Minecraft, but Kills Give You Hearts

You start at the usual ten hearts. Then you kill a zombie and keep half a heart of it. Every hostile mob in the game is now a health upgrade: common mobs pay half a heart, elites like blazes, ravagers and piglin brutes pay a full one, and the four bosses hand over three at a time. The gains are written straight into your max_health attribute, so the bar really grows, and they survive death, respawn and reloads. It caps at 40 hearts so the run stays a game instead of a victory lap, and the cap is one scoreboard command away if you disagree.

Built for Java Edition 26.3 only. Older versions read loot tables, predicates and advancements in a different format, so they list the pack as made for a newer version, and it will not work there.

How it works

• A hidden advancement listens for minecraft:player_killed_entity and revokes itself on the very first line of its reward function, so it re-arms for the next kill instead of firing once.
• Kills are graded by three custom entity_type tags: common hostiles pay one half-heart, elites such as blazes, evokers and ravagers pay two, and the ender dragon, wither, warden and elder guardian pay six.
• Earned half-hearts are stored on a scoreboard, and a macro function writes twenty plus that total into the minecraft:max_health attribute base value, so the health bar itself gets longer.
• A once-per-second loop reads the attribute back with execute store result and repairs any mismatch, which is what silently restores your hearts after every respawn.
• The cap sits at 60 earned half-hearts (40 hearts total) with an optional death penalty; both are plain scoreboard values you can retune live without editing a file.
• Run /trigger bkgh_check at any time for a readout of your current hearts, qualifying kills, and how many half-hearts remain before the cap.

Installing it

1. 1.Download the zip below. Do not unzip it — Minecraft reads the zip directly.
2. 2.In Minecraft, click your world, then Edit, then Open World Folder.
3. 3.Drop the zip into the datapacks folder inside that world.
4. 4.Load the world. Run /datapack list to confirm it is enabled.

First time? How to install Minecraft data packs

Written by MineSpecs and released under CC0 — public domain. Use it, change it, ship it in a modpack, no attribution required. Pairs well with our mods, shaders and resource packs.