Hearths

The Hearths mod adds decorative terrain and two kinds of structure to the Nether, and it replaces the vanilla definitions of the crimson forest, warped forest and nether wastes biomes. It is datapack-only and adds no items, blocks, mobs, recipes or code of its own. Its one gameplay-relevant feature is the Hearths Nether Towers, which hold chests or a blaze spawner and change which hostile mobs spawn inside their bounding boxes. A player is most likely to notice the mod through these towers and the extra piglin groups inside them.

Overview

Hearths is a small Nether expansion. It touches only the Nether dimension. It adds natural terrain to the nether wastes, giant fungi and roots to the crimson and warped forests, and three jigsaw structures that belong to two structure sets. It also replaces the three vanilla biome definitions with versions that include its features. The mod has no progression, no unlocks and no new recipes, so nothing it adds is required to craft or reach anything else in the pack.

Content

Hearths adds no items, blocks, mobs or enchantments. Its content is limited to the following:

• Structures: the crimson tower and the warped tower, both described on Hearths Nether Towers, and the netherrack spiral, which is a separate structure that generates in the nether wastes and is described on the same page under Generation.
• Terrain in the nether wastes: netherrack and blackstone pillars rising from the floor and hanging from the ceiling, small lakes of Netherrack, Blackstone or magma block, and patches of Fire.
• Vegetation in the crimson forest and warped forest: tall fungus trees built from crimson or warped stems, nether wart blocks and shroomlight, rock formations of blackstone, short stem columns, and forest vegetation weighted toward roots and fungi.
• Mobs inside towers: the towers reuse vanilla mobs, namely blazes, piglins, magma cubes and endermen, and blaze rooms contain a spawner. The mob mix for each tower is listed on the tower page. For the wider mob list, see Mobs.
• Loot: tower chests use the vanilla nether bridge chest table, which is also the table behind Nether fortress chests. The pack adds to that table (see In Fear Nightfall). For loot in general, see Loot and Chests.

Mechanics

Hearths' terrain is placed by ordinary biome features, and each feature has a fixed density per chunk. In the nether wastes, surface pillars are placed in layers of one to seven per layer, with a rarity filter of one in three. Each pillar is chosen as a large netherrack column (50%), a medium blackstone column (20%), an enormous netherrack column (20%) or a small netherrack column (the default). Small columns are one to two blocks tall, large columns one to three, and medium blackstone and enormous columns two to four. Enormous columns spread across a wider vertical range than the others. Lakes are shallow disks of netherrack, blackstone or magma block cut into the base stone, with a radius of roughly one to five blocks. Fire patches place nine to twelve fire blocks per chunk on netherrack floors at least four blocks above the bottom of the Nether.

In the crimson and warped forests, the vegetation features place four giant fungus trees per chunk, two rock formations per chunk, one stem column per chunk and seven vegetation patches per chunk. Fungus trees use a stem trunk three to seven blocks tall, with blobs of wart block, mangrove-style roots and vines or shroomlight decorations. The roots feature is configured to grow through lava, so some lava tiles become roots or stems. Giant fungus trees are placed on one in eight nylium tiles, and rock formations on one in sixteen.

The towers are jigsaw structures about six pieces deep. Each one starts at a height within a range given on the tower page, and its interior is chosen from a small set of rooms by weight. Inside the tower's own bounding box, the mob spawn list is replaced, so the piglin groups, magma cube groups and blaze or enderman groups described on the tower page spawn there instead of the normal Nether mobs. Outside the box the biome's spawn list is unchanged. Hearths does not change the spawn list of any biome as a whole.

The netherrack spiral has no loot, no mobs and no spawn override. It is terrain, and it is built from netherrack and lava.

Changes to vanilla

Hearths overwrites three vanilla biome files in full: the crimson forest, the nether wastes and the warped forest. Because a whole-file replacement discards any other edit to the same file, a player who runs another datapack or mod that edits those biomes will lose one of the two sets of changes. The features are inserted into the biome's existing feature lists, so the vanilla features in those lists remain.

Hearths makes no changes to physics, hunger, combat, redstone, inventory, experience, death, sleep, recipes, loot tables, trades or enchantments.

In Fear Nightfall

Fear Nightfall uses Hearths without any configuration. The mod has no config file, so its values are the ones in the datapack.

The pack's structure system affects the towers in three ways. First, the pack places each structure set at a density set by its Sparse Structures configuration, and the spacing values on Hearths Nether Towers are the values that apply in game. Second, the pack's overlap guard skips a smaller structure when a larger structure from another set would overlap it, so a tower can be missing from a spot where a larger structure already sits. Third, the pack extends vanilla-biome structures to modded biomes with the same climate and biome type, which may let the towers appear in modded biomes as well as in the two vanilla forests. The biomes that apply are listed on the tower page, and for help finding them, see Finding Structures and Biomes.

The pack adds loot to the vanilla nether bridge chest table through Traveler's Backpack tier upgrades. Those entries are added to the same table that the tower chests use, so tower chests can contain backpack upgrades in addition to the vanilla nether bridge loot. The nether wastes and the two forests are not among the biomes weighted up for horror content (see Horror and Spooky Content), so the towers are not part of the pack's horror emphasis. Their danger comes from the piglin, magma cube and blaze or enderman groups inside them, and from the mobs that spawn in the surrounding Nether, which is covered on The Nether.