Minecraft, but Night Is Deadly

When the sun goes down the overworld turns on you. A boss bar counts the night through four phases, and any player standing under open sky picks up Dread every second: Weakness, then Slowness, then Mining Fatigue and Hunger, then Darkness and Wither. Meanwhile every hostile mob within 64 blocks of a player gets Speed, Strength, Resistance and finally Regeneration. Get a roof over your head or dig in. Survive to sunrise and the whole thing lifts, you bank a night on the scoreboard and dawn hands you Regeneration and Absorption. Sleep through it and it does not count. Every fifth night the baseline gets worse.

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

• The tick function reads the day clock once a second with `time of minecraft:overworld query minecraft:day` and sorts it into four night phases: Dusk (12600), Deep Night (15000), Witching Hour (17500) and Dead of Night (20500). A boss bar shows how long is left until dawn.
• Shelter is checked with `execute positioned over world_surface if entity @s[distance=..2.5]` — if the world surface is within two and a half blocks of your feet you count as under open sky, and Dread ticks up one per second to a cap of 100. Under a roof or underground it bleeds off three per second.
• Severity = night phase + Dread tier (one per 25 Dread) + world escalation, capped at 6. Each step adds a debuff: Weakness, Slowness, Mining Fatigue and Hunger, Slowness II, Weakness II and Darkness, then Wither. Everything is applied with a 3 second duration and refreshed each second, so it all expires on its own at sunrise instead of stripping your own potions.
• Every hostile mob within 64 blocks of a player in the overworld — a 27 entry entity type tag covering zombies, husks, drowned, skeletons, strays, bogged, parched, creepers, spiders, endermen, witches, phantoms, all four illager types, ravagers, breezes and more — gets Speed at Dusk, Strength at Deep Night, Resistance and Health Boost at the Witching Hour, and Speed II with Regeneration in the Dead of Night.
• Killing a hostile after dark rolls a `loot give` bounty table for torches, food, iron or a rare diamond, tracked by a hidden `player_killed_entity` advancement that revokes itself on its first line so it re-arms for the next kill.
• At dawn every overworld player banks a night, gains Regeneration II and Absorption, and unlocks milestone advancements at 1, 3, 7 and 14 nights. Every fifth unbroken night pays a dawn cache. Dying at night resets your streak, and a `slept_in_bed` advancement flags anyone who bought the night off so it does not count.

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.