A total conversion mod for Minecraft created by user Flower Child, that adds mechanical power to the game, which creates a wide variety of things ranging from elevators to pottery. There are also a large number of change to game mechanics ranging from mob behavior to starvation and mining.
Tropes:
- An Interior Designer Is You: This mod adds quite a few decorate items, sometimes with an extra functional use as well, such as tables, candles, a series of paintings themed around occultism called canvases, and planters.
- Black Magic: Soulforged Steel is used to create the best tier of tools in the game. You also need to trap souls and combine them with iron ingots to create it.
- Crossover: Defied. Unlike the majority of major mods, Better Than Wolves is (deliberately) not built against the Minecraft Forge modding API, and as such cannot be played alongside any other mods.
- However, there is currently a little-known-of in-development rewrite called Better With Mods, which is built against Forge.
- Difficult, but Awesome: Refined Tools require a LOT of work to get, but are better than even diamond tools.
- Early Game Hell: In Minecraft, it's fairly easy to get a full set of stone tools and a decent food supply in less than five minutes. In Better Than Wolves, you must go through a much slower process just to get a stone pickaxe. Every block breaks very slowly if you're not using the right tool. If you don't build a shelter and find a source of food before the first nightfall, you will die quickly and respawn hundreds of metersnote away from where you were, with no co-ordinates system to help you find your way back.
- Festering Fungus: Nether groth. When fully mature, any creature standing on it takes damage and is launched into the air. If you try to destroy mature growth in any way, it explodes, poisoning anything around it and spreading the growth farther.
- Hell-Bent for Leather: This mod adds a set of tanned leather armor, which offers the same protection as regular leather armor in Vanilla Minecraft but is twice as durable. It also adds the ability to cut both raw and tanned leather into leather sheets, so you can spend less resources exhibiting this trope.
- I'm a Humanitarian:
- Sometimes players drop 'mystery meat' upon their death, which you can cook and eat. You can even turn it into a sandwich.
- You can feed wolfchops to wolves. They will instantly turn hostile even if you've tamed them.
- Instant Fish Kill: Possible by throwing dynamite into a body of water.
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Nintendo Hard: Minecraft is easy compared to Better Than Wolves. Everything you would take for granted in Vanilla has been removed, nerfed, or made more dangerous. 'Peaceful' and 'Easy' difficulties are disabled. - Made of Explodium: Blasting oil. As you'd expect, getting caught in a flame or explosion causes it to go off, but so does dropping down any height higher than a few meters, and if you get hit while carrying some, all the blasting oil in your inventory will explode.
- Mundane Utility: You can harness the torment of the souls of the damned to...make cement.
- Refining Resources: A fair amount. For example, while you can still craft using raw leather from vanilla, this mod lets you scour raw leather with a millstone and then cook it with dung and tree bark in a cauldron to get tanned leather, which is essential for crafting various machines and soul-forged tools and armor.
- Self-Imposed Challenge: An option has been added that disables the use of buckets, called "Hardcore Bucket."
- Just having this mod installed is one of these. Beds are no longer usable at all, eating too much slows you down, armor slows you down, explosives are much more bothersome to get, iron is now worth 1/9th of what it was in the normal game. There's a reason FlowerChild puts the term "Hardcore" before nearly every change to Minecraft he makes.
- Soul Jar: Soul Urns. Also a partial case with Soulforged Steel, which requires Soul Urns to make.
- Soul-Powered Engine: In addition to being used to craft high-level tools and armor, the aforementioned soul urns are also used to activate snow and iron golems and craft pistons and block dispensers,which are quite useful for automating farms and other setups.
- Tech Tree: There are specified ages within the game, and you must make a certain item considered to be the "head" which unlocks the next age and allows you to craft more items. There's a full list here
, with the ages listed. It is so huge people in the forums call the one in vanilla "tech shrub" here - Throw Down the Bomblet: This mod adds dynamite and, naturally, the ability to light and throw it. It's not very good as a weapon, but it's reasonably cheap once you have the technology to make it.
- Savage Wolves: If you feed rotten flesh to a wolf, it will turn into the beast. Unlike normal wolves, beasts are permanently hostile.
