Minecraft Survival, fixed by design.

An opinionated redesign of Minecraft Survival, built for both solo and multiplayer.

View on GitHub Fabric 0.19.2 on Minecraft 26.1.2

The Catalogue in game: an enchanting table screen listing enchantments from the surrounding chiseled bookshelves, with a tooltip showing the reagent, experience and slot cost of Mending I — The Catalogue: every enchantment your bookshelves can teach, with its exact price.

The idea

Minecraft Survival has incredible foundations.

Fixed by Design rethinks the systems that get in their way. It is not a different game, a kitchen-sink modpack, or a collection of buffs. It is a redesign that keeps every system's original purpose and fixes what that system actually encourages you to do.

Every change starts from the same four questions: what was this system trying to achieve, what behaviour does it actually reward, where does it become tedious or dominant, and can it be improved without making Minecraft feel like something else.

Dominant strategies
One correct answer crowds out every alternative.
Trivialised progression
A single item ends a whole progression curve.
Multiplayer friction
Rules built for one player, applied to twenty.
Forgotten mechanics
Whole systems nobody has a reason to touch.
Tedium without decisions
Time spent that never asks you to choose.
Systems undermining systems
One feature quietly deleting another.

Designed systems

Four pillars, rebuilt system by system.

Equipment & Enchanting

Enchanting stops being a slot machine. It becomes a catalogue you stock yourself, spent against a budget.

The Catalogue · Enchantment slots · Smithing upgrades · Material resistances

Exploration & Navigation

Flight runs on campfires you built, and the map becomes an atlas a whole server can edit.

Campfire flight · Map Book · Shared cartography · Reworked fishing

Survival & Multiplayer

Death costs something real without costing everything, and the world has a shape worth crossing.

Bonus hearts · Partial keep inventory · Spawn protection · Ore progression

Transportation

Rails become infrastructure. Copper sets the speed, and a locomotive pulls a real train behind it.

Copper rails · Furnace locomotives · Minecart trains · Dispenser Minecart

How a change is made

Vanilla, the problem, and the fix.

Every feature is documented the same way. Here is what that looks like in practice.

The Catalogue

Vanilla: Right-clicking an enchanting table offers three random enchantments hidden behind Standard Galactic Alphabet. You spend lapis and levels on a slot machine, reroll until the result is acceptable, and bookshelves only raise the numbers.
Problem: Randomness makes enchanting a chore rather than a decision. The optimal play is to reroll, so the system rewards patience instead of planning, and bookshelves become wallpaper you place once and never think about again.
Fixed by Design: The table opens the Catalogue, a list of every enchantment stored in the chiseled bookshelves around it. You choose the enchantment and the level, pay its specific reagent and an experience cost, and get exactly that. Bookshelves become a library you build deliberately.

Smithing Upgrades

Vanilla: Sharpness, Protection, Unbreaking and Efficiency are enchantments. They are also the only enchantments that matter, so every enchanting decision starts by securing them and ends with whatever slots are left.
Problem: Twelve vanilla enchantments are pure statistics wearing a magic costume. They crowd out the enchantments with actual behaviour, and they make the enchanting table a numbers dispenser rather than a place you go for something interesting.
Fixed by Design: Honing, Warding, Tempering and Grinding become smithing templates. You apply them at a smithing table, the ingot decides the level, and no experience is charged. Statistics live at the anvil's neighbour, magic lives at the enchanting table.

Campfire Elytra Flight

Vanilla: Elytra flight ends at firework rockets. Once you have a gunpowder farm, flight is holding right click in a straight line at a fixed speed, indefinitely.
Problem: Rockets delete route planning. Terrain stops mattering, distance stops mattering, and every transportation system you might have built becomes irrelevant the moment the elytra comes out. The best-looking mechanic in the game gets reduced to one button.
Fixed by Design: Firework rockets give zero thrust while gliding. Flight is powered by campfires instead. Crouch in the smoke to launch and to bank charges, spend those charges as mid-air dashes, and ride updraft columns you built on the ground.

Map Book

Vanilla: Maps are single items. Covering any real distance means a chest of them, sorted by hand, and reading one means holding it and standing still. Sharing means cloning at a cartography table and hoping everyone remembers to re-clone.
Problem: Cartography is one of the best systems in Minecraft and almost nobody uses it past the first map, because the inventory cost grows faster than the usefulness. Shared exploration in particular has no answer at all.
Fixed by Design: The Map Book is one item holding many maps, opening as a pannable and zoomable full-screen atlas drawn in world coordinates. Two books can share an id, so several players read and edit the same atlas, with markers and holder positions synced live.

Play it

Fixed SMP 1.8.0 bundles the four first-party mods with a curated set of third-party mods, shaders and quality-of-life improvements. It is not published yet.

Installation guide

Shape it

Fixed by Design runs on playtesting. Feedback becomes design problems, design problems become decisions, and the reasoning is published.

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