Diminishing Health

Diminishing Health is an attempt to make Minecraft's death system more meaningful and less of a chore. Instead of just losing your items or progress, the mod punishes you by cutting your current maximum health in half every time you die, down to a minimum of 1 heart. Making every death impactful and, most importantly, lasting.

For example: starting at 20 health, after dying once you'll have 10, then 5, then 2, and finally 1. It is meant to punish you for dying repeatedly until you have nothing left to lose. Everything with its own flavor texts and little sound alerts.

By only reducing your health, you can still mine, build, and even explore right after you die. Instead of having to stop whatever you are doing to go pick up your stuff. The mod is meant to be used with KeepInventory, any grave mod, or whatever death mod you prefer. But it can be used with vanilla death.

There are lots of mods that use health as a mechanic, but few have the same detail, configurability, and unique approach to health management as Diminishing Health, especially for this version. While health is often treated as a simple or secondary feature in other mods, this mod is fully centered around it as a lightweight and focused alternative.

Broken Body

When you lose any amount of maximum health, you’ll receive the Broken Body effect as a visual reminder that a piece of you is missing. This effect has no gameplay impact and disappears once you fully recover your maximum health. It can be toggled on or off in the config.

Recovering Health

The mod offers 5 different ways of recovering your health max health. Each recovery method has its own flavor texts and subtle sound alerts, making every healing moment feel special, and none of these can push your health beyond your original maximum. They are healing, not power ups.

Partial Health Recovery.

Eating a golden apple restores 25% of your original max health. For example, if you have 10 hearts left, eating one will bring you back to 15. Golden apples are the default, rare enough to feel valuable, but not so hard to find that healing feels impossible. You can choose to use them early for safety, or save them for when you’re really desperate.

Full Health Recovery

An enchanted golden apple will instantly restore your health to its full original maximum. Meant to be a magical "restart". Having all your hearts feels refreshing for once.

Sleeping Health Recovery

Sleeping through the night restores 5% of your original max health. This recovery only works if you wake up in daytime, so modded ways to skip nights, like the hammocks in Comforts by TheIllusiveC4 will not work. It's supposed to give you a reason to sleep, to heal rather than just skipping the night.

Passive Health Recovery

Every full Minecraft day (around 20 minutes), you’ll regain 5% of your max health naturally, healing by just surviving. As such, this timer resets on death, to give you a reason to relax and do something less deadly.

Determination

When reduced to just half a heart, dying three times in a row triggers a burst of determination, restoring 15% of your max health. This mechanic can only activate once every half Minecraft day, meant to keep you from getting stuck too hard. Recovering any bit of health will reduce your frustration, and thus your determination.

Balanced by Design

Unlike most health-based mods that use flat values, this mod is built around a percentage-based system. Loss and recovery always scale with your current and original max health, respectively, whether you have 5 hearts or 30. That means death penalties and healing rewards stay consistent and fair.

This is actually rarely seen in health mods. Since your health is always changing and customizable, using percentages keeps everything balanced, intuitive, fresh.

HardMode

HardMode is Diminishing Health’s new, reworked optional Hard mode. No longer a gimmick.

Instead of losing health on every hit, HardMode introduces a damage threshold mechanic. Each time you take damage from any source, that damage is accumulated. If the accumulated damage surpasses the threshold, you'll lose a portion of your maximum health.

The accumulated damage slowly decays over time and accounts for all armor and damage reduction. To help you track it, HardMode adds a golden-framed heart that fades as you approach the threshold:

All usual recovery mechanics still apply, and death will still cut your health in half. For those who prefer the older system where every hit has a chance of reducing health, there's a config option to bring it back.

HardMode also includes an optional True Damage setting, which ignores armor and damage reductions when adding to the threshold. This makes the system more predictable and consistent, but harsher. (Disabled by default)

As with the rest of the mod, HardMode is incredibly configurable. Every single thing you can think could be configurable, is, and more.

HardMode is disabled by default. Enable it with the gamerule:

hardmodeEnabled

Advancements

Added a set of 10 simple, mildly funny advancements to help guide you through the mod.

HardMode comes with its own exclusive set of advancements.

Compatibility

Diminishing Health doesn't play well with mods that change your max health. It uses its own internal system that calculates loss and recovery based on your original health value, and other mods can throw that math off. No crashes, but the numbers won’t behave as intended.

You can manually set your max health in the config (default: 20), but this is best used to rebalance the mod, not to patch in modded health. Mixing in extra hearts from other mods will likely lead to weird halving and recovery values.

At first, I thought updating this value manually (e.g., setting it to 24 if another mod adds 4 hearts) would work, but this causes incorrect halving, faulty recovery values, and breaks the intended functionality of the mod.

Ideas to improve compatibility may come later, but only if they don’t overcomplicate the mod too much. For now, I rather keep the mod lightweight and solid on its own.

Mods like Hardcore Revival by BlayTheNinth, gravestone mods or similar. Since Diminishing Health only reduces health after you respawn, it won’t interfere with mods that delay death or preserve your body. In fact, I encourage using death mods. This mod is harsh, they soften it a bit.

ModernFix Compatibility: ModernFix by embeddedt blocks dynamic config reloads. A warning will appear if it's installed, but you can disable that in the config. Everything else works just fine.

Optional Tag Support: Diminishing Health! Supports item tags for those who want to use them for modpacks or compatibility. Tags are not applied to default recovery items by default, so the config list still controls everything. The tags are there and checked if you want to use them. Available tags: diminishinghealth:partial_recovery_items and diminishinghealth:full_recovery_items.

Configuration

I put a lot of effort into making this mod as configurable as it can be.

You can enable or disable every individual health recovery mechanic. Adjust how much health you lose on death or how much each recovery method restores.

• Enable or disable every individual health recovery mechanic.
• Adjust how much max health you lose on death or with HardMode.
• Control how much each recovery method restores.
• Add any items you want as partial or full health recovery foods, not just golden apples.
• Fine-tune passive regeneration: how often it triggers, whether the timer resets on death, and more.
• Customize Determination: how much it recovers, how many deaths it takes to earn it, whether cooldown deaths count, and cooldown length.
• Configure HardMode: threshold values, decay speed, health loss per trigger, chance-based vs. guaranteed loss, and True Damage.
• And more!

By default, the mod can be quite harsh if you die early on, this is more or less intentional to make dying and the first night scary, but please feel free to tweak the configs until the difficulty feels just right. Make the pain of implementing them worth it. Every config was tested, so if it’s in the mod, it is safe to change.

The mod supports dynamic config reload, meaning any changes you make will apply live without needing to restart Minecraft or do anything really. This feature won’t work if ModernFix is installed, as mentioned earlier.

Note: Configs are server configs, located under saves/worldname/serverconfig. They are world-specific.

Small notes

Fully translated to Spanish!

This is my first mod, and while I’ve tested it with many mods, there may still be bugs. If you find any, please report them, your feedback helps a lot.

In general, please feel free to leave feedback, I adore reading what you think and I will listen. HardMode as a whole was a requested mechanic, for example.

The mod is lightweight and optimized as much as my (limited) abilities allow, so you shouldn’t notice any performance impact.

If you ever need to reload the config manually, use the command /diminishinghealthresetconfig. Tho normally, the dynamic config reload will handle this for you. Also note, this command won’t work if ModernFix is installed.

Thank You

Hope you have fun with it, please tell me about any issues you find with the mod, any recommendations or to simply tell me what you think. Either on CurseForge or in the FTB discord channel!