u/earlofcheddar

I fell in love with hardcore mode a few years back and have played it many times.

Because I'm certainly a masochist, the way I have been playing is like this: every time I beat the dragon, I would start over with a random seed and impose a new additional limitation that would increase the difficulty, going down each rung of this challenge ladder until all 9 rules were in effect.

1-7 are not too bad if you've played hardcore before (Ultra is more tedious than difficult, IMO). But adding 8+9 on top of everything else provides the ultimate challenge here.

1. regular hardcore (only one life per world)
2. no totems mod
3. villages & igloos disabled (Structurify mod) and no trading (with zombie villagers found in the wild and then cured)
4. vegan (a long, long list of restrictions - including no wool, no crafting books & no bed use... technically the new straw bed is allowed, but I didn't use one)
5. Ultra (regeneration disabled... grab those Oxeye Daisies and baby, you got a stew going)
6. no enchanting
7. no potions
8. no armor
9. Half Heart mod

This was an extreme challenge, to say the least, but I finally pulled it off with all of the above restrictions (over the course of many months and 109 attempts). I literally died every way you can possibly imagine.

Some tips/lessons I learned along the way:

• the biggest problem was looting enough blaze rods without taking any damage
  • no potions means no crafting fire resist potions or trading with Piglins for them (not like I could do this safely without a piece of gold armor anyway)
  • the key here is going straight down to an Ancient City as early as possible, as they are the best source of Enchanted Golden Apples (which provide a small window of fire resist). I must have looted 50+ Ancient Cities during these attempts and I probably spent more time in these structures than anywhere else. In the final Ancient City I found I was able to loot 5! (No wool makes Ancient Cities a little more interesting.)
  • I needed at least 2 Enchanted Golden Apples each attempt: 1 to light up and disable a blaze spawner, and 1 to go back and in and break the glowstone.
  • bigbooty17's blaze farm is highly recommended. I died so many times trying to build this at various exposed blaze spawners until I found an enclosed spawner - use the enclosed one for sure!
  • even with an Enchanted Golden Apple up they can still kill you in 1-2 melee hits so you have to not get close until you're sure the spawner is disabled. I died many times to blazes spawning next to me and killing me with melee attacks after I thought the spawner was disabled.
• The second biggest problem was finding a reliable source of arrows without crafting them/killing chickens (the goal was to stockpile 80+ arrows for ender dragon fight)
  • I looted many bastions and died in many bastions solely for the purpose of trying to loot arrows. But the time it takes to locate bastions in each seed & the risk/reward ratio could not be justified.
  • A skeleton spawner works well for grinding arrows but these can be very laborious to locate without caving (and you do not want to go caving with half a heart and no armor)
  • I ended up designing a custom version of the standard mob farm, but with a water filter to safely remove chicken jockeys (so no chickens were killed)
• Movement in the Nether without gold armor is extremely dangerous
  • The best form of Nether travel in this challenge becomes a 1x1 coward's crawl tunnel
• The dragon fight is pretty doable with ianxofour's water trap. Still works in 26.2.
  • with no armor, no slow falling, no feather falling, and no beds... honestly this was the only method I considered
  • have to just stay on your toes and move quickly when the dragon shoots at you! Very stressful at the end of another long attempt.

That's it! Now I rest. If you attempt this I hope you have as much fun as I did, fellow masochists.

edit: fixed order of progressive ruleset & fixed typos