I used to play a Minecraft mod called Better Than Wolves, which had a mechanic called Hardcore Spawn. The idea was that you would spawn randomly within a fairly large radius of the world spawn.
BTW made a lot of changes to the early game of Minecraft to make survival significantly more difficult, so you would wind up respawning often. At first this feels ridiculously unfair, but there's a magical thing that starts to happen the longer you play - you begin to stumble upon old bases, little caches of early game treasure (maybe just as simple as some tools or a few pieces of food).
Lots of the design of BTW was to encourage you to build - for example, certain materials like stone or packed dirt would make "roads", on which you would travel slightly faster (and critically, using up less hunger).
Over time, you would have a small network of hidey holes with roads or signposts leading back to larger bases. It gave your world a sense of history and was extremely rewarding over time - each death allowing you to claw out a small bit of advantage and control over the world.
BTW started out largely as a technology mod, letting you automate things and build better gear. So when these early game changes were introduced, they felt mean, and unnecessary, and frustrating. But anyone who could stick with it long enough would find themselves handsomely rewarded, both in in game power of creation and also in the experience of slowly conquering challenges through the things you built.
BTW's creator, who went by the handle FlowerChild, has long since left the mod community, but I remember him fondly. I learned a lot about game design from his posts outlining the decisions he made in designing the mod.
There is still a community around the mod, I think they've even carried on with the development. The period of my life where BTW was the thing for me is behind me, but I look back on it with a lot of good memories.
I played both Sevtech Ages and GTNH and the difficulty was definitely part of the fun - you feel real accomplished having moved past a laborious process.
BTW made a lot of changes to the early game of Minecraft to make survival significantly more difficult, so you would wind up respawning often. At first this feels ridiculously unfair, but there's a magical thing that starts to happen the longer you play - you begin to stumble upon old bases, little caches of early game treasure (maybe just as simple as some tools or a few pieces of food).
Lots of the design of BTW was to encourage you to build - for example, certain materials like stone or packed dirt would make "roads", on which you would travel slightly faster (and critically, using up less hunger).
Over time, you would have a small network of hidey holes with roads or signposts leading back to larger bases. It gave your world a sense of history and was extremely rewarding over time - each death allowing you to claw out a small bit of advantage and control over the world.
BTW started out largely as a technology mod, letting you automate things and build better gear. So when these early game changes were introduced, they felt mean, and unnecessary, and frustrating. But anyone who could stick with it long enough would find themselves handsomely rewarded, both in in game power of creation and also in the experience of slowly conquering challenges through the things you built.
BTW's creator, who went by the handle FlowerChild, has long since left the mod community, but I remember him fondly. I learned a lot about game design from his posts outlining the decisions he made in designing the mod.
There is still a community around the mod, I think they've even carried on with the development. The period of my life where BTW was the thing for me is behind me, but I look back on it with a lot of good memories.