Matcha Flavoured

This article is about the datapack. For this wiki, see Matcha Flavoured Wiki:About.

Matcha Flavoured

A crystal heart, one of the pack's signature items

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! Developer | Klei Wright ("kleiwright") |- ! First release | 0.2-alpha (June 9, 2026) |- ! Full release | 1.0 (July 24, 2026) |- ! Latest version | 1.12.2-beta (September 19, 2026) |- ! Minecraft version | Java Edition 26.2 |- ! Pack format | Datapack 107.1, resource pack 88.0 |- ! Distribution | Modrinth, GitHub |- ! License

| CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Type	Datapack and resource pack

Matcha Flavoured is a datapack and companion resource pack for Minecraft: Java Edition by Klei Wright. It reworks survival progression so that casual and non-technical players, who explore, farm, cook and build instead of building mob farms, can gather resources as efficiently as technical players do. It replaces hunger with a cooking system in which food takes over the role of potions, replaces item loss on death with the loss of maximum health, adds four new alloys and two hybrid tool types, makes enchanting a crafting process, and overhauls villager trading, fishing and world generation.

The pack was first published on Modrinth in June 2026 and reached version 1.0 on July 24, 2026, alongside a design video by the developer. It is developed in the open on GitHub with contributions from the community, and all of its code, textures and data are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license.

Design

The developer's introduction video sets out the pack's reasoning. It argues that vanilla Minecraft rewards technical play, such as copying mob farm designs from tutorials and leaving them running, far more than exploration and building, and that casual players "work 10 times hard for 1/10 the resources technical players get". The README describes the goal as letting "casual players, who like to play slowly, [...] gather the same amount of resources technical players do in the same amount of time". Most features follow from a few principles:

No mob grinders

Mob drops are increased so that killing a single mob is worth it: every enderman drops a stable void (the pack's ender pearl), and zombies drop tattered leather instead of rotten flesh. The key progression items, divine fragments, come only from breaking spawners and defeating powerful mobs, so turning a spawner into a grinder costs the player the fragment they need for eyes of ender, crystal hearts, bedrock busters and several blessings. Villagers no longer buy everyday goods (only the fisherman, jeweler and weaponsmith buy a few things), so automated farms cannot be turned into currency.

Food over potions

Twelve ingredients have hidden intrinsics, potion effects that appear once the ingredient is cooked. Every such ingredient has at least three dishes (a simple preparation, a preserve and a meal), and four oven-cooked meals give long, strong effects. Because food stacks and potions largely do not exist, planning a trip means cooking the right food: melons before going to Hell, glow berries or carrots for caving, chorus fruit for the End. Meat has no intrinsics, which the developer intended to make slaughterhouses unattractive.

No hunger, no natural regeneration

The hunger bar is held at a fixed level, so the player can always sprint, and natural regeneration is off. The player heals by eating. The developer cited the hunger system of Minecraft Beta as the model.

Death costs health, not items

Keep inventory is on, and each death removes a heart of maximum health instead. Crystal hearts restore it, up to 30 hearts. The developer wanted a penalty that tolerates the occasional mistake but punishes reckless play, without the demoralizing loss of a whole inventory to lava.

A harder early game and a peaceful late game

Mobs are faster and more dangerous, and only undead mobs spawn on the open surface. Once the Ender Dragon is killed, hostile mobs stop spawning on the surface altogether, so that a player who has finished the game can build in peace while caves stay dangerous.

Early quality of life

Sacks (the pack's shulker boxes) are cheap and craftable from the start, because the developer considers inventory management tools too important to lock behind the End: "Overpowered isn't the question you should be asking. Instead, ask is it fun?" The mattock and dolabra combine two tools each to free hotbar space, and repairing has no experience cap.

Horizontal progression

The alloys are meant to be alternatives rather than strict upgrades, so that players pick different equipment for different jobs even after defeating the dragon.

Features

Main article: Changes from vanilla

The following is a summary. Changes from vanilla lists every change.

Survival

• Health and death: Players start with 10 hearts and can hold up to 30. Dying removes 1 heart (2 hearts on Hard), down to a per-player minimum. That minimum starts at 10 hearts and drops by 1 heart for each of seven progression milestones in the advancement tree, such as smelting copper, obtaining diamonds and entering Hell. On Easy the minimum never falls below 10 hearts.
• Difficulty: Each difficulty changes mob behavior, health and damage. On Normal, a player whose heart minimum falls below 6 hearts switches the world to Hard.
• Mobs: Zombies are fast and fragile, husks are slow, heavily armored "tanks" that spawn in every biome, skeletons have about half their vanilla health, and creepers and spiders live underground.
• Surface: Only undead spawn in the open overworld. After the first Ender Dragon kill, no hostile mobs spawn above ground. The chat message reads "Evil has been banished from the surface."
• Darkness: The overworld has "true darkness", while Hell (the renamed Nether) is slightly brighter than in vanilla.
• Day and night: A full day lasts 72,000 ticks (one hour), three times as long as vanilla.

Food and cooking

• Dozens of new foods (the README counts about 50; the wiki lists over 90 food items), including secret recipes, built around twelve ingredients with intrinsics, such as apples, carrots, glow berries, melons, pumpkins, sweet berries and tomatoes.
• Cooking stations: the kindling (campfire), the mud kiln (smoker) and the oven (furnace). See Cooking.

Equipment and materials

• Stone tools are removed. Equipment goes from wood to copper, iron and diamond, with each metal needing a better furnace: copper is smelted in a mud kiln, while iron, gold, silver and diamond need a blast furnace.
• Five alloys are applied to base equipment in a smithing table: steel on iron, hepatizon and shakudo on copper, and electrum and adamant (netherite) on diamond. Each tier has its own intrinsic effects and set bonuses.
• New tool types: the mattock, dolabra, claymore, compound bow, snow shovel and more. See Tools and Weapons.
• Jewelry made from gems found in structures and dropped by bosses, and warding equipment that burns the undead.

Magic

• The enchanting table is removed. Enchantments are crafted as blessings ("prayers") from hell-bound books, which are made with Estus refined from the ash that undead mobs drop. See Enchanting.
• Warding stones protect a base by burning undead and healing villagers, players and pets.

Villagers and trading

• Most professions are renamed and have new trades that can be used 999 times without restocking. Obols replace emeralds and are rare. See Trading.
• The wandering trader can be summoned with beacon kindling and sells asylum seekers, villagers who need a home.

World

• New structures: the Abbey and papal outpost. Villages are abandoned.
• Renamed and redistributed ores and stones, including native silver, limestone and malachite.
• 47 fish sorted by climate and rarity, catalogued in the Angler's Almanac. See Fishing.
• New music discs and background tracks. See Music.

Development

Origins

Klei Wright began the pack for personal use in a "forever world" after playing Raspmary's modpack Raspberry Flavoured, which the developer admired but did not want to use because it required mods. The first change was a recipe to blast cobblestone into gravel and gravel into sand, so that the developer would not have to dig up a desert. More recipes, foods, items and economy changes followed, with the aim of never needing a mob grinder. According to the video, the only farm the developer built in that world was for moss. The credits name Raspberry Flavoured as the direct inspiration for electrum, shakudo, hepatizon and divine fragments.

The textures began as the developer's own updates to JermsyBoy's "A Little Taste of Jerm" resource pack after it stopped being updated. They were later redrawn from scratch so that they could be released under a free license. By the time of the video the pack had been in development for over a year.

Alpha versions

The first public build was replaced within days. According to the 0.2-alpha release notes, the previous file was deleted because another pack's assets had been packaged with it by accident. 0.2-alpha and 0.3-alpha targeted Minecraft 26.1.2. Every later version targets 26.2. The alphas added crystal hearts (0.3), the sulfur blocks and more equipment (0.4), the fishing overhaul (0.5), abandoned villages and the new hostile mob spawning rules (0.6), and the final food changes (0.7).

1.0 and hotfixes

Version 1.0, "Finally Done", was released on July 24, 2026, together with the design video. Three hotfixes followed within four days: 1.01 (deserts), 1.02 (tutorial advancements) and 1.03 (carbon-rich iron, electrum and trial chambers). A version 1.04 was published and then deleted because of bugs, especially in multiplayer.

1.10 to 1.12

1.10, "Abbey, Multiplayer and Update Support", was the first large update after release. It added the Abbey and papal outpost, difficulty-dependent mob behavior, multiplayer support, and tools for carrying worlds between versions. From this version, the release notes mark features requested by the community with 👥. Versions 1.11 and 1.12 were hotfixes for deleted recipes and for performance problems caused by alloy armor.

Open development

With 1.12.1-alpha ("Experimental: Death System"), the developer began publishing pre-releases for players willing to test. The pack moved to a public GitHub repository, adopted major.minor.patch version numbers and gained a translation project. The experimental death system, in which advancements lower a player's minimum hearts, was kept in 1.12.2-beta after what the developer described as "so much positive feedback". 1.12.2-beta also moved nearly every item and function into the matcha namespace, which required the item update trigger, and credits eighteen community contributors. A port to Minecraft 26.3, which changes datapack syntax, was in progress at the time.

See Version history for the full list of releases and Upcoming features for work in progress.

Distribution

The pack is distributed on Modrinth and GitHub. Up to 1.12.1-alpha, each release was a single archive that worked as both the datapack and the resource pack; from 1.12.2-beta the two are separate files. Both must be installed. See Installation. An accessible version of the resource pack and a community resource pack with vanilla-style textures are linked from the README. A Fabric mod manifest (fabric.mod.json) is included with the datapack.

License

Matcha Flavoured is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. In the video, the developer explains that anyone may reuse any part of the pack, such as its recipes or textures, in their own work, as long as they credit it, share it under the same license and do not sell it. The README adds that this includes the Bedrock Marketplace unless the result is free. The music disc "Golden" and several background tracks were contributed by other artists; see Credits.

Reception

The release notes track the community's response to several features. Players who liked the fast zombies' ability to make night and caves "scary again" led to the 1.10 split of zombies into fast strikers and slow husks rather than a plain nerf. "True darkness" in the overworld was removed in 1.03 and brought back in 1.10 because "a lot of people said they liked it because it was scary". Since 1.12 it can be turned off by swapping a file in the datapack. The experimental death system of 1.12.1-alpha received enough positive feedback to become permanent in 1.12.2-beta. As of September 2026, the pack's Modrinth files had been downloaded about 403,000 times across all versions.

The developer responded to the reception in a second video, "How Criticism changed Matcha Flavoured", released on August 14, 2026, a few days after 1.10. It separates complaints about taste from problems in the design. The developer kept the dark Hell, the lenient death system and the unexplained advancements as matters of taste. Other complaints led to changes: difficulty support for players frustrated by fast zombies, cheaper crystal hearts so that more players would use the heart system, and silver in the new Abbey for players who could not find it. The developer also regretted shipping many full-release patches in quick succession, and said that pre-releases would have let players test fixes without feeling pressure to update. Later versions were published as 1.12.1-alpha and 1.12.2-beta.

Trivia

• The translation keys of most custom content use the prefix kleispack (for example item.kleispack.tinder), after the developer's name.
• Datapacks cannot add new items, so many custom items are vanilla items with a different model, name and components. For example, benzene is an endermite spawn egg and divine fragments are turtle scutes. In 0.7-alpha the developer reworked several recipes because spawn eggs cannot be made edible, and put new food ingredients on hold "until Mojang allows us to just add our own items and blocks with datapacks".
• Shakudo and hepatizon were called "Palatinate" and "Bronze" until 1.10, which renamed them in the language file only, so that existing items would not break. The old names survive in internal IDs and in the advancement titles "Palatinate Perfection" and "Brilliant Bronze".
• The developer renamed emeralds to obols simply because "I like that more".
• The 1.10 release notes list "Removed Herobrine" among the major changes.
• The music disc "Golden", composed by Ciren, was added in 1.0 in memory of the developer's dog, Dakota.
• In 1.12.2, the chat message shown when the pack loads still reports version 1.12.1, although the internal version number is 1122.

See also

• Guide for new players
• Changes from vanilla
• Version history
• Credits