(disclaimer: My use of bulleted points with bolded headers is not due to AI use, but because it is an effective way to write. I do not condone the use of AI; Desert Survival is a 100% human project :D)

Preamble

Desert Survival is a vanilla-like datapack that, among much more significant changes, makes the whole world a desert. Without a tree to punch, you’ll find yourself working hard to survive through detoured and rerouted progression. Through changes to crafting, loot, and world generation, I’ve upped the difficulty, meaningfully extended all stages of the game, and brought some of Minecraft's overlooked features to light.

Desert Survival has:

• Less stuff. The desert really is a blank slate. I’ve found ways to implement many interesting and/or beloved features, and the rest of Minecraft's glut of features are nowhere to be seen. It’s a simpler life out here.
• Revitalized vanilla features. Some features in Minecraft are terribly outclassed or have absurd barriers to entry. Why craft a crossbow when you can use a bow? Why should you ride a camel when saddles are uncraftable? I’ve removed many of these barriers and better options to create a novel metagame.
• Decisions in progression. By nature of having clear best options and linear progression, vanilla Minecraft makes a lot of decisions for you. I’ve added a variety of competing choices for gear as well as multiple progression pathways throughout the game to counteract this.
• Mechanical depth. What I mean by that, is that Desert Survival's resources and features are all generally useful in multiple ways rather than being one-note. I’ve reworked many of these one-note features (why is wolf armor made of armadillo scutes? I made the recipe use copper instead) and excluded many others. You’ll never be unhappy to pick up an item other than diorite.
• Limited new content. I didn’t want to take away from the vanilla feel, so the custom features that exist are aligned with vanilla principles, are designed to maintain immersion, and uphold the design principles I’ve detailed. They’re also really fun!

Desert Survival isn’t:

• Strictly additive. This datapack modifies many of Minecraft's features and excludes many more, but it doesn't add much new content. Desert Survival is a renovation, not an added floor.
• Divorced from vanilla. I developed this datapack as a close alternative to vanilla Minecraft, not as a modded experience. A lot has been edited, but everything I’ve done is specifically chosen and designed to feel vanilla.
• Overly difficult. This datapack's got a kick to it, but making the game difficult isn't the focus of Desert Survival. If you're good at vanilla survival, you'll be fine.
• Drawn out. When I say I meaningfully extended progression, the emphasis is on the meaning. You won’t find yourself grinding, and you won’t be subjected to tedium. I went about Desert Survival's lengthened progression in an intentionally natural way.

Enjoy the Desert Survival experience! I guarantee you won’t miss your crafting table :)

Rundown

Avoid this section if you want to go in blind! Inaccuracies may be present if you are not playing the latest version.

First Days

Spoiler

• Collect sticks for tools and sugarcane to farm
• Make a flint shovel as an early weapon
• Hunting rabbits is a decent safe food source
• Find a village ruins and kill the golem - it won't be happy to see you (in versions prior to 1.9)
• Hay bales can be used to make a bed
• Wheat, sugar, and raw rabbit can be combined into pemmican to get more food out of each piece of rabbit
• Iron nuggets from the golem can be used for flint and steel
• Break dry grass to find wheat seeds
• Once night falls, kill a creeper
• Gunpowder can be used for TNT and fire starters
• Blowing up stone will get you your first set of real tools
• A stone shovel and/or a stone spear are your best weapon options
• Finding coal will let you build a campfire - make sure you have something to light it with
• Killing camels or cooking rotten flesh gets you leather for armor and bowls
• Spider eyes and rotten flesh can be used to make gruel, which can be cooked on a campfire to remove the negative effects
• Dirt for farmland can be found in caves
• Dirt can be used to make a composter; using a shovel to collect from a composter yields dirt as well as bone meal
• Raw metals can be smelted on the campfire or in a furnace
• Copper ingots can be made into lanterns, rails, and arrows, as well as copper tools
• Iron ingots are used to make crossbows and a smithing table
• Bundles and item frames (or shelves) in tandem are useful for storage
• Obtaining certain workstations will allow you to craft a guidebook; doing so is recommended

Arms and Armaments

Spoiler

• By combining a stone tool with a gold block in a smithing table, a golden tool is created
• By combining a golden tool with an iron block in a smithing table, an iron tool is created
• Some similar upgrades exist outside of tools, such as upgrading a bundle with an iron block to get a hopper
• Any piece of leather armour can be upgraded with a metal block to add an effect to the armour
• Copper upgrades increase your movement speed
• Gold upgrades increase your mining speed and block reach
• Iron upgrades increase your defense, knockback, and knockback resistance
• Certain "specialist" upgrades for leather armour exist; these are obtainable through crafting rather than smithing
• Placing a filled cauldron over a lit campfire and dropping metal-upgraded armour into it separates the metal from the armour
• Cactus flowers, gunpowder, glass bottles, and common mob drops can be used to make harmful splash bottles
• Using rotten flesh produces bottles of toxin, which give the Wither effect
• Using bones produces bottles of dust, which give the Slowness and Weakness effects
• Using spider eyes produces bottles of acid, which give the Instant Damage effect

Adventuring Time

Spoilers

• Saddles can be easily crafted from leather and string and allow for camel riding
• Maps can be made with paper, blue dye, green dye, and white dye, or by using white dye to reset a filled map
• Trail ruins can be found uncommonly
• Striped wolves are often present at trail ruins
• Using a brush to extract relics from a trail ruin yields gold nuggets, iron nuggets, and lapis lazuli, as well as clay balls
• Packed mud can be found in the architecture of a trail ruins
• Occasionally, a fishing rod or temple map can be found in a block of suspicious gravel
• Fishing rarely yields actual fish. This is the desert.
• Fishing can yield enchanted gear as per vanilla, as well as driftwood crates which contain a large volume of fishing junk
• Temple maps lead to desert pyramids, which contain abundant gold as well as pumpkin seeds and red sand
• As well as being used for golems, pumpkins can be combined with sugar and a bottle to craft pumpkin puree
• Like in vanilla, building a copper golem creates a copper chest; this is a good source of renewable storage
• Placing mud, packed mud, clay, sand, or red sand underneath a composter will cause harvesting it with a shovel to yield that block in place of some dirt
• Very rarely, dungeons can generate close to the surface

Digging Deep

Spoilers

• Hunting glow squids for their glow ink sacs is useful for making luminous gruel, which provides Night Vision
• Many redstone devices are craftable
• Dungeons (monster rooms) can be found more abundantly than in vanilla and contain valuable loot
• Breaking the monster spawner in a dungeon yields three chains
• Chains can be used in conjunction with diamonds, iron, and deepslate to craft reinforced deepslate
• Reinforced deepslate can be used to upgrade leather armour, which doubles each piece's defense and provides extra niche protections but reduces movement speed
• Reinforced deepslate can be used to upgrade a bowl to a bucket, which is necessary for creating a Nether portal
• Reinforced deepslate can be used to upgrade tools and weapons into powerful variants
• Chains can also be used in conjuction with iron nuggets to craft unbreakable chainmail armor
• Similarly to leather armour and metals, chainmail armour can be upgraded using magical artifacts
• Enchanted book upgrades increase maximum health at the cost of melee damage
• Wither skeleton skull upgrades increase melee damage and movement speed at the cost of maximum health
• Dungeon chests contain melon seeds, which provides an easy and stable food source
• Melons, wheat, and glow ink sacs can be combined to make dungeoneer's stew, which gives Regeneration and Night Vision
• Dungeon chests contain emeralds, which can be combined with sandstone (and, since update 1.9, prismarine crystals) to create end portal frames

The Need to Go Deeper

Spoilers

• The Nether lacks the two fungus forest biomes, with only the Soul Sand Valley, Nether Wastes, and Basalt Deltas present
• Nether quartz can be used to craft quartz plating, which fully repairs a tool when used to upgrade it
• Combining a leather armour piece with a quartz block and two gold blocks produces a golden armour piece
• Nether Wastes
• Brown mushrooms are useful for making rabbit stew
• Red mushrooms are useful in tandem with nether wart for crafting positive potions
• Both rabbit stew and mushroom stew, like gruel, are stackable
• Soul Sand Valley
• Wither skeletons spawn frequently
• Dying mobs spawn crimson roots at their feet, which has a chance to drop nether wart when broken
• Basalt Deltas
• Magma cubes spawn frequently
• Magma cream can be dropped in water to cool it into a slime ball and a block of obsidian
• Obsidian can be used to craft enchanting tables, ender chests, and raw alloy
• Bastion Remnants
• Magma cube spawners and nether wart farms can be present
• Chests contain obsidian, gold, and magma cream among other loot
• Chains are abundant in the architecture of the bastion
• Combining magma cream with an ender pearl creates an ender eye
• Raw alloy can be smelted to obtain refined alloy
• Refined alloy can be used to upgrade tools and leather armour similarly to reinforced deepslate; alloy-upgraded armour has fire protection and grants increased defense and melee damage
• Using diamonds and other specific materials, enchanted books can be crafted into books with other enchantments; for example, any enchanted book when combined with a diamond and a rabbit's foot becomes an enchanted book with Looting I

The Endgame

Spoilers

• The End portal can be built anywhere due to end portal frames being craftable
• The Ender Dragon fight is unmodified
• The End is positioned directly over the Overworld; falling into the End void causes you to fall into the Overworld
• Each player present at the Ender Dragon fight receives a loot chest when the fight is won, which contains a dragon head, an ender veil, and a levitation rod as well as other goodies
• Throwing an ender pearl while wearing an ender veil teleports you to your spawnpoint
• Holding the levitation rod in your mainhand gives you antigravity
• Holding the levitation rod in your mainhand or offhand fully prevents fall damage from heights less than 384 blocks
• The Wither fight is unmodified
• The Nether star can be used for a variety of purposes
• Upgrading an enchanted golden apple with a Nether star produces an Apple of Eden, which functions similarly to a Totem of Undying
• Placing a Nether star in an item frame atop a monster spawner transforms it into a cornucopia, which produces a dungeon chest's worth of loot once per day
• Placing a Nether star in an item frame atop a beacon creates a panoculus, which gives all players within 2000 blocks Night Vision

Content added in release 1.8 (Catch Bigger Fish)

Spoilers

• Upgrading a fishing rod with reinforced deepslate produces a reinforced fishing rod
• The reinforced fishing rod catches fish far more often
• Holding meat in your offhand uses it as bait for the reinforced fishing rod; using bait while fishing in open water will cause you to catch 1-3 guardians
• The guardians each drop prismarine shards and crystals
• Prismarine shards allow for the crafting of prismarine blocks
• Prismarine crystals can be used to craft certain enchanted books as well as a flowstone, which increases movement and attack speed as well as breath capacity when held in the offhand
• Killing piglins for porkchops and using the porkchops as bait fishes up the Elder Guardian
• If you defeat the Elder Guardian, you will receive a trident in addition to a sponge and prismarine shards/crystals

Content added in release 1.9 (Tomb Slayer)

Spoilers

• Ancient talismans can be crafted from bricks, diamonds, and skulls
• Skeleton skulls or wither skeleton skulls can be used
• Skeleton skulls can be found while doing archaeology in desert pyramids
• With a talisman in your inventory, archaeological digs will spawn powerful undead enemies
• Undead enemies will drop treasures, more talismans, and sometimes a higher-level talisman
• These treasures include diamonds, emeralds, chains, and rarely enchanted golden apples
• Higher level talismans summon stronger enemies, which drop better loot
• Level I talismans summon standard undead, which drop small amounts of treasure
• Level II talismans summon undead warriors, which drop lots of treasure and some enchanted books
• Level III talismans summon undead tyrants, which drop powerful enchanted books and unique gear
• There are no level IV talismans... yet
• The Lord Tyrant (holds a golden sword, accompanied by four husks) drops the Horn of Plenty
• The Warrior Tyrant (holds a golden spear, accompanied by two parcheds) drops the War Crossbow
• The Witch Tyrant (holds a golden hoe, accompanied by two witches) drops the Chemical Satchel

Join the Community!

Found a bug? Looking for a Desert Survival server? Want to tell the developer he's the coolest? Join the official Discord here: https://discord.gg/SQFMnuU4rN

Credits

Development: MZZ

Design: MZZ, nbnerd, moccyman, Jam1108, Wilozyxx

Playtesting: MZZ, nbnerd, audreydronegirl, moccyman, TattiestShoe, Jam1108, Wilozyxx