A variety of people tried challenge runs early in the pack’s history. A popular type of this run was “no rocket,” which means not going to any of the space dimensions.
Near the start of October 2021, bigfluf was testing out the possibility of a skyblock run in vanilla GTNH. They mentioned the run on the GTNH Discord and we started discussing it in DMs. After we figured out some routing and tested it in singleplayer, Sampsa generously donated his void world to us so we could chunkload and build together. Others also joined around this time, notably vTurtle (sovy.).
From October 2021 - February 2022, we reached late IV (almost to LuV transition, just needed to do BM ore meteors) with a restricted list of items to spawn in. You can see details of this run here. This run started as peaceful (for maximum challenge) and transitioned to doMobSpawning=false as we needed to spawn a wither for nether stars, and it would nearly instantly despawn in peaceful mode. Our motivation for the run eventually tapered off, as there were no methods for late game ready production using crops / bees except laggy parallelization, and void dim has no access to void miners or pumps (ironic).
In reaction to the peaceful run, in July 2022 cubic-chariot started routing the “Garden of Grind” (GoG) run, which allows mob spawning. You can see details on their Github. Ultimately it was found that GoG allowed us to reduce the spawn count down to just 4 items, which is much, much less than the 25 or so minimum possible item set in the other run.
At the end of October 2022, with additional routing from the whole team, we found that it was possible to reach 0 starting items when questbook was allowed! Thanks to new late game production multis for renewables (EIG for crops, EEC for mobs, iApiary and later mApiary for bees) and our new route, we had to do the run, so we started a new server with Sampsa.
Many other GoG runs have been done since then, reaching as high as UEV.
In April 2024, sovy. got everyone together for a new community GoG run - Gates of the Garden. This new run was created after we figured out a workaround for all gates, making stargate theoretically achieveable! We were greatly aided by nzbasic's mixin allowing complete disabling of world gen in all dimensions. More news to come...