Ancient Ruins 🏛️
Whispers of a forgotten civilization lie buried beneath the Overworld — if you know where to look.
Ancient Ruins is a data-driven Fabric mod for Minecraft 26.2 that adds 12 handcrafted ruins to the Overworld, each with its own biome, story, loot, and achievement. No new blocks, no code bloat — just pure worldgen, built on the latest 1.21.5+/26.x data pack standards.
🗺️ The 12 Ruins
Every ruin generates naturally at the same rarity as its vanilla counterpart — surface watchtowers that hug the terrain, vaults buried in the deep, and ruins resting on the ocean floor.
- Watchtower of the Plains — a lonely sentinel of the grasslands, meadows and savannas
- Desert Watchtower — deep in the desert sands
- Snowy Watchtower — snowy plains, ice spikes and frozen slopes
- Jungle Shrine — beneath the jungle canopy and dark forests
- Badlands Mine — the red earth of the badlands
- Mossy Maze — forest floors tangled in vines and moss
- Abandoned Campsite — a forgotten well in the woods
- Frost Altar — frozen peaks, an offering to the cold
- Coastal Outpost — beaches, shores and shallow oceans
- Swamp Ruins — a witch's hut in disguise, its chests full of brewing supplies
- Underground Vault — the deep dark and caverns far below (y = −40)
- Sunken Ruins — beneath every ocean, a drowned memory
🏆 Advancements
A dedicated "Ancient Ruins" advancement tab — unlocked automatically when you join a world — tracks your journey: enter each of the 12 ruins to earn its own exploration achievement.
💰 Themed Loot
Each ruin has a hand-crafted loot table using the latest data component syntax — enchanted gear, armor trims, even brewed potions:
- The Underground Vault guards diamonds, echo shards and a mace — occasionally a Protection III diamond chestplate with a copper trim
- The Swamp Ruins (witch-hut variant) rewards brewers with nether wart, blaze powder and ghast tears — sometimes a ready-made swiftness potion
- The Sunken Ruins may yield a heart of the sea
- The Watchtowers hide spyglasses, maps and enchanted books
- No meat in any chest — the ancients were picky eaters
⚙️ Requirements
- Minecraft 26.2
- Fabric Loader 0.19.3+
- Fabric API 0.156.0+26.2
🔧 Technical Highlights
- 100% data-driven — structures, advancements and loot tables need zero Java code
- Uses the latest 26.x formats: advancement / loot_table / structure (singular directories), entity_properties location predicates, set_components/set_enchantments loot functions
- Spawn rates tuned to match the vanilla ruins they stand alongside
- Open source under the MIT License
🔗 Links
- GitHub Repository
- Releases & changelog in the Releases tab
AI Generation Disclosure
Parts of this project were created with the assistance of AI tools: Code & Logic: Developed with the assistance of Claude Code / ChatGPT. Description & Documentation: Refined and formatted with AI assistance.
All generated code and assets have been reviewed, tested, and modified to ensure stability and compatibility with Minecraft 26.2 (Fabric).
