I hadn't been playing much Minecraft lately because I'd finally gotten my gear and villagers all leveled up and made a few auto farms for basic stuff I need, and what I really wanted to do next was either more exploring or some really serious building/redstone farms, but I didn't want to do much more exploring in my main peaceful world when the 1.20 update was about to come out, because I wanted 1.20 stuff not too far from my base, and I also didn't want to do any elaborate building or technical stuff until I had shulker boxes, but to get shulker boxes I need a datapack that adds blaze powder, but it also didn't make sense to try to learn datapacks when a new edition was about to come out, and I thought about making a new world just to explore in, but that still didn't make sense when I could wait and start a brand new one for 1.20 –

So anyway 1.20 came out last week and now I have made my first datapack! I am calling it "A peaceful End" and it adds back in all the stuff that is otherwise inaccessible in Peaceful. There are other datapacks that do this, but they are all aimed at making the stuff *easy* to get, and as we all know, Peaceful is actually the hardest mode of the game, for only the most hardcore of players, and I wanted to keep that spirit. So the goal was to make the missing items *possible* but *very difficult* to get - along the lines of slimeballs and string and gunpowder - to keep the difficulty up. The idea is that if you want these things in your Peaceful world, you need to *really* want them. The other main idea is that if you are playing on anything other than peaceful, this datapack probably wouldn't change the game much at all, because it would still be much, much easier to get these things as mob loot.

So it adds:

1. Tridents as very rare chest loot in large ocean ruins.
   
2. Totems as very rare chest loot in woodland mansions.
   
3. Wither skulls as very rare chest loot in Nether Fortresses.
   
4. Froglights as very rare chest loot in ruined portals, since that's the mostly likely place for a frog to have encountered a magma cube in the past.
   
5. Ghast tears as cat gifts at the same frequency as phantom membranes (since *Earth* cats can fight ghosts in other dimensions I don't see why Minecraft cats couldn't.)
   
6. Blaze powder is craftable from one magma cream + one fire charge (with some loss of powder).
   
7. Blaze rods are craftable from blaze powder (with some loss of powder.)
   
8. Nether stars are craftable from four wither skulls + four netherite blocks + one end crystal.
   
9. Wither skulls can be smelted into wither roses.
   
10. Prismarine crystals can be smelted into prismarine shards.

Things you still cannot get even with this datapack:
Piglin, zombie, and creeper heads: these are only available in-game via a special mechanic different from other mob drops. Since they don't really have any game mechanic effects I am leaving them alone for now (you can get naturally-generated skeleton heads without the datapack.)
Music discs: You can currently get 6/16 music discs in Peaceful. I may add these later but there are so many of them and the original way of getting them is so baroque I have not yet come up with something that seems even vaguely equivalent. And six is a lot!
Tide smithing template: Every other smithing template is available in Peaceful. I'm leaving this out until we get a better idea of how smithing templates work out in the game.

As you can tell, so far all I know how to do is alter standard loot tables and add custom crafting recipes. Ideally I would actually like a few of these things to either be rare wandering trader trades, baroque mob drops, or, for the blocks, generate as part of the structures rather than as loot, but I don't know how to do either of those yet. And I would *really* like to be able to summon the Wither to get my nether stars instead of crafting them - there's no game-mechanics reason to not allow that, just like the Dragon, so I suspect there's a technical reason it would be difficult.

But I already have way too much power just with loot tables and custom crafting. Next goal: make a scoreboard-based datapack.

I have also started a new world for 1.20 - it's on Easy mode instead of Peaceful, even, be proud of me! - where my only goal is to speedrun the world border, which is what I used to do when I first started playing in 1.8 and hadn't even figured out crafting tables existed, except this time I am also stopping to light every ruined portal I find (so I can go back through the Nether once i get there, of course.) And as always I am now remembering why I waste way too much time playing Minecraft when I am playing Minecraft again. I still have way to much to do in the next month and a half but I think I have reached a state of extremely advanced fuck-its about it.

Anyway, here you go, tested as much as I know how to test:

A peaceful End datapack

Hello Yuletide writer! Thank you for writing for me! Treats are also accepted!

This is yet another year where I requested what I thought was a set of very assorted fandoms, wrote my signup, looked back at my prompts, and said "Oh. I guess I had a theme." So I seem to be in a nesting mood this winter, I requested a bunch of stuff about people finding homes, making homes, making the best of homes, finding people who are homes, leaving homes, being stuck in toxic homes, etc. So if you're the sort of person who just wants a broad idea to get you started, there you are, you can stop reading here!

I am happy with lots of other things too, though. I really would be happy with just any new fic at all in these fandoms (and where there's nominated characters I didn't request, it's because I wasn't confident coming up with prompts, not because I don't want to see them.) If you want to write one of my prompts in a way that doesn't line up with that overall theme, that's also great (like I said, it was inadvertent!) But I don't usually do much of a likes list on these because I like nearly everything - all kinds of tropes, AU, genres, ships, kinks, unusual POV and formats, it's all good - and I am hereby opting in to all the official opt-in-only things. I especially like crossovers and I'm not picky about what with - several of my fandoms this year would be good for crossovers with each other or other stuff. I didn't put in any porn-specific prompts but if you want to write me porn of any kind for any of my prompts I'm up for it. And if there's something that's not in this letter or my signup that turns out to be what you really want to write, I don't mind ODAO either.

The yuletide letter link you have followed led you to my yuletide tag on this dreamwidth, which goes back 20 years; it should also include previous posts I've made about this year's requested fandoms. Feel free to poke around on this journal if you want to know more about me, or feel free to ignore it if you'd rather not.

I don't have any DNWs, really truly - all the things on the standard DNW lists are things I'm okay reading, if that's where your story leads you (I'm not particularly looking for noncon incest bestiality genocide torture death fic this year, my prompts came out pretty wholesome overall, but if it's where my prompts or your heart leads you or you need a place to drop off a treat for someone who doesn't DNW your kinks, as long as it's not intentionally OOC I will probably enjoy it. I really do just want anything at all for these fandoms!)

The only thing I really want to put under DNW is that if you write the SMPEarth fandom, please keep it focused on SMPEarth, and not as worked into the lore of a different SMP. There's plenty of fanfic already for other things Phil and Techno have done, and for SBI generally (Sleepy Bois Inc didn't even exist yet when SMPEarth started!) so while I'm fine if you pull in elements from elsewhere - it's hard to write this kind of fandom without doing that a little - and fine to thematically work with how what they did in SMP Earth made them the people they were later, that's something I find interesting too - please write something that is fundamentally centered in SMP Earth and doesn't twist SMP Earth lore to make it fit better with other SMPs' lore or make SMP Earth subordinate to them, and if you do write me a crossover for SMP Earth fandom, please don't cross over with any of the too-large-for-YT Minecraft fandoms. (You can crossover my other requested fandoms with the big Minecraft fandoms though, that's fine! Hannibal and Scipio would do great in any Minecraft world I'm pretty sure.)

Here's a copy of my signup:

• Request 1 by melannen
  Fandom:SMPEarth

( SMPEarth )

• Request 2 by melannen
  Fandom:Punic Wars RPF
  Hannibal Barca (Punic Wars RPF)Scipio Africanus (Punic Wars RPF)

( Punic Wars )

• Request 3 by melannen
  Fandom:Wulf and Eadwacer

( Wulf and Eadwacer )

• Request 4 by melannen
  Fandom:Perilous Gard - Elizabeth Marie Pope
  Christopher Heron

( Perilous Gard )

• Request 5 by melannen
  Fandom:The Ordinary Princess - M.M. Kaye

( The Ordinary Princess )

• Request 6 by melannen
  Fandom:Nimona (Webcomic)
  Ballister Blackheart

( Nimona )

And if you want to know more about the canons:

• SMPEarth is a Minecraft multiplayer server that was played on by a group of video game streamers c. 2019. It happened right before a lot of them became way more popular with the explosion in Minecraft streamer fandom early in the pandemic, so it's kind of a look at the very beginning of the modern Minecraft ecosystem. This is probably a terrible fandom to pick up just for Yuletide, but I am invested in sucking other people into it anyway, so if you want to get started, Technoblade's SMP Earth playlist is the reasonably-sized starting point, and if that makes you want more, you can sample his archived SMP Earth livestreams and Ph1lza's archived SMP Earth livestreams, which will give you more than enough for my prompts, and by that time it will be too late for you anyway.

• The Punic Wars are the wars between Rome and Carthage, during the Roman Republic. For this prompt you want the second one, in the 3rd century BCE. Polybius (not the video game) wrote a book about it. Hannibal was Carthage's genius undefeated general, taking much of Italy with impunity, until a young unknown named Scipio on the Roman side rose up to be his equal at military command. It was all very romantic and dramatic and a lot of people died around them. There is actually very little recorded history about them, so it doesn't take much to get caught up on the backstory, but every bit of it is somehow building the evidence that they were secret soulmates. (soulmate AU yes? please?) Here is a previous post by me on the topic, here are some background resource posts from dhampyresa who got me into it.

• Wulf and Eadwacer is a very short English poem from about the 9th century AD, from the first-person POV of a woman who has been troubled in love. This is probably your best option if you want to pick up one of these fast! You can probably read it faster than I can summarize. Here is teenage me's translation and commentary which I still mostly endorse, here is the academic paper that inexplicably decided to analyze Teenage Me alongside a bunch of professional translations (also in the paper). For some reason a lot of academia likes to treat this poem as a Great Enigma but? it's just a poem about some people? That's why it doesn't have simple obvious interpretations, it's about people.

• The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope is an older YA/Middle Grade novel set in Elizabethan England and loosely based on the legend of Tam Lin: Our Heroine Kate is sent to a remote keep and discovers a fairy cult (or possibly actually fairies?) who take her captive and are planning to sacrifice Christopher Heron as a tithe to their gods. Kate and Christopher are both very not fairy-story sorts of people and they and the fairies come up against a lot of blankly mutual incomprehension, but eventually Kate and Christopher manage to escape the fairy underworld (or possibly secret cult caves?) together to get a happy-ever-after, but changed forever and tinged with a bit of regret for losing the fairy world. If you can find a copy it's definitely worth a read.

• The Ordinary Princess by M. M. Kaye is another older YA/Middle Grade novel, this one set in a classic fairy tale world. Princess Amethyst of Ambergeldar is cursed as a baby by a not-exactly-evil-but-kind-of-cranky fairy to be Ordinary, so she grows up as a perfectly ordinary little girl who happens to be living in a castle with her parents and her princess sisters. She has mousy brown hair that doesn't grow very long, freckles, and no particular talents other than living a fairly ordinary life, but it works OK until she gets old enough for her parents to think about marriage, at which point she runs away and lives wild in the forest for most of a year. Eventually she needs money for clothes so she becomes and ordinary kitchenmaid at a neighboring castle, where she meets and falls for an ordinary young serving man named Perry who, of course, turns out to be a prince in disguise. It's a delightful little fairy tale about running around the woods shoeless and nut-brown, and about the value of the ordinary and the extraordinary, and is also definitely worth a read if you can find a copy!

• Nimona is a comic by N. D. Stevenson (now better known for things like She-Ra) that originally ran on Tumblr. It has since been put out by a major publisher as a graphic novel and you should be able to find it that way, and unfortunately most of comic is no longer online, but you can still find bits and pieces on Tumblr to get a taste of it. It's set in a sort-of-medieval, sort-of-steampunk, sort-of-SF world, about a mysterious shapeshifter who is generally shaped like a mischievous young girl, who has appointed herself sidekick to an evil (but not really) villain/mad scientist/former knight, who opposes the Institute who trained him and the Knights he trained with that support it. It is also excellent and worth a read if you can get your hands on it!