Vanilla Progression

Build a town, unlock better gear, and automate your way to the endgame.

Vanilla Progression is a settlement-based progression mod that gives you a reason to build something bigger than a house.

Instead of simply mining your way to better equipment, you’ll need to develop a town. Build farms, workshops, mines, universities, defences, and more. Each building has its own requirements and seven upgrade tiers, all based on the blocks you actually place in the world.

There are no new ores or arbitrary XP levels. Your settlement’s buildings determine what you can craft, which upgrades you can unlock, and how well your town handles the challenges ahead.

Start small, gather resources, and turn a few buildings into a fully developed settlement.

Build your own buildings

Vanilla Progression currently includes 32 building types, with another three available when playing with Easy Mob Farm. Each building has seven tiers.

Every building starts with a marker. Place it wherever you want the structure to be, supply the required materials, and build around it.

The mod scans the surrounding area for the blocks and conditions required by that building. There are no fixed blueprints, so you can design your own layouts and fit buildings into your town however you like.

A few examples:

Farm: farmland, water, and a composter.
Blacksmith: an anvil, furnace, iron blocks, and a proper structure.
Watchtower: build upwards to meet its height requirements.
University: bookshelves and other requirements for your enchanting progression.
Mine & Quarry: develop your resource production to support higher building tiers.

When a building meets its requirements, its marker updates to show the new tier. If something is missing, you’ll see which blocks, materials, or building upgrades you still need.

Some buildings also depend on others. A high-tier Blacksmith, for example, requires a developed Mine and Quarry. You’ll need to improve the whole settlement rather than upgrading everything in isolation.

How progression works

Getting started is straightforward:

Found a settlement. Craft a Settlement Core, place it, and give your town a name. It becomes your Town Hall, with a border extending 100 blocks in every direction.
Place building markers. Choose where your farms, workshops, mines, and other structures will go.
Construct and upgrade. Build the required structures and supply their markers with materials. Markers support hopper and dropper input, which becomes particularly useful for expensive upgrades.
Unlock new progression. Your buildings contribute to your Town Hall’s progression, unlocking crafting options and equipment for the entire settlement.

In multiplayer, everyone shares the same progression. If one player spends the afternoon gathering materials for a Blacksmith upgrade, the resulting unlocks are available to the whole town.

What’s included?

Feature	Details
32 buildings + 3 optional buildings	Seven tiers per building, with dependencies between different structures.
Shared progression	Settlement upgrades unlock gear and recipes for every member.
Enchanting	University upgrades, Magic Academy features, and additional ways to obtain enchantments.
Custom enchantments	Excavation mines a 3×3 area, while Vein Mining follows an ore vein.
Building perks	Ten distinct perks, including faster crops, extra ore, more durable tools, and improved deliveries.
Random events	Blight, Harsh Winter, Bandit Scouts, and Sickness, alongside helpful events such as merchant caravans and wandering scholars.
Raids	Enemy waves scaled to your settlement, with warnings, boss bars, and meaningful defensive structures.
Mob drops	Special drops from mobs that can be used in settlement recipes and crafting.
Population & food	Your town’s infrastructure determines its population and food supply.
Machines	Automated mining, farming, forestry, excavation, and stone quarrying.
Dimension progression	Unlock access to the Nether and End through settlement progression.
Titles	Ten titles earned through your settlement’s achievements.
Endgame	Nether and End milestones, sulfur caves, advanced recipes, and Dragon Scales.

Your town needs to survive

As your settlement develops, the world becomes more dangerous.

Mobs are tougher than in vanilla Minecraft, with additional difficulty in the Nether and End, as well as around developed settlements. Raids bring waves of enemies to your town, with their strength influenced by your progression and population.

You’ll also encounter events that affect your settlement.

Blight damages your harvest, Harsh Winter increases food consumption, Bandit Scouts threaten your borders, and Sickness slows your growth. Helpful events can bring merchants, scholars, and other benefits.

These events aren’t just random penalties. Your buildings can reduce their effects, and sufficiently upgraded structures can prevent certain events entirely.

For example, a developed Farm and Alchemist can reduce the effects of Blight, while a higher-tier Alchemist can stop it altogether.

The same idea applies to positive events. A Market and Trading Hall improve merchant deliveries, while a University can benefit from visiting scholars.

Building the right infrastructure is how you deal with the problems your town faces.

Perks, recipes, and custom enchantments

Buildings provide benefits beyond unlocking equipment.

Vanilla Progression includes ten unique building perks. Your Farm can grow crops faster, your Mine can produce additional ore, and your Blacksmith can make tools last longer. Other buildings improve deliveries and provide their own bonuses.

Your Town Hall also unlocks two custom enchantments:

Excavation: mines a 3×3 area.
Vein Mining: follows an ore vein to its end.

Both enchantments consume durability for additional blocks mined and stop before your tool would break. Hold sneak to mine a single block normally.

They are obtained through settlement progression rather than ordinary enchanting table rolls or librarian trades.

Mobs can also drop special materials, including Tidal Pearls, Silk Glands, Hex Residue, Ember Hearts, and Void Shards. Different buildings let you turn these drops into useful items, from crafting materials to otherwise unobtainable vanilla resources.

Defeating the Ender Dragon also provides Dragon Scales. Once your End Spire reaches the required tier, these can be used to craft your own Dragon Egg, allowing subsequent dragon fights to provide another one.

Machines and automation

Later building tiers require a lot of resources. That’s where the machines come in.

Vanilla Progression includes several machines that automate resource gathering:

Deep Drill: extracts resources from naturally generated ore veins.
Forester: cuts down trees grown from saplings you planted.
Harvester: collects crops you’ve planted.
Stone Breaker: quarries a chunk down to bedrock.
Excavator: digs a real hole through the terrain.

Machines require fuel and tools, with iron, diamond, and netherite heads that wear out over time. Coolant reduces wear, while modules provide bonuses such as increased speed, Fortune, and Efficiency.

They also require workers. Your settlement’s buildings determine how many machines you can operate, and drills require a crew of four.

Exceeding your worker limit pauses the affected machine without destroying its resources. Machines can catch up when you return without keeping their chunks loaded.

A Chunk Loader, available from Town Hall I, can keep a chunk of machines running while you’re away. The number of available loaders increases with your Town Hall tier.

Optional: Easy Mob Farm integration

Vanilla Progression can integrate with Easy Mob Farm. This integration is optional and does nothing if Easy Mob Farm isn’t installed.

With both mods installed, three additional buildings become available:

Building	Requirements	Unlocks
Ranch	Fences, hay, a composter, water, and flowers	Animal, bee, ocean, jungle, swamp, and desert farms
Monster Pit	Cobblestone, iron bars, chains, and darkness	Monster, Nether, End, and other mob farms
Golem Foundry	Iron blocks, an anvil, pumpkins, and a bell	Iron Golem farm

Each building has seven tiers. Farm tiers are unlocked through building progression rather than purchased directly.

Tier 1, 2, and 3 farms require the corresponding building to reach tiers II, IV, and VI. These requirements apply to crafting, placing, and using farms, including those obtained through commands or the creative inventory.

Templates and catchers have their own crafting requirements, including materials obtained through progression and raids.

Existing Easy Mob Farm recipes aren’t removed. Instead, the integration adds progression requirements and increases the costs of relevant recipes.

Your progress is safe

Upgrading a settlement takes time, so the mod is designed to preserve what you’ve built.

Your territory only expands.
Losing a raid can cost stored materials and require repairs, but it won’t remove building tiers or territory.
Food shortages slow your settlement down rather than demoting it.
Breaking a building marker doesn’t erase the building’s progress.

If you need to move a building, break its marker and place it somewhere else within your settlement. If you lose the marker, a newly crafted core of the same type can recover the building’s record.

Dropped cores cannot burn or be destroyed by explosions.

The progression menu

Press K to open the main menu. It includes 14 tabs for managing your settlement:

Overview: your settlement’s current status.
Buildings: requirements, tiers, and missing materials.
Progress: your next settlement level.
Tree: the full progression tree, including unlocks and dependencies.
Population: citizens and food supply.
Perks: active bonuses and future upgrades.
Events: current events, their effects, and ways to counter them.
Titles: earned titles and progression towards new ones.
Chronicle: your settlement’s history, filterable by player.
Machines: active machines, their status, and reasons for pausing.
Raid, Threat & Trophies: information about raids, enemies, and rewards.
Guide: an in-game manual generated from your server’s loaded datapacks.

The progression tree includes item icons and a search function. Search for an item to find the building that unlocks it and the entire path required to obtain it.

There are also a couple of extra controls:

J: switch between a compact building shopping list and the full list.
V: toggle automatic mining while digging. It mines blocks only and cannot attack mobs.

You can pin a building’s material requirements to your HUD, making it easier to keep track of what you need while gathering resources.

For server owners and modpack creators

Most of Vanilla Progression’s gameplay values are configurable through datapack JSON files.

This includes building requirements, material costs, settlement progression, mob scaling, raids, defences, food, member roles, perks, events, titles, dimension requirements, and recipes.

Changes can be applied with /reload, without rebuilding the mod or restarting the server.

Individual files can be overridden by datapacks, and the in-game guide is generated from the data your server actually loads.

Additional options include disabling raids or food pressure, as well as protecting building markers from outsiders. Marker protection doesn’t prevent players from modifying ordinary blocks, so it can coexist with other land-claim systems.

The gameplay logic is handled server-side.

Balance and material costs

Vanilla Progression is designed around long-term settlement development.

Early tiers are manageable by hand, but the material requirements increase considerably as you progress. By the middle tiers, automation becomes an important part of the experience.

A typical tier I building requires around 20,000 delivered items across several common materials. The first Town Hall tier is cheaper, requiring around 8,500 items.

At tier VII, costs can reach millions of items. These numbers are intentional: high-tier buildings are meant to be long-term projects, supported by machines, hoppers, and settlement perks.

If the default costs aren’t right for your server, they’re configurable through datapacks and can be changed with /reload.

The material progression ends at netherite. There are no custom ores, higher-than-vanilla enchantment levels, or additional equipment tiers beyond it. Further progression comes from new buildings, perks, recipes, automation, and increasingly demanding challenges.

Commands

Command	Description
`/vprog found <name>`	Found a settlement.
`/vprog info`	View settlement information.
`/vprog building`	Inspect the nearest building and its requirements.
`/vprog tree`	View the progression tree.
`/vprog raid`	Check raid status and requirements.
`/vprog population`	View population and food information.
`/vprog members`	View settlement members.
`/vprog role`	View or manage member roles.
`/vprog perks`	View active perks and upcoming upgrades.
`/vprog event`	View current and possible events.
`/vprog title`	View earned titles and title progression.
`/vprog guide`	Open the in-game guide.
`/vprog admin setlevel <tier>`	Operators: set the targeted settlement’s level. Use `0` to clear it.

Development status

Vanilla Progression is in early release.

The core systems are covered by 212 automated in-world tests, which create structures in a Minecraft world and verify the progression rules. These tests don’t render the game, so the interface still needs more testing through actual gameplay.

Several rounds of playtesting have already helped identify and fix issues. Feedback on balance, building requirements, automation, and progression is welcome.

Most gameplay values are configurable, so server owners and modpack creators can adjust the experience to suit their players.

Vanilla Progression is built for players who enjoy building, resource gathering, automation, and cooperative survival. Develop your settlement, unlock new possibilities, and see how far you can take it.

VProg

介绍