Explorer Mode (1.14) - Minecraft PE Addons

Experience Minecraft like it was on your first day: Scary, challenging and full of wonder! Disables most crafting recipes for tools and armor. So you have to either find them or trade for them in villages.

About Explorer Mode

Remember the first time you started Minecraft? Being put into an unknown world that was yours to explore. Digging a little hole in the dirt to survive your first night? Being excited when after hours of playtime you found your first diamond? The good old days, when “Survival” mode actually meant you have to struggle?

Compare this feeling to modern Minecraft. You skip your first night by killing some sheep, strip mine at y-level 12 and find your first diamonds after an hour in game and get fully enchanted diamond equipment before a day is up. Making the rest of the game absolutely trivial. You then spend the rest of your time to make it even more trivial by creating huge automated farms taking all challenge out of the game.

Removed Crafting Recipes

This add-on aims to bring the feeling of your first days in Minecraft back. It achieves this goal by disabling the crafting recipes for stone, iron and diamond tools and armor. It also disables the recipes for shears and buckets. So you have to either find them or trade for them in villages. This means that you will have to explore the world, gather loot and emeralds and fight for every bit of progression. No longer can you ignore all those different villager trades because all of them are now useful. Llamas and donkeys will become your best friend, when they transport your loot while you travel from village to village looking for that enchanted pickaxe trade. When you delve into abandoned mineshafts or dive for sunken ruins and you find that iron pickaxe or gold ingots to repair your enchanted golden armor you will rejoice!

Enhanced Loot and Trade Tables

Explorer mode also enhances some loot tables for mods and chests. To prevent sleeping through your first night by murdering sheep, they will not drop wool anymore when killed. So you have to shear them in order to get wool. On the other hand some mobs and all loot chests have enhanced loot so you will usually find something you can use. It also edits the trade tables for the villagers so you are not offered a bell for 36 emeralds anymore.

Restricted Breeding

In order to prevent massive animal farms that make obtaining food and leather trivial, breeding now requires golden food. To breed rabbits or chicken you need a golden carrot, to breed pigs and sheep you need glistering melon and to breed cows you need a golden apple. This makes breeding less trivial (and incidently helps with the spawn limit, therefore making hostile mobs more likely to appear in caves). 

Rebalanced food

Not all food is created equal now. Food consumption time now corresponds to the amount of hunger restored. So a berry can be eaten very quickly while rabbit stew takes five seconds to slurp.

Rebalanced Ore Spawn

In vanilla Minecraft exploring the underground lacks variety. No matter in which biome you mine, the underground stays the same. In Explorer Mode it actually makes a difference where you mine. Right now there are three significant changes to the ore spawn. The amount of coal and lapis lazuli that generates in the world has been significantly reduced. To compensate you will find a lot of coal underneath a swamp biome and a lot of lapis when mining below a desert biome. Additionally when you face the dangers of the frozen biomes (Strays will spawn underground now!) you can find diamonds up to y-level 32.  

New Ores

Explorer Mode adds Nether Gold Ore and the rare Nether Emerald Ore to the nether. They can be mined with any pickaxe (even wooden) and will drop gold nuggets or an emerald respectively. So it might be worth it to take the risks of the nether to get your hands on some precious gems and metals. You can also smelt them in a furnace to get an emerald or a gold ingot.

Added Mobs

Explorer mode also adds some new (retextured)  mobs to the game, to make exploring more interesting and challenging.

Pygmy Skeleton

In the  jungle, instead of normal zombies and skeletons there will now spawn pygmy skeletons that shoot arrows of poison and weakness. They can also drop those arrows if you slay them.

Nether Golem

In the Nether you can now find the mighty Nether Golem, a hostile mob that is very powerful and probably best avoided. If you kill it, you will be rewarded with some nether bricks and a bucket of lava.

Obsidian Golem

Another golem added to the world is the obsidian golem. These huge ancient guardians roam the deepes recesses of the underworld. They are neutral towards the player but if you manage to slay one of those rare entities you will be rewarded with obsidian and a block of diamond.

Hellhound

Another new resident of the nether is the hellhound. These creatures hunt in packs and will drop leather when slain.

Cavecreeper

This creeper replaces it’s surface variant when underground. It behaves just like a ordinary (green) creeper but with a much more powerful explosion (less powerful than a charged creeper though).

Golden Creeper

This creeper variant will spawn very rarely when underground. In contrast to a normal creeper the golden variant will flee from the player at very high speed. If you manage to catch and kill it, the golden creeper will explode in a “lootsplosion” dropping many valuables.

Red Husks

This variant of the Husk replaces Zombies in Mesa biomes. They drop red sand on death. Normal husks will also drop normal (yellow) sand when killed.

Parting Words

Explorer mode makes the game much more challenging. You can spend hundreds of hours before facing the Ender dragon or the Wither. There is no “optimal” way to play Minecraft anymore and when playing Explorer Mode you are here for the way not for the destination.

Will you take up the challenge and enter Explorer Mode? 

Installation

• Make sure you are on the 1.14 Beta! (Instructions)
• Download the mcaddon
• Double-click and Minecraft should open
• Create a new world and enable experimental features
• Choose "Explorer Mode" under behaviour packs