So, me and a couple friends are planning to visit each others house spend about a 12 hour period playing minecraft over the summer holidays, (which occurs within a months time from this post). In total we add up to about 4 ~ 7 people (depending if they're free).
Two of us are pro players (One has beaten the game in 20 minutes on his own and has a strong understanding on redstoning, crafting etc; the other has a large knowledge when it comes to commands, but we don't trust him as, if he gets a chance to use commands/cheats, he tends to go crazy.
Two of us are useless (complete dumbasses), and the rest have a decent understanding on building/crafting as well as other things.
Our challenge is no sleep until we finish the game (which sounds fun but when you think about it, very unlikely to happen). This is because I'm afraid will not take 12 hours to beat the ender dragon, in fact if we all tried I'm sure we can beat it in an hour or so, which makes it boring.
SO MY QUESTION IS: Is there anyway to make the game more difficult and make the play time last longer? We all have minecraft JAVA edition, but two of us have a 'cracked' minecraft (due to the fact they already have purchased the console edition), but if we need too, they can buy the official game. But the only other problem is we are still deciding to:
A) run a server on which we all join (much easier than option B; but at the same time we're not sure if one person's internet can handle it), or
B) We all join LAN, which should be pretty much lag free but more difficult as we need LAN hubs, LAN cables ect. but possible.
Me and 2 others understand how to install mods and stuff, but only a few basic installation mods. Any large mods that require a lot of set up and can not be done manually won't work. (by manual I mean dragging and dropping files into the 'minecraft mod' folders). We can't use discord or other client based mod launchers to connect to minecraft and run mods, as I said two of us have a cracked version of minecraft without a paid account.
ANY help is awesome, this post will not only help us but everyone that views it! Remember feel free to add any range of difficulty within the game, as we have a few pros that can carry the others. So far, all we know is to put the difficulty to 'hard' but I doubt it will make a huge impact. Mods, options anything to increase the duration of our play is greatly appreciated