Killer Bees

Minecraft 1.21.1 · NeoForge · by GestSe

Vanilla bees sting you for a few hearts and buzz off. These ones call the rest of the hive, chase you down, and leave something in you that keeps working long after the swarm is dead.

Killer Bees is a standalone mob with its own model, its own sounds, and a venom simulation that runs on the server as a real gameplay system rather than a stack of potion effects.

The swarm

A Killer Bee that spots you, gets hurt, or lands a sting tells every other bee nearby. They share the target and come as a group. Break or punch a nest and the whole colony enters a rage state: faster, harder hitting, and a few more come boiling out of the hive to join in.

Nests generate in warm biomes — savanna, jungle, sparse jungle, plains — and quietly maintain a capped population around themselves. They will never breed without bound.

The danger is the swarm, not the individual. One bee is an annoyance. Six is a problem you need a plan for.

Venom is a state, not a debuff

Every player tracks four values from 0 to 100:

Stings stack. Each one adds to all three, which is what makes a swarm genuinely dangerous rather than just a slow chip of damage. Each value decays at its own rate, so venom lingers long after the pain has faded.

As pain and panic climb you get a red vignette, a heartbeat that speeds up with your pulse, camera shake, FOV drift, heavy breathing, ringing in your ears — all easing in smoothly, never snapping on at a threshold.

Losing control

At high panic your character stops fully obeying you. Not random inputs every tick — discrete, occasional involuntary movements: a bolt forward, a stumble, a flinch away from nothing, a moment where you simply freeze. They get more frequent and more violent as panic rises.

When pain crosses the threshold, KEEP CONTROL appears: a marker sweeps a bar and you press your bound key inside the green zone. Land it and you claw back Control and shed some Panic. Miss and both get worse. The worse your poisoning, the smaller the zone and the faster the marker.

Run out of Control entirely and you get a CONTROL BREAKDOWN — a few seconds of darkness, chaotic movement, and possibly dropping what you were holding.

Phantom bees

At very high panic you start hearing bees that are not there. Buzzing right behind you. A shape filling your vision for half a second. None of it exists on the server — no entity, no hitbox, nothing to fight. The phantom buzzing after an attack is over is the part people remember.

Every hallucination effect can be turned off client-side, and server owners have a kill switch.

Venom, vials and syringes

Kill a Killer Bee and you may recover a Venom Sac (Looting increases the chance). From there:

• Venom Sac ×2 + Glass Bottle → Venom Vial
• Glass Bottle + Iron Nugget + String → Empty Syringe
• Empty Syringe + Venom Vial → Venom Syringe
• Empty Syringe + Antivenom → Antivenom Syringe
• Honey Bottle + Venom Sac + Sugar + Glowstone Dust → Antivenom

A filled syringe can be used on another player or creature, or on yourself. Walk up, look at them, use it — there's a short wind-up, then the dose goes in. An injection is far more concentrated than a single sting and hits almost immediately.

The server validates everything: range, line of sight, whether the target is real, spectator mode, and the PvP setting. The dose comes from the item stack on the server, never from the client.

Antivenom cuts Venom hard, reduces Pain, settles Panic and restores some Control — but it is deliberately not a full cure at high doses. You may need more than one, and you may not have time.

Crucially, the bee's sting and the syringe run through the same venom system. There is no second, parallel poisoning implementation to fall out of sync.

Controls

R (rebindable, Options → Controls → Killer Bees) — KEEP CONTROL. The prompt shows whichever key you actually bound.

Configuration

config/killerbees-common.toml — server-authoritative balance: aggression and swarm-alert radius, venom/pain/panic per sting, syringe dose, all decay rates, nest rarity and population cap, venom sac drop chance, panic impulse frequency, KEEP CONTROL difficulty, whether venom can kill.

config/killerbees-client.toml — purely cosmetic, per-player: overall effect intensity, camera shake, FOV effects, hallucinations, red overlay, heartbeat audio. Each can be switched off independently.

Commands (permission level 2)

/killerbees setVenom|setPain|setPanic|setControl <0-100> [player]
/killerbees clearTrauma [player]
/killerbees status [player]
/killerbees spawnBee
/killerbees spawnSwarm [count] [player]
/killerbees callSwarm [player]

Multiplayer

Built for dedicated servers. All gameplay state is server-authoritative and survives logout, death and respawn correctly; the client only renders. The KEEP CONTROL minigame compensates for your ping using the server's own latency measurement, so a distant player is not punished for it.

Assets

Every texture and sound in this mod is generated procedurally by scripts included in the source. Nothing is copied from Mojang or from any other mod.