Nook of the Dead

0.4.0 (beta) - 2026-10

Requires Nookworks 1.1.0 or later (below 1.2), NeoForge 26.3. Back up your world before updating. The new places in the town and the sky base's new way through appear only where you have not been yet. A refuge past the Vandal that no one has stood in yet gets its new rooms the next time you come near it.

• Films at the road's turns, a few seconds each, Esc to skip: when the Vandal falls, a look to the refuge's door as its lamps come on and the plug draws back (for everyone near); come to the second institute, a look up the Tower from its foot to the base in the clouds; come up into the sky base, a look over the drop at the shut laboratory and the way round. Each arrival once for each player; none in creative or spectator.
• The opening passes a holdout's roof, its white rag, when there is one near; a bell far off, once, and somewhere a scream cut short.
• The ending's credits go back over what the town left - a shelter's well and a holdout's roof near the town.
• Diaries are of where you find them. The inn, the clinics, the station, the checkpoint, the farms, the tunnels, the sand's town and the base above the clouds each have their own first; one is found only at the top of the tower. Three new diaries; one rewritten.
• New notes: how the suppressant was made, the two who stayed at the second institute, where the keys were. The note in the refuge reads better.
• The launch keys: two at the second institute, two on the key-holders in the sky base, who always let theirs fall. A key on the ground never despawns and nothing destroys it; one lost all the same turns up again before the console. The refuge's chest has a Lode Pearl to the second institute again for whoever has none (once a day).
• A dead with a launch key in hand now drops it (it went with the rest of what the dead leave nothing of).
• The game's difficulty counts. Easy: smaller crowds, a bite costs two seconds, fewer of the quick, the keen, the wall-breakers and the screamers. Hard and Hardcore: crowds half again as big and more of them at a time, a bite costs twelve seconds, twice as many of the dangerous kinds, quicker to break walls, sharper ears, slow to give up a chase, and wounded below half health, the idle dead near you come for you. The Vandal, the thing in the sewers and the Sentry Golems have a quarter less health on Easy, half again as much on Hard. Normal is as it was.
• More of the town's story (new ground only):
  • Holdouts on the roofs: on the flat roofs of some buildings, what one of the living left - a bedroll, a cold fire, rainwater, a white rag on a pole, a diary - and sometimes the one who kept it.
  • The church of "salvation": in some of the ruined churches, the pews pushed back, a ring of the ones in white knelt round one of the dead, white candles, and what they sang.
  • Shelters under the town: a dry, roofed well in the town's open ground, a ladder down to a hall the townspeople dug, and rooms off it - beds, stores, the sick, a place to pray, a pool, one passage fallen in.
  • Sinkholes: where a street fell into the galleries below, a way down by the vines.
  • The covered market: a timber hall of eight booths whose trades are drawn anew for each market - the baker, the butcher, the greengrocer, the apothecary, the smith, the tailor, the chandler, the bookseller, the potter, the cooper.
• Three longer books to read through: the town clerk's record book (in the squares' buildings), the town doctor's case notes (in the clinics), and a child's adventure book (only in the shelters under the town - and in one of them, what the child called treasure number one).
• Fewer sewer blooms: at most one in each square of about 80 blocks, and not in every square (new ground only).
• Rats again: now and then a pack of them comes with the dead in the town, or out of the dark down in the galleries.
• Infected Cats in the zombie villages: in the houses, and now and then among the dead that come near a village. Small and quick, their bite counts against the infection, and they leap - onto fences, walls and low roofs the dead cannot get onto (not up a ladder). More of them on Hard, fewer on Easy.
• The refuge, lived in. Its door in the Vandal's hall is marked now, and sealed with a plug nothing breaks: it opens when the Vandal dies, and not before. A Vandal gone without dying is put back in its hall (never two), and Peaceful no longer takes it away. Inside: a decontamination room, a kitchen, cubicles in the dormitory, and a lower floor down a stair from the machine hall - the machine hall two storeys high with more machines, the records room, the chief's room, an isolation room, a cold room, a washroom. Three diaries are found only there. A refuge nobody has stood in yet gets all this the first time you come near it.
• The sky base, a dungeon. The laboratory is shut off from the hub and stands out over the drop; the way in is round and up - the quarters' stair, a landing on their roof, a catwalk in the wind, a bridge, the laboratory's roof and its gallery. Off the way: the director's room, the radio mast, the water tank, an infirmary, a washroom, a cold store. Only where the base has not been made yet.
• The guide, in all its languages: what to aim for, the road from the first map scrap to the end set out step by step (folded shut with the other spoilers), the town's new places with pictures, and no more counting of diaries.