Hollowmere

Hollowmere opens a door into The Hallowlands, an eternal-autumn dimension built for Halloween without gore. Light is a resource and the dark has teeth: hostile creatures, fog that hides them, harvest and blood moons, and an optional Dread that punishes anyone who stays outside a lantern's reach.

The way in is a crypt-portal. Build the stone tomb from the guide book, set four ritual candles on its rim and light four fires in its 2×2 pit: the pit becomes the veil. Step in and you cross at once, arriving on your feet two blocks in front of the return tomb, and the return trip is free.

Inside there are 10 biomes: Pumpkin Moor, Corn Maze, Drowned Crypts, Ash Hills, Tall Bone Forest, Veil Mire, Lantern Lake, Scarecrow Graveyard, Amber Mirror Wood and Abandoned Fair. Each has its own fog, flora, surface rules and fauna.

The world is dressed with 53 structures in 13 sets and 74 pieces: crypts, a drowned cathedral, an ossuary, a necropolis, a keeper lodge, a mill settlement, a lantern harbor, an amphitheatre, a mirror maze, an abandoned fair and more. 50 entities populate them, from crypt toads and lantern moths to multi-phase bosses.

There are 110 blocks, 153 items, 96 worldgen features and 107 recipes. The audio is original: 203 OGG files with creature voices, ambience and three music pieces, all built for this mod.

Hollowmere is meant to be spooky-cozy: 16×16 art, no gore, no shaders, no custom HUD. Custom sounds carry subtitles, and the config has safe defaults for servers. On Fabric it requires Fabric API; on NeoForge and Forge it needs nothing beyond the loader.

1.0.1 is a quality update: a new four-candle crypt-portal lit by four fires, with instant crossing; redrawn tools, armor and ingots; cleaner blocks; repainted creatures with idle motion; more wildlife; richer crypts, docks, fair and village walls; and wider Minecraft version ranges per jar. The known limitations are listed at the end of this page. They are not hidden.

Installation

Each jar declares the range it was measured on: static linking against each version's mappings and a dedicated-server test on each version. Not supported yet: 1.20.5–1.20.6 and 1.21.2–1.21.11, where Mojang changed APIs the jars use; they are planned for 1.0.5.

1. Install the loader for your game version.
2. On Fabric, install Fabric API for your exact game version (the latest build for that version is fine). In 26.2, use the full Fabric API build: the standalone fabric-resource-loader-v1 module crashes at startup.
3. On NeoForge or Forge, no extra mod is required.
4. Put the Hollowmere jar in the mods folder.
5. Install Hollowmere on both client and server. In single-player the integrated server uses the same jar.
6. Use Java 17 for 1.20.x, Java 21 for 1.21.x and Java 25 for 26.2.

Back up the world before adding or removing the mod. Removing Hollowmere from a world where The Hallowlands has already been generated prevents the world from loading: the world stores the dimension, and without the mod its data is missing.

Configuration

config/hollowmere.json, reloaded in game with /hollowmere config reload:

• fog_enabled (true) and fog_density (0.35): biome fog.
• leaf_rain_enabled (true) and leaf_rain_density (0.5): falling leaves.
• dread_enabled (false), dread_damage (1.0) and dread_moon_scale (1.5): the optional Dread.
• darkness_seconds (0): extra darkness on entering the dark; 0 turns it off.
• harvest_moon_nights (3) and blood_moon_every (7): moon calendar.
• lantern_light (7): light level of the mod's lanterns.
• portal_sound (true) and accessible_audio (false): portal sounds and softer variants.
• settlement_growth (true) and transform_scale (1.0): village growth.

Commands: /hollowmere portal_coords, /hollowmere verify, /hollowmere config reload.

Known issues and pending work

These are the player-facing limitations at the 1.0.1 cut. They are listed here so nobody has to discover them after installing.

1. Drowned Crypts and Veil Mire can look sparser than other biomes. 1.0.1 adds more willows, but much of both biomes is open water. Chunks generated before 1.0.1 keep their old vegetation.
2. A few ember ore blocks can appear in Veil Mire. It is a biome-border effect of ore veins; it does not block progression.
3. Minecraft 1.20.5–1.20.6 and 1.21.2–1.21.11 are not supported yet. They are planned for 1.0.5.
4. Custom particle types (falling leaves, embers, fireflies) are planned for 1.0.5; the leaf rain uses vanilla particles tinted per biome.

Accessibility and photosensitivity

Hollowmere contains brief light flashes used as attack warnings (capped at three per second), sudden darkness during some boss phases, short Blindness and Nausea effects, biome fog and ambient particles. Fog, leaf rain and the optional Dread can be disabled in config/hollowmere.json, and accessible_audio replaces the portal and candle sounds with softer variants. The boss darkness phases are part of the fight and are not configurable in 1.0.1.

If you are sensitive to flashing lights, sudden darkness, fog or screen distortion, play in a well-lit room and in short sessions, and skip the boss fights you are not comfortable with.

Disclosures

AI assistance. Code, textures, models, audio and texts were produced with AI assistance under the author's direction and reviewed before release. No generative AI runs inside the mod, and the mod sends no data anywhere.

No telemetry, no ads, no paid features. The mod does not collect or send data, does not contain advertisements and has no paid unlocks. Outside the world save, it only reads and writes its own config file inside the game directory. It is MIT licensed and fully free.

Credits

Author, code, art, data and audio direction: FernWork.

Audio: creature voices, ambience and music were produced for Hollowmere from 55 licensed recordings, then edited, pitched, layered and mixed. Attribution-required sources:

• erdie — Pig grunt — Wikimedia Commons — CC BY 3.0
• TheVeoMammoth11 — Freesound 492654 — CC BY 3.0
• Shizhao — Bear growl — Wikimedia Commons — CC BY 3.0
• Briefer et al. (Scientific Reports) — Horse whinnies — Wikimedia Commons — CC BY 4.0
• Faragó et al. — Dog growls — Wikimedia Commons — CC BY 2.5
• Benboncan — Freesound 117147 and Freesound 69355 — CC BY 4.0
• SwampVids — American Toad Vocalization — Wikimedia Commons — CC BY 4.0
• pauliperez1999 — Freesound 428810 — CC BY 3.0
• Yannick Dauby — Bat echolocation — Wikimedia Commons — CC BY 2.5

Tools: Fabric Loom, NeoForge ModDevGradle, ForgeGradle, Stonecutter, Gradle and JUnit.

Minecraft is a trademark of Mojang Studios and Microsoft. Hollowmere is not affiliated with or endorsed by Mojang or Microsoft. No Mojang assets are redistributed; the mod's textures and models are original.

License

Hollowmere is released under the MIT License. The full text is in LICENSE. You may use, modify, redistribute and include it in modpacks under the terms of that license. Copyright (c) 2026 FernWork.

The source code is not public.