BetterRuins

Structures
Adds over 600 new structures to the world, from small ruins and graves to larger landmarks, underground areas, villages, story locations, and other points of interest.

Story content
Includes unique story locations with maps, trader dialogue, connected structures, and exploration-focused progression with worthwhile rewards.

Blueprints
Adds collectible blueprints that unlock special crafting options for rare, useful, or otherwise unobtainable blocks and items.

Lore
Many locations include custom lore and worldbuilding elements to make exploration feel more immersive and connected to the world.

Loot
Expands loot with valuable, useful, and unusual rewards that make exploration more interesting throughout the game.

Compatibility
Works alongside many landform and content mods, while also supporting modded loot integration in many places.

Configurable
A lot of features can be adjusted to better fit your world, server setup, and preferred exploration experience.

BetterRuins can be added to existing worlds and updated later, but newly added or changed content will only appear in chunks generated after installation or update.

If the location of a newly added story location is blocked by already generated terrain, you may have to do some manual cleanup or adjustments like this:

Any mod that touches landforms will affect how story locations generate because they change the landforms that those story locations are depending on. BetterRuins adds compatibility patches to its story locations for all known landform mods to allow them to generate as good as possible. Some landform mods have more fitting landforms for story locations than others so keep that in mind.

• FieldsAndPlateaus: Compatible
• PlainsAndValleys: Compatible
• Vanilla_PlusWorldGen: Compatible
• Worldgenfix: Compatible
• Worldgenfixremix: Compatible
• Conquest Landform Overhaul: Compatible
• TerraPrety: Compatible but not ideal terrain gen for story locations

BetterRuins is more than just a content mod. The idea behind it is to create a project where builders can share their work in a way that feels naturally integrated into the world and can be experienced by all players during normal gameplay.

A big part of the mod comes from hobby builders and creative people who contribute whenever they feel inspired. Most contributions are driven by self-motivation, personal ideas, and the wish to create something memorable for others to discover.

At the same time, community feedback plays a huge role in pushing the project forward. Player reactions, suggestions, and support help shape new ideas, improvements, and future additions. Being one of the most popular mods also gives the project visibility that helps it keep growing.

We try to keep the team open and approachable, so joining the project is relatively easy for people who want to contribute with building, ideas, testing, writing, or other creative work.

Most of the coordination happens through our Discord, where we organize tasks, discuss ideas, review progress, and manage the many details behind the scenes. We also use our creative server as the main place where a lot of structures are planned, built, and refined together.

BetterRuins includes a range of configurable settings so you can adjust structure frequency, balancing, and other parts of the experience to better fit your world or server setup.

To generate and edit the config through the in-game interface, you need both ConfigLib and ImGui. Without these two mods, the config file will not be generated and you will not have access to the configuration UI.

A common setup is to install the required config mods in singleplayer first, generate and adjust the BetterRuins config there, and then copy the created .yaml file into your server config folder.

Example of the BetterRuins config file:

These videos can help with some of the most common BetterRuins tasks, including configuration, manually spawning structures, and working with story structures.

BetterRuins is supported by community translations to make the mod more accessible for players across different languages.

Translators:
Xandoria, macoto_hino, Yanazake, Knave2000, Grigoriewich, Jefferzon, Srloboalbino, Vilderos, Adrian Misiak, hellcatcher228, Richard Rokyta, Japuk, RomainOdeval, Justice_shrimp, FoxMage3243, correobasuratx, Kiroyoku Kiara, DejVIIK

If you want to help as well, you can contribute through the public Crowdin web editor:

Open the BetterRuins translation project on Crowdin