Apocalypse: Zombie & Abandoned Cities

The world ended a while ago. What is left is a pale red sky, ash drifting through empty streets, and five different things wearing the faces of the people who used to live here.

This is not a reskin pack. Every species has its own model, its own textures, its own AI, its own senses and its own idea of where it belongs. What makes the mod dangerous is not their statistics — it is that they hear you, they hunt in numbers, and the night belongs to them.

The five

Normal — barely a threat alone. It forms hordes: a group shares one identity, passes targets between its members and drifts across the same ground, so being seen by one means being followed by nine. The bigger the horde, the tougher its members.

Big — a worker in a hi-vis vest, carrying a wrench or a steel pipe. The weapon is real: it changes how fast it swings and how hard it hits, and every landed blow rings loudly enough to bring the rest of the building.

Goon — two metres seventy of industrial accident with a Heavy Rebar. Its swing takes over a second to arrive and lands as an arc that throws everything in front of it. Small hits barely register. Trading blows with one is a losing plan; leaving the room is the correct one.

Viral — waits motionless in a dark room, costing nothing, until it hears something. Then it screams and runs, physically, through the doors it can break and around the walls it cannot. It hears more than twice as far as a Normal.

Coleric — the worst thing underground. It does not burn in daylight like a vanilla zombie: sunlight drains its speed and strength, hurts it more the longer it stays out, and drives it to find cover. At night it comes up. It pounces across eighteen blocks and takes hold of you — dragged in, slammed down, and if you were already hurt, torn apart. Stand somewhere it cannot walk to and it spits acid at you in arcing volleys. Hide in a pipe and it flattens itself and follows you in.

They hear you

Noise is a real system, not a flag. Every sound in the world has a position, a type and a radius: footsteps carry five blocks, a broken block fourteen, a gunshot seventy-two, TNT a hundred and twenty-eight. Each species hears at its own range — the Viral at more than double a Normal's, the Coleric at triple.

Sprinting is loud. Walking is not. Crouching is silent. That is the whole stealth system, and it costs one check per player tick.

Fire a gun and it does more than turn heads: a pack of Virals comes up out of the ground somewhere out of sight, often with a horde behind them, and you hear them start moving from the direction they will arrive from.

The night

As the light starts to go, everyone hears it coming. Then the waves begin: a mixed group of all five species lands around every player every few seconds, in the dark, out of sight, and keeps landing until dawn. Colerics come up out of the sewers with them.

You either have somewhere to be, or you do not survive it.

Darkness is real darkness. The fog closes to a fraction of its normal range at night and drains to the colour of old blood, and underground it closes further. A night walk is a walk inside a small circle of ground with something moving at the edge of it.

Under everything

A sewer network runs beneath most of the world — tunnels with water channels, junctions, technical rooms, flooded stretches, rooms hidden behind grating, and shafts climbing to a manhole cover in the street above. The cover swings open on a real animation, sounds like cast iron, and is loud enough to be heard by something that was listening.

There is no light down there at all. Only what you carry.

Running the length of it is a crawlable pipe network. Crouch beside a pipe and your character drops onto their belly to get in; grated sections let you see out into the tunnel you are crawling beside; open mouths at every junction are the way in — and the way something else gets in after you.

Five procedural structures

Laid out and built in code rather than loaded from templates, so no two are the same, and declared as datapack files so their biomes, spawns and frequency can be edited without recompiling.

• Abandoned city — a street grid, blocks of buildings at uneven heights, explorable interiors, a multi-storey car park, and its own sewers underneath.
• Ruined suburb — a crossroads, houses, shops and a great many small closed rooms for Virals.
• Industrial zone — a factory with real plant and catwalks, warehouses, storage tanks, a workshop.
• Abandoned sorting station — sorting halls with their conveyor lines, warehouses, offices, and a section of sewer genuinely connected to the yard above it.
• Great sewers — the network itself, the largest structure in the mod.

Almost everything is built from vanilla blocks, by design. The mod's own blocks exist only where vanilla cannot do the job.

Weapons

• Wrench and steel pipe — moderate melee, and what the Big brings with it.
• Heavy Rebar — devastating, extremely slow, and it slows you down to carry. It is the Goon's weapon, and you are not meant to be comfortable with it.
• Pistol — a real firearm, not a renamed bow. Its own magazine stored on the item, a reload with duration, recoil, spread, a rate of fire and its own round. Every shot is a noise event.
• Ammunition, ammo boxes, scrap and casings, all craftable.

Configuration

Everything worth tuning is in config/apocalypse-common.toml and none of it needs a recompile:

• global damage, health and speed multipliers, and a hardcore switch
• spawn weights per species, population caps per chunk and per player, day/night bias
• horde chance, size and bonuses
• noise radii per type, hearing multipliers, investigation length
• base statistics for each species separately
• spacing and separation of every structure
• night wave size and interval, sewer wave size, noise summoning, nightfall cue
• red skies, ash, darker nights — each switchable on its own
• every pistol parameter

Requirements

Minecraft 1.21.1 and NeoForge 21.1.234 or newer. No other dependencies.