Underground Living

Another game that my friends and I play from time to time is Minecraft. Specifically we play on the Java version which allows us to mod the game to spice the game up a bit when we want something different than the normal experience. Recently this happened and I made a datapack for the game which changes some slight things about how the game works to provide an interesting challenge.

What it does​

The datapack named Underground Living aptly forces players to live under ground in the game. The datapack does this by detecting if a player is exposed to the sky. If the player is exposed to the sky it starts damaging them. The datapack also applies hunger to players if they are too high up in the world regardless if they are exposed to the sky or not. These two changes force players to live underground as living on the surface would be more challenging or impossible. When playing we noticed this provided some interesting challenges beyond what was expected as we could not get certain items easily such as food and leather. Overall these simple changes resulted in a fun but different take on the normal gameplay of Minecraft and provide my friends and I with some fun.

Making the Datapack​

Making the datapack overall was a simple process. The datapack uses the mcfunction language along with json files as is required by Minecraft. I was able to find resources online that helped me get the sky detection working along other general tutorials on how to setup the datapack so that Minecraft would recognize it. Lastly I made this mod a datapack instead a of a traditional mod as it allowed us to run it on a Minecraft Realm sever and no one needed to install anything client side as the server did all the work.

Undergound Living Code​

You can view the code for the datapack here.