Tough as Nails is a mod that aims to significantly increase the difficulty for the player in Minecraft. This mod turns an average survival mode world into a similar difficulty as hardcore survival. When you first spawn into your world with this mod enabled you should notice that you’ve been given fewer hearts that the full amount you would typically have otherwise. And this will indicate your first important task will be finding something to replenish yourself back to full hearts. Typically you would just need to eat something to restore your health but this mod changes that functionality and now you’ll need to find heart containers scattered throughout the world. You will otherwise maintain the hearts you already have much better than normal gameplay but until you find those heart containers to unlock all available heart slots, you’ll have to survive with a deficit. This can be compared slightly to the Legend of Zelda games where Link would need to find heart containers in order to add more hearts to his overall health bar.

This mod absolutely adds another wrinkle in your enhanced adventure by making the player also have thirst. Now along with maintaining your hunger level and eating to heal, you will need to also replenish your thirst level in a similar way. This can be done by filling canteens with water or crafting various juices as you would expect but this addition to survival necessities creates a broader level of difficulty to be aware of.

You will also be affected by any changes in outdoor temperature so you’ll have to act fast or it may cost you dearly. As you should in real life, the addition of weather affecting the player in Minecraft will now require the right preparation of armor or survival items always at the ready for exploring new areas. You can help get a jump on nature by crafting a thermometer to show you real time temperature changes and you will also see an indicator in the middle of the screen that will display an icon that changes depending on how cold it gets. You can build a fire and wear warmer clothing to help offset the cold and otherwise you can simply remove the warm clothes when you leave the dangerous cold places.

You may also notice throughout your journey that the seasons change over time. Normally without this mod there is only a change from day to night and depending on what biome you are in there may be rain or snow. But this mod alters the entire time structure of Minecraft by changing seasons along with the daily time advancement from day to night. So in a sense biomes will all go through a seasonal shift much like we all do in real life and some biomes will now change temperatures from warm to cold and instead of rain, those biomes will have snow. It’s a slow process for sure but you can also craft a season tracker to see when it changes. This is one of the unexpectedly wonderful additions this mod adds to make the worlds you build in that much more real.

This mod requires an additional API found here.