The ancient city is the best-looking structure Mojang has ever shipped and one of the least interesting to actually explore. It is enormous, repetitive, and the loot is famously a lot of hoes and pants.
Dungeons and Taverns Ancient City Overhaul rebuilds it. Version 3.5 went out on 17 September with full 26.3 support, and the changes are specific enough to be worth listing rather than summarising.
It is standalone
Worth establishing first, because the naming confuses people. This does not require the main Dungeons and Taverns mod, and the main mod does not include these changes. It is a splinter project that can be installed entirely on its own.
Datapack, Fabric, Forge and NeoForge versions all exist. If you already run the main Dungeons and Taverns pack, this sits alongside it without conflict.
What changes structurally
- Main walls are slimmer and taller, which changes the silhouette more than anything else on this list.
- Slim roads added, giving the city circulation rather than open floor.
- The deepslate cobblestone ring structures are removed – these were the most repetitive element in the vanilla layout.
- Several smaller houses added, plus smaller versions of the existing city parts.
- A second ice box structure and two amethyst box structures.
- Alarm towers, small road lanterns and soul fire bonfires on the pillars.
- Three chests inside the city centre statue.
The removal is as important as the additions. Vanilla’s ancient city reads as large because it repeats a few modules across a huge footprint, and cutting the most repeated one while adding smaller pieces makes the same area read as a place rather than a pattern.
The loot fix
This is the part most players will care about. The overhaul adds iron ingots and nuggets, gold ingots and nuggets, and a rare chance of diamonds to the loot tables.
More importantly, it allows all iron and diamond tools and armour to be found, rather than only hoes and pants. Hoes and pants are still the most common results – the joke survives – but they are no longer the only possibility.
Armour trims are made rarer relative to the total chest count across the city. That sounds like a downgrade and is not: vanilla’s ancient city hands out so many trims that they stop being an event, and the point of a trim is that it is one.
Every structure part also gets rubble with archaeology loot tables attached, so brushing becomes part of clearing the city rather than a separate activity you do somewhere else.
The 3.5 changelog
Three items, and the first is the one that mattered for release timing: all files converted to the new 26.3 format, and configured features rewritten as inline features rather than nested inside a config object.
That is a worldgen data format change on Mojang’s side, and it is the kind of thing that keeps structure mods offline for weeks after a drop. Getting it done two days after Wilderness Bound is quick.
The third item: the ancient city centre chest’s final roll has a decreased chance of being empty, so it is more likely to produce an actual item. Small, and it addresses the specific disappointment of opening the most dramatically placed chest in the structure and finding nothing.
What it does not change
The warden is untouched. Sculk sensors and shriekers behave exactly as they do in vanilla, and the danger model of the structure is identical. This is a layout and loot mod, not a difficulty mod.
That means everything in the warden guide still applies without modification – wool, careful movement, and an exit plan. The city is more interesting to clear; it is not safer to clear.
It also does not touch the deep dark biome itself, only the structure inside it.
Installing it on an existing world
Structure changes only affect chunks generated after installation. An ancient city you have already loaded stays vanilla forever.
If you want the overhaul in a world you have been playing, you need to explore into fresh deep dark, which in practice means travelling a long way. That is the standard constraint for adding worldgen mods to an existing world and there is no way around it.
On a new world it simply applies. Licence is all rights reserved, so modpack distribution needs permission.
Verdict
Install it. There is no real argument against it for a world where you have not already found the city – it keeps vanilla’s aesthetic, removes its most repetitive element, and fixes a loot table that is a running joke rather than a reward.
It sits at over 4.2 million downloads, which for a single-structure overhaul is a large number and a reasonable proxy for how many people found the vanilla version disappointing. If you want the rest of the series, the wider structure roundup covers what else is worth the trip.
Images: Dungeons and Taverns project gallery.