Minecraft, but the World Border Shrinks

The world opens at 3,000 blocks across and then starts eating itself. Every thirty seconds the border takes another five percent off its own width and glides inward across the whole interval, so the wall is always moving - there is no quiet pause between steps. Warnings land at 2,000, 1,000, 500, 250, 100 and 50 blocks, each one raising the damage outside the wall, and at 100 everyone starts glowing. It stops at 25 blocks: a final arena nobody can leave. Chill, Standard and Brutal presets, pause, resume, recentre and a one-command reset are all included.

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

• load.mcfunction creates the scoreboard objectives, sets the opening width, retained percentage, floor and interval from the Standard preset, then snaps the border out to full size and builds the boss bar.
• tick.mcfunction runs a scoreboard clock. Every interval the target width is multiplied down by the retained percentage and handed to a macro function that calls worldborder set with a travel time equal to the interval, so the wall interpolates inward continuously instead of teleporting. Each dimension has its own border, so the macro moves all three: the End to the same width, the Nether to one eighth of it.
• Six threshold functions fire once each at 2,000, 1,000, 500, 250, 100 and 50 blocks, guarded by a stage counter so a run never repeats a warning. Each one raises worldborder damage amount and the warning distance, and 100 blocks puts glowing on everyone.
• A boss bar shows the width the border is closing to plus a live seconds countdown, updated once a second through storage-driven macro arguments. Any player can type /trigger bsh_status for a full readout without needing operator permissions.
• The clock only advances while at least one player is online, so an empty server never shrinks itself into nothing while nobody is watching.
• Operator functions cover the whole lifecycle: reset restarts a run, pause and resume hold the clock, shrink_now forces the next step, center_here and center_origin move the middle, three presets retune the pace, and uninstall restores every vanilla border default.

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.