What exactly does vanilla Hardcore change abt the BTW experience?

[Locke_hart]

Hey y'all, new to BTW, and I've been loving it so far! It's been super fun learning the new mechanics and the way it shakes up early game - I feel like it's just the right amount of survival-focused gameplay without being full-on Vintage Story or TFC, since I've found those to be a bit overwhelming for me to dive into right now.

I've got a question, though, and it's in the title - I've been updating as new patches come out, but saw the change to disable vanilla Hardcore by default when making a new world. I was a little confused, since I had been doing Hardcore worlds from the get-go, and I knew it was gonna be hard, but I just chalked it up to inexperience. But after reading the notes on how it's supposed to be for folks that "know exactly what they're doing," I wanted to know if there were any specific things enabling Hardcore did to mess with the BTW experience besides not being able to experience the Hardcore Respawn mechanic. Y'know, like does it throw off damage values, hunger costs, health regen, things like that? Just curious 'cause I couldn't seem to find anyone really talking about it through searching.

[Sarudak]

Better than wolves is designed in a way that it WILL KILL YOU if you mess up. Most people mess up on occasion and having your entire world deleted seems unnecessarily harsh. On the other hand in old minecraft there was almost no consequence to death, you would just respawn at your bed. Hardcore spawn which spawns you somewhere in a very large radius on death is a way of keeping the spirit of hardcore spawn without truly losing your world. You will have to start from scratch but you will know that somewhere in the world is your old base and items if you can manage to work your way back to finding it. Other than deleting your world AFAIK hardcore does nothing to change the experience.

[EpicAaron]

When you die in Better Than Wolves, you respawn at a random position in the world from your original spawn point. Possibly thousands of blocks away. You can use a compass to return to spawn.

When you play hardcore mode, you are limiting yourself to one life. This might not seem like a big deal when you are just starting, languishing in the campfire stage, but when you actually have cool builds and machines, dying means losing a ton of hours of work. This isn't like RL Craft where you just have some loot in a village that disappears. In BTW, you will lose mob traps, auto-farms, maxed-out villagers, and crops that took you hours of exploration to cultivate.

Hardcore Spawn is awesome because you get to have the experience of starting fresh inside a world that you already inhabit. Over time, you build more roads and bases and the whole world starts to feel interconnected and storied.

Only one person to date has ever beaten BTW all the way through on Hardcore Mode. It looks soul crushing and not-fun to me.

For example, here is my spawn base in May of 2020:


And here is how it has developed to today:



This was built up over the course of many lives. I come back from a respawn and continue to build! If at any point I died permanently and had to restart from scratch, I don't think I would have developed such an awesome single player world that has stuck with me for years at this point. To me, this is the core of Minecraft--forming a deep bond with a world--and Hardcore Mode takes that away.

[EpicAaron]

To add, I decided to look through some old screenshots to see how my world developed over time. Hardcore Spawn was quintessential to the experience.

Putting in spoilers because I didn't resize the pics:

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My original dirt fort at spawn,with idyllic stream and log bridge. Plenty of hunting grounds, lots of wood. This was in 2019 I believe.


I died, of course. In a stupid way too! And I suppose I could have just restarted, but I had committed myself to playing one world so I decided to see what new spawns had to offer. I eventually settled in an abandoned village and made some great progress!


And I died again... spent a long time wandering. Set up some more bases with ovens and strange strategies (like a giant wooden bridge spanning a lake for fishing and safety.

Eventually, however, while starving and lost after a death, I happened to find an old road leading to the long lost village!!


The rest is history :)

I transformed the village into a wind-powered fortress with agriculture. Found diamonds, breached the nether, and even made my way back to spawn.

It turns out, this village base was across an entire ocean, so I had to make a voyage across a couple thousand blocks to reach my spawn. This proved to be a major boon, however, because my village base was close to villagers. I was able to start trading and harvesting wheat way earlier than I would have if I had just stayed at spawn. And because of the long range of my bases, future deaths would bring me back to my established infrastructure so that I would not always have to start from scratch.


This is my first view of the ocean after finding a compass. I felt like I was on a journey! Crossed a jungle, boated across the sea, traversed a bleak tundra, and eventually made it to where it all began.

In short, Better Than Wolves offers a really rich way to experience Minecraft. It is very rare that a player takes a linear, easy path through the tech tree, and in fact I think it is more fun when the game throws you a curveball and forces you to try new strategies. You don't get to experience this in Hardcore mode at all.

Also, as a caveat, I played many different worlds and built quite a bit of experience before finally committing to one world, no cheats. Everyone is different, and sometimes it takes a while to fall into the BTW rhythm. The experience of finally settling down and taking a single world seriously, however, ended up being sooo rewarding! It is like watching Ethos lab or some other long lets play, except instead of somebody else's old world, I get to have my own and show it off to other people.

[dawnraider]

Pretty much Aaron hit the nail on the head.

Hardcore spawn already provides consequences for death, without completely trashing potentially hundreds of hours of progress in a world. I disabled vanilla's hardcore mode because I saw lots of brand new players enabling it without understanding how hardcore spawn works and the effect it has on gameplay, and also not understanding just how deep the mod is and how long it takes to progress through it.

Part of the game loop is dying multiple times, building up respawns, and connecting your world together to make future deaths easier to recover from every time. You can also proactively build infrastructure which helps with recovery as well. If you play on vanilla's hardcore, that completely destroys that part of the game.

I left it in as a config for people like upperman (the aforementioned only known player to beat BTW on hardcore) who *do* understand the mechanics of the game, and choose to play hardcore anyway, but it is *very* much not an intended method of play.

[Locke_hart]

Oh wow, thanks for the replies! Yeah, now I see where y'all are coming from - I suppose I just haven't hit that stage where I've wanted to sit down and start that 'for the long haul' world as of yet. After seeing how y'all feel about it though, I'm definitely much more interested in starting one soon!

I actually feel like I had a mini-crisis with doing Hardcore runs not too long ago - I had been grinding away with runs for a while, and outside of looking at the beginner's guide on the wiki, I've been trying to discover as much as I can through playing. I had had a few runs where I got my first brick oven down, but I usually died shortly thereafter. This last one - or, well, my current one as of writing this - I actually got past that big early game hump and felt pretty stable, and I got a few more ovens and a chisel/workstump, it was great. But then, I had a couple weeks where I kinda got scared to play 'cause I REALLY didn't want to lose the progress I had made. I did get back in it though, and I've been chugging along, though finding enough iron for an axe has been a bit of a struggle lol. So, I think I really do get why it's not the go-to/intended experience now, though I will also say I'm still a fan of Hardcore simply because I like the idea of being one of the few who's done it one day.

Y'know, I think porting in Spectator Mode would be an awesome addition specifically for the Permadeath folks, 'cause I can see how without it, there really is less of an incentive to try it out; you can only experience that world when you're playing it, which in its own way is interesting and (at least to me) meaningful, but also means that once it's gone, it's GONE (unless you save scum, which I did for one of my vanilla HC worlds that I was really proud of LMAO). But that's just me spitballing, since I have no experience or real idea how hard that would be to implement.

Also, your world looks sick Aaron! The screenshots that are years apart are so wild to look at, and I'm sure it's even cooler when it's your own world you're looking back at.

[Equitis1024]

You can also proactively build infrastructure which helps with recovery as well.

This was one of my favorite things about Hardcore Spawn. In the midgame if you find yourself in the mood to go on a big expedition you actually have a reason to explore your world and build outposts and map landmarks. This is the heart of Better than Wolves' design to me: making all the cool things that are possible in Minecraft actually mean something. And to this day no other game has ever given me the rollercoaster of emotion that I have felt because of this. The despair from dying to a dumb mistake suddenly turning to elation when you miraculously see a tower on the horizon is an incredible thing to experience. All this is impossible if your world just gets deleted when you die.