☠️ Cobblemon Nuzlocke & Soul Link

Play the Nuzlocke. Let the mod be the referee.

Every rule you would otherwise have to hold yourself to — one catch per zone, permadeath, nicknames, level caps — enforced by the game instead of by your own honesty. And if you play with friends, Soul Link ties your runs together so a death on one screen is a death on everyone's.

✨ What you get

• One catch per zone. Your first encounter in a route, an area or a town is the only Pokémon you may catch there. Fail it and that zone is shut for good. Zones can be the world's geography, the biome you are standing in, or both at once.
• Permadeath that holds. A fainted Pokémon is gone, and every way of quietly undoing it — healing, reviving, trading it away — is closed off.
• Mandatory nicknames. Everything you obtain gets named before you can use it. It is what makes losing one hurt.
• Shiny clause and duplicates clause. A wild shiny is always catchable; meeting something you already own does not burn the zone.
• A window to catch what you knocked out. A fainted wild stays catchable for a while, so a lucky crit does not silently cost you the only encounter that zone had.
• Whiteout, your way. Choose what losing your whole party means — from waking at the last Pokémon Center you used, to Game Over.
• A starter you did not pick. Randomise the opening three, filter out legendaries, paradox forms and Ultra Beasts, and decide whether a shiny is on the table.
• Level caps and honest EXP. Caps track gym progression, EXP is tunable, and Mega Evolution, Gigantamax, Z-Moves and Terastallisation can each be switched off for a stricter run.
• A Gym Leader Challenge. Lock a run to one elemental type, and the starter offer and the spawns follow the lock.
• Trainers standing on the roads. They challenge you on sight with the classic "!" wind-up, duel each other when left alone, respect their cooldowns, and never reach you through a wall or drag you out of a building. One that badly outlevels you does not pick the fight at all. A battle you dodged by relogging is still owed — they re-challenge you when you come back.
• A run log you can read. Every zone you have found, what you caught there and what became of it, with the place you are standing in marked and the Pokémon clickable.
• Soul Link, for co-op. Link parties so your runs are bound: when one linked Pokémon dies, so do its soulmates. A lone-combat block stops anyone grinding ahead alone. Entirely optional — the whole ruleset above works on a single-player world.

ℹ️ Not the same thing as the Cobblemon Nuzlocke datapack. There is an unrelated datapack with a similar name. This is a mod, which is why Soul Link is part of the name.

🧩 Requirements

• Cobblemon (CurseForge) for Minecraft 1.21.1.
• Routes (CurseForge) — the latest version. A hard dependency, not a suggestion: the "one catch per zone" rule needs a definition of zone, and it takes it from the routes, areas and towns Routes generates. One source of truth for where you are, shared by both mods. Routes itself does not need Cobblemon — it is a worldgen mod for roads. This is the mod that turns that world into a Pokémon adventure. If the version you have is too old, the launcher tells you.
• Fabric: Fabric API + Fabric Language Kotlin.
• NeoForge: Architectury API + Kotlin For Forge.

Road trainers need a trainer mod for their teams — Radical Cobblemon Trainers (CurseForge) is the default, and the feature stays quietly inert without one.

Already playing with Routes? These rules used to ship inside it. Your world, its settings and its zone log all carry over.

📖 Everything else

Set your run up on the NUZLOCKE tab of the create-world screen, and change your mind later without starting over — every rule can be read back and adjusted from in game, in a world you are already playing.

Full rules, every setting, the commands and the Soul Link guide are in the wiki.

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