The 18 Best Minecraft Survival Challenges

Hardcore Mode

Hardcore mode is the same fun you know and love from Minecraft, but with a big change. You lose everything if you die in the game. You won’t just restart where you were last set to respawn. After you die, you’ll only have two choices: spectate world or delete world, which takes you back to the main menu.

Hardcore mode’s difficulty is set to Hard and can’t be changed, so you can’t play it on an easier level. Before you go into intense mode, you should know everything about it. It’s not for people who are easily scared.

Down-Up Mining

The Down-Up Mining task is pretty simple; it only changes how you mine blocks. For this challenge, you can only mine blocks that are right above or below you. Some people force themselves to do this even when they’re not in a cave, like when they’re cutting down a tree. Others only pay attention to it when they’re exploring the underground world.

The most dangerous places are caves, where you have to put yourself in a lot of danger. You never know what could fall on you from above or what you could fall into from below. What should you do? Bring some water with you in case you come across any lava pools.

Survival Island

Survival Island is straightforward. You start out on an island in the middle of nowhere and are never allowed to leave. You have to do what you can to stay alive on the island and eat what grows there. Some of the best Minecraft seeds put you on a small island where you have to live.

With this task, at least you’ll never have to worry about being too far from home. Aside from that, it won’t be easy to slide. If the island has a cave, you might still be able to mine and explore underground caves.

See It, Kill It

If you want something dangerous to do, we have something you’ll love. In this one, you can’t back down from a fight. If you run into a mob, either it or you will die.

Some players count mobs that don’t attack them as part of this task, while others only count the ones that do. In the end, this one makes you change how you plan your days and spend a lot of time learning how to protect yourself.

SkyBlock Survival

SkyBlock is one of Minecraft‘s oldest mods, and it’s been around for more than a decade. This mod puts you on a small moving island with just one tree and a chest with the most basic items.

Inside the chest, you’ll find a lava bucket with two ice blocks to make a cobblestone generator, seeds for melon and pumpkin, red and brown mushrooms, a bone, one loaf of bread, and a full set of leather armor. Your goal is to build outward to find other Skyblock islands and then challenge the Ender dragon. As soon as you beat the boss, the task is over.

No Crafting Table

If you are crazy enough to take on this task, all you need is vanilla Minecraft. Your aim? Beat the Ender Dragon without ever using a Crafting Table. Only things that can be made with the 2-by-2 crafting piece in your inventory can be crafted.

It goes without saying that this makes your choices very limited. We know what you’re thinking: Is it even possible? It is, but it takes a lot of time, work, and dedication, plus a little bit of having too much free time. Bluemagic123, who made the task, has written down some tips in case you get stuck.

Never Leave The Nether

The Nether is a very dangerous place for both new and experienced Minecraft players. It’s the perfect place for a test run because of this. Build a portal to the Nether, then go through it and leave everything behind. After that, you should never go back to the overworld. The world is always full of dangerous mobs, and it will be much harder to keep food and wood on hand. Thanks to changes that have been made to the Nether in the past, this is now a more interesting and playable option.

You can choose to either beat the Wither or get the Pigstep Music Disc back. For the Wither to spawn, you need three Wither Skeleton heads, which you can get by grinding at a Nether Fortress. Somewhere inside a Bastion Remnant is where you can find the Pigstep disc. Both tasks will take a lot of planning and patience, but they can still be done without going anywhere.

Become A Vegetarian

Even if you want to make Minecraft a little harder, that doesn’t mean you want to spend a lot of time on a very specific task. Just making your character a vegetarian is an easy way to make the game harder. That means you can’t eat any kind of meat, so you’ll need to learn how to farm fast.

Why stop at being a vegetarian? Try a vegan or pescatarian diet. On the other hand, you could do the reverse and only eat meat. As your hunger grows, it might be hard to keep an animal farm going.

Hermit Chunk Challenge

The Hermit Chunk task is a fun way to play survival mode. It’s a mod that puts you on a 16×16 chunk with nothing else on it when you start the game. Even though it doesn’t look like it, this 16×16 piece has everything you need to stay alive. This chunk has wood, a small cave, rare ores, and lava. Even the Nether and the End will be open to you. The goal of the game is to beat the Ender Dragon with the limited tools you have. If you can beat this boss with the gear you can make on this island, you are a real Minecraft pro.

If you don’t want to mess with mods, you can make this survival task easier by using a simple in-game command. When cheats are turned on, type “/worldborder set 16” into the chat to make a world border the same size as a chunk. You’ll still be able to see what’s going on around you, but you won’t be able to go anywhere else. The worst thing about this place is that you won’t be able to get supplies and you won’t be able to go to The End.

City Construction Challenge

The Minecraft survival challenge of building a city is famous because it doesn’t require any mods. You just start in a small town and have to turn it into a full-fledged city over time. You will have to spend the whole game in this city, sleeping there every night and acting like a real villager.

It will take a long time to get along with the people in the village and build new things. In fact, there are probably a lot of things about towns that you don’t know. Before you start, you should find out how they work.

Nomad Challenge

This is exactly what the Nomad Challenge is. You have to keep moving. In this task, you can’t use chests, so you have to use your four armor slots, 27 storage slots, nine hotbar slots, and one off-hand slot. You can take a total of 41 things, so you’ll need to stay organized.

You can spend the night in a small hut, but as soon as you wake up, you have to destroy it and keep going. If you’re a real traveler, you won’t sleep in the same place for more than one night.

Just Build Stuff

Another, less obvious way to make Minecraft more difficult? Try to build things in Survival mode that you would normally build in Creative mode. It might not sound that bad, but if you’re honest with yourself, it will be a real nightmare.

In Creative mode, we all like having access to all the special blocks without having to make them ourselves, and we tend to make things much bigger than they need to be. Plan something big, then work hard for 500 hours to get it done. We bet you.

Stay Underground

Use a starter box to start a new game. You have until sunrise the next day to get as many supplies as you can and go underground. You can never go back to the top again. This adds new tasks, such as making sure you always have enough wood, enough light, and easy access to things like food and trading. Your goal is to get to the End and beat the ender dragon.

For the purposes of this survival task, the whole Nether is thought of as underground.

Maps can help you change the game’s difficulty by showing you where resources might be hiding above you. This lets you do things like avoid oceans or dig under a town to try to boost trade. You can add more to Flappy Bird by modding, but you don’t have to. One common choice is to use a mod that hurts you in sunlight, like how skeletons and zombies do. Purely secret modpacks like StoneBlock let you play with the same idea in a very different way.

Animal Hoarder

Playing as an Animal Hoarder in Minecraft sounds like a lot of fun, until another sheep comes into view and you have to take it home. It was made by minecraftforum.net user kane705, who was looking for a task they hadn’t done yet.

The rules are pretty easy to understand: you have to find as many animals as you can and defend them at all costs. From what we’ve seen, this is most fun when done with other people. Who can take care of the most animals? Who will become a sneaky killer and come kill your sheep? Will the stress be too much for your friendships?

OneBlock Survival

OneBlock is a mod that changes how Minecraft is played in a big way. In OneBlock, you start on a block that floats in the air. You can keep mining this one block to get simple materials that slowly get better over time.

As you go through stages, the block slowly gets better blocks, chests, and even some new mobs. With the elements this block gives you, you can pretty much build your whole world. If you’ve ever been annoyed by the way your world was made, you can now start from scratch.

Pacifist Challenge

The Pacifist Challenge is a lot like the See It, Kill It Challenge, but it goes in the opposite direction. You can’t kill any mobs during this task. You can’t attack them, no matter if they’re friendly, neutral, or not friendly.

Since you can’t kill animals for food, you have to plant seeds and eat what you grow. You should also bring some torches with you. Since you can’t fight hostile mobs, you’ll need to make sure you always have light. This task is all about peace and love.

Single Biome Challenge

The Single Biome Challenge, which is also called the Buffet Challenge, is a fun one. It turns the whole map into just one biome, which you must live in.

To start this task, go to “Create New World,” click “More World Options,” and change “World Type” to “Single Biome.” From there, you can choose how to make the biome.If you want a real challenge, choose an area with few resources, such as the desert or the badlands. These biomes don’t have much going on, which makes it hard to live there.

100 Day Challenge

The 100-Day Challenge is the hardest thing to do in Minecraft. It means playing the game in Hardcore mode and trying to beat the Ender Dragon in no more than 100 in-game days. This is hard because it makes the game a race against the clock.

If you fight the Ender Dragon too soon, you’ll die and lose everything, so you’ll have to start over from the beginning. Even if you feel like you’re ready to fight on day 80, it’s best to wait until day 99 or 100. You can add a day-counter mod to help you keep track of the days. It will make life a lot easier.