Scaling Health

What is Scaling Health Mod

Please read the "Help!" section before commenting. Many common questions are answered there.

Found a bug or have a feature suggestion? Use the issue tracker on GitHub. If you report a bug in the comments, I will not fix it. I need the proper information to fix issues, and the issue tracker makes sure it is provided. Comments are fine for questions and small suggestions. Please don't make me disable comments.

Introduction

Minecraft too easy for you? After playing the game for years, I can't help but feel it is. Or perhaps it's too hard with all the crazy mods you've added? Scaling Health aims to balance out modpacks, by allowing players, mobs, or both to gain extra health! Or players can start with less health, if that's what you want. The mod is highly configurable.

This mod started as an unofficial port of Difficult Life, a mod I personally loved playing with. Eventually, I decided to rebuild the mod from the ground up, fixing bugs, adding more config options and widening the scope of the mod to include players who need an easier experience, not just a harder one. The difficulty system is very server-friendly, unlike the system used in Difficult Life.

Feedback and constructive criticism are always appreciated.

Key Features

• A per-player difficulty system. A difficulty value is tracked for each player. There are several factors that can increase/decrease your difficulty. By default, it increasing slowly as time passes. As difficulty increases, mobs become stronger. Mob strength is calculated based on one of several methods (see below). This feature can be tweaked/disabled to your heart's content.
• More player health! Or less. Players can obtain heart containers that increase their maximum health. Normally, you keep the extra health even after dying (configurable). The player's starting health can also be changed, and the max health cap is configurable as well. You can also set health to increase/decrease with XP levels.
  
• Lots of control. Plenty of config options to let you play the game however you like! There's even an in-game config screen, so you can tweak options without restarting Minecraft.

Requirements

• Silent Lib and Java 8 or higher.

Add-ons

• Scaling Wealth (1.12.2) by ejektaflex - Allows customizing mob drops based on difficulty. Scaling Health allows this to be done with loot tables, but this mod is useful in cases where loot tables either don't exist or are inconvenient to edit.

Example Configs

Looking to get going in the right direction quickly? Here are a couple of config files I made. You are of course free to modify and share these. If you would like to share your config file here, I'd be happy to add it to the list (assuming it's unique...)

• Easy Mode - Name says it all, this makes the game much easier. The difficulty system is entirely disabled (no extra mob health, no blights, etc) and heart container drops are much more common. Max health cap is raised to 4096.
• Gentle Mode - Slowly increasing difficulty with a low cap. Blights are disabled. Players gain more health as they accumulate XP (but spending the XP will decrease health). Health from heart containers is capped to 100 (does not count the health from XP), but that can be easily changed if it doesn't suit you.

Difficulty

Player Difficulty

A difficulty value is tracked for each player. By default, this increases slowly over time. You can also set the mod to increase/decrease difficulty when players kill certain types of mobs, or when the player dies. You can also set difficulty to reset at certain intervals, like every week.

Player difficulty is typically used to calculate difficulty when spawning mobs, but some modes use other methods (see next section). The starting and maximum difficulty levels and the amount added each second are configurable. By default, idle players accumulate difficulty more slowly.

The difficulty value will determine how much extra health mobs can have. Mobs will also gain bonus attack damage and potion effects. Higher difficulty values also increase the chance of mobs spawning as blights...

Area Difficulty

When mobs are spawned, an "area difficulty" value is calculated for the position the mob is spawned at. This value is then used to determine extra health/damage, chance of becoming a blight, etc. Depending on the mode, this is usually based on the difficulty level of all nearby players. "Nearby" means within the search radius, which is configurable.

Modes

• Weighted Average - A weighted average of the difficulty of all nearby players, with distance being used to calculate the weight. In layman's terms, closer players have a greater impact on the area difficulty. This is the default mode.
• Average - Simply takes the average difficulty of all nearby players.
• Min Level - Takes the lowest difficulty level of nearby players.
• Max Level - Takes the highest difficulty level of nearby players.
• Distance from Spawn - Uses the distance from the world spawn to calculate the area difficulty. Basically, it's distance multiplied by the "Distance Per Block" config option.
• Distance from Origin - Same as "Distance from Spawn", but uses the distance from the origin (0, 0, 0).
• Distance and Time - A mix of Weighted Average and Distance from Spawn. Difficulty increases over time, but mobs also get stronger the further from spawn they are! Originally a user suggestion, now my personal favorite!
• Server-Wide - Or you can ditch my system and use an equivalent to Difficult Life's. Difficulty is tracked at the world/server level. Player difficulty values are completely ignored (but still tracked).

Health Scaling

Mobs (both passive and hostile by default) will gain extra health as difficulty increases. The way extra health is added can be changed in the config file.

• Multiplier modes (MULTI, MULTI_HALF, and MULTI_QUARTER) - The mob's health is multiplied, so that mobs with a higher base health will get a bigger boost. MULTI applies the same multiplier to all mobs, while MULTI_HALF and MULTI_QUARTER apply less for mobs with greater than 20 health. All of these should still apply more health than ADD mode. MULTI_HALF is the default.
• Additive mode (ADD) - A flat increase for all mobs. This is what Difficult Life used.

Damage Scaling

New in 1.3.15, you can now increase the amount of damage players take from various sources. By default, no damage scaling is performed. You can customize this in the config under player/damage.

You can choose one of three modes: scale with player max health, player difficulty, or area difficulty. Max health mode is proportional to the starting health you set in the config. So if you have 100 health and starting health is 20, that's a 4x multiplier (100 - 20)/20. The difficulty modes multiply the difficulty value by a "weight" value you can tweak in the config. The weight defaults to 0.04, which would result in a 10x multiplier at 250 difficulty (0.04*250=10). I'll call this number the mode amount.

For the scale value for each damage source, a value of 0 (default) results in no scaling. A value of 1 would scale proportional to the mode amount, so survivability would not increase with health. Between 0 and 1 might be ideal, but you could also set it higher than 1 if you want to buff certain damage types.

The final calculation multiples the scale by the mode amount by the original damage amount, then adds that to the damage dealt. So, something like damage = original * (1 + scale * modeAmount).

Blights

Blights are extremely powerful mobs. These are ordinary mobs (even from other mods) that have spawned with far more health, higher damage-dealing potential, and a variety of potion effects including a large speed boost. They also tend to spawn with armor. The mobs themselves spawn with an invisibility effect, but are on fire. Blights have a purple fire effect at all times which makes them easy to identify, even if submerged in water.

By default, blights drop more heart containers than standard mobs (0-2 each by default, instead of a small chance of getting one) and ten times the XP. Blights have a variety of config options available, and can even be disabled entirely if that's what you want.

Blocks and Items

Heart Crystal

Heart crystals (or heart containers in earlier versions) are used to increase players' maximum health. They can drop when mobs are killed (with configurable rates for different mob types) or crafted from heart crystal shards. Simply use (right-click) them to gain one extra heart per container. Heart containers also restore a couple extra hearts.

Gaining health from heart containers can be disabled in the config, allowing them to act only as a healing item. Heart containers will make a "ding" sound when giving extra health or a "burp" sound when they can only heal.

Drops are controlled by loot tables in 1.13.2 and higher, so you need to override Scaling Health's mob type loot tables to change drop rates.

Power Crystal

(No texture yet)

Found in versions for Minecraft 1.13.2 and higher. Power crystals behave similarly to heart crystals, but they increase a player's base attack power when used. By default, it is a 0.5 (quarter heart) increase per crystal used. They are less common than heart crystals by default.

Cursed Heart and Enchanted Heart

The cursed heart will increased difficulty when used. The enchanted heart will decrease difficulty when used. In 1.13.2, these drop occasionally from certain mob types at certain difficulty levels. This can be changed by editing Scaling Health's loot tables for mob types. In 1.12.2, there is no built-in way to obtain them. You need to add them to loot tables or add recipes for them if you want to use them.

By default, they increase/decrease difficulty by ten points, but this can be changed in the configs.

Bandages and Medkits

Bandages and medkits will restore a percentage of your maximum health when used. To apply one, use it (hold right-click) for 5 seconds. You will be given the "Bandaged" potion effect and a portion of your health will be restored each second, but you will move more slowly while this is in effect. The effect is removed if your health is fully restored. Both bandages and medkits require heart dust to craft, so they won't be very economical to make until your maximum health is higher.

Miscellaneous

• Heart/power crystal ore - Drops heart/power crystals when mined. Becomes more common as you travel further from spawn.
• Heart/power crystal shards - Dropped when heart/power crystal ore blocks are mined. These sometimes drop from killed mobs as well. In 1.12.2, you can also configure heart crystals to drop in place of heart containers.
• Heart dust - Crafted from a heart container and used to make bandages and medkits. A single heart container makes 24 dust.

Difficulty Bar

A difficulty bar will appear on your HUD from time-to-time (there's also a keybinding to show it). This bar actually has two parts, although you can't tell in most cases. The upper part of the bar (the largest part) is the Area Difficulty at your location. You may see this portion grow when near other players on a server, or when using a distance-based mode. The lower part is your Player Difficulty. That's the difficulty your player accumulates over time, which is used to calculate Area Difficulty in most cases.

Commands

1.13.2+

Commands have different names now. They should all start with "sh_", like "sh_difficulty", "sh_health", and "sh_power". Otherwise, they behave similarly to earlier versions. Argument order may differ.

Earlier Versions

Scaling Health includes a couple of commands. These are good for testing, goofing off, and working around bugs... These consist of a main command, which is the mod ID (scalinghealth) and then several subcommands. Full usage:

/scalinghealth   [value] [player]

 where 'value' is omitted for 'get' commands. If [value] is out-of-bounds, the command will tell you. [player] fully supports target selectors like '@p' (nearest player/yourself) and '@a' (all players).

Subcommands

• difficulty - Check or change player difficulty
• health - Check or change player health
• world_difficulty - Check or change world difficulty (SERVER_WIDE mode only)

Modes

• get - Check the value. The [value] parameter must be left out.
• set - Set the value to [value].
• add - Adds [value] to the current value.
• sub - Subtracts [value] from the current value. Same as 'add' with a negative number.

Examples

• '/scalinghealth health get @a' - Check the health of all players on the server
• '/scalinghealth difficulty add 10 @p' - Add 10 to your difficulty

Help!

FAQ, tech support, and such.

• Q: How do I configure the mod?
  A: (1.13.2) You must edit the config files with a text editor (config/scalinghealth). (1.12.2) The easiest way is to use the in-game config GUI. From the main menu, click Mods, select Scaling Health, click Config. Or if you are in a world, press Escape and click Mod Options. If you prefer to edit the file directly, it can be found at config/scalinghealth/main.cfg. If you see an asm.cfg file, you can ignore/delete it as it is no longer used.
• Q: How do I disable the difficulty system?
  A: Set "Max Value" under the "difficulty" category in the config file to 0. You won't be able to gain any difficulty, so the effects of the system are effectively disabled.
• Q: Is the health system compatible with other mods?
  A: It depends. Mods that use modifiers to change health seem to work well enough together. For player health, Tough As Nails has no issues, but Cyclic's heart containers are completely overridden by Scaling Health. For mobs, I've seen some cases where modifiers stack together in undesirable ways. Probably best to just allow one mod to tinker with health in each case.
• Q: There's a config/feature I wanted, but the mod doesn't have it...
  A: Let me know about it! There's a good chance I'll add it for you, if it fits with the mod. Please use the issue tracker (link at top of page), otherwise I will not do it.
• Q: Can I use this in a mod pack, make videos/streams with the mod installed, or share/publish config files?
  A: YES! And I'd love to see your work! Send links if you want, but it's not required.
• Q: Can I redistribute your mod on another site? (Not part of a mod pack)
  A: NO! Absolutely not! You can link back to here for downloads if you want to promote my work on another site, but all downloads should happen through CurseForge.
• Q: Can we get a port to ?
  A: No. Too much work for too little reward.