The Algid boss inflicts greater levels of cold, which in turn may be countered by wearing more pieces of Thermal armor.
• Heat: The Thermal Ridge biome will continuously burn players who swim there. This effect can be countered by wearing a piece of Algid armor.
  The Thermal boss similarly inflicts greater levels of heat, which in turn may be countered by wearing more pieces of Algid armor, and/or by having the fire resistance effect.

Not really "hazards" per se, but still worth mentioning are:

• Time of Day and Moon Phase: The spawn rates of a few mobs, namely different jellyfish and Nightfish, are tied to both the time of day, as well as the phase of the moon.
• The closer toward midnight and the fuller the moon, the more jellies will spawn - leaving little to no jellies on nights where the moon is emptier and plenty during nights with a full moon.
• The closer toward midnight but emptier the moon, the more Nightfish will spawn - preventing them from spawning during nights of the full moon, but making them commonplace on new moon nights.

Fishing:

This mod includes its own fishing system - which functions very similarly to, but still a bit different to vanilla. There are nine new fishing rods - each having their own "wait time", "bite chance", and pool of catches. There are also four types of bait that are required to catch the mod's fish. Note that helpful tooltips are provided on both bait and rods.

To try and explain this system: In order to catch one of the mod's fish, you must hold a certain type of bait in your off-hand slot - the type depending on the biome you want to fish in. Fruit Paste is crafted from wheat and tropical berries (uncommonly found in the Tranquil Archipelago), Shrimp can be obtained from killing some arthropods or large filter-feeders, Fish Chunks can be crafted by putting poisonous fish meat by itself in a crafting table, and Zombie Worms can be obtained from killing certain mobs in the Hadal Stretch (Aquatic Void as of 1.16.5).

Each biome has its own pool of potential catches and each fishing rod has its own sub section of 4 items from each of those biomes' pools. Things aren't so specific that you must use x rod in y biome in order to catch z fish, as there is some overlap between what each rod is able to catch, but higher-tier fish are generally restricted to higher-tier rods. You are able to catch every unique non-hadal fish using a combination of the Stone Rod and Aquamarine Rod, however!

A fishing rod's "wait time" is how much time passes between each "bite chance", which itself is a percentage of how likely the rod is to successfully get a bite.
For example, a stone rod has a wait time of 48 ticks and a bite chance of ~1/15. An aquamarine rod has a wait time of 28 ticks and a bite chance of ~1/12. Every 48 ticks a stone rod will run a check with a ~1/15 chance of success to see if it gets a bite or not; whereas an aquamarine rod performs a check with a ~1/12 chance of success every 28 ticks!

How will you know if you get a successful bite? The fishing bobber will suddenly jerk downwards about a block or so and there'll be an audible 'sploosh' noise. Right-click after that happens to reel your rod back in. I tried to make it pretty obvious. Just be patient and you'll work it out!

Now, why would you want to fish, if you aren't already so inclined? Most of the fish correspond to a certain status effect - they're basically like fishing up potions! Some act as loot bags and can give a variety of miscellaneous resources. Those that do function similarly to potions generally provide a level I effect when eaten raw and a level II effect after having been cooked, but not for as long. Some do provide effects of a higher level and I tried balancing them pretty well, but the concept of 'raw = lower-tier, longer-lasting' and 'cooked = higher-tier, shorter-lasting' remains true for most of them.

Several fish are also required to craft items to summon the mod's bosses, and an Aquamarine or higher tier rod is required to catch several of these!

Vanilla changes:

Not much to mention here, but I have altered the loot tables of turtles and dolphins to include scute, and a new item, sinew, respectively. As of 2.5.0, pufferfish may now drop sponge chunks too.
I don't know what this may mean for any potential incompatibility with other mods that have also altered these loot tables, but I can't imagine too many mods have done this.

Any equipment with the sharpness or impaling enchantments will also inflict Blood Loss for a short period of time.

Lastly, magma blocks now drop fragments, similarly to glowstone blocks, instead of their whole selves - which now require silk touch. 4 fragments can be combined into magma blocks and magma blocks can be crafted into 4 fragments.

Looking Forward:

At the time of writing, the mod is considered complete in the sense that it has satisfying progression from start to finish. No further content updates are planned, but I'll certainly keep an eye out for bugs and may add or tweak things further down the line.

What about 1.16+? Well, when I started working on the mod again in MCreator, it was being designed for 1.14. At that time I didn't have too much in the mod, so updating it went fairly smooth. Once MCreator was first getting around to supporting 1.16 I did make a backup and tried updating again; however, I just couldn't get biomes to generate correctly, so I stuck with 1.15. I believe this issue was later noticed and resolved; but another problem is that I also have a lot more stuff in my mod now, and quite a bit of it has locked code. While I don't fully understand Java, often times I will tweak existing code, or add or remove something that MCreator doesn't have the option to simply select by default. Essentially, it'll take quite some effort to update versions.
Now that I'm "done" with the mod, however, updating it is one of the few things I have left to do for it; but as of the time of writing, it still isn't a high priority.

Edit: I initially intended to update my mod and then publish it to Curse; however, after having difficulties with MCreator attempting to work on my mod in 1.16 and 1.18, I have decided to publish it now and likely won't ever update it again. Apologies for the inconvienence~

The one-year anniversary of the mod having been uploaded to MCreator was coming around and I decided to give updating to 1.16 another shot. I realized that it was better to have a mod- even if part of it were broken- updated so more people can experience and enjoy it, than to leave it stagnate in an older version of the game. After getting over a few large hurdles I managed to re-create something similar to the 1.15 version. Then it just took several weeks after that to make countless smaller adjustments to get things just right…

What about 1.17+? It’s something I’ve yet to look into, but it is planned. Who knows!

A 1.17 version of the mod has been scrapped. The MCreator versions I have the 1.16 and 1.18 versions of the mod in no longer support 1.17 and due to its lesser popularity, I don't believe creating a 1.17 version would be worthwhile. 

What about 1.19+? I have no intentions of updating the mod to any other versions. As more and more things change in vanilla Minecraft, more things in the mod end up 'breaking', too. I'd love to continue updating the mod if it were quick to do so, and if I had more control over how things look and behave, but it's quite the time investment to update a mod as large as this! 1.18 will be as far as Aquatic Craft goes.

All right, I was convinced. Here's to 1.19.2, 1.19.4, and 1.20.1! Even though things keep breaking and I need to keep fixing them, I suppose I'll keep updating Aquatic Craft as long as I can, if a bit delayed... Aquatic Craft: Overworld Edition is planned!

What about mob animations? Ugh, don't remind me... I am not looking forward to fixing them all and updating 4+ versions with all of them.

What's the 1.18.2 mountainous seed edition? The 1.16 and 1.18 versions force me to use a set seed in the dimension settings, which I need to have locked in order to set and keep the sea level to 128. While testing out changes in new worlds, I like to use different seeds to see if I can get anything new and interesting. The mountainous edition is just a one-off with a huge mountainous region just east (positive x) of 0, 0. The seed itself is 3678624066296237212. The seed for the regular version is 4448555006753193073.

I've been unable to work on the mod as much as I would like to thus far this year, but I plan to do a little bug testing in 1.19 and below and fix those versions before continuing work on Overworld Edition 1.16. (Which is currently in-progress and I plan to release as the first OE version.)

Edit as of version 2.5.0 here: I intend to update the 1.16.5 Overworld Edition next, followed by the main 1.20.1 version. Then I'll work on 1.19.2, cutting support for 1.19.4 and possibly for 1.18.2 too. I'd also like to spend time working on my other mod projects, but I DO intend to try and release 1.16.5 OE and 1.20.1 ME before then! 1.20.1 OE is a bigger can of worms due to the way biome generation works so it'll be saved for last.

Additionally, 2.5.0 marks the end of planned content updates for Aquatic Craft. I do still have some ideas floating around, but after updating other versions to 2.5.0, Aquatic Craft will more or less permanently be on the back burner compared to other projects. Aside from bug fixes, or maybe smaller additions, I'll be "done" with Aquatic Craft from here on out. That being said, I don't want the mod to die off in increasingly outdated versions of Minecraft and I do intend to try and keep the mod updated over time. Just don't expect any more content updates! (Animations? Ughhh... Not looking forward to it. x_x)

2.5.1 edit: I've updated the main 1.20.1 edition and 1.16.5 Overworld Edition with the features of 2.5.0 and did some extra tweaks and bug fixing for 2.5.1. Please continue to let me know if there are any notable bugs. I appreciate it. I'll be taking a break to work on other projects now, so I'll be holding off on 1.18 and 1.19 for now.

Please feel free to mention any questions/concerns on this mod's discussion thread. And if and when questions have been asked frequently enough, I shall update this post with a FAQ. Feel free to play it in multiplayer, record playthroughs, add it to your own modpacks (hopefully there won't be any conflicts), and all that jazz!

I do now give permission to create and upload custom, public modpacks containing this mod online, however that works! If there are any issues, I'm not to be held responsible for them, and I won’t update the 1.15 version in the event any conflicts arise, but I’ll see what I can do about later versions.
If you do record a let's play/playthrough, please provide a link to this mod's page on Curse Forge or the MCreator website.

Enjoy!~