Shadowstep: Stealth & Mob Senses
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Mobs that see, hear and smell. Sneak through the dark, throw decoys, vanish in smoke and ambush unaware enemies, with ?/! awareness glyphs over every hostile.
Standing in the open with a torch: two mobs grow suspicious. The Stalker's Lens shows their vision cones turning yellow.
Description
They see. They hear. They smell. You vanish.
In vanilla Minecraft every monster knows exactly where you are the moment you get close. Shadowstep gives hostile mobs real senses, so you can finally play like it's a stealth game: creep through the dark, throw a pebble to pull a guard away, slip into a smoke cloud when things go wrong, and take down an unaware enemy before it ever turns around.
No dependencies. Every texture, sound and line of code was made from scratch for this mod.
👁 Sight
- Mobs see in a cone in front of their eyes: full sight in the middle, weak at the edges, nothing behind them.
- Light matters. Darkness hides you. Holding a torch or lantern gives you away.
- Stance matters. Sneaking makes you much harder to see, sprinting makes you easier. Stand still in the dark and mobs a few blocks away can look straight at you without noticing.
- Tall grass, crops and leaves hide you. Ghillie gear hides you even better.
- Different mobs see differently: spiders see in the dark.
👂 Hearing
- Mobs hear every vanilla game event: footsteps, landings, doors, chests, mining, eating, arrows hitting the ground and explosions.
- Sounds made by other mods count as well, as long as they send a vanilla game event (and most do). No compat patches needed.
- Noise fades with distance, walls muffle it and wool almost stops it. Sneaking hides your footsteps, the same way it does with sculk sensors.
- Noise alone makes a mob curious, never certain. It comes over to take a look.
👃 Scent
- You leave a scent trail. Zombies and spiders follow it while they search for you.
- Water breaks the trail and rain washes it away faster. A Scent Mask leaves no trail at all.
Every hostile mob shows you what it's thinking:
| Glyph | State | What the mob does |
|---|---|---|
| 🟡 ? filling up | Suspicious | Stops, turns toward what it noticed and walks over to check |
| 🔴 ! | Alert | It found you. It attacks and calls nearby allies |
| 🟠 ? | Searching | Lost you: checks your last known spot and follows your scent |
| (fades out) | Gives up | Goes back to whatever it was doing |
A mob has to notice you before it can target you. Hitting a mob always alerts it, so make the first hit count.
| Item | What it does |
|---|---|
| Pebble | Throw it and it clacks where it lands. Nearby mobs go to look. You can often pick it back up. |
| Clockwork Rattle | Keeps rattling for 8 seconds and draws mobs in from far away. Handy for clearing out a room. |
| Smoke Bomb | Makes a thick cloud that nothing can see into or through. Duck inside to lose a pursuer. |
| Scent Mask | You leave no scent trail for 3 minutes. |
| Ghillie Hood & Cloak | Camouflage armor. Works best in leaves and grass, and wearing both gives the full effect. |
| Stalker's Lens | Hold it to see the vision cone and mood of every mob within 24 blocks, so you can plan a route through the gaps. |
| Lure Chime | A loud copper chime. Ring it by hand or with redstone, and every mob within 24 blocks comes to see what rang. Put it over a pit, a lava moat or your mob farm. |
| Field Guide | An illustrated in-game guide to everything above. You get one the first time you join. |
Enchantments
- Muffled (boots, I–III): quieter footsteps and landings.
- Ambush (melee, I–III): even more damage on mobs that haven't spotted you.
You'll also find Shadowstep gear in chests in dungeons, mineshafts, jungle temples, pillager outposts, woodland mansions and ancient cities.
- If you hit a mob that hasn't spotted you, the hit does double damage.
- A kill with an ambush strike is a Silent Takedown and gives bonus XP.
- The HUD next to your hotbar shows how visible you are (the eye) and how loud your last action was (the bars). Arrows around the crosshair point to mobs that noticed you but are off-screen.
- A new advancement tab has 11 advancements, such as Unseen, Silent Takedown, Assassin, Misdirection, Now You See Me…, Trapper and Ghost. Stats track your Silent Takedowns, Times Spotted and Pursuers Lost.
The most common complaints about older mob-awareness mods helped shape this one:
- ✅ Alert sounds are optional. There's a volume slider, and you can turn them off.
- ✅ No gore. No forced blood, no screen splatter.
- ✅ Covers every hostile mob, not only zombies and skeletons. Zombies, skeletons, creepers, spiders, illagers, witches and silverfish have their own sense profiles. Bosses, the warden, endermen and brain-driven mobs such as piglins keep their vanilla behavior.
- ✅ Sounds from other mods are heard.
- ✅ Works on dedicated servers. Mob senses run on the server, and each client only draws the glyphs and HUD.
- ✅ Data-driven. Mob sense profiles and how loud each game event is are JSON files that modpacks can change with a datapack.
Server config: master switch, "mobs must notice you first", raiders always alert, sight sharpness, hearing range, scent on/off, how loud unknown (modded) sounds are, ally call radius, search duration, ambush damage multiplier and takedown XP. Client config: glyphs (all / only mobs aware of you / off), glyph size, off-screen arrows, stealth HUD, alert sound volume.
📦 Details
- Minecraft 1.21.1 · NeoForge (21.1.x) · Java 21
- Install it on both the server and the client. It adds items, blocks and enchantments.
- No dependencies.
- Languages: English and Spanish.
- Tested with 22 automated in-game tests (perception, hearing, decoys, smoke, ambush, gear, chime, advancements) and played in a dev world.
💬 Feedback
Found a bug or have an idea, like a mob that should sense differently or a sound from another mod that's too loud? Leave a comment and I'll look into it.
You're welcome to use Shadowstep in modpacks.
Shadowstep: Stealth & Mob Senses Team
