Tribulation

Changelog

Every stable release. Jars and full notes live on GitHub Releases — the canonical download source.

Unreleased — v1.1.0

Tribulation 1.1.0 makes the world push back harder. Blood moons, elite champions, and pack tactics turn a crowd into a real threat, an optional pressure layer lets the night itself close in, and a new Ascendant Shard lets you court the danger early instead of waiting out the clock. Everything is still configurable, still zero dependencies.

Added

  • Blood Moon — full-moon nights in the Overworld now have a 25% chance to rise blood red. The moon-phase scaling triples, hostile spawn caps double, and you can't sleep through it. The sky, fog, and moon tint crimson with a warning sting, and a Blood Moon survives a mid-night restart. Operators can force one on or off with /tribulation bloodmoon.
  • Elite Champions — once you pass level 50, roughly 5% of hostile mobs spawn as nameplated minibosses carrying one or two random affixes: Vampiric, Explosive, Repulsing, Thorns, or Regenerating. A champion has 1.5× health, 1.25× damage, drops 3× the XP and an extra loot roll, and never appears on a boss.
  • Pack Tactics — at tier 3 and above, striking a zombie, skeleton, or spider turns every mob of its kind within 16 blocks that can see the fight against you, and those mobs spawn in larger groups. No more picking a horde apart one at a time.
  • Environmental Pressure (opt-in) — an optional layer where the world presses back. Debilitating Strikes (tier 3+) sap your strength on a hit from a scaled hostile, and Oppressive Nights (tier 4+) let high-tier night mobs track you from farther away as the dark closes in a little tighter.
  • Ascendant Shard — a crafted counterweight to the death penalties: four Shatter Shards around a Nether Star, raising your difficulty level by 25 on use. Chase harder mobs and their richer rewards on your own terms instead of waiting out the clock.
  • Location-based threat — flat level offsets tied to where a mob spawns. Per-biome offsets single out hostile ground (the Deep Dark is deadlier), and per-structure danger zones turn landmark raids into a gauntlet — ancient cities, end cities, nether fortresses, bastions, and more. Both understand biome and structure tags, so modded content slots in.
  • Multiplayer group health (opt-in) — mobs gain +20% health for each extra player nearby, capped at +100%, so a crowd that ganks a mob doesn't also trivialize it. Health only — grouping up never inflates the XP those mobs drop.
  • Offline Level Decay (opt-in) — after a grace period away from the server (7 days by default), your level slowly slips, 2 levels per day gone, so a returning player meets a difficulty that matches their rust. It never drops below a configurable floor.
  • Meridian integration — with Meridian installed, tier-4 and tier-5 scaled mobs wield a bonus of its curated combat enchants on their weapons and armor, on top of the vanilla ones, so endgame gear feels like it belongs in a Meridian world. Toggle it off any time, and never required.
  • Two new difficulty statistics — Ascendant Shards used and levels lost to offline decay — join the counters in the Statistics → Custom screen.

Changed

  • The server now syncs its config to joining clients, with a local-file fallback, so client-side visuals match the server's rules in multiplayer.
  • First-join and first-level-up now come with brief teaching moments, and your first tier-up points you at the tier detail panel.
  • Death Relief announces itself with an actionbar message and a HUD flash when it drops your level.
  • Heart Fragment and Ascendant Shard details now show in the base item tooltip, not only inside recipe viewers, and every config screen entry gained a tooltip.
  • Soul Inventory now honors any enchantment tagged #c:soulbound, so soulbound-style protections from other mods count.
  • /tribulation output is fully localized.

Fixed

  • The level badge HUD no longer drops sprites when ImmediatelyFast or Blur+ is installed.
  • HUD offset settings are clamped to the screen, and a corrupted or hand-edited save can no longer push a player's level, hearts, or a mob's ability tier out of bounds when a world loads.
  • Fixed a lighting glitch on synced Blood Moon and oppressive nights.

v1.0.0 — Jul 1, 2026

Tribulation 1.0.0 is the first stable release — the full difficulty overhaul. Minecraft's flat threat curve becomes an escalating gauntlet: mobs grow stronger the longer you play, the farther you roam, and the deeper you dig, then start fighting back with abilities of their own. Everything is configurable, and nothing is pulled in as an extra dependency.

Added

  • Mob scaling on four axes — every hostile mob's health, damage, armor, and toughness rise with your playtime (a per-player level from 0 to 250), your distance from world spawn, how far you are above or below sea level, and the moon phase on Overworld nights. 21 vanilla mobs have individually tuned rates and caps; modded hostiles get safe fallback scaling automatically.
  • Tier-gated abilities — at levels 50/100/150/200/250, scaled mobs unlock new behavior: zombie reinforcements and door-breaking, creepers with shorter fuses that can spawn charged, skeletons that switch to swords and loose flaming arrows, web-placing and leaping spiders, sprinting wither skeletons, and more.
  • Death penalties — Death Relief drops you two levels when you die, easing the climb back. Optional harsher systems layer on top: Shatter Shards (rare drops that cut five levels on use), Hardcore Hearts (permanently lose max health on death, restored with Heart Fragments), and Soul Inventory (your items are destroyed on death unless they carry the Soulbound enchantment). A popped Totem of Undying can be set to count as Death Relief and/or shield your hearts.
  • Special mob variants — Big and Speed zombies, plus Deadeye and Brute skeletons, each with a distinct stat profile and combat feel.
  • Boss, trial-spawner, and raid scaling — bosses scale on a separate, gentler curve; trial spawners scale to nearby players with an optional ominous upgrade; pillager patrols gain members and high-tier raids run extra waves.
  • Tier equipment — scaled mobs equip tier-appropriate armor and weapons with matching enchantments, tunable per tier.
  • Level HUD and peek panel — an on-screen badge shows your level, color-coded by tier. Hold the Peek Tier Detail key (unbound by default) for a panel with your progress and the abilities nearby mobs have at your tier.
  • Bonus XP — tougher mobs drop proportionally more experience, roughly 5x on a fully-scaled kill by default.
  • Statistics and advancements — six custom stats in the vanilla Statistics screen, plus a Tribulation advancement tab that tracks the tier ladder and the death-penalty milestones, with a toast and sound sting each time you cross a tier.
  • Commands/tribulation covers your own level and tier, admin level get/set/reset, live config reload, a scaling-breakdown debug view, and inspecting the mob you're looking at.
  • Fully configurable, zero dependencies — every value tunes live through config/tribulation.json and /tribulation reload, with per-mob toggles and namespace exclusion for modded mobs. Optional in-game integration with Mod Menu, Cloth Config, Jade/WTHIT, and EMI/REI/JEI when they're installed.

Download & full notes on GitHub →

v0.1.1 — May 17, 2026

Full notes on GitHub Releases →

v0.1.0 — May 17, 2026

Full notes on GitHub Releases →

Versioning

Tribulation follows semantic versioning. Every tagged release is on GitHub Releases, the canonical download source; prereleases are published there but omitted from this page.