RLCraft Server Hosting

RLCraft is Shivaxi's hardcore survival pack for Minecraft 1.12.2, and it is one of the most downloaded modpacks ever made — past 29 million downloads on CurseForge. The premise is simple and brutal: vanilla Minecraft is too forgiving, so RLCraft rebuilds survival from the ground up with thirst, temperature, limb-based injuries, a skill gate on almost every item, and a world full of things that will kill a fresh player in seconds.

It is not a kitchen-sink pack. Every mod in it serves the same goal — making the first week genuinely dangerous — which is why the pack has such a distinct feel compared to the big all-in-one packs.

The first night in RLCraft is where most groups learn the rules the hard way. A few things are worth knowing before you spawn in:

• Thirst. You need clean water. Drinking straight from a river will make you ill, so a canteen and a purifying setup are early priorities, not luxuries.
• Limb damage. First Aid replaces the hearts bar with individual body parts. A hit to the head kills you outright regardless of how much total health you had.
• Skill gates. You cannot use most tools, armour and enchantments until your levels allow it, so early progression is about experience as much as materials.
• Lycanite's Mobs. The overworld is full of creatures that do not exist in vanilla, and many of them fly, swarm or hit far harder than anything you have fought before.
• Dragons. Ice and Fire puts sleeping dragons in the world early. Waking one before you are ready ends the run.

RLCraft runs on Minecraft 1.12.2 with Forge. The current release is v2.9.3, published in June 2023, and the pack has stayed on 1.12.2 for its entire life — the mods it depends on, especially Lycanite's Mobs and Ice and Fire, are what anchor it there.

For a server that stability is useful: the pack is not going to shift under your world. What matters is that every player installs the exact same RLCraft version as the server. A client on 2.9.2 will not join a 2.9.3 server, and that mismatch is behind almost every connection problem groups report.

RLCraft is lighter than a 350-mod kitchen-sink pack but heavier than it looks, mostly because of mob-heavy world generation. For two or three players, 4 GB works. For a group of four to six, 6 GB is the comfortable number. Larger servers with spread-out bases and lots of explored terrain are happier at 8 GB.

The bigger factor on RLCraft is CPU. Lycanite's Mobs spawns a lot of entities, and entity ticking is single-threaded, so a fast core does more for your server than extra memory. If the server stutters when players split up to explore, that is entity load, not RAM starvation.

• Create a Minecraft server and choose a location close to your players — RLCraft combat is timing-based, so latency is felt.
• Open the mod installer and select RLCraft; the pack and its Forge 1.12.2 build are installed for you.
• Let the first start finish fully in the console. RLCraft generates a heavy world and the first run takes noticeably longer than vanilla.
• Share the exact same pack version with everyone from CurseForge before they try to connect.
• Decide as a group whether you are playing with keepInventory on. On default settings, dying in a dangerous biome usually means losing the run's gear for good.

Yes, but set expectations first. RLCraft rewards players who read before they build — the community guides on thirst, temperature and the skill system will save your group several wiped nights. Groups that treat the first few in-game days as a shared learning curve tend to stick with the pack; groups that expect vanilla pacing usually quit on night two.

Travel in RLCraft is slow and dangerous by design, which becomes a problem when players build bases far apart. Waystones are the pack's answer, and on a multiplayer server they effectively define how your group settles. Agreeing early on a shared hub waystone keeps people playing together instead of drifting into isolated single-player worlds on the same map.