ChaosLoop Mod

ChaosLoop for Fabric, with the datapack built in. Install it and every world you make is a chaos world: no zip to download, no world/datapacks folder to find, nothing to enable.

The mimic is a real player

Not a zombie carrying somebody's face on its head. A player model, wearing their skin, their name and their armour, swinging their sword.

The plugin could hand that job to LibsDisguises when it was installed. There is no such library on Fabric, so it is done inside the mod — and done the way a disguise library does it: the mimic is still a zombie on the server, and only the packets describing it are rewritten on the way out.

That is deliberate, not a shortcut. A hand-built fake player has no AI at all — no pathfinding, no target, no reach, no swing — and every one of those would have to be written from nothing and kept working. A zombie already walks, hunts, follows you through a wall and hits what it is holding, and ChaosLoop already teaches it to dig through blocks and pillar up after you. So the brain is left exactly as it is and the body is a lie told to the client.

It still does everything it used to. It digs, it builds, it uses the copied player's own tools at the speed those tools would really take, it makes a player's noise when you hurt it, and it dies without dropping anything, because the gear was never its own.

It no longer burns at dawn. It never used to, by accident — the player head it wore counted as a helmet, and a zombie in a helmet burns the helmet. With the head slot now free for their real armour, that is done on purpose instead.

mimic-player-model: true in the config. Turn it off and every mimic goes back to being the zombie in the mask, which still works.

A mimic built before ChaosLoop has the copied player's skin — a first ever join on an offline server, say — stays the zombie in the mask on purpose. A mask can be repainted when the skin lands a second later; a disguise cannot, because the client already has the profile.

/function chaosloop:admin/status names the body you are getting.

Where it runs

• Single player — works on its own. There is a server inside your game and this runs on it.
• Opened to LAN — works, and your friends need nothing installed.
• A Fabric server — put it in mods/ and nobody joining needs a thing.
• Somebody else's server — it goes quiet by itself. No server starts on your machine, so nothing of it runs and it cannot argue with the ChaosLoop already there, mod or plugin.

What it is

Everything the Paper plugin does, rewritten against Fabric: graves and one-click looting, /back, /graves, /restore, the minigame vault, the mimics and their real skins, the illusions, the walkie-talkies, the Chronicle, the sidebar, the world reset and the waiting room.

/restore — snapshots every minute of inventory, position, health and experience, kept for 90 minutes, plus one taken the instant before anything takes an inventory away. /restore <name> all lastevent is exactly what somebody walked into a game with. A restore snapshots the current state first, so a wrong minute is itself undoable.

Skins on an offline server. Everybody is Steve on an offline-mode server because the profile is built from a name and no textures. The skin is looked up by name and put on the profile as you log in. First ever join is Steve; every one after that is you.

Sneak and right-click a grave and it empties in one movement: best armour on, everything else in your bag, bag sorted, hotbar untouched.

A bounty costs the marked player the death and nothing else.

The push-to-talk key, for anybody running the ChaosLoop Radio client mod: hold it and your voice goes out on your channel, let go and you are back to whoever is standing next to you. Without that mod the radio transmits whenever it is switched on.

/function chaosloop:admin/status names the half that is running — mod, plugin, or neither, and says plainly when neither is answering, since that is when graves, the vault, real mimic faces and the radios are all quietly off.

An update check on start, which needs a free CurseForge API key — their API takes one on every request. It downloads nothing.

What is different from the plugin, and why

• The world is one folder, not three. Paper keeps the nether and end beside the overworld; vanilla keeps them inside it. The reset deletes one folder — same result, less to go wrong.
• The waiting room is a real dimension, shipped inside the mod, because vanilla will not build a world at runtime.
• Radios and compasses are new items. The plugin stamped them in a corner of the item data only Bukkit could read; the mod uses the item's real NBT, which the datapack can read too. Old ones are not recognised — throw them away, a fresh one arrives within seconds.

Notes

The config file is the same file. Same keys, in config/chaosloop/config.yml — copy an old plugins/ChaosLoop/config.yml over it and it works. A few of them mean nothing on this side, because the datapack is inside the mod rather than beside it: install-datapack has nothing to install, and updates.download-datapack has nothing to fetch — a zip arriving in world/datapacks would *shadow* the built-in copy, not update it. Both keys are still accepted so a copied config loads, and each says so where it sits.

Two copies is not a crash. If you also drop the datapack zip into world/datapacks, the tick is guarded by the world's own clock so nothing runs twice, and it says so once rather than quietly running every timer at double speed. Take the zip out — a world pack overrides the mod's built-in copy, so an older zip would shadow this one.

Needs Fabric API and Java 17 or newer. Server-side: a vanilla client sees all of it, mimics included.

— Amjed Elkateb, powered by orbt.ly