Secrets of the Sunken

# Secrets of the Sunken

**The ocean floor is inhabited. Some of it wants to trade with you. Most of it does not.**

Merfolk turns the empty blue between islands into a place with residents, politics and predators. Coral villages sit on the seabed where merfolk traders deal in the things only the deep produces. A hostile people raid them from the lightless trenches. And somewhere out in the dark water, something very large is hunting all of you.

Every creature here breathes water, fights in three dimensions, and behaves differently from anything on land.

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## 🔱 The Merfolk

Humanoid above the waist, fish below it. Merfolk are peaceful traders who live in coral domes on the ocean floor — and they are armed.

Right-click one to open a familiar merchant screen. The title tells you their rank:

| Rank | Title | Trade XP | What they deal in |
|:---:|:---|:---:|:---|
| I | **Tidecaller** | 0 | Buys kelp, cod, tropical fish · sells seagrass, sea pickles |
| II | **Reefwarden** | 10 | Buys prismarine shards, ink sacs · sells coral blocks, sponge, Water Breathing |
| III | **Currentspeaker** | 70 | Sells sea lanterns, prismarine bricks · Depth Strider, Respiration, Aqua Affinity |
| IV | **Deepsinger** | 150 | Sells nautilus shells, turtle helmets · Impaling, Loyalty, Riptide |
| V | **Tidelord** | 250 | Sells **Heart of the Sea**, **Tridents**, Channeling, and a finished **Conduit** |

Coral is nearly unfarmable without a warm ocean, so a Reefwarden who sells it is worth finding.

### They fight back

Hurt a merfolk and it draws a trident. It throws from range, stabs up close, and **every merfolk within 32 blocks joins in** — attack one trader and the whole village turns on you. They stand down about fifteen seconds after the last threat is gone, and they won't haggle while their weapon is out.

They also hunt drowned on sight, meet Trench raiders head-on, and are sensible enough to run from a kraken.

> Merfolk never drop their tridents, and the ones they throw can't be picked up. Killing traders is not a trident farm.

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## 🏘️ Underwater Villages

Villages generate on the floor of any ocean biome, roughly 30 chunks apart, wherever there's enough open water and a reasonably flat basin.

They're built procedurally rather than stamped from a template, so every settlement shapes itself to the seabed it lands on:

- **The Tide Hall** — prismarine, four arched doorways, lantern-capped corner pillars and a stepped roof. Home to an elder and two attendants, and a loot chest worth opening.
- **Coral domes** — houses grown rather than built, each in one of five coral species, no two the same size, lit by a sea lantern at the crown.
- **Kelp farms** — tended beds of sand and dirt under standing kelp.
- **Sea-lantern lampposts** marking the paths between.

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## 🦈 The Great White

The threat you'll actually meet. Fast, persistent, and far more interested in you than you'd like.

A great white doesn't simply swim at you:

- **It charges.** From four to fourteen blocks out it lunges, so backing off doesn't buy the space it looks like it should.
- **It smells blood.** Once its prey drops below 60% health it enters a frenzy — faster, harder-hitting, and visibly thrashing. That's your warning.
- **It respects a hit to the snout.** Strike it head-on as it comes in and it aborts the run, banks hard into a turn, sweeps out to your flank, and comes back in from the side. Hit it from behind and it just gets angry.
- **It eats and leaves.** A shark that makes a kill is full, and drifts off instead of turning to the next victim. Attack it and that courtesy ends immediately.

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## 🐙 The Kraken (Boss)

**Very rare. Deep ocean only. It never despawns, and it does not leave.**

Where the Wither is remembered for what it destroys, a kraken is remembered for who didn't come back. It never breaks a single block.

It moves at half the speed of a walking merfolk, and that is deliberate — **a kraken cannot win a chase, so it never bothers having one.**

- **The grapple.** It lashes a tentacle out to fourteen blocks, kills your momentum, and hauls you into reach. With all eight arms it seizes **up to four victims at once**. You do not escape a kraken by swimming away from it.
- **The sweep.** Every few seconds it thrashes every arm at once — eight blocks in all directions, no line of sight required, scattering everything nearby. This is what turns an attack on one merfolk into an attack on the village.
- **Its melee drags.** Being hit pulls you closer instead of knocking you clear.
- **The ink.** Below half health it blacks out the water. Anything caught inside loses track of what it was fighting, and players are left effectively blind.
- **It knits itself back together** if you disengage, so half-hearted attrition loses ground.
- **Arrows barely bother it.** Shooting one from a boat is not the answer; the fight belongs in the water beside it.

As you wear it down, **it starts losing tentacles** — eight when whole, down to three at the end. Fewer arms means a slower grapple and a weaker sweep. You can see how the fight is going by counting them.

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## 🗡️ The Trench

Half-Atlantean and half something worse, the Trench are a hostile people from the deep ravines and sea caves. They raid merfolk settlements, and they will happily add you to the list.

They spawn only in **genuine darkness** — the floors of ravines, sea caves, the deepest basins — and they **hate the light**. Bright water slows them down, which quietly means a well-lit merfolk village is hard ground to raid. Those sea lanterns are not just decoration.

Two roles, both organised, both fighting as a unit — hurt one and the patrol answers:

- **Trench Raider** — 30 HP, closes to melee with an axe salvaged off a wreck. The common one.
- **Trench Harpooner** — 24 HP, hangs back and throws harpoons.

### Six bloodlines

Every Trench is crossed with something, and it shows:

| Bloodline | The tell | Frequency |
|:---|:---|:---:|
| **Fish-kin** | A dorsal ridge down the spine | 28% |
| **Squid-kin** | A long mantle trailing off the skull, two hunting tentacles | 18% |
| **Crab-kin** | An arm ending in an oversized claw, carapace pauldrons, eyes on drifting stalks | 18% |
| **Octopus-kin** | A bulbous mantle and a beard of four curling arms | 14% |
| **Shark-kin** | A blade of a head fin and a jaw of teeth | 12% |
| **Urchin-kin** | A spined skull and back | 10% |

All of them carry an anglerfish lure arching over the face — the one thing every Trench has in common.

## 💡 Notes

- **Everything is vanilla-compatible.** Merfolk use the standard merchant interface; no new UI to learn.
- Safe to add to an existing world — villages generate in newly explored chunks.
- Contains some AI content (unfortunately)
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*Built for 1.20.1 Forge.*