Primitive Ages

Minecraft's first ten minutes become your first few days.

Primitive Ages is a prehistoric survival mod for NeoForge. You start with bare hands and no way to punch a tree. You knap stone into blades, twist plant fiber into cordage, haft your own tools and light fires by hand. Then you work up from copper to bronze to iron. Once you have iron, progression is vanilla again. Biomes, mobs, the Nether and the End aren't changed.

You get the Primitive Survival Guide on first join. It's an in-game book that walks through every step, with live recipes.

Progression

Playing at a normal pace, the stone and copper ages take two to three in-game days.

Features

Stone tools

• Knapping: hold two rocks or flint and strike cells off a 5x5 core to match a pattern. Clean work makes a Fine head (+15% durability). Too many fractures make it Rough.
• Hafting: put a head on a stick with cordage, bark strips, sinew or retted cordage. Better bindings last longer. The head often survives when the tool breaks.
• The knife cuts plant fiber from grass, peels bark, cuts vines and butchers animals for hide, sinew, bone and fat. Knives come in every tier, from stone to netherite.
• Also a sling, a stone spear, a hand drill and a bow drill.

Fire

• Build a fire lay from tinder, kindling and logs. Light it with a drill, then blow the ember into flame.
• Rain puts out an unsheltered fire. A fire with no fuel falls to embers, which you can revive, and left too long it goes cold.
• Ring a fire with rocks to make a fire pit. A pit can take a cooking spit, a clay cooking pot or a thatch cover that turns it into a pit kiln.
• Primitive torches are lit at a fire and burn out after two in-game days. An ember pot carries fire with you.

Pottery and metal

• Shape clay by hand into pots, basins, jugs, molds and more, then fire them in the pit kiln.
• Raw copper fires into ingots in the kiln, before you have a furnace.
• Seared bricks build the first furnace. Tin ore generates a little rarer than iron. Bronze tools and armor are as strong as iron but wear out like copper.

Workshop

• Primitive crafting table: lay items on a log stump and strike it with a crafting rock.
• Millstone: a hand-turned stone that grinds flour, dye, bone meal, sugar, gravel, flint and metal dust.
• Chopping block for planks and sticks.
• Horse power: hitch a horse, donkey, llama or camel to a millstone or chopping block and it walks circles doing the work.
• Wind power (iron age): a windmill-driven millstone and sawmill. They need open sky, and they run faster in rain and storms.
• Baskets, primitive chests, a hide bag, drying racks, a loom, rope, fish traps and snares.

Food and water

• Roast on a spit and boil stews in a clay pot over the fire.
• Brew tea from wild tea and herbs, and ferment cider and mead in a sealed basin. Each gives a short buff.
• Boil sea water down to salt, salt your meat and dry it into jerky. Pemmican never spoils.
• Pots and basins hold water in millibuckets and work with pipes from fluid mods.

Hides and shelter

• Animals drop hides. Scrape them on a drying rack, tan them in a basin with bark, then dry them into leather.
• Hide wraps are your first warm clothing.
• Thatch, lean-tos, wattle and daub, a bedroll and a placeable mud hut.

Spirit

• Paint cave art on stone with red ochre or charcoal. There are fourteen pictures.
• Bone flute (calls animals), war drum (scares off monsters), herb bundles and a ceremonial bowl (area buffs).
• A spirit shrine grants a boon of your choice for a spider eye. A spirit post keeps hostile mobs away.

Survival (all optional)

• Thirst: drinking straight from a river can make you sick, and sea water makes it worse. Boiled water and rain are safe to drink.
• Temperature: biome, altitude, weather, shelter, fire and clothing all affect it. It turns itself off if Serene Seasons, Tough As Nails, Cold Sweat or Legendary Survival Overhaul is installed.
• Spoilage: food rots on a shelf life. Salting, drying and a preservative make it keep.
• Raw food can make you sick.

Gating

• Vanilla wooden and cobblestone tools can't be crafted, and planks need an axe.
• The crafting table needs copper, and chests and barrels need iron.
• The iron hoe is the first hoe. Until then, farmers and wandering traders sell farmland for bone meal.
• Ruins: until you reach bronze, furniture in villages and other structures breaks into salvage, and their loot comes a tier lower. You can't skip ahead by raiding a village.

Configuration

• Every system has a toggle, and the pacing numbers are adjustable. Configs can be edited in game through the NeoForge config screen.
• Thirst, temperature and spoilage are game rules, so you can switch them per world when you create it.
• Presets: GENTLE (punching logs allowed, easier fire starting, temperature is cosmetic only), STANDARD (default) and PRIMAL (harsher).
• Accessibility: a pattern overlay for knapping and pottery, a colorblind-safe palette, toggle mode for hold-to-use actions and audio cues for fire state. Every minigame also has a plain crafting fallback.

For modpacks

• Knapping patterns, pottery, fuels, butchering drops and all recipes are datapack JSON.
• Tin, bronze, dusts and knives use common c: tags, so they work with other mods' versions.
• You can keep vanilla recipes the mod removes (keepRecipes), remove more (removeRecipes) and turn off the starting guide (giveFieldGuide).
• Any recipe can be tied to a config option with the primitiveages:config_gated recipe type.

Requirements

• Minecraft 26.1.2
• NeoForge 26.1.2.100 or newer
• Modonomicon 2.17.0 or newer (required, for the field guide)
• Required on both client and server

Optional

• JEI: recipe categories for every new crafting type, plus info pages for things done in the world
• Jade: fire state and heat, pot and basin contents, torch burn time and machine status

FAQ

Can I add this to an existing world? Yes, but it's built for a fresh start. Structures generated before you install it aren't affected by the ruins rules.

Does it change the Nether or the End? No. Once you have iron, everything is vanilla.

It's too hard / too easy. Try the GENTLE or PRIMAL preset, or turn individual systems off in the server config.