Penumbra — Chapter 1

Recommended for ages 14+. Deals with death, grief and suicide (of fictional characters), with scares, disturbing sounds and frightening images (includes a jumpscare). The mod shows this warning the first time you enter each world.

Atmospheric horror for Minecraft. No monster jumping at your face every minute: the fear comes from the dark, from sound, and from what you almost see.

What it does

• VHS tape on a CRT TV look: curved screen, scanlines, static, smeared colour and rare signal drops (Subtle, Medium and Heavy VHS presets). The HUD stays sharp.
• No music. Instead, sounds that belong to the place: whispers and footsteps far away in big caves, nails inside the wall in tight tunnels, stones falling to the bottom of a chasm, an old radio hissing in a mineshaft, twigs snapping in the forest at night. And when you stare into a dark corner for too long, sometimes something answers right there.
• Sanity (hidden, saved in the world): drops in the dark, alone and underground; recovers in the light, by a campfire, at home and by sleeping. The lower it gets, the more the world answers: a heartbeat, whispers calling from one side and then the other, footsteps behind you that stop when you turn.
• Something at a glance: a tall, thin figure that shows up for half a second in a dark gap, at the corner of your eye, and is gone when you look. Then only the footsteps walking away.
• Something that crawls: if you "break the dark" (night vision in pitch black) or make too much noise in a cave, something comes. It climbs walls, avoids light and moves in fits and starts. A torch in hand and a lit place are your friends.
• A broken-VHS title screen (with reduced/off options for accessibility) and Penumbra difficulty chosen per world when you create it (Light / Normal / Nightmare).
• A story to discover, with a beginning, a middle and an end, told little by little by the game itself (a book in the starting chest is the first step). No spoilers here.

Everything is configurable in Mod Menu (Light / Normal / Nightmare difficulty, every effect can be turned off).

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.1 with Fabric Loader (0.16+) and Fabric API.
• Client and server (in singleplayer just install it). On a server, the server needs the mod too.
• Recommended: Iris + Pedra Shaders (the TV effect is drawn on top of any shader).
• Optional: Mod Menu + Cloth Config (settings screen).

Credits

• Idea, story and characters: Miguel.
• Original sounds (whispers, breathing, footsteps, nails, crying, knocks, shriek...): generated by Miguel with ElevenLabs.
• Models and textures: generated by code, original (nothing copied from Mojang or other mods).

Use of AI (honest statement)

This mod was made with a lot of help from artificial intelligence: the code, the models and textures (generated by scripts) and most of the texts were written by Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant), directed and designed by Miguel. The sounds were AI-generated (ElevenLabs) by Miguel himself. The story and the creative decisions are Miguel's.

License

MIT.