VanillaSkills

VanillaSkills replaces vanilla’s progression with one of its own: experience is removed entirely and Skill Shards take its place — earned from advancements, spent in a 15-lane skill tree, at the anvil, and at the Infusing Table that replaces enchanting. On top of that sit five tiers of craftable gear that slot in between the vanilla tiers, a Bounty Board with a rotating shop, and crates you fish out of the water.

Almost all of its content — the skill tree, quests, shop, crates and feats — lives in datapack files, so a server can rewrite any of it without touching code. It runs on Fabric and NeoForge, and custom textures reach vanilla clients through an automatically pushed resource pack: nobody installs anything by hand.

Requirements

Minecraft 26.2 or 26.1.2
Fabric (with Fabric API) or NeoForge
Install on the server. Vanilla clients are fully supported (they receive the texture pack on join); a client install is optional.

Download

CurseForge

The documentation

Quick guide — the short version: what changed, how shards work, and fast answers to the questions everyone asks. Start here.
Progression & economy — the two shard currencies, the 15-lane skill tree, quests, the shop, crates, feats, and how other mods’ advancements feed in.
Gear & crafting — the five gear tiers, the Dragon end-game chain, the Infusing Table, the re-priced anvil, the Satchel, and the mining gates.
Running a server — configuration, commands, datapacks, translations, and how textures reach vanilla clients.

Upgrading from 1.7.x

2.0 is a breaking release. Back up your world, and test the upgrade on a copy first — the save changes are one way.

What carries over on its own:

Gear keeps working. Pieces crafted before 2.0 are repointed to the new textures as their owner logs in. That now includes the two cases that used to slip through: a piece that had lost its marker altogether and was rendering as a plain vanilla sword or helmet, and gear sitting inside a shulker box rather than loose in the inventory. Enchantments, damage and anvil names are untouched.
Skill points, unlocked nodes and bounty progress carry over. Quests move from list positions to stable ids automatically.

What needs a decision:

Two vanilla blocks change meaning. Reinforced deepslate becomes the Unstable Skill Shard Block and lodestone the Stable one. Ancient cities only generate obsidian in newly generated chunks, so cities already in your world keep their reinforced deepslate and become farmable.
Experience is removed by default, so existing levels stop mattering and the XP bar shows banked Skill Shards instead. Set experienceEnabled to put vanilla experience back.
Steel moved from the anvil to the furnace: an iron block smelts into three ingots.
Some commands were removed, and /skill points is now /skill skillshards.

Playing via the VSP modpack

VanillaSkills is the centerpiece of VanillaSkillsPlus (VSP), a ready-to-play modpack that bundles it with the rest of the server’s mods. It comes as two separate CurseForge downloads:

VSP - Player Pack — for anyone joining the server. Install it through the CurseForge app; it pulls VanillaSkills and every other mod automatically. Launch it and connect to the server’s address — nothing to configure.
VSP - Server Pack — for whoever hosts the server. Download it, unzip it on your host machine (or upload it to your hosting panel), then run the included start script (start.bat on Windows, start.sh on Linux). It boots a Fabric server with all the server-side mods already in place. Once it’s up, share your server’s IP with players so they can connect using the Player Pack.

You don’t need both — players only need the Player Pack, and a host only needs the Server Pack.

Add-ons

Casino — adds a casino to the skill screen: slots, blackjack and video poker, all played with your Quest Shards.
VS - Textures — the mod’s textures as a standalone resource pack, for using the look without the mod.