The LevelZ mod brings RPG-like skill levels to modern minecraft versions 1.18 and 1.19. It’s a mod written by Globox_Z, the develper of many mods including AdventureZ and RPGdifficulty, all available on Curseforge.

Adding skills that lock the use of different parts of minecraft can extend the life of your game greatly. It forces you to stay in the early game longer, and progressing in all the skills can take a while. If you’re ever frustrated at how quickly you progress in a mod pack and you become too OP too quickly, this might be just the thing.

Note: if you are playing LevelZ in a mod pack, the mod pack developers may have changed the defaults. We’ll talk about that later, but until then and unless otherwise indicated, all the screens, and skill values we’re talking about are default LevelZ configuration.

How Does LevelZ Mod Work?

LevelZ addds a skill system to Minecraft, which appears in a new interface behind the ‘k’ key and available from the inventory screen. It introduces 12 skills to the game which you must level up to access the items, gear, tools, and blocks that are locked behind them. In doing so, it forces players to experience more of the early Minecraft game and slows down progression to the end game in a way that gives players constant goals to strive for. You’re forced to use wooden tools for the first few days until you level up enough to unlock stone tools. Then you have to unlock iron tools. This plays out in many different ways adding a whole new facet to minecraft.

When opened in a brand new game, the LevelZ Skills window looks like this:

You gain sill points to allocate to skills by leveling up. You level up by doing things in Minecraft that grant you regular XP in minecraft. You’ll notice that there are blue XP orbs in addition to green orbs. Those are LevelZ specific orbs. You may get different amounts of blue XP than you get regular minecraft XP. Here you can see there’s a two blue XP orbs and a green XP orb from killing this poor sheep. The blue ones contribute to LevelZ XP.

When you gain 50 XP, you will increase to level 1 and gain a skill point that you can allocate to a skill. When you level up and have a point to spend, your Minecraft XP number turns blue like this.

Looking at our skill screen, you can see that I’ve leveled up and got a point. Also note that it took 4 Minecraft levels to get 50 XP points in LevelZ. They don’t match. The XP bar resets and I need another 50 to get to level 2. The more you level up, the more XP it takes to get to the next level. This increases slowly at first, and goes higher exponentially as you gain levels.

You can also see that the skill buttons have activated, and I can spend that point!

Where to spend the points? That’s a great question. Keep in mind that different skills not only give you abilities, but also affect what blocks you can break. Be sure to take a good look at the farming, mining, strength, and defense skills. Those lock tools, weapons, and armor respectively as well as abilities, like mining specific blocks! For example, you cannot break stone until mining level 4. You can’t use a smelter until Farming level 1. And you can’t use a stone shovel or pickaxe until mining level 4. More on that afer we talk about the individual skills.

LevelZ Skills

To see the skill info, click on the icon for each skill. For example, to view the mining skill info, click on the pickaxe icon to see information about the skill and what you get for each skill point. That page also shows you what skills you can unlock, like in this case using different types of tools.

Some skills have extra information behind the small button in the upper right. If you click on it in the Mining skill, you’ll see this, which tells you what level you need to be to mine specific blocks. There are a few other skills that have this like smithing and alchemy.

Below are the individual skills. I don’t go into specifics on the values of increases by each skill because the mod pack you’re playing in will probably change them You can view the details in your game by clicking on the icon.

Health

The health skill increases HP. You may have already noticed that you have only three hearts. That’s because with no levels on the health skill, you start with 6 HP, and each HP is a half a heart. Each skill point you add to health gives you 1 HP by default.

Strength

The Strength skill unlocks swords and gives you more attack damage with each level gained. At the highest level, the player gains a chance to deal double damage with melee weapons.

Agility

The Agility skill gives you additional speed points and decreases fall damage with every point added. It unlocks usage of items like Compass and Elytra. At Level 20, the play gains a chance to evade an enemy attack.

Defense

The defense skill increases defense with each skill point increase. Different types of armor are unlocked with different defense levels.

Stamina

The Stamina skill decreases exhaustion and increases regeneration with eack skill increase. There are no items to unlock but at max level, the player gains a bonus on food value.

Luck

Luck increases loot value and also gives a chance for crit damage. Maximum luck gives you a 50% chance to survive instant death.

Archery

Increasing your skill levels in Archery unlocks bow and crossbow use. Increased skill will increase damage by bows and crossbows. Maxed out Archery gives an increased chance to do double damage with ranged weapons.

Trade

Trading gives access to Villagers and Wandering Traders. Increased trade skills increase the amount XP you get from trading and decreased trade prices.

Smithing

Smithing gives access to Smithing table, fint & steel, grindstones, and anvils. Increasing your smithing skill will decrease damage to used tools, and will decrease anvil XP cost.

Mining

Increasing your mining skill gives you access to more advanced types of tools as well as what blocks you can mine as we saw in the overview above. Increasing mining also gives a chance to drop my raw ore. Max mining gives increased TNT power.

Farming

Farming gives access to lots of skills like hoe use, axe use, furnace use and many more. Increased Farming skills gives chance of double harvest, and max farming gives an increased chance of breeding twins.

Alchemy

Like mining, many brewing ingredients are locked to levels. increasing alchemy skill gives more chance of enchantment strength. Max alchemy gains a chance of double potion effects.

What should you level up in first in LevelZ?

This will depend a lot on your play style, but in general, early on, you want to maximize your ability to get XP. Therefore, Mining, Farming, and Trading make the most sense.

Mining gives you XP drops from coal, lapis, and redstone, and other ores depending on your modpack

Farming gives you fishing and smelter use, both decent sources fo early XP. And a better axe for killing mobs.

Trading gives you better prices with villagers, and trading is one of the best ways overall to get XP. Start with fletchers who buy sticks.

If you’re up for it, killing hostile mobs early on will get you quick levels every night. In that case, you may want to focus on Farming to get a better axe, Defense for shields and armor as well as Health so you aren’t one-shots to skeletons. It just takes one point in Archery to use a bow.

What’s the best way to level up later in LevelZ?

As you progress in your game, because the amount of XP needed to level up increases exponentially as you gain levels, you’ll need some good sources of lots of XP. Besides just playing the game and getting XP as you go, the best sources of XP are villager trading and mob XP farms.

1. Set up a villager trading hall with villagers that buy the things you can generate most easily.
2. Find a mob spawner and build an XP farm.
3. Profit

Depending on the mod pack you’re playing in, you may have relatively easy access to certain items that villagers buy. For example, there may be biomes with lots of clay, which you can sell to masons. If you can grow crops easily, farmers. Tree farms for sticks to sell to Fletchers. And you can never go wrong with Clerics and Libarians to buy stuff back with all the Emeralds you’ll get.

Be sure to invest early in the Trading skill to maximize your efforts in trading.

What is Rare Candy in LevelZ?

Rare Candy is a drop from mobs. Eat it and you get leveled up one level.

Eats candy…

Oops. Candy was worth 2 XP!

If you happen to find one, don’t eat it until right after you’ve leveled up to get the maximum benefit as it only completes the level you’re on. And if you get one, you might want to save it until later in the game so you get the equivalent of thousands of XP, not just a few.

What is Strange Potion in LevelZ?

Strange Potion allows you to reset your skills. See the next question…

Can you reset your skills in LevelZ?

Yes, you can reset your levels in LevelZ! You can brew what’s called a “Strange Potion”, which will reset one random skill (if it has points) and give you all the points back. You can brew strange potion with a nether star and dragon’s breath. So it’s not cheap!

Did you remember to get dragon’s breath when you killed the dragon? No? Me either.

How to Customize LevelZ in Mod Packs?

The author of LevelZ certainly intended for this mod to be edited by pack developers as they cannot make it automatically compatible with all other modded tools, etc. It takes a lot of work to integrate other mods with LevelZ, especially those that add lots of tools and blocks.

You can customize LevelZ in a few ways. The settings that affect how users advance in levels, how to allocate XP, how much, how XP increases, max levels, etc. are all configurable in the /config/levelz.json5 file. Many of the settings do things like prevent people from making massive XP farms. Some of the settings in that file look like this

You can customize the various skills and what items and blocks they affect by using a custom datapack. This is documented in the LevelZ github page here.

An example of the code that’s required to set the level of an item in the archery skill looks like this:

What Mod Packs use LevelZ?

You may have encountered LevelZ in a mod pack. While there are other smaller packs, the most popular pack by far that contains Level Z is Valhelsia: Enhanced Vanilla. It’s been downloaded three quarters of a million times since it launched in December 2021.

See my Valhelsia Enhanced Vanilla guide here.

The Valhelsia developers have made many customizations to the LevelZ mod to make it more balanced and also make it work with all the mods in that pack. For example, if you just add LevelZ to a pack that has some tools mods, they won’t be locked behind levels, defeating the purpose of the Mining skill. They’ve taken care of all that.

Further, they’ve tweaked the max level to 40 to prolong the game and extend the late game. The pack’s most end-game modded and advanced tools are locked at higher levels. They’ve also added other ways to get skill points tied to advancements. For example, if you get the “return to sender” advancement, you get 3 archery points. They’ve also balanced things like how many HP you get for a health skill point so you don’t get too OP too quickly.

They’ve balanced the mod and incorporated it into the mod pack very well, and it truly extends the game play on a world by a long time. If you are frustrated at how quickly you get over-powered in other large modpacks, defiinitely check this out.

In fact, if you think this mod is interesting at all, I’d definitely suggest you check out Valhelsia: Enhanced Vanilla to benefit from all the work that the Valhelsia dev team did to build a great RPG-like , and balanced mod pack with some good technology and quality of life mods in it. Unless you’re building your own mod pack, Valhelsia Enhanced Vanilla is surely your best bet. If you are building your own pack, take a look at it for inspiration.

This video gives a good look at the LevelZ mod in Valhelsia Enhanced Vanilla

How to Manually Set Skills and Levels in LevelZ?

LevelZ has an operator command called /playerstats. It’s formatted like this:

/playerstats [user] [add|get|remove|set] [agility|alchemy|archery|defense|experience|farming|health|level|luck|mining|points|smithing|stamina|strength|trade] [points]

With that command you can modify any of the skills as as well as experience, level, and points, marked in bold above. You can do that for any player, or any number of players. On game startup, you can include scripts to set these values as a way to give custom points to new players, for example.

And if you’re giving out levels, why not /give your players rare candy. That’s much more fun!

Summary

In the right mod pack with the right customizations, LevelZ can be the best thing that’s ever happened to your Minecraft experience. I’ve been playing in a single Valhelsia Enhanced Vanilla world (the world in my Valhelsia Enhanced Vanilla Hardcore video series) for 8 months now. Prior to that, my worlds last a month the most because I get OP too fast. For that reason, this ia my favorite mod pack I’ve ever played, and much of that is thanks to LevelZ.

Have fun!