The philosophy of Iberia is to make Minecraft harder in ways that respect the vanilla Minecraft experience, enhance gameplay, encourage more experiences that are available in the game, and add a dose of reality.
Iberia: Hardcore Alchemy Edition is a fork of Iberia, a mod by Rock Hymas. The fork focuses on cross-mod compatibility. Please see the Releases for information about what has changed in the fork.
What is it?
Hard stone is any of the stone types (stone, andesite, diorite, granite) that has been surrounded by a compressing block on all six sides. Blocks that compress stone include stone itself, dirt, and bedrock. Hard stone takes ten times as long to mine, unless you're using a golden or a diamond pickaxe. Once a block of stone has been surrounded by compressing blocks, it will convert to hard stone in about the same time as it takes for wheat to grow one stage. Likewise, hard stone will convert back to stone after it's been un-surrounded in the same amount of time.
How do I deal with it?
In the early game, you'll need to go caving for stone and for ores. Mining is just going to take too long. In the later game, your diamond pickaxe will open up the ability to do branch mining.
What is it?
Vanilla natural regeneration is just too fast to be challenging. Disabling it entirely makes the game harder, but doesn't give you any way to recover from injuries until you can eat a golden apple or make potions of healing. "Sleep to heal" allows you to slowly recover from injuries by sleeping. Each time you sleep and wake naturally, you can heal two hearts (one on Hard difficulty, three on Easy difficulty) as long as you are not hungry at all.
How do I deal with it?
Without natural regeneration, in the early game you can make sure you're well fed, and then sleep through the night to recover from injuries. You'll still want to be very careful not to get hurt, because losing half your hearts will require a full 50 minutes of gameplay (plus food and a bed) to recover back to full health.
What is it?
When wearing armor, your access to chests, crafting tables, enchanting tables, furnaces, dispensers, hoppers, droppers, potion stands, and beacons will be slowed down. The slowdown is a delay that shows up when first accessing the object. The slowdown is greatest with full diamond armor, and non-existent with no armor. While waiting for access, you can still cancel out by pressing ESC.
How do I deal with it?
The best way to deal with it is to wear no armor or light armor when doing lots of crafting work. This encourages protecting the areas where you will be doing crafting with barriers and lighting. It also means you'll want to easily put on and take off armor. To allow for that, you can now hold down SHIFT while right clicking an armor stand to swap the armor on the stand with the armor that you are wearing. As an dded bonus, quick armor swapping can put elytra on an armor stand.
What is it?
This challenge turns on reduced debug info, which is a game rule that turns off "cheaty" info on the debug screen. So, with this on, you won't be able to find your location, the direction you are facing, the biome you're in, the light level, the local difficulty, or what you're looking at from the F3 debug screen.
How do I deal with it?
You're going to need to use in-game tools for keeping track of where you are, and getting around. Maps, compasses, and markers that you build in your world are all tools for knowing where you are and where you are headed. The sun can be used to find your direction. You're on your own to be careful about light levels and local difficulty.
What is it?
This challenge is a new take on the hardcore world type, and is currently focused on single player games. When you die, the world spawn point and the player's spawn point will be randomly moved to a location 1000+ blocks from the current world spawn. Combined with the "Find Your Way" challenge, it will be impossible to know which direction to go to find your old base. It's like hardcore in that you are starting over completely fresh, but different, because you'll still be in the same world as before. But like a fresh world, you likely won't know where you are. Or maybe you'll spawn smack dab in the middle of a base you built four lifetimes ago.
How do I deal with it?
First, don't die. That's the basic rule for hardcore worlds, and still applies. But if you do, your best bet is to start a new life and hope that as you build and explore that you'll find your old whereabouts. Once you've died once, you instantly have a new and important reason to go exploring. You can think of it like having a longing to find your way back home, but having no idea how to get there. If you do find an old base while building your new life, then you have a natural opportunity to link up your bases, creating a natural transportation network that may be difficult to find the motivation to build in standard single player Minecraft.
Iberia is Open Source and distributed under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 License.