TONI’s Better Strongholds

The vanilla stronghold is a string of corridors with a library and a portal somewhere along it. Better Strongholds buries a fortress-monastery of the Eye in its place: two levels of halls round a great rotunda, a library of two or three floors, prisons and crypts, and the Sanctum of the End portal at the heart of it.

No two alike: every stronghold is put together from its own seed. The eye of ender still leads you to it.

The portal room is a hall of its own, 32 blocks square and 25 high, held up by pillars of obsidian and purpur with bands of froglight. From its single door a landing and a flight run down along the wall. In the middle, a dais of three steps stands in a moat of lava, of soul fire, or of water on a flooded floor, and on top of it the twelve frames ring a well of lava, as they always have. The silverfish spawner waits beside them, and a chest of offerings behind.

Dig down where the eye of ender falls and you come down into the rotunda: a tall octagonal hall in the middle of the stronghold with a gallery round it on the upper level, a flight down to its floor, and a fountain, a well or the statue of the Eye in the middle. Every way into the stronghold starts here.

Shelves from the floor to the vault, a gallery all round the upper level, ladders up the shelves and chandeliers over the reading tables. The big one has three floors and the enchanter’s well in the middle of it. Its chests are worth the climb.

Round the rotunda, two levels of rooms joined by corridors, crossings and stairwells, laid out differently every time:

• The upper level: barracks, armories with their weapons on the walls, refectories, chapels of the Eye, alchemists’ rooms, scriptoria, storerooms, long galleries of banners, and fountain crossings.
• The lower level: prison blocks behind iron bars, crypts of sarcophagi, an ossuary lined with bone, a flooded cistern, a nest of silverfish, and the treasury.
• The corridors, three wide under rounded vaults, some of them lined with prison cells, some of them with a chest in a niche.

• Tripwires across the corridors, with dispensers in the walls that fire across.
• Plates that shoot up from a dispenser under them.
• Plates over TNT, and in the treasury a trapped chest with charges under it.
• Infested bricks in the walls, and a whole room of them round the silverfish nest.

Every stronghold rolls its own:

• The plan: which rooms there are, where, and how the doors join them, on a grid of 25 cells and two levels.
• The stone: stone bricks, tuff bricks (from 1.20.3), or deepslate when it lies deep.
• Its state: kept, worn, or a ruin with cave-ins and webs in every corner.
• The Sanctum (lava, soul fire or flooded), the rotunda (fountain, well or statue), the library (two or three floors), the wood and the colours of the banners.

2000 strongholds built in a row came out as 2000 different ones, and in every one of them every door, spawner and chest (but the ones locked in the prison cells) can be walked to, every trap is wired, and the portal is whole.

Every version from 1.19 to 26.3: Fabric, Forge on every version Forge shipped for, and NeoForge from 1.20.1 on. Pick the file that matches your game.

It requires TONI’s Structure Lib, the engine of the structure series: the stronghold is written once and the lib builds it in every version. On Fabric it also needs Fabric API. Both are marked as dependencies, so the CurseForge app installs them with it.

• Replaces strongholds in newly generated chunks; the ones already generated are left alone.
• The same 128 strongholds on the same rings as vanilla: /locate and eyes of ender find it.
• Fully underground and buried like the vanilla one, so caves do not cut through it. Nothing on the surface changes.
• Ten loot tables; the library, corridor and treasury chests also roll the vanilla stronghold tables.
• Server-side: clients do not need it.

Do I need any other mod?
Yes: TONI’s Structure Lib, and on Fabric Fabric API.

Do I need it on the client?
No. It is a server-side mod. Installing it on a client as well is harmless.

Can I add it to an existing world?
Yes. Strongholds in chunks you have not generated yet will be the new ones.

How do I find one?
Throw an eye of ender, or /locate structure minecraft:stronghold. Dig down where it lands: you come out in the rotunda.

Does the portal still work?
Yes: twelve frames facing in, now and then one with its eye already in. Fill them and jump.

Older versions?
1.19 is the floor, as for the rest of the series built on the lib.

Modpacks?
Go ahead.

Every picture is a screenshot from the game, taken with Complementary Reimagined.