Top 10 Best Minecraft Mods That Make the Game Harder in March 2024 (ver. 1.20+)

Have you ever felt that Minecraft was just too easy? Don’t the combat and survival mechanics challenge you enough that you need a difficulty boost? Then you’ve come to the right place. Here are my top 10 best Minecraft mods that make the game harder in March 2024.

What Are the Top X Best Minecraft Mods That Make the Game Harder in March 2024

Increasing difficulty in Minecraft is all about introducing new survival mechanics and making monsters tougher and more aggressive. I compiled a list of mods that will make both combat and mundane tasks like managing resources and torches more difficult. There are also mods here that will affect your world and make survival harder. Here’s a brief overview before we dive into the list:

• Tough as Nails
• Improved Mobs
• Majrusz’s Progressive Difficulty
• TerraFirmaCraft
• Zombie Awareness
• Realistic Torches
• Enhanced Celestials
• Angry Mobs
• Harder Branch Mining
• Limited Lives
• Honorable Mention: RLCraft

Feel free to click on any one of these to skip ahead to their entries.

Tough as Nails

Tough as Nails by TheAdubbz introduces various ways to make survival harder in Minecraft. For example, in addition to hunger, you’ll also have to manage your thirst and drink water. Furthermore, the elements are your enemy, so you’ll have to manage heat in desert biomes and cold in snowy ones.

Body temperature can drastically affect how you explore the world and can inevitably lead to death if not managed properly, for example, with fires to keep warm during winter. I also highly recommend the Serene Seasons mod from the same creator to spice survival up even more.

Improved Mobs

The Improved Mobs mod is one of the simplest ways to ramp up the difficulty of your combat encounters. It can drastically increase the health and damage of mobs to start. Also, mobs will also be smarter, climb ladders, and have better path trajectories toward the player. They’ll even wear armor and use gear like flint and steel, TNT, and more.

Majrusz’s Progressive Difficulty

Inspired by the difficulty mechanic from Terraria, the Progressive Difficulty mod ramps up the difficulty of your Minecraft game as time passes. You’ll progress from Normal Mode all the way to Master Mode. Over the course of your journey, you’ll face groups of enemies with a boss mob that wears gear or even undead raids that come in waves of monsters. This mod isn’t for the faint of heart.

TerraFirmaCraft

This mod is all about changing how you approach exploring the world and making that aspect of Minecraft more realistic and difficult. TerraFirmaCraft adds vast dangerous caverns, seasons and weather will change to hinder your traversal, and you’ll need to stockpile resources like wood for the winter. You’ll also need to manage your food since this mod adds expiration dates. There are even new predators roaming the woods, so prepare for a fight once you’re out in the wild.

Zombie Awareness

Zombie Awareness is a mod with a simple idea of introducing horror elements into your Minecraft experience. If you get hurt, you’ll start to bleed and the blood with attract monsters through sent. Furthermore, mobs will react to sound and light sources, so sneaking becomes much more of an issue. Finally, there will be monstrous hordes roaming in the night, which makes learning how to sneak around them with this mod’s mechanics crucial to survival.

Realistic Torches

Another simple and effective mod to make exploration harder is Realistic Torches. Essentially, torches you wield and place around the world will expire after a certain amount of time. You’ll need to light them back up with matchboxes or a flint and steel. This makes it so that you can no longer go back to a cavern you visited safely, as mobs will spawn if there’s no light.  

Enhanced Celestials

Thematically, I think Enhanced Celestials is one of my favorite difficulty mods because it plays with how the phases of the moon work and how they affect difficulty. The nighttime becomes a horror game as Blood Moons will increase monster spawns.

Furthermore, you cannot sleep through a night when the Blood Moon is active, so you’ll have to survive it as mobs try to smash your doors open. This means you’re now tracking the phases of the moon and preparing for haunting nights of survival. That said, the other two Moon phases are mostly beneficial, so you’ll have periods where you can take a breather.

Angry Mobs

If you want to evolve your mobs even further, then Angry Mobs is for you. This mod will expand the move set of monsters, allowing them to call for help, leap, and shoot objects at the player. What I like about it the most is that you can tweak these behaviors with simple commands. All of them are listed on the mod page.

Harder Branch Mining

Monster buffs aside, the Harder Branch Mining mod tweaks how difficult mining is. You can set the difficulty for mining blocks at each height, making lower layers harder to break. Additionally, you can also set how difficult specific ore blocks are to mine. Overall, this is a neat mod to affect aspects of Minecraft that usually remain unaffected by difficulty mods.

Limited Lives

The Limited Lives mod introduces perma-death to the game. Essentially, each world you create will have a set amount of lives. When you die, you’ll lose half a heart of your permanent health, and this can be increased with commands. These losses are permanent and once you lose all hearts you’ll lose access to the world. Dying is now a much bigger factor where you can lose your entire world rather than just drop all your gear.

Honorable Mention: RLCraft

Even though it doesn’t support the current game version, RLCraft is one of the best mod packs out there to make your game harder and more difficult. It’s essentially a combination pack of all the previous mods we listed to some degree. Monsters will be tougher, survival mechanics will be less forgiving, and you’re going to die a lot until you get used to it. If you’re looking for an all-in-one difficulty mod package, look no further than RLCraft.

That concludes my list of the top 10 best Minecraft mods that will make the game harder in March 2024. For more Minecraft articles, check out the top 10 best shaders mods or whatSnapshot Realms are.