Category: Iberia

The first release of Iberia was not designed with the multiplayer experience in mind. Many of the original challenges just didn’t make sense when you tried to play multiplayer. Sleep to Heal is great in a single player world, but in multiplayer it can be difficult to get everyone to sleep so that you can heal. Find Your Way is a nice challenge, but really only worked because the world spawn was continuously moving, so compasses would point to your last respawn point. If that happened in a multiplayer world anybody could just go find the latest player to die by following their compasses and bring them back to civilization. So that wrecked Death With Consequences, which didn’t really extend to multiple players on it’s own anyway. At least hard stone and armor slowing crafting are fundamentally single player in a way that still works fine with multiplayer.

So, Iberia 2 is all about designing something that makes sense when you’re playing with friends. Except for hard stone, all of the challenges have been rethought.

Before I dig into the details, though, here’s an awesome mod review that JSQ made:

Armor

Let’s get armor out of the way first. Iberian armor is now more than just an annoyance when trying to craft or open chests. That drawback has been toned back to fit into a bigger story: armor has purposes in Iberia 2, which will give you a reason to wear types of armor other than just iron (early game) and diamond (late game).

Leather armor is a great all around armor without any drawbacks, except that it offers fairly light protection. On the opposite end of the spectrum is diamond armor. In addition to slowing crafting access (but not chest access), diamond armor will slow you down when using axes, pickaxes, and shovels, it will make you trample crops when walking on them, and prevent you from placing blocks when jumping or falling.

Iron only has some of these drawbacks, and chain has even less, giving you a reason beyond aesthetics to wear chain armor.

Finally, gold armor is ceremonial. As such, it slows you down. But it’s also necessary to unlock enchantment levels above 22. Each piece of golden armor you’re wearing will unlock 2 more enchantment levels, up to the max of 30.

None of that is specifically multiplayer, but armor needed a reworking from Iberia 1.

Spawn

So now, to the multiplayer aspects of Iberia 2. It’s impossible to talk seriously about sleep, healing, and navigation without first discussing spawn. In Iberia, everyone spawns separately. So, on a new server with Iberia, the first player to join will spawn one place, the next one 1000+ blocks away, the next one 1000+ blocks from there. Because the direction is always random, it’s very possible for two players to spawn near each other, but for the most part, when you join a server you won’t be near anyone. You’ll be alone.

This immediately adds a new objective to the game. Alongside building a base, enchanting your armor, defeating the Ender Dragon, and getting a beacon, you can now work to explore your world to find others. In single player Iberia, the only reason to do that was to find your old bases. And you’ll still respawn in a completely new place when you die, giving you a completely new start. But in multiplayer, you also explore to find other players. You have a reason to explore beyond just finding a few rare biomes or trying to find the perfect location for a base. Now you could stumble upon the amazing build of another player, or maybe just a small early game hut. The world now has variety that is only limited by how many players there are and what those players can build. And it’s all out there to find once you go exploring.

Navigation

Which brings us to the next challenge: navigation. In Iberia, the F3 debug screen doesn’t show your coordinates, so you cannot find your way using that. You’ll need to build waypoints, use compasses and maps, or have a really good spatial memory. Compasses in Iberia are special in that they point to the personal spawn point of the user who crafted them. So you can build compasses and share them with others and they’ll be able to find your place.

Sleep

Next up: sleep. Nobody likes sleep in multiplayer, because everyone currently playing has to sleep at the same time, which is a pain. So the first change to sleep in Iberia is to make it so that all players have to sleep, but not necessarily at the same time. So if Alice and Bob are playing and night comes, Alice can go to sleep, wait till she’s fully asleep, and then get out of bed. Later that night, when Bob decides to sleep, once he’s fully asleep he’ll wake up and the world time will switch to day. You’ll still have to wait for the other players to sleep for night to turn to day, but you don’t need to wait around in your bed till everyone sleeps at the same time.

But that’s not a challenge. The challenge is that you may have a sleepless night. If your bed is not protected, there is a good chance you’ll wake up in the middle of the night to the sounds of zombies. You can protect your bed by covering it and the surrounding blocks, so the sky isn’t visible, and then lighting up the surrounding area. In multiplayer, if anyone wakes in the middle of the night everyone does. Consider that even further incentive to protect your bed.

Healing

Finally, natural regeneration is turned off. As in Iberia 1, you can heal by sleeping. Due to the nature of multiplayer sleep, the healing will happen when you get out of bed, even if day doesn’t come immediately. The default amount you heal has also been balanced upwards a little bit.

That’s it for Iberia 2. I’m starting a server with my sons to playtest all the new multiplayer stuff, and make sure things feel balanced. In the meantime, feel free to check out the release, and let me know what works, what doesn’t, and what new challenges you’d like to see.

One reason I like the Death With Consequences challenge in Iberia is that you can use the forced restart that comes with a death to challenge yourself in a new way each time. I’m a big fan of self-imposed challenges to make the game more fun, exciting, difficult, or just plain weird. They can change the way you play so significantly that you accomplish completely different things, learn about whole areas of the game you’ve never explored, and leave you with a totally new experience each time you play.

But that’s all just high falutin talk – let’s get down to brass tacks. I first discovered the concept of self-imposed challenges when I heard about the city construction challenge. It’s a challenge where you willingly submit to a set of rules that limits what tech you can use in the game, and to level up you have to build parts of a city, until you’ve eventually got a whole city built. As I played I realized that I had imposed challenges on myself before that, specifically not letting myself branch mine until I had diamonds. That forced me to explore caves or trade with villagers. Since then I’ve tried other challenges, like not using the F3 debug screen, turning off natural regeneration, etc.

At this point, you’ve probably noticed that some of these ideas made it into Iberia. In fact, Iberia came from me trying to take self-imposed challenges and enforce them in a realistic way through a Minecraft mod. And now that I have it, I’ve realized it not only imposes obvious challenges. Through death with consequences, it gives you a structure for experimenting over and over again with self-imposed challenges.

Each time you die, you begin a new life. And with each new life, you can play the game a completely new way. Obviously, I could have done this without Iberia, but the added structure makes it easier. And I’m tempted to find ways to encourage that more through the mod. But for now, I’m just exploring different ideas each time I die.

Currently, I’m only allowing myself a single chest for personal storage, forcing me to build dedicated structures for storage of different items. I spawned near a savanna village, so I’m building it up with a tree farm, tannery, stonecutter’s smithy, brickmaker, kitchen, etc. It’s a fun new challenge, not unlike the city construction challenge.

As I’ve done it, I’ve thought about what I might do the next time I die. If I had died relatively quickly, I probably just would have picked up the same challenge in a new location.

But other ideas have come up as well, like:

• Find a base from a previous life as quickly as possible (challenging because of the Find Your Way challenge)
• City Construction Challenge
• Tree Spirit Challenge
• Cubeaism
• Build a modern city with skyscrapers
• Create a floating city after conquering an ocean monument
• After 1 to 3 days above ground, you must play the rest of the game below ground.

Some ideas are just smaller tweaks that can be added on to other ideas, like:

• Don’t eat any meat
• Never eat the same item twice in a row
• No AFKing
• Must AFK when not actively playing, try to take advantage of it
• No sleeping through the night
• Must sleep through the night
• Cannot use chests for storage
• Not allowed to mine diamond without diamond tools
• Not allowed to use water to make obsidian
• No buckets till you’ve built a waterwheel
• No iron tools or armor until you’ve built an anvil

For many of these tweaks, the primary effect will be to lengthen the early and mid game experience. I enjoy that. For some, you may find other interesting twists to the game that you wouldn’t have considered otherwise. With debug info turned off, I realized the Nether was much harder to navigate. Specifically, it was really hard to link up nether portals effectively. One trick is to build two portals in the nether 17 blocks apart in one of the four cardinal directions. Then find the relationship between them in the overworld. At that point, you can determine directions in the Nether, making exploration and nether portal linking significantly easier (though still pretty hard).

What self-imposed challenges do you like? Are there any that would make good additions to Minecraft itself?

I’ve been playing in my Iberia world for a couple months now. So far, I really like it. Though it’s far from perfect, I enjoy the additional challenges to the gameplay, and the excitement that new experiences creates. Let’s go through the challenges and see what I’ve learned.

Hard Stone Challenge

Late in the development of this feature, I added new stone textures for hard stone, and a crumbling noise when it changes to regular stone. Those are the best parts of the feature for me now. The sounds add an ambiance to mining and caving that is really cool. You’re working your way through a branch mine and can hear the stone settling around you. It’s also an indication that hard stone can now be mined more quickly. The other indication is that the texture changes to be lighter. It makes sense as you see it happen, and helps make the challenge understandable, even if you haven’t read anything about it. Another late change was to make all of the hard stone generate during world generation, which greatly reduced lag in a new world, or a new portion of the world.

As for gameplay, I still love this challenge. It was the seed that started Iberia, and it’s held up well. Before finding diamonds it’s just not feasible to do branch mining. But once you get to iron tools, it makes sense to start a mineshaft and work on it a bit at a time, while spending your other time building up an early game base and farms, and caving as well. When building that first mineshaft I’ve learned to make it as small as possible on the first pass. Just try to get somewhere. You can easily go back later, once the hard stone has crumbled into regular stone, to widen it. I’ve also built a stone quarry, where I have a lot of exposed stone that I can clear out. By the time a new layer has been mined the next layer has almost all crumbled to regular stone and is mineable.

Given how happy I am with this feature, I don’t see making any major changes or additions to the design.

Sleep to Heal Challenge

Like the hard stone challenge, the sleep to heal challenge is all about the early game. Once you’ve got decent armor, healing and regeneration potions, and golden apples, it isn’t as necessary to sleep. That said, the main point of this challenge, besides increasing difficulty, is to push you back home to encourage building up an early base. And it certainly had that effect for me. I’ve now died five times, meaning I’ve effectively restarted in this same world six times. Each time, I eventually try to go caving, and it’s challenging. I want to make inroads into a cave system, but after going a little ways I’m hurt enough that I have to back out, and heal up by resting. As I do that, I flesh out my base or work on my farms, maybe make some progress on a mineshaft. And then head back into the cave once I’m ready again. Only to head home again after lighting up a little more.

In some ways, I love it. Minecraft is hard again. I have to make strategic decisions about whether to go deeper or go home. And it’s scary to go into a cave again, knowing I could get laid out for a Minecraft week, if I’m lucky. If I’m not, I’ve got to start over again. Even once I’ve got decent armor and weapons, spending the night in the wild is still a risky proposition.

In some ways, it’s too difficult. On hard difficulty, you only heal one heart for a night’s sleep. The amount of time stuck at home base healing up is a little excessive at first. And if you’re on an island without sheep, it could be hard to get that first bed, which you’ll need.

In some ways, it’s too tedious. Challenges that seriously deplete health now require an excessive amount of preparation. I needed a bunch of regeneration potions before tackling the Ender Dragon, and later, when I built an enderman farm, I went through healing potions like water trying to get an endermite to spawn. I suppose that could be one way the challenge pushes you to automate – automate a potion brewer, automate a gold farm, and automate collection of potion ingredients.

In some ways, it’s too easy. Once I’ve got a bed, I can easily spend a Minecraft week exploring the surrounding areas, just putting the bed down to sleep, and healing each day if I need to. Exploring should be a little more challenging in the early game.

All that is to say I feel like this challenge could use some tweaks. I’ll probably double the default amount healed when sleeping (from one to two hearts in hard mode), to take the edge off just a little bit. There may also need to be another end game way of healing.

Armor Slows Crafting Challenge

Armor slows crafting is the weakest challenge. When I asked for initial feedback on Iberia, everyone agreed that this one needed to change. At the time I came up with some good replacement ideas, but because Iberia was close to being done, I went ahead and left it in, as it was. Which means that when wearing heavier armor, access to chests, crafting tables, brewing stands, hoppers, droppers, etc. all takes longer. Without playing with it, everyone agreed that it was not a well designed challenge.

I have now played with it for a couple months and while I agree that it is problematic, it actually achieves it’s goals better than I thought it would. The goal here was to give people a reason for having different sets of armor, and for using armor stands. And that definitely happened. I now have a leather suit of armor for working around my base, and I actually had a reason to enchant it. I want it protect me as much as possible. There is still no real reason for keeping iron armor around after getting diamond armor, but it takes long enough to get diamond armor that that’s OK. And the armor stands are great both for storing the armor, and for quickly swapping it.

That said, it’s really easy to forget to swap armor when you venture forth. So you head into the Nether only to realize too late that you’re still wearing your weak leather armor because you forgot to “suit up”. I’m not sure if this is a good part of the challenge, or something that needs to be fixed in the gameplay. Maybe if it were easier to notice what armor your wearing, while wearing it, that would be good. Like, it would be cool if wearing a helmet obscured your vision like wearing a pumpkin does, but way less, so it’s not annoying or detrimental, but still lets you see what armor type you’ve got on your head.

The big problem is that when you do have heavier armor on and try to craft, open chests, etc. it’s just really annoying. Like, not fun annoying. So, I’m leaning towards changing this to be “armor with drawbacks” challenge. The different drawbacks could be applied at different armor levels and could be things like prevent sprinting, trample crops, disable block placement while jumping, disable hoes, disable shears, disable fishing poles, disable cow milking, slower bow pulling, slower axes, no potion stand access, slower horses, and no crafting table access. I’m sure I’ll come up with other ideas in time. Figuring out which of these makes the most sense, and how best to set the defaults will be an interesting gameplay problem to solve. But I like all of these options better than the current annoying wait that’s in place.

Find Your Way Challenge

As with hard stone, this is another challenge that fits well into Minecraft. No longer can you simply use the debug screen to figure out your coordinates, what direction your facing, etc. Being forced to use maps, compasses, and waypoints has been a good change to the game. As long as you don’t go wandering without a compass, this challenge is most notable after you die. When you do, your spawn and world spawn are moved over one thousand blocks away. Because of the find your way challenge, there’s no easy way to find your old spawn and base.

So this challenge really gives death with consequences it’s sting. There are a couple things I’ve discovered. First of all, large maps are your friend. They’re pretty cheap, and if you’ve got a horse, not too hard to fill in. Second, the Nether is not just a quicker way to travel, but a way to find your old bases. If you can get to the Nether there is now a portal marking the location of your base. 250+ blocks to travel in the nether is still difficult, and you won’t know what direction to travel, but it’s a much smaller amount of space to explore than in the overworld.

All that said, this challenge is hard because Minecraft’s solutions for finding your way around aren’t fleshed out quite enough. I have a few ideas for features to add to this challenge to make finding your way more enjoyable. First, the ability to craft a compass that can be set to point to a specific location. This should require more effort/materials than a regular compass that points to spawn. Second, the ability to add markers to maps. Third, a new tool that makes it easier to measure distances. The chunk-local coordinates are still available in the debug screen, but it would be nice to have a measuring tool that could easily tell you how far you are from a given location. I think there would also be value in some sort of compass that lets you figure out which direction is north while in the Nether, and an End compass

Death with Consequences Challenge

While this was the last challenge added to Iberia, it’s one of my favorites. When you die your spawn, and the world spawn, are moved over a thousand blocks away. Because of the find your way challenge, you can’t just go run back to your old base, you don’t even know where it is. Even making a compass won’t help.

So, I’ve now died five times in my Iberia world. In my first life I built up a nice island base, with a lighthouse, some farms, a Nether portal, etc. I had healed a zombie villager, and was hoping to get the ender pearls I’d need to make a trek to the End soon. And I made a stupid mistake while mining and died. Next up, I started a little home in a savannah valley but died fairly early on to a baby zombie. My third life was quick too, another island build cut short by a creeper I never even saw. My fourth life got interesting again. I built a home on some ice plains, found a couple igloos, explored a ravine and some caves, and built up a rabbit farm to collect leather for enchanting. On an excursion into my mines I forgot to change into my good armor and once again a creeper surprised me before I got out. On my fifth life I spawned right next to a taiga village. I quickly herded the villagers into protective custody in one of the buildings, and started leveling out the ground and improving the village layout. Thanks to the villagers, and a whole lot of sugar cane, I got some diamond tools and armor, went to the Nether and did some exploring in hopes of finding my first nether portal and returning to my first island. No luck though. Then one afternoon I accidentally walked away from my computer without pausing Minecraft. Zombies got me.

So, after five deaths, and three good starts, I was now on my sixth life. This time I got a great spawn. Before my first night I found an exposed spider dungeon, lit it up, and found a saddle in one of the chests. Fortunately there were horses nearby, so I tamed one, and entered the ice plains that opened out on one side of the valley. Sure enough, after a days ride I came upon my ice plains base. While there I built up an iron farm from the villagers under one of the igloos, made it back to the Nether, and found the portal to my taiga village. After consolidating the goods from both bases, I decided to finish improving the village. So I’ve focused on that, taking occasional breaks to go clear out a stronghold, fill in a few maps, and rediscover my very first island base. It’s been a long road, but I’ve now made it to the End, defeated the Ender Dragon, and acquired some elytra. And I’ve learned a ton about the challenges Iberia poses.

While Death With Consequences can be demoralizing, it’s nowhere near as bad as dying in a hardcore world. Because of that, I quickly jumped into my new lives, hopeful that I could find my old bases. And honestly, the excitement that came when I did reminded me of the joy I had playing the game for the first time. When you’re on a third or fourth life and stumble upon an old base it’s absolutely wonderful. Plus, I now have multiple interesting locations that I naturally want to connect with rail lines and easy Nether travel.

When I first started, I thought moving the spawn 1500 blocks might not be enough in hard mode, but since it can take multiple lives to get back to the Nether, it worked out pretty well. I didn’t want it to be so easy that in every life you live you find your old bases. But it should be possible, so I don’t think I’ll change that. I have thought about how it might make sense to adjust the distance based on how long your current life has lasted, but overall, I’m happy with the current design.

The big challenge is how to extend Death With Consequences to multiplayer. One thought is to just have every player spawn and respawn some distance away from the last one to spawn or respawn. This means everyone starts separately, builds up their base, but can go explore and try to find the other players. Going that route may mean chat should be limited between players who are within a certain distance of each other, though with the find your way challenge, it would still be hard to find each other, even if you could magically talk to each other across large distances. Compasses would have to point to the last spawn for the player who made them, found them, or traded for them. In this case, it probably makes sense to leave world spawn in one place, and have some end-game way of finding it.

Other Ideas

All of this play time has also given me a chance to consider other additions to Iberia that aren’t directly related to the existing challenges. I love some challenges from other mods, especially additional mobs that come with Quark: the Ashen and Dweller depth mobs, Wraiths, Pirates, Blazes in the nether, and Guardians in the oceans. For that reason there is no plan to add new mobs to Iberia.

That said, some minor tweaks to existing mobs are on the table. Some percentage of spiders that spawn underground should be cave spiders. The occasional zombie should afflict you with slowness, poison, or other effects when they hit you. I’d like to make zombie pigmen a little easier to accidentally aggro – maybe if you collide with one at a high enough speed. Larger creeper explosions at deeper levels also seems appropriate.

I want to do more with hunger in a new way. Not just have it make you slower, but cause other problems. Because natural regeneration is off in Iberia, hunger is not that big of a deal after the first day or two.

Exploring is still pretty easy to do, as soon as you have a bed to pass the night away without any worries. Another challenge could be sleepless nights. This would mean that if your bed is not in an enclosed, lit up space there is a chance that you’ll wake up in the middle of the night. When that happens you cannot go back to sleep that night. It would mean that if you go exploring you’ll want to create small shacks for yourself when sleeping away from base, to avoid waking to the terrors of Minecraft nights.

All that is to say, Iberia is great, and I can make it even better. Watch for future releases at https://minecraft.curseforge.com/projects/iberia.

I’m wrapping up the first version of Iberia, and put together a little trailer for it. It’s pretty simple, but tries to show off all of the key features in just a few minutes, to give a sense for what playing with Iberia is like. Without further ado, here it is.

Now, a few notes on how I made it. I used Open Broadcaster Software for all of the recording. It’s an open source tool that I’ve found to be pretty good for recording Minecraft footage, and I’ve used it in the past for videos of my melon and pumpkin farm, and my library and sugar cane farm.

For the audio, I wrote up a script and recorded it on my cheap work microphone. If I ever make Minecraft videos more regularly, I’ll definitely want to get a decent mic. For the music, I looked around on Youtube for some good, royalty free tunes that fit the feel I was going for and found Jingle Punks.

For editing, I used Adobe Premiere Pro CC. I’m still very much a beginner, and took way longer than a pro would have to put this together. But I learned a lot, which I’m happy about. If I make more videos with it, it should be a little easier.

Also, in making the video I came up with a new logo for Iberia. You can see it above.

If you’re like me, you remember your first time playing Minecraft vividly. You may have seen a youtube video, or heard about the game from a friend. Maybe you were an early player, when it was still an almost underground movement. Or maybe you just tried it out recently, after Minecraft paraphernalia had already taken the world by storm. Regardless, that first day, and especially that first night, in Minecraft was special. You probably died. Maybe you died a lot. But the satisfaction of building your first tools, and later your first home, ugly as it surely was. And then the wonderful sense of discovery when you found coal, or iron, and later gold, redstone, and even diamonds.

Over time, maybe that “new player” excitement has faded. That’s fine. It is just a game, after all. And there are other good things to do with your life. But maybe you want to recapture that, to be a new player once again. If so, I think Iberia might be the way to make Minecraft fun again. Iberia takes the Minecraft you know and love, and with a few simple tweaks makes it hard again, makes it challenging in ways that force you to learn new habits, face new challenges, and overcome simple mistakes again.

Your first day may start out much the same, but you’ll quickly find that mining to bedrock and quickly accumulating all the coal, iron, gold, and diamonds you need is hard. Literally hard, as the stone you want to mine has become hard stone, and takes much longer to break. If you want the goods, you’ll need to go caving. But to do that, you’ll probably need to prepare a bit first: gather some food, maybe get a set of leather armor. You can play vanilla Minecraft for years and never have made yourself leather armor, but now you have a reason to.

Once you start exploring caves, you’ll notice that you don’t magically heal just because your stomach is full. To heal, you’ll need that, but you’ll also need to sleep. So even minor injuries, or brief skirmishes may force you to head home to recover for a few days. You can build up a better base during those days, and actually build with limited resources. Your forays into the caves will slowly grow longer as you build up better armor.

But acquiring nicer armor also has a drawback – it will slow you down if you wear it while crafting, opening chests, checking furnaces, etc. And the heavier the armor, the slower that will be. All of a sudden you actually have a reason for armor stands. Fortunately, it’s easier to swap what you’re wearing with the armor stand quickly.

Because you won’t just be exploring caves, but also the land surrounding your base, you’ll also need to find your way. No longer do you have access to exact coordinates via a completely unrealistic “debug screen”. You’ve got to use waypoints, towers, compasses and maps to find your way around your world.

Of course, the inevitable will happen. We all die, eventually. Minecraft put some teeth into death with hardcore mode, and Iberia keeps those teeth there, but it also gives you a reason not to rage quit when you die. Instead of having to start an entirely new game when you die, you’ll find that you respawn in your same world, but kilometers away from your original spawn, at the start of a new day. And the world spawn has changed as well. There is no easy way to find your old home, your old mine, etc. You’re starting fresh, a new player in a new world, but not a blank slate world like the one you had at first. Now, this world has been lived in. There are ruins – maybe just a first day hut, maybe a mid-game base with nice farms and a nether portal, maybe an entire castle, city, or multiple cities that you built up in a previous life. Now you have a reason to build up again, create a new life for yourself, and venture forth to discover new, and old, worlds.

Happy Mining!

One of the goals of Iberia is to preserve the vanilla feel of Minecraft. As such, it’s worth asking if it would be a good introduction to Minecraft for the brand new player. Well, it depends. If the brand new player is a five year old kid who wants to play Minecraft because she just got a Minecraft lunchbox, probably not. If the brand new player is an adult or an active gamer who is finally ready to try out Minecraft, definitely.

Let’s play this scenario out a little further. Let’s imagine that Iberia were baked into Minecraft and when you started you could select the easy introduction (vanilla) or the challenging introduction (Iberia). People like my thirteen year old son would choose the challenging one, just because it’s a challenge. And at that point he is dropped into a survival world with all of the challenges Iberia adds on top of that.

And so, of course, he would die. But first he’d knock down a few trees, build some tools, maybe even create a hidey hole. But within the first day or two, he’d be dead, as a new player. He’s not even going to face the challenges of finding your way or slow crafting with armor. And without natural regeneration, he may not even get to mining enough to experience hard stone. And so, he dies, the spawn point is changed and he respawns (reincarnates?) in a seemingly new world. At the start of a new day, though he may have died at night. So he now gets another 10 minutes to learn better how to start a new life in Minecraft. He’ll get further this time around, maybe even build a place to survive the night. But if not, he dies again, and gets more practice.

This repeated practice of the first day is a way better experience than my first attempts at Minecraft. Sure, I made it through that first day, and then died early in the night. And respawned in the dark. Then I had to run around blindly in the dark, hoping I could maybe find my stuff, but in reality just dying a couple more times till it got light again. Then getting a new start. But not really learning how to start well.

True, the new player using Iberia would likely repeat that first day experience more times because of the need to sleep to heal. And that could get grindy and annoying for a new player. But once he can survive through two or three nights, he’s got the basics down. Sleeping to heal will force the new player to do more early work during the day and he’ll have more time to build a home and base with early game materials (wood, dirt, grass, sand). Over time, this home base will be expanded and rebuilt using stone and other materials, giving him a greater sense of accomplishment.

I love the concept of hardcore: you die, you have to start all over in a new world. It gives your play some weight – you have to make good decisions. One level beyond hardcore would be that when you die, your license to the game is revoked and you have to pay to play again. Yikes! I keep wanting to call that ultra hardcore, but that’s already come to mean a hardcore world where natural regeneration is turned off, so it’s harder to stay alive. Iberia already has natural regeneration turned off as part of the Sleep to Heal challenge. But there are some changes we can make to the hardcore concept, at least for single player games, that will make it even better.

That’s where death with consequences comes in. You essentially have the same consequences as in a hardcore game, but set up in such a way that you want to play again when you die, and each time you die the game becomes richer, even though you have to start from scratch. With that little teaser, let’s just lay it out. When you die, the world spawn is moved far away and you respawn there as if in a new game. No matter what time of day you die, you respawn at the start of a new day, 1000+ blocks from your old spawn, as naked and poor as when you played your first game of Minecraft. The twist is that instead of losing your old base, your old buildings, all the knowledge you gained exploring and great gear you built up, it’s all in the world.

Somewhere.

But you have no way of locating it easily. You can’t just build a compass and find your old spawn, because the world spawn has changed. And because of the Find Your Way challenge, you can’t rely on debug coordinates to find your old base. You never knew where it was either, except in relation to waypoints and markers that you built. You don’t know which direction the old spawn is from the new spawn so while you could go exploring, you’re as likely to get lost as anything.

You’ve started a new game.

But it’s not like your other games of Minecraft. In this one, someone has already played. Maybe many people have. They’ve built a base, they’ve mined, they’ve farmed, they’ve set up markers and waypoints. And there’s a chance you could find those bases, those old buildings and abandoned towns. But you’ll have to build your own base, make yourself safe, collect resources, and go out exploring. Then, when you do find those abandoned constructions from your own previous lives, you can loot them, or revive them, connecting with them via marked paths, rail lines, or nether portals, or take TNT to these relics of your past failed lives.

This is the simplest challenge so far, and you don’t need Iberia to make it happen. The “Find Your Way” challenge is just that you have to find your own way in Minecraft – no coordinates are available in the debug view that you get by pressing F3. Really straightforward, really easy to implement, you don’t even need to install Iberia. But it’s part of Iberia because of how well it fits the goals.

First, it makes the game more difficult. If you get lost, you’re lost. Second, it preserves the vanilla feel. I actually think this should be the default in vanilla Minecraft. Third, it enhances the gameplay. Now you’ve got to consider how to keep track of where you are when you’re traveling. Besides using the under-appreciated features of maps and compasses, you can use other tools to find your way: landmarks in the environment, of course. Waypoints that you build, or bigger structures that you build. Breadcrumbs that you leave, whether they’re as simple as torches or stone blocks. Beacons as well.

This is a good time to point out that none of these features is set in stone, not even hard stone. But “Find Your Way” is especially open to changing, whether through other ways to make it difficult to get information to guide you that wouldn’t be available in the real world, or more likely, by mitigating the challenge in the same way that quick armor swapping makes slow crafting with armor feasible. In other words, more tools for finding you way, measuring distances, discovering direction (especially in the End or the Nether), and measuring light may be added as a part of this challenge.