🌿 Against the Wild

Survival the way it was always meant to feel — real.

Against the Wild turns Minecraft's early game into a slower, grounded survival experience. Tools must be earned, fire must be prepared, food goes bad, and every night has to be planned for.

You will not begin by punching down a tree. First, you search the wilderness for loose stones, fallen branches and flint. From those simple materials you work your way up to tools, fire, a shelter for the night and a steady supply of food.

⚠️ Early Alpha

Against the Wild is in early Alpha. The core survival loop is taking shape, but features may still be expanded, rebalanced or redesigned.

Feedback and bug reports are greatly appreciated.

🆕 What's New in 0.0.5 Alpha

• 🏕️ Lean-to shelter — build your first shelter from sticks, rope and leafy branches. It replaces the bed early on.
• 🍖 Food spoilage — raw meat and fish go bad in real-world time. Cold slows it down, heat speeds it up.
• 🌬️ Drying and smoking — preserve meat and fish on a drying rack, in the sun or over a fire pit.
• ⛏️ Digging — soil is slow to dig by hand. Primitive spades help, and the ground hides roots, grubs and stones.
• 🐟 Fishing — spear fish underwater or set a woven fish trap with bait.
• 🪢 Snares — set traps for rabbits and chickens, then check them in the morning before a fox does.

🧭 Primitive Survival Progression

Gather resources → knap flint → twist rope → build tools → cut wood → prepare tinder → light a fire → build a shelter → hunt, fish, trap and preserve food

There are no instant shortcuts. Every tool needs preparation, and every new resource unlocks the next stage of survival.

🌾 Gathering

Resources on the Ground

Freshly explored chunks contain physical resources scattered across the ground:

• Sticks — fallen branches
• Small Rocks — loose pebbles
• Rocks — heavier stones, common near water
• Flint — rarer, used for cutting tools

Right-click a resource to pick it up. Rocks and flint are more common near rivers and shorelines, collect underwater, and appear on cave floors.

Plant Fiber and Primitive Rope

Breaking grass has a chance to drop Plant Fiber, which is twisted into Primitive Rope. Rope binds tool heads to handles and holds almost every primitive construction together.

Leafy Branches

Hold right-click on natural leaves with a Primitive Knife to cut 2–3 Leafy Branches. Breaking leaves by hand sometimes drops one too.

Leafy branches cover your lean-to and make a quick, smoky fire fuel.

🌳 Bark and Tinder

Hold the Primitive Knife against a birch log to scrape off Birch Bark. It takes a few seconds, strips the log and costs knife durability.

Birch Bark and Plant Fiber are prepared into Tinder Bundles for starting fires.

⛏️ Digging the Ground

Soil can be dug by hand, but it is slow and tiring: about 8 seconds for dirt and 15 for clay, and every block makes you hungrier. Vanilla shovels still work normally, but the wooden shovel is disabled.

Two primitive spades make digging practical:

The Stone Spade Head is knapped from two Rocks, and one Rock is returned.

What the ground hides: digging grass, podzol, mud and other sod can turn up Wild Roots, Wild Onions, Grubs, stones, and sometimes a bone or a wild carrot. What you find depends on the biome: swamps and riverbanks are rich in roots, jungles in grubs, and cold biomes and deserts give almost nothing.

One area can only be foraged so much. After enough finds, the ground is dug out and recovers slowly over the following days, so you have to move on.

🪨 Tools

Flint Knapping

Flint is shaped step by step with a Rock as a hammerstone (the Rock is returned):

• Flint + Rock → Flint Shards
• Flint Shard + Rock → Sharp Flint, a cutting edge
• Flint Axe Head, shaped separately and later bound to a handle

🔪 Primitive Knife

A quick but fragile flint tool, used as an early weapon and for harvesting bark and leafy branches.

• Damage: 4.5 · Durability: 50
• Faster than a sword, but easy to chip and break

🏹 Primitive Spear

Melee reach and an early ranged option. Hold right-click to charge a throw: the longer you charge, the harder it flies.

• Melee damage: 6 · Fully charged throw: 7.5 · Durability: 80
• Sticks into blocks and entities and can be picked up again
• Works underwater: a thrown spear travels 2–3 blocks through water, enough to hit a fish

🪓 Primitive Flint Axe

Wood cannot be collected with bare hands. Shape a Flint Axe Head, then bind it to a handle with Primitive Rope.

The axe is deliberately slow and fragile. It is a survival tool, not a way to clear a forest in minutes.

🔨 Stone Hammer

The first mining tool: a heavy stone head tied to a handle. Craft it from a Rock, a Stick and two Plant Fibers, Primitive Rope or String.

• Mines stone, cobblestone, granite, diorite, andesite, tuff and calcite
• Broken stone gives 2–4 Small Rocks, with a chance for a larger Rock
• Cannot extract ores: they break very slowly and the metal is lost
• Durability: 64. Harder stone wears it faster, and the handle is returned when it breaks
• Repair with stone or binding materials

✋ Your Bare Hands Are Not Tools

Logs cannot be punched down. Getting your first wood is a real survival milestone, not an automatic first step.

🔥 Fire and Cooking

Primitive Fire Drill

Early fire comes from a Primitive Fire Drill, not flint and steel. Place tinder in a fire pit and hold the drill against it for several seconds.

• Working animation, progress feedback, friction sounds and particles
• Attempts can fail, and each attempt uses up the tinder
• Much harder in rain or wet conditions

🪵 World-Built Fire Pits

Fire pits are built in the world, one visible stage at a time:

1. Build a stone ring.
2. Add kindling sticks.
3. Add fuel logs.
4. Place a Tinder Bundle in the centre.
5. Light it with the Fire Drill.

A burning fire pit uses up fuel over time, accepts logs, planks, coal and charcoal, melts nearby snow, can spread fire, and slowly dies in the rain. Water puts it out at once. It leaves hot embers that can be revived with fresh sticks before they turn to ash.

🍖 Cooking Over Fire

Build a cooking rack on a burning fire pit with two sticks: one for the supports and one for the spit. It holds up to four food items, shown on the spit, and cooks more slowly than a vanilla campfire.

🏕️ Shelter

Lean-to

Your first night is spent under a lean-to, not in a bed. Bed recipes are disabled early on, though beds found in villages still work.

The lean-to is 2 blocks long and is built in place, stage by stage:

1. Shift + right-click the ground with sticks to drive in the forked posts.
2. Add a ridge pole and slanted poles with more sticks.
3. Tie the frame with 2 Primitive Rope.
4. Cover it with 12 Leafy Branches, in three visible layers.

That makes 6 sticks, 2 rope and 12 leafy branches in total, which is possible on day one if you make a knife before dark.

Sleeping:

• A finished lean-to works like a bed and sets your respawn point.
• You need a lit fire pit within 4 blocks. Without one, it is too cold to sleep.
• The fire burns through the night, so in the morning it is down to embers and needs fresh wood.
• Rest gives a short Regeneration instead of full healing, and you wake up a little hungry.

Wear: rain and time wear the covering down. A worn lean-to loses a layer and stops working until you patch it with fresh branches.

🍖 Food That Spoils

Perishable food has a freshness value shown in its tooltip: Fresh → Stale → Spoiling → Rotten. Lifetimes follow real-world values, where one in-game hour equals one real hour:

Where food is kept matters:

• Hot biomes ×2, the Nether ×3
• Cold biomes ×0.5, caves ×0.4
• Next to ice or snow ×0.2, like an old icehouse
• Freezes in snowy places away from fire
• On the rack of a burning fire pit, spoilage stops

Eating old food: stale food gives less saturation and spoiling food gives less of everything, with a risk of food poisoning. Rotten meat turns into Rotten Flesh. Even fresh raw pork and fish can carry parasites (this can be turned off in the config).

Cooking does not reset the clock: cooked meat keeps only the share of freshness the raw meat had left.

🌬️ Drying and Smoking

Build a Drying Rack (4 Sticks + 2 Primitive Rope) to turn meat into Jerky and fish into Dried Fish, which keep for 60 days.

• Sun drying: under open sky, by day and without rain, it takes about 2 sunny days. Rain sets it back.
• Smoking: place the rack over a fire pit. Embers cold-smoke in 16 hours. A small fire of sticks, planks or leafy branches hot-smokes in 8 hours. A big fire of logs or coal just cooks the meat.

🎣 Hunting, Fishing and Trapping

Spear Fishing

Throw the spear at fish underwater. A fish it kills stays impaled on the spear, so you collect both together. A spear that hits a fish floats to the surface, and a missed throw stays stuck in the riverbed.

🧺 Fish Trap

A woven funnel trap (4 Sticks + 2 Primitive Rope) set in water. It catches fish over time, even in lakes and ponds where vanilla has no fish.

• About 1 fish per day in a lake, more in rivers and oceans and at night
• Bait speeds it up: Grubs ×2, Rotten Flesh ×1.5
• Its own menu with a bait slot and 3 catch slots
• Fish stay alive in the trap and do not spoil, but they escape after about 2 days
• Wears out after 12 catches and leaks fish until repaired with rope
• Needs enough water around it, and two traps cannot be placed close together

🪢 Snares

Snares catch small game while you are away. Set a few in the evening and check them in the morning.

Crafting: 1 Primitive Rope + 2 Sticks. Place it on grass, dirt, podzol, moss or snow.

Using it, with no menu:

What it catches depends on which animals live in the biome, so it works with modded biomes too:

• Rabbit → raw rabbit + rabbit hide, sometimes a rabbit's foot
• Chicken → raw chicken + 1–2 feathers
• Bait decides the prey: roots, wild onions, carrots or dandelions draw rabbits, and seeds draw chickens

How often: about 1 catch every 2 days by default, and up to 1–2 per night with the right conditions:

• Bait ×2, dawn and dusk ×2, bushes, leaves or tall grass nearby ×1.5
• Animals avoid you: a snare catches nothing while you are within 8 blocks
• The smoke of a lit fire pit nearby ×0.25, and another snare too close ×0.5
• Every catch thins out the local game, which comes back about one animal per day

Wear and losses:

• 4 uses, counting every catch and every animal or player that trips it
• On its last use, the animal has a chance to slip free. After that, repair the snare with rope.
• Walking into a snare springs it and slows you down for a moment.
• Scavengers: a catch left for more than about 12 hours may be taken. A fox runs off with it in its mouth (you can still get it back), or a wolf tears the snare apart and leaves bones behind.
• Your items are safe otherwise. If the snare is broken or blown up, the catch and bait drop on the ground.

🎯 The Vision

Against the Wild is being developed as a complete realistic survival overhaul. Future updates will expand systems such as:

• Bows and more hunting
• Hides, tanning and leather gear
• Clay and pottery
• Injuries and recovery
• Predators and dangerous nights
• Temperature and exposure
• Early metalworking
• Farming and permanent camps

The goal is not difficulty for its own sake. Every mechanic should make the wilderness feel more physical, believable and rewarding to overcome.

⚙️ Technical Information

• Version: 0.0.5 Alpha
• Minecraft: 1.21.1
• Mod loader: Forge 52.1.0
• Spoilage times, digging, fishing and snare settings can be changed in the server config.

🐛 Feedback and Bug Reports

Against the Wild is still in Alpha, so bugs and balance issues are expected. Share your feedback, report problems and suggest ideas to help shape the future of the mod.

Made with ❤️ by ZappyQ