Progressive World Difficulty

Vanilla Minecraft stops getting harder the moment you own a diamond sword. Progressive World Difficulty keeps the pressure on: every hostile mob that spawns is scaled by how far your world has come, so the zombies you meet at day 150 in netherite country are not the ones you met on night one.

It is built for modpacks whose progression runs well past the Ender Dragon, and every number is configurable.

What makes mobs stronger

Four things add up to one difficulty score, read at the moment a mob spawns:

• World age — difficulty creeps up every in-game day after a short grace period.
• Distance from spawn — the further from 0, 0 a mob spawns, the harder it is, maxing out at 10,000 blocks. Nether distances count ×8, the same as travel does.
• Your gear — the armour, toughness, weapon damage and enchantment levels of the nearest player. Modded gear can push this further than vanilla gear ever can.
• Milestones — killing the Ender Dragon, the Wither, the Warden or an Elder Guardian, and advancements such as reaching the Nether or earning an Elytra, raise difficulty for the whole world, permanently.

On top of that, the Nether multiplies the total by 1.25 and the End by 1.5.

What it does to mobs

• Health — up to 7× vanilla at the default ceiling.
• Damage dealt to players — up to 4×, covering melee, arrows, explosions and fireballs alike. Armour and enchantments still reduce it as normal.
• Optional extras — movement speed, armour and knockback resistance, all off by default.

A brand-new world plays exactly like vanilla. Difficulty is locked in when a mob spawns, so each mob keeps the strength it spawned with.

Death relief

Getting walled in by mobs you cannot beat is no fun. If a player dies more than once within ten minutes, mobs spawning near them get weaker for a while, and the effect fades on its own once they stop dying. A single unlucky death does nothing, and a string of quick deaths while recovering your items only counts once.

Commands

• /pwd — the difficulty where you are standing, broken down by source, plus the health and damage multipliers a mob spawning there would get.
• /pwd milestones — which milestones your world has reached.
• /pwd reload — reloads the config (operators only).

Configuration

Everything lives in config/progressive_world_difficulty.json5, with a short comment on every option: rates, caps, which mobs are affected, per-mob multipliers, the boss and advancement milestones (add your modpack's own bosses), dimension multipliers and the death relief settings.

Bosses count as monsters and are scaled like any other mob. Add them to the exclude list to keep boss fights vanilla.

Requirements

• Minecraft 26.2
• Fabric Loader 0.19.5 or newer
• Fabric API
• Java 25

All of the logic runs on the server, and it works in singleplayer too.

Modpacks

You are welcome to include this mod in any modpack.