Tough Beginnings
Tough Beginnings is a mod that make the early game process of obtaining wood/stone/tools/workbench a little more difficult. Instead of being able to punch trees to obtain wood you must harvest gravel to obtain Raw Flint, this flint is useless in its raw form. In order to sharpen the flint you must bash it on a stone block which will give you the chance to obtain flint, keep in mind this can fail and leave you with flint shards which can be combined to create a new block of gravel. Once the flint has been obtained you are now able to craft a flint knife which can help you in obtaining fiber from foliage around the world. This fiber can be used to craft fiber rope which in turn can be used to craft a flint axe.
Using the flint axe you're now able to obtain logs as you would normally. However, regular old wood planks is no longer an option for crafting wooden tools. Instead you will need carve wooden planks into blocks of wood using the flint knife and 1 plank block in a crafting table, then you will need a Pile of Fiber which can be crafted with 7 pieces of fiber, place it in the world and ignite with friction by right clicking with a stick in your main-hand. This will create a fire, from here you can toughen the blocks of wood by right clicking them on the flame. Using the tough blocks of wood you will now be able to craft wooden tools.
Stone now no longer drops its respective block, instead it drops rocks which can be combined to create the original block and be used in recipes to create stone tools and enter the stone age!
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i like how the progression logically makes sense, and the flint knife texture also looks really epic, but i think there are too many in between steps (for example you should be able to use the flint directly instead of having to craft a flint knife), leading to many items that aren't useful outside of the early game stages. also, about the concept of the mod itself – it doesn't make the game more challenging, it just makes it take longer, and the challenges should probably come in the later game anyway. however if you extend this sort of idea and the exploration vibe to the later stages of gameplay, i think it might be interesting.