YUNG's Better Nether Fortresses in All the Mods 10

YUNG's Better Nether Fortresses is a complete redesign of Minecraft's Nether fortresses, rebuilt from the ground up. Compared to vanilla, these fortresses are much larger, more complex and more rewarding.^[1]

What a fortress looks like

Each fortress has three parts: the bridge networks, the Keep, and the Lava Halls that extend deep underground. So don't just stay on the surface bridges, because the fortress goes well below them.^[1]

The mod also has built-in Create compatibility. If Create is installed, certain parts of the fortress have a chance of spawning using Create pieces. It's an optional feature, and Create isn't required for the mod to run.^[1]

It's meant to work with other worldgen mods too. With Apocalyptic Fortress, that mod's fortress spawns alongside the Better Fortress. With Bygone Nether, the Better Fortress spawns instead of its enhanced vanilla fortress.^[1]

In this pack

This pack ships version 1.21.1-NeoForge-3.1.5 of the mod, and it has been included since the pack's 1.0 release or earlier.^[2]

Same as in the All the Mods 10 8.1 guide

Good news: there's nothing to craft before you start with this mod. YUNG's Better Nether Fortresses is a worldgen mod that redesigns Nether fortresses from the ground up, so your first step is simply finding one in the Nether.^[1]

Compared to vanilla, these fortresses are much larger, more complex and more rewarding. Each one has three parts: the bridge networks, the Keep, and the Lava Halls that extend deep underground.^[1]

What to expect when you go exploring

• Expect a much bigger structure than a vanilla fortress. Look for the bridge networks first, then the Keep, and remember the Lava Halls go deep underground.^[1]
• If Create is installed, certain parts of the fortress have a chance of spawning with Create pieces. This is an optional feature, so you may or may not see it.^[1]
• The mod is intended to work with other worldgen mods. With Apocalyptic Fortress, that mod's fortress spawns alongside the Better Fortress. With Bygone Nether, Better Fortresses spawn instead of its enhanced vanilla fortress.^[1]

Vanilla fortresses

The mod has a config option called disableVanillaFortresses, which controls whether vanilla Nether Fortresses are disabled. I can't confirm its value in this pack, so check your config before you assume which fortress types you'll run into.^[3]

Unverified The sources I have don't show any in-pack recipes, quests or items for this mod, so there is no crafting order to follow here. If you find a recipe or quest tied to it, treat it as unconfirmed until it's verified.

This mod is a worldgen overhaul, so there are no machines, power or fluid systems to learn. What follows is how its fortresses are generated, as far as the mod's data files show. The mod describes each fortress as three parts: the bridge networks, the Keep, and the Lava Halls that extend deep underground.^[1][4]

Where fortresses generate

Fortresses can appear in biomes tagged as Nether biomes, plus an optional tag many other mods use for Nether biomes. That is why Nether biome mods work with it.^[1][5]

Placement uses a random spread with a spacing of 30 and a separation of 20. It also has an exclusion zone of 10 chunks around the vanilla nether_complexes structure set, so a Better Fortress should not spawn right on top of a vanilla one.^[6][7]

The fortress is a single structure, generated at the surface_structures step. Its start height is picked between 80 and 100. The structure size is 46, and pieces may extend up to 116 from the center.^[4][8]

The terrain around it is adapted with a kernel size and distance of 24. The top is carved and the bottom is left alone, which helps the fortress fit into the Nether terrain.^[4]

How a fortress is assembled

Fortresses are built from jigsaw pieces. Every fortress starts from the starts pool, which holds the Keep. If Create is installed, a Create version of the Keep is also in that pool and is marked as a priority piece. Create is optional for the mod.^[1][9]

The Keep pool contains a well, a left side and a right side.^[10]

The battle bridge pool has a start piece (at most 3 per fortress), a straight section, a gate, a split and a pillar. A Create-flavoured gate is added when Create is loaded.^[11]

The blaze pool forces one blaze piece to generate (max_count 1, priority). More blaze pieces, including broken variants, can appear only at a depth of at least 28, up to 2 per variant name.^[12]

Bridge chests are limited to 6 per fortress. The empty chest-less variant has a weight of 12, against 1 for the chest piece, so most spots stay empty.^[13]

A mobs pool adds decorative piglin, wither skeleton and skeleton pieces.^[14]

Mob spawns

The fortress overrides monster spawns, applied inside the bounding box of each piece. Spawn weights and group sizes are:^[4]

• Blaze: weight 10, groups of 2 to 3.^[4]
• Zombified piglin: weight 5, groups of 4.^[4]
• Wither skeleton: weight 8, groups of 5.^[4]
• Skeleton: weight 2, groups of 5.^[4]
• Magma cube: weight 3, groups of 4.^[4]

Loot

The mod includes an obsidian chest loot table. The first pool picks equally between Obsidian and Crying Obsidian. A second pool may or may not roll, and when it does it gives Flint And Steel (weight 10) or Diamond (weight 5).^[15]

The sources here don't show a tier ladder for this mod, so this section covers what they do confirm: where the fortress generates and what a couple of its chests hold.^[5][16][17]

Where to find it

The fortress can generate in any biome tagged as a Nether biome. Biomes in the optional in-nether common tag are included too, if that tag exists.^[5]

It is placed with an enhanced random spread, using spacing 30 and separation 20. It also keeps its distance from the vanilla Nether complexes: the exclusion zone is set to 10 chunks, so you won't find one of these fortresses right on top of a vanilla one.^[6][7]

Loot worth knowing about

The beacon chest is split into separate pools. One pool gives a few rolls of either Arrow or Fire Charge, both at weight 5. The other pool rolls once for a Bow. A bow without enchantments is the most common result (weight 20). Next comes a bow enchanted at level 10 (weight 10), then one enchanted at level 20 (weight 5).^[16]

The extra chest is a single pool of basic materials. The iron and gold entries are weighted like this:^[17]

• Iron Nugget and Iron Ingot (weight 25 each)^[17]
• Gold Nugget and Gold Ingot (weight 50 each)^[17]

The rest of the pool is Leather, String, Glowstone Dust and Quartz. All of these have weight 50.^[17]

Unverified The contents of the other fortress chest types (hall, keep, obsidian, puzzle, quarters, storage, worship and others) live in the mod's loot table data files, and the sources here do not show them, so what they hold is unconfirmed.

All the Mods 10 8.2 ships YUNG's Better Nether Fortresses 1.21.1-NeoForge-3.1.5. The mod has been in the pack since All the Mods 10 1.0 or earlier. Here is what changed along the way, from the mod's own changelogs and the pack's.^[2]

Mod changelog highlights

• 3.1.0: the port to 1.21.1, with all structure NBT files updated.^[18]
• 3.1.2: the minimum version requirements were lowered so the mod works on both 1.21 and 1.21.1.^[19]
• 3.1.3: fixed an issue where feature mixins could cause worldgen deadlocks.^[20]
• 3.1.4: fixed modded blocks and items not working with the extra JSON config files on Fabric. The pack runs on NeoForge, so this one mainly matters for the Fabric version of the mod.^[21]
• 3.1.5: fixed a long-standing issue where the spawn behavior of Nether Fortress mobs (Wither Skeletons, Blazes and so on) in Better Fortresses didn't match vanilla Fortresses.^[22]

Pack changelog entries

• All the Mods 10 2.39 updated the mod from 3.1.3 to 3.1.4.^[23]
• All the Mods 10 4.0 updated the mod from 3.1.4 to 3.1.5, which is the version 8.2 still uses.^[2][24]