Minecraft is a great and simple open-world survival game, but has it been getting a little stale for you? Are you looking for an exciting and refreshing new survival experience, instead of coming across the same old caves, biomes, and animals? Don’t let the explorer in you get discouraged, there is a way to make the game more of a survivalist adventure, with mods! Below are some mods to get you started and turn the nearly fifteen-year-old game into a fresh, true survival game!

20. No Tree Punching

What better way to start by spicing up the very first action in the game, punching trees, or more specifically, not punching trees? “No Tree Punching” makes the very first moments of your Minecraft adventure more realistic! Since when does hitting trees in real life immediately give you perfectly refined wood blocks to work with? That’s right - it doesn’t! 

No Tree Punching’s Key Features:

• Creation of flint tools with flint shards, plant fibers, and sticks obtained from leaves
• New primitive tools for harvesting and crafting specific early game materials
• Removes vanilla recipes for the campfire, wooden tools, and stone tools to make the early game more believable

Get the mod here

19. Fast Leaf Decay

This mod speeds up how fast leaf blocks despawn! It takes way too long for leaves to disappear from midair in the vanilla game, and it can ruin your immersion right at the beginning of the game.Since when do leaves hang around after chopping a whole tree down? It’s much more exciting to watch saplings, apples, and sticks come toppling down from freshly chopped trees with this mod!

Fast Leaf Decay’s Key Features:

• Gives leaf blocks five seconds to disappear after the tree is chopped down

Get the mod here

18. Oh The Biomes You’ll Go

Oh The Biomes You’ll Go adds over 80 new biomes to travel through in the overworld and in the nether. This mod makes Minecraft feel like an entirely new world with so many new biomes to explore and build in! The brand-new, colorful, and even magical natural landscapes make the game feel like it just got a fresh coat of paint, and changes the scenery!

• Oh the Biomes You’ll Go’s Key Features:
• Adds over eighty new biomes to Minecraft to encourage exploration
• Features tons of new blocks for building

Get the mod here

17. Yung’s Better Caves

This mod revamps caves to make them become even more exciting to venture into the deeper underground you go. So, spelunk away! There’s no need to be bored by the same old tired cave generation with this mod. The more you explore the underbelly of the surface, the more wild and wonderful the caves will become.

Yung’s Better Caves Key Features:

• Adds huge lava caverns, underground lakes, flooded caves, and tons of other underground features
• Adds customization options for further control of cave generation
• Perfect for the explorer in you to spend more time in the caves!

Get the mod here

16. Recurrent Complex

This mod adds over two hundred abandoned structures, all of which are randomly generated! The world of Minecraft sometimes feels . . . empty, doesn’t it? Sure, there’s villages, but who wants to listen to the “humming” and “hahhing” of the villagers all the time?  What if there were hundreds of brand-new structures and buildings to make the game feel more lived-in? The best part is, you don’t even have to build yourself a starter home, you can repurpose one of the structures you come across to become your home base!

Recurrent Complex’s Key Features:

• Adds fortresses, temples, shrines, and towers
• Adds inns, abandoned houses, mineshafts, and hideouts
• Makes forests feel more diverse with all kinds of new trees
• Adds plants to caves for more colorful caving

Get it here

15. Waystones

Waystones adds pillar-like structures throughout the world for the player to warp to for a fast-travel experience without cheats. With a little bit of magic, Waystones adds some much-needed fast travel to Minecraft! Warp scrolls can transfer you to different waystones you’ve discovered throughout your world, making quick travel a breeze!

Waystones’ Key Features:

• Adds activate able waystone blocks for easy travel
• Adds craftable warp scrolls and warp stones to add depth and immersion to the travel system

Get it here

14. Comforts

Stuck in the wilderness at night, without a bed? That’s one of my worst Minecraft nightmares! What if you had a portable bed to carry in your inventory that doesn’t set your respawn point? This mod adds comfortable sleeping bags and hammocks to your game to help your character feel cozy and well-rested in the open world. There’s nothing more annoying than needing to craft an entire bed while you’re trying to explore your Minecraft world! “Comforts” brings an incredibly cozy and more realistic camping mechanic to the game! You can now feel more immersed by falling asleep on a colorful sleeping bag in the wilderness, and not have to worry about your character respawning there.

Comforts’ Key Features:

• Brings sleeping bags and hammocks to Minecraft
• Adds configuration options to the basic sleeping bags and hammocks

Get it here

13. Pam’s Harvestcraft

Pam’s Harvestcraft brings – are you ready for this? – over 1400 new food blocks, items, food recipes, and cooking tools to Minecraft! This mod, in addition to adding so many new food-related items, totally revamps the cooking system in Minecraft! For years, I waited for new foods to be added to the game, as cooking and farming are such a huge part of survival games. This mod will please any survivalist chefs looking to explore hundreds of various food options! So why not try your hand at cooking? At least with this mod, you can’t burn anything!

Pam’s HarvestCraft’s Key Features:

• Over 100 new foods to find in the wild
• New tools and blocks to refine, produce, or harvest certain foods and drinks
• A market block to buy saplings, crops, and seeds

Get it here

12. Nature’s Compass

A nature’s compass is a craftable item that you can use to search for a specific biome. Once you click on the biome you want to find, the needle – instead of pointing north – will point you in the direction of the biome you searched! Personally, I can’t stand it when I need something as simple as a cactus block for a recipe, and then I can’t  find a desert anywhere! With this mod, I can use this special compass to find a desert filled with much-needed cacti, taking the tedium out of the potentially long and frustrating search all over the world..

Nature’s Compass’ Key Features:

• Simply adds the Nature’s Compass item

Get it here

11. First Aid

This mod completely revamps the health system in Minecraft, making things much more interesting and much more difficult! Now, getting hit on different parts of your character’s body will cause debuffs based on what part gets damaged (eg: getting your legs injured can cause slower movement). What could be more challenging than handling more realistic injuries in Minecraft? When a zombie sneaks up behind you and hits you on the back of the head, your character might suddenly have nausea, emulating a real concussion! Now, instead of watching one health bar, you need to watch eight – one for each major part of your body!

First Aid’s Key Features:

• Adds individual health bars to your character’s body
• Adds bandages and morphine to combat damage or negative health effects
• Disables vanilla health generation. Now eating food will no longer heal you.

Get it here

10. Tough As Nails

Here we have one of my favorites - Tough As Nails tests your strength against other elements besides hunger – with this mod, you’ll get thirsty and too cold or too hot! If you like the idea of something simple yet challenging, this mod will add just that! What would any survival game be without thirst and needing special clothes for keeping warm or cool? This is an incredibly vanilla-like mod that gives you just a bit more depth to surviving.

Tough as Nails’ Key Features:

• Adds a thirst and temperature system
• Adds new items to combat thirst and extreme temperatures
• Adds a rain collector and water purifier for water collection

Get it here

9. Sophisticated Backpacks

This mod adds something that Minecraft desperately needed, in my opinion – backpacks! What would any survivalist be without a trusty backpack on their back, especially given the amount of items they pick up? When you’re constantly harvesting and foraging for food, plant fibers, or sticks, you need some space to hold all of it to haul back to your base! Since I’m a hoarder in any game I play, this mod is perfect for me to expand my inventory space and bring back as many resources as I can carry! After all, I’m going to need every resource I can come across!

Sophisticated Backpacks’ Key Features:

• Adds highly upgradeable backpacks
• Backpacks can be placed on the ground to be accessed
• Can have items piped into or out of them for automation purposes

Get it here

8. Cooking for Blockheads

Cooking for Blockheads adds some much-needed kitchen blocks and interfaces to further improve your character’s cooking skills! Instead of furnaces and crafting tables, this mod brings sinks, ovens, counters, cabinets, and cooking tables to easily access and craft different kinds of foods from adjacent inventories. Perfectly compatible with most food mods, this mod will make cooking much more entertaining and immersive! Now, with all of the new foods you’ve added to the game, you can take it a step further by experimenting with recipe combinations and become the chef of your dreams with all of your harvested bounties! Keep all your cooked foods in a fridge, and your tools in kitchen cabinets!

Cooking for Blockheads’ Key Features:

• Adds a functional kitchen and cookbooks
• Adds kitchen sinks, which provide infinite water
• Adds a cow in a jar item for infinite milk for recipes

Get it here

7. Carry-On

No longer do you have to break your storage chests and put them back down, picking up all your items and putting them back! With this mod, just pick up the chest, and place it back where you want, no item spillage needed! This mod will speed up the process of moving your storage by allowing you to pick up your chests or any block containing an inventory, and letting you just place it right back down. Not only that, but it gave me a chuckle when I found out that I could pick up animals as well! Need to relocate a whole herd of cows? Pick them up and put them back down!

• Carry-On’s Key Features:
• Lets you pick up blocks and place them down without needing to break them
• Lets you pick up animals for moving them

Get it here

6. BlockCraftery

BlockCraftery gives the game some very much needed decorative options, in the form of framed blocks. You can’t go wrong adding in what looks like wool stairs or slabs! Place a framed block, place any block within it, and you have a new decorative block! Framed blocks come in many different shapes, including stairs, slabs, fences, and more! With these, you can create decorations that you wouldn’t be able to create in the game! Are you looking for grass stairs? You can make them with this mod! Or perhaps a diamond trapdoor? All possible with this mod!

BlockCraftery’s Key Features:

• Adds framed blocks of many shapes to add whatever texture the player likes
• Adds reinforced framed blocks to make stronger variants

Get it here

5. Iron Chests

This mod, simply put, brings chests with more storage space. Similarly to the backpacks mod, Iron Chests makes chests upgradeable to add more storage space to their inventories. This is extremely useful for progressing in the game, especially as you’ve collected a lot of resources and materials. Now, instead of needing to keep crafting wooden chests, you can upgrade your existing chests to hold more! Once again, the hoarder in me always pats herself on the back for downloading this mod!

Iron Chests’ Key Features:

• Adds iron, gold, diamond, crystal, and obsidian chests with progressively more storage space per tier
• Adds upgrades that can be right-clicked on any chest to upgrade it a tier

Get it here

4. Ore Excavation

By holding down a key as you mine a block, the surrounding blocks of the same kind will all be harvested with it! This mod has become a staple for millions of modded players for a good reason – it speeds up the process of mining, digging, breaking structures, and terraforming! Now, with only the click of a button, you can mine out an entire vein of diamond instead of needing to break the ore blocks individually. Imagine how much faster you can mine or dig with this mod! If resource gathering is tedious for you, you’ll love how fast you can clear out caves with this mod!

Ore Excavation’s Key Features:

• Ability to bulk harvest any block
• Adds configuration features to customize the mod further
• Ability to mine multiple blocks in different shapes such as a five by five grid

Get it here

3. Tinker’s Construct

Tinker’s Construct completely overhauls the tool creation and ore smelting by adding an ore smeltery and dozens of tool material combinations and upgrades. Add a new layer of depth to your ore smelting by using an entire smeltery for casting metal into different shapes, blocks, ingots, or nuggets! Instead of throwing together cobblestone and sticks, you can now cast yourself the head of a pickaxe made from obsidian from a smeltery, and use the same obsidian to make the handle as well! There’s hundreds of combinations, and even modifiers to make the game more involved and strategic!

Tinker’s Construct’s Key Features:

• Adds a multiblock smeltery for ore smelting
• Adds new materials created by alloying metals together
• Adds new crafting tables and chests exclusively to create the mod’s tools

Get it here

2. Botany Pots

Botany Pots adds . . .  well, botany pots! These are used for growing crops in such a small space! Is a farm too much to handle for you? Never fear, as this mod brings tiny pots that can automatically grow and harvest crops and trees! Now, you can focus on other things while the farming is done on its own!

Botany Pots’ Key Features:

Adds botany pots to grow one plant per pot

Adds hopping botany pots to dispense the harvest into inventories beneath the pots

Get it here

1. Spoiled

The final mod on this list is incredibly important when it comes to realistic survival: now, your foods can go bad! If you’re looking for an ultimately realistic survival challenge, why not make it so that your precious food can spoil? I love the idea of gritty realism in Minecraft, so this mod is perfect for not taking advantage of the foods you collect. Savor them, as they will not last long with this mod! Rotten flesh will become a staple of your diet if you let food sit in your inventory too long!

Spoiled’s Key Features:

• All food items will go bad within one day
• Food spoilage will stop by being placed into a shulker box

Get it here

And those are twenty fun and exciting mods to spice up your survival experience in Minecraft! Good luck, and keep on adventuring!

If you enjoyed this article, please feel free to check out these headlines as well:

• Minecraft: How to Add Mods 
• 10 Most Important Things to Know About Minecraft Mods
• Top 20 Best Minecraft Mods for Building