Source-checkedCreatures & NPCs

Scaling Health

by SilentChaos512 · for Minecraft

Change player/mob health and more! Spiritual successor to Difficult Life.

392KDownloads
19 mo agoLast updated
MITLicense
ForgeLoaders

About Scaling Health

From Modrinth

Change player/mob health and more! Spiritual successor to Difficult Life.

This mod is no longer maintained. For Minecraft 1.21 and beyond try Silent's Power Scale instead!

Introduction

Minecraft too easy for you? After playing the game for years, I can't help but feel it is. Or perhaps it's too hard with all the crazy mods you've added? Scaling Health aims to balance out modpacks, by allowing players, mobs, or both to gain extra health! Or players can start with less health, if that's what you want. The mod is highly configurable.

This mod started as an unofficial port of Difficult Life, a mod I personally loved playing with. Eventually, I decided to rebuild the mod from the ground up, fixing bugs, adding more config options and widening the scope of the mod to include players who need an easier experience, not just a harder one. The difficulty system is very server-friendly, unlike the system used in Difficult Life.

Key Features

  • A per-player difficulty system. A difficulty value is tracked for each player. There are several factors that can increase/decrease your difficulty. By default, it increases slowly as time passes. As difficulty increases, mobs become stronger. Mob strength is calculated based on one of several methods (see below). This feature can be tweaked/disabled to your heart's content.
  • More player health! Or less. Players can obtain heart crystals that increase their maximum health. Normally, you keep the extra health even after dying (configurable). The player's starting health can also be changed, and the max health cap is configurable as well. You can also set health to increase/decrease with XP levels.
  • Lots of control. Plenty of config options and data files to let you play the game however you like!

Requirements

Silent Lib and Minecraft Forge are required.

Difficulty

Player Difficulty

A difficulty value is tracked for each player. By default, this increases slowly over time. You can also set the mod to increase/decrease difficulty when players kill certain types of mobs or when the player dies. You can also set difficulty to reset at certain intervals, like every week.

Player difficulty is typically used to calculate difficulty when spawning mobs, but some modes use other methods (see next section). The starting and maximum difficulty levels and the amount added each second are configurable. By default, idle players accumulate difficulty more slowly.

The difficulty value will determine how much extra health mobs can have. Mobs will also gain bonus attack damage and potion effects. Higher difficulty values also increase the chance of mobs spawning as blights...

Area Difficulty

When mobs are spawned, an "area difficulty" value is calculated for the position the mob is spawned at. This value is then used to determine extra health/damage, chance of becoming a blight, etc. Depending on the mode, this is usually based on the difficulty level of all nearby players. "Nearby" means within the search radius, which is configurable.

Modes

  • average - 2 fields: "radius", which is an integer greater than 64 and an optional boolean "weighted" which defaults to true. The mode takes the (weighted or not) average of all players in the specified radius.
  • maxima - 2 fields: "radius, which is an integer greater than 64 and an optional boolean "min" which defaults to true. Takes the min or max player difficulty in the specified radius.
  • distance - 2 fields: "distanceFactor", which is a positive real number (a double), and an optional boolean "fromOrigin" which defaults to false. Difficulty is based on distanced from the origin or the spawn, multiplied by the distanceFactor.
  • distance_and_time - 2 fields: "average" and "distance", which are the objects mentioned above.
  • server_wide - no fields, the difficulty is not per player but the same for the whole server.

Health Scaling

Mobs (both passive and hostile by default) will gain extra health as difficulty increases. The way extra health is added can be changed in the config file.

  • Multiplier modes (MULTI, MULTI_HALF, and MULTI_QUARTER) - The mob's health is multiplied, so that mobs with a higher base health will get a bigger boost. MULTI applies the same multiplier to all mobs, while MULTI_HALF and MULTI_QUARTER apply less for mobs with greater than 20 health. All of these should still apply more health than ADD mode. MULTI_HALF is the default.
  • Additive mode (ADD) - A flat increase for all mobs. This is what Difficult Life used.

Damage Scaling

You can increase the amount of damage players take from various sources. By default, no damage scaling is performed. You can customize this in the config under player/damage.

You can choose one of three modes: scale with player max health, player difficulty, or area difficulty. Max health mode is proportional to the starting health you set in the config. So if you have 100 health and starting health is 20, that's a 4x multiplier (100 - 20)/20. The difficulty modes multiply the difficulty value by a "weight" value you can tweak in the config. The weight defaults to 0.04, which would result in a 10x multiplier at 250 difficulty (0.04*250=10). I'll call this number the mode amount.

For the scale value for each damage source, a value of 0 (default) results in no scaling. A value of 1 would scale proportional to the mode amount, so survivability would not increase with health. Between 0 and 1 might be ideal, but you could also set it higher than 1 if you want to buff certain damage types.

The final calculation multiples the scale by the mode amount by the original damage amount, then adds that to the damage dealt. So, something like damage = original (1 + scale modeAmount).

Blights

Read the full description on Modrinth →

Highlights

From source data

Game versions

Supports 9 Minecraft versions, the newest being 1.20.1.

Loaders

Runs on Forge.

Footprint

Rated a light load on a server.

Scaling Health on Nxeon

From our catalogue
One-click install
Supported on Nxeon Minecraft servers. We download it from Modrinth, place it, and restart the server.
Server side
Required on the server
Server type needed
Forge
Server load
light
Smallest plan we suggest
Minecraft — 2 GB (2 GB RAM). This follows our own load rating above, not a benchmark.
Latest build
8.0.2+9, released 2025-04-05

Game versions by loader

LoaderGame versionsNewest
Forge1.16.5 to 1.20.1 (5 versions)1.20.1

From 5 recorded builds of Scaling Health.

Recent builds

BuildReleasedGame versionsLoaders
8.0.2+92025-04-051.20.1Forge
7.0.1+72025-04-051.19.2Forge
6.3.1+62025-04-051.18.2Forge
5.0.4+42025-04-051.17.1Forge
4.1.5+112025-04-051.16.5Forge

Run Scaling Health on a Minecraft server

Pick a server or deploy a new one above; it is installed in one click.

What kind of mod it is

From the catalog
Listed on Modrinth as “Mods”

Creatures & NPCs

Adds or changes creatures, NPCs and how they behave.

Runs on your server

From source side support

Modrinth lists Scaling Health as required on the server. Check its Modrinth page to see whether players need it too.

Compatibility

Game
Minecraft
Loaders
Forge
Runs on
Serverrequired on the server
Game versions
1.20.1 and 8 earlier

Verified at the source

  • ✓ModrinthOfficial listing, checked 2026-10-01Open ↗
  • ✓AuthorSilentChaos512, as published on Modrinth
  • ✓LicenseMITFree

Scaling Health, answered

Generated from the mod’s own source data.

Do my players need to install Scaling Health?

Modrinth lists Scaling Health as required on the server. Check its Modrinth page to see whether players need it too.

Which loaders does it support?

Forge.

Is it free?

Yes. Scaling Health is free to download from Modrinth. Its license is MIT.

How do I add it to my Nxeon server?

Use “Add to a server” on this page, or open NxLabs from your dashboard. We install it, restart your server and switch it on.

NxLabs

Run Scaling Health on a Minecraft server.

Deploy in about a minute from $4.99 a month, then add Scaling Health in one click.