Better Beginnings is the most vanilla friendly early game progression mod for Minecraft. It enhances immersion and the lack of meaningful progression in the early game by introducing the hatchet item, and giving copper its proper place in minecraft. It reorders the early game progression to go:

rocks -> stone tools -> copper tools -> iron tools -> coal

Your 2 minute early game turns to a slight challenge that will take a day or two, and now there's a reason to use the campfire, copper, and smelting fuels other than coal.

No more beating trees with your bare fists, you'll need the right tool for the job. Rocks spawn at a moderate rate anywhere you can find stone or gravel, on steep terrain, or near bodies of water. Sticks now drop much more frequently from leaves. Pick up a rock and place it on top of a stick in your crafting table to make a hatchet. Now you can chop your trees and keep moving foward.

You can craft a stone pickaxe with rocks from the ground now, as stone is not mineable without a copper pickaxe or higher. You will need to make a stone pickaxe to mine the abundant copper ore that spawns at the mouths of caves, which is mostly useless in vanilla minecraft.

Then craft a campfire or furnace. (You can make cobblestone with four rocks)

From here you can enter the "Bronze Age", smelt your copper to make copper tools.

You'll next need to get iron, make an iron pickaxe and then finally be able to mine coal and make it past the early game.

Check out my latest mod: Critter Colonies! 🐿️