Lighter End

A reimagined vision of a Better End

What Is This?

LighterEnd transforms Minecraft's least-loved dimension into one full of light, life, wonder and mystery. It adds:

• nine new biomes, each with its own ambient sounds and music
• seven new mobs (some friendly, some hostile)
• six new stone building materials
• five new wood types
• four new music discs
• an armored elytra
• and much more

through a balanced gameplay experience that will make you want to explore, base and build in The End, and not just go straight home after raiding an End City.

A New Future for a Better End

This mod is based on and inspired by Paulevs' legendary mod, BetterEnd, development on which ceased in 2024 after over five years. LighterEnd is a ground-up rewrite, built using modern design principles, and has no dependencies outside of the Fabric API. It is my hope, by making this mod easily maintainable, with the bare minimum of abstractions, that BetterEnd's core ethos can be carried through to new Minecraft versions, as they release, with a minimum of effort.

What We Leave Behind

LighterEnd is not and never will be a 1-to-1 recreation of BetterEnd. Explicitly, a lot of BetterEnd's features were either unbalanced with vanilla Minecraft, were too difficult to maintain or never worked right to begin with. For example:

• Thallasium and Ender Ore were redundant, and Terminite, Aeternium and Crystalite tool tiers were overpowered. LighterEnd introduces no new ores to the game and only one new armor material, exclusive to the Silk Elytra, which had weaker glide than base elytra, a protection level roughly on par with diamond and a durability only slightly better than leather
• LighterEnd does not implement its own terrain generation, instead overlaying biomes onto either the Vanilla End or that of a datapack like Nullscape or Stellarity.
• Instead of biome-specific end soil, LighterEnd makes do with one End Moss which takes on different colors (and bonemeal behaviors) based on the biome it's in
• End Veil is a potion-only effect instead of an enchantment, though intrepid explorers may find other ways of avoiding the ire of Endermen
• LighterEnd does not include hammers, forging, infusing or alloying
• LighterEnd has no Eternal Portals—the only ways to make it out of The End alive is through the central island.

Regarding BetterEnd's twenty four biomes, LighterEnd has nine (as of v1.0), along with six wood sets. While none of BetterEnd's mods are explicitly being excluded, which ones will be ported, when and how is dependent on interest (the developers' and the community's).

You can find a list of features slated for development, tied to the "milestone" (release) they're targeted for, on the issues page. If there's a specific biome or feature (from BetterEnd or no) you'd like to see prioritized, feel free to open an issue requesting it.

New Features

On the flip side, LighterEnd has features not present in BetterEnd:

• The option for gravity in The End to be 1/3 of normal
• Silk Elytra—a craftable, trimmable and renewable armored elytra
• New survival-challenge-friendly crafting recipes (such as the ability to get paper from the leaves of End Lilies and arrows from Cubozoa drops)
• Sniffers that sploot on End Moss will dig up rare End saplings
• Obelisks that you can teleport to upon almost dying (meaning your stuff is safe even if you fall into The Void)
• Ice Stars that contain ice enriched with metals (copper, gold, iron)
• New mobs such as the Chorus Crab and Glossy Mooshroom

Broad Compatibility

Lighter End can be installed alongside other End mods, including (but by no means limited to):

• Nullscape
• Moog's End Structures
• Elytra Trims
• Better End Sky

For a more detailed and up-to-date list of compatible mods and datapacks, consult the Lighter End Wiki

If you find a Fabric End mod that doesn't work with LighterEnd, please open an issue.

Contributing

Worldgen datapack developers wanted!! If you have experience creating custom dimensions or adding biomes to existing dimensions, please contact me!

If there is a BetterEnd feature you would like to take responsibility for porting, please open an issue to start that discussion!

Building the Mod from Source

0. Download and install a Java 21 OpenJDK such as Temurin
1. Clone this repo
2. Load this project into your favorite Java IDE and run the "runDatagen" gradle task (or, from the command line, run sh ./gradlew runDatagen from the project root)
3. Now run the "build" task, either from the IDE or via sh ./gradlew build
4. The compiled jar will be found under build/libs

Style Guide

• This project uses pre-commit hooks to format Markdown and non-generated JSON files. To set up pre-commit, follow the instructions linked above to install pre-commit on your system, then, from the repo root, run pre-commit install to have the hooks run on every commit.
• It is strongly recommended that you turn on automatic format on save / commit in your Java IDE. Instructions for doing that inside IntelliJ can be found here. Make sure to select:
  • Reformat code
  • Optimize imports on any save.
• The top priority of this mod is to make it easy to understand and maintain (note that "difficult to update" and "tedious to update" are not the same thing). This means that implementations should be as "flat" as possible—no interfaces, the bare minimum of abstraction, and any "helper" methods should be used at least twice before they're refactored out into their own "library" class.
  • And, just to be extra clear: this mod should never depend on any other mod, library, API or project outside the Fabric API. If someone else already solved a thing, adapt how they did it (with proper attribution, and assuming it's GPL-compatible open source)—don't just count on that library always existing forever.
  • The corollary to the above is that this project will never be refactored into a general-purpose modding library or API. Anyone seeking to adapt the solutions developed for this mod is welcome to adapt those bits of code (subject to the license below).

License and Acknowledgements

All code in this repository is licensed under GPLv3.

Substantial portions of this mod—including most of its assets—were adapted from BetterEnd and BCLib, developed primarily by Paulevs and quiqueck, in accordance with the terms of their respective licenses:

• https://github.com/quiqueck/BCLib/blob/9607e2e50818c9059505c32c72eb2d8d00bf6e9d/LICENSE
• https://github.com/quiqueck/BetterEnd/blob/00e4892827c4f1b0d2e213348f63e57a647a8011/LICENSE

The Chorus Crab was designed by Pegnok of the BetterX Discord.

Music discs were composed, performed and recorded by Firel.

Many thanks:

• to the excellent tutorial mods developed by Kaupenjoe and TurtyWurty
• to Pintér Gábor and his IronSigns mod for providing an extremely helpful example of adding custom signs
• KikuGie for their elytra trims
• TerraformersMC for figuring out how to automate some of the ridiculous amount of complexity involved in adding a custom armor material
• to the Enderscape team for great modern examples of library-free worldgen and terrain modification
• to Vanilla Tweaks for the concept of grooved levers
• to the developers of Quartz for building a fantastic static site generator
  • and to the developers of Gatekeeper for providing a phenomenal example of Quartz in practice with their game wiki
• to the deveopers of and contributors to the isometric-renders mod
• to the BetterX Discord for their feedback in shaping this mod's development

You may use, modify and redistribute this mod, and you may include this mod within your modpack or run it on a server, so long as you abide by the terms of this license, which critically states that you must make the source code (including your modifications to the mod) available to anyone downloading the mod (including modified versions and including within a modpack)