Minecraft mods which make bases necessary again?

Hello, thought I would post this on lemmy before reddit or some other forum.

I want to make make a scarier version of minecraft to play with a few of my friends. I have a desktop running debian with 4gb of ram allocated to the server, so it needs to be kind of lightweight. Here's the kind of stuff I'm looking for.

I want it to last maybe a month, people start vanilla servers like they're going to last forever, and they never do, so I want an experience which will start and end, satisfyingly in a short-ish amount of time.

I want it to be scary, and hard. I don't want players to simply "skip the night" I want night to be something they have to go through, and for it to be difficult. I want some linear progression mods, zombie hordes which get progressively more difficult, daytime is a rush for people to get as much gear and head underground during the night. I want there to be a real need to build a base. I want mobs to be able to break in if the base isn't strong enough. And I want a lot of co-op multiplayer gameplay.

I want the player mechanics to essentially remain the same. No thirst mods for example. I want it to have a bit of a pre 1900s theme, no gun mods, maybe some fantasy/medieval themes. And obviously I want it to be fun and immersive. Any version as long as it's compatible with a wide range of mods.

Any help would be great, thank you.