Minecraft is a game of infinite customization, where players attempt to push boundaries on what can and cannot be done in a video game. The game has been used to recreate the entire country of Denmark, as an educational tool to introduce children to programming, and even has applications in secondary school science classrooms. For a game that is over a decade old, it has a thriving community of both players and modders helping to keep it alive. Among them are those who are most fascinated by the dramatic changes that can be achieved by meddling with its difficulty.
Minecraft comes with four difficulties by default: Peaceful, which allows only neutral mobs to spawn, and is by far the easiest mode; Easy, which enables hostile mobs but lessens the damage dealt, and makes the hostile environment easier to deal with; Normal, in which mobs deal the standard amount of damage; and Hard, which increases the damage dealt and now hunger can kill. There is also a mode exclusive to the Java edition of Minecraft, Hardcore, which takes Hard difficulty but reduces the player to a single life, and doesn’t allow the difficulty to be lowered.
For some players, all of these are just too easy. For others, they’re not easy enough. For more still, they don’t bring enough weird. Here are seven custom difficulty modes that players have incorporated into Minecraft, ranging from the tame to the impressively difficult, that might help sate some players’ desires for difficulty.
