BENEATH

A Minecraft Bedrock horror add-on. Something lives under the floor of the world. It knows when you arrive. Shortly after you spawn in, it comes up through the ground, takes you, and drags you down into a system of bloody caves. Then it leaves — because it has to get ready first.

You get three minutes.

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Install

1. Double-click BENEATH.mcaddon. Minecraft imports both packs.
2. Create or edit a world:
   • Behaviour Packs → activate BENEATH
   • Resource Packs → activate BENEATH (check this screen too — see below)
3. In that world's settings, turn Beta APIs ON (Experiments → Beta APIs). The add-on's scripting needs it. Nothing else needs enabling.
4. Play in Survival. It takes you shortly after you spawn into the world.

If anything is invisible

Custom entities take their entire appearance from the resource pack, so if the resource pack is not applied to the world they spawn, move and hunt you while rendering as nothing at all. Check the world's Resource Packs screen.

BENEATH_BP.mcpack and BENEATH_RP.mcpack are included as well. If the combined import ever leaves you with only one of the two, double-click these two files instead — they import one pack each and cannot half-apply.

BENEATH_RP_SAFEMODE.mcpack is a fallback resource pack with the animation layer stripped out. Everything is visible but unanimated. Only reach for it if the normal one leaves things invisible.

Chat commands (!beneath …) do not work in ordinary Bedrock worlds — chatSend script events are unavailable there. Ignore any that appear below.

Multiplayer works — each player gets their own cave system and their own hunt.

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What happens

1. It notices you — a few seconds after you arrive in the world, and then about 35 seconds of build-up. Distant roars under your feet, whispering, something being eaten a long way down, your own heartbeat getting louder, the ground shaking. The caves are being carved beneath you while this happens.

2. It takes you. The ground opens behind you, it comes up, screams in your face, and hauls you under.

3. The gut. You wake on a floor of gore in a chamber heaped with the dead, and the screen says:

IT IS GETTING READY TO FEAST UPON YOU YOU MUST ESCAPE

4. Three minutes of grace. A countdown runs on your action bar. While it runs you hear it working somewhere in the tunnels — wet chewing, bones snapping, people screaming a long way off, roars through the rock. It is not looking for you yet. Use the time.

5. IT IS COMING. At zero the action bar turns red and it starts hunting. Your heartbeat gets faster the closer it gets, and the action bar escalates: IT IS COMING → IT IS CLOSE → IT IS RIGHT THERE → IT IS HERE.

6. Out. Somewhere in the topmost chamber there is one ladder — a real ladder, the only climbable thing down there, standing in a hole one block wide with marrow lamps ringed around its foot so it reads as a landmark across a dark chamber. Climb it until you see sky. It surfaces exactly where you were standing when it took you, and it is too narrow for the Gorger to follow you up.

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The Gorger

A gaunt, long-limbed thing that runs on all fours. A heavy-browed skull with cheekbones and a low crest, a jaw that splits four ways, a ribcage of eight bone bands standing proud of the flank with something burning in the seams between them, shoulder blades, hip bones pushing through, three long fingers to a hand, clawed toes, a ridge of vertebrae down the back and a dragging spine-tail. In the dark you mostly see the eyes and the seams between its ribs.

• 55 bones and 14 animation clips — idle, breathing, stalk, walk, gallop, airborne, lunge, scream, feast, emerge-from-the-ground, hurt, death, plus layered head-tracking and an independent tail. A state machine blends them.
• Climbs up to 3 blocks. It has a real jump, goat-style block-jumping, and a script assist that shoves it up any ledge up to three blocks high, so no ledge down there is a safe place to stand.
• Hunts like Alien: Isolation. If Bedrock's pathfinding loses you it does not wander home — it repositions to a corridor near you and starts again. You cannot outlast it by hiding in a corner.
• 200 HP, immune to fall/fire/lava/drowning. You can fight it. You should not.

The caves

Not a maze — a cave system. Eighteen chambers scattered through a sealed block of rock at three depths, hollowed out of overlapping irregular blobs so none of them is a room shape. They are joined by tunnels that wander instead of running straight. Each tunnel has a character — a squeeze barely wider than you, an ordinary passage, or a gallery you cannot see the far wall of — and breathes along its length on top of that, so the same tunnel opens out and closes in as you follow it. Chambers range from a cupboard to a cathedral. Loops are cut on top of the spanning tree so you can never be sure you have not been down here before.

The depths are joined by stair shafts you simply walk up — wide hollow shafts with a spiral of steps cut into their walls. There is nothing to climb anywhere in the system except one thing.

Floors of gore and bone, blood puddles, flesh dripping from the ceilings, hanging sinew, stalagmites and stalactites of meat, and marrow lamps giving just enough light to move. Solid decoration is only ever placed in open ground, never in a doorway, so nothing can seal a route shut behind you.

Every generated system is verified escapable before you are dropped into it. With nothing to climb, every drop became one-way — you can fall from the exit down to where you woke and never get back. So the generator does not ask "are these joined", it asks "can you walk UP to the ladder from where you wake", and if not it anchors a stair shaft on a cell you are provably standing on and cuts across to the ladder at its own height. Then it checks again, up to five times. A player sealed underground with no way out is the one bug that cannot ship.

The walls take ~14 seconds a block to mine and are blast-proof. Digging straight up is not an escape route — finding your way is.

The dead

20 species of corpse scattered through the tunnels and heaped in the gut chamber: cow, pig, sheep, wolf, horse, fox, goat, polar bear, cat, rabbit, llama, chicken, creeper, spider, zombie, skeleton, villager, pillager, enderman, iron golem.

Every one of them is a model and a texture built for this pack — none of it borrows a vanilla asset, so there is no way for one to fail to resolve and render as nothing. Each hangs off a single corpse_root bone, so the body rolls over as one piece instead of being contorted joint by joint, and the rest height of each species is solved numerically so the body lies on the floor rather than half-buried in it. Per-corpse random roll, tilt, twist and limb spread mean no two are laid out the same way. You can break them.

The atmosphere

You cannot see across a chamber. Custom fog closes visibility to about 20 blocks in the caves, 12 once it starts hunting, and 6 when it is nearly on you — so losing your sight line is itself the warning.

The light is rationed and it takes it away. Only about a third of the chambers have marrow growing in them; everything between is pitch black, so you cross the dark from one dim island to the next. Once it is hunting and gets within 26 blocks, the lamps around you start going out one at a time, each with a wet little snuff, from the far side of the chamber inward. Get away from it and they slowly come back.

Sound is aimed at you, not scattered. Distant sounds are placed behind you wherever possible — something you cannot turn to look at is worth three of the same sound in front. Close sounds are played dry, with no reverb at all, so they arrive with no room around them: breathing at your ear, whispering at your shoulder, something scraping stone right next to your head.

Silence is used as an instrument. Every so often the caves build to a rush and then cut to nothing for four seconds before something lands right on you. Thirty seconds before the hunt starts, everything simply stops.

You see it when it is not there. During the three minutes, every 35–75 seconds it appears in the middle distance ahead of you, motionless, and is gone a second and a half later.

The sound

47 original sounds, all synthesised from scratch — nothing sampled, nothing borrowed. The screams are real vocal synthesis: a glottal source with jitter, shimmer and period-doubling (the physical thing that makes a scream sound torn) driven through a modelled vocal tract. The Gorger's screech is that, pitched down and layered under a beast roar. Also: wet chewing, bones cracking, breathing far too close to you, the drag, the ground bursting open, heartbeats, whispers, and a cave drone. The atmosphere layer adds a person sobbing a long way off, someone humming tunelessly in the dark, claws on stone, rock groaning as it settles, blood bubbling, footsteps closing on you and then stopping, and a reverse-swell sting that rushes up into silence.

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Commands

Type these in chat:

Tuning

Open BENEATH_BP/scripts/main.js — the CFG block at the top has everything: startOnJoin, graceTicks (the three minutes, in ticks), span and depth for how big the cave system is, nodesPerBand and extraEdges for how tangled, chimneys, fogNear and snuffRange for how close it has to be before the fog shuts in and the lights die, glimpseEvery, and losePatience for how stubborn the hunt is.

Notes

• Blocks down there behave like ordinary stone underfoot. An earlier build set a friction value on every custom block that made the whole cave slide.
• It takes you when you spawn into the world. Set startOnJoin: false and nightAmbush: true in CFG if you would rather it stalked you on random nights instead, and cooldownTicks to put a delay between abductions.
• The caves stay in your world after you escape — a permanent bloody scar under the spot where it took you. If you would rather they did not accumulate, set cooldownTicks above zero.
• There is exactly one ladder in the whole system and it is the way out. The generator asserts this: every ladder block sits in a single column.
• If the world reloads mid-escape you are put back in the tunnels where you were, with the timer reset to the start of the grace period.
• It cannot take you in Creative or Spectator.

Content warning: this add-on is about being eaten. Blood, corpses, screaming.