Weeping Creeper

A creeper × Weeping Angel crossbreed for Minecraft 26.1.x on Fabric and NeoForge.

Stare at it: it freezes. Look away: it sprints. Catches you: explodes — but only damages you, not the terrain. Build whatever you want, wherever you want, and stop fearing the psssss.

What it does

Freezes when observed. Any time a weeping creeper falls within your 120° front cone and has line-of-sight, it stops moving completely. No fuse advance, no path-tick, frozen in place. Look away, break line-of-sight, or duck behind a wall — it resumes the hunt.
Faster than vanilla (movementSpeed 0.40 vs vanilla 0.25 — about a spider). When you're not watching, it closes the gap aggressively.
Player-only explosion. No block damage. No collateral damage to other mobs, your animals, your itemframes, your shulker boxes, your everything. Just you. Vanilla damage scaling preserved, so a charged weeping creeper one-shots an unarmoured player at point-blank.
Replaces vanilla creepers by default. Every natural creeper spawn becomes a weeping creeper. Tunable from 0% (only spawn from spawn eggs) to 100% (full replacement).
Statue aesthetic. Subtle darker, slightly desaturated tint via the entity-tint API — not a separate texture, so installed resource packs (Faithful, Sphax, etc.) still apply their HD creeper textures, just dimmed.
Tear streaks below each eye, drawn as a translucent overlay layer. Toggleable.
Proximity safety net. Walk into melee range and it freezes regardless of look angle, so close encounters don't always end in detonation.
Optional heart particles for an "I see you seeing me" comedic cue (off by default — enable in config if that's your tone).

Configuration

Config at config/weepingcreeper.json (created on first launch):

{
  "replacementChance": 1.0,
  "movementSpeed": 0.4,
  "lookArcDegrees": 120.0,
  "proximityFreezeRadius": 1.5,
  "followRange": 64.0,
  "tearsEnabled": true,
  "heartParticlesEnabled": false,
  "heartIntervalTicks": 60,
  "tintBrightness": 0.55,
  "desaturation": 0.25,
  "explosionRadius": 3.0,
  "chargedExplosionRadius": 6.0
}

Key	Default	Notes
`replacementChance`	`1.0`	Fraction of vanilla creeper spawns that become weeping creepers. `0.0` = never replace; `1.0` = always.
`movementSpeed`	`0.4`	Movement speed attribute. Vanilla creeper is `0.25`.
`lookArcDegrees`	`120.0`	Front cone width that counts as "looking at".
`proximityFreezeRadius`	`1.5`	Any player within this distance freezes the creeper regardless of look angle. `0` to disable.
`followRange`	`64.0`	Detection / pursuit range. Vanilla creeper is around 16.
`tearsEnabled`	`true`	Tears overlay on the face.
`heartParticlesEnabled`	`false`	Spawn a heart particle above the creeper while observed. Comedic, off by default.
`heartIntervalTicks`	`60`	Ticks between hearts when enabled. 20 = 1 second.
`tintBrightness`	`0.55`	Uniform brightness multiplier on the creeper texture. `1.0` = no change.
`desaturation`	`0.25`	Per-channel green reduction for the statue look. `0.0` = uniform darken only.
`explosionRadius`	`3.0`	Player-damage radius. Same as vanilla creeper.
`chargedExplosionRadius`	`6.0`	Radius when struck by lightning. Same as vanilla charged.

tearsEnabled, heartParticlesEnabled, and the tint values take effect live on render. Other values require restart.

How it works under the hood

Custom entity (WeepingCreeperEntity extends Creeper) — inherits the standard creeper AI, swell timer, and charged variant. Spawn-replaces vanilla creepers via EntityJoinLevelEvent (NeoForge) / ServerEntityEvents.ENTITY_LOAD (Fabric).
Look detection: dot product between the player's look vector and the player-eye-to-creeper-center vector, vs cos(arc / 2), plus a vanilla hasLineOfSight() check.
The freeze: customServerAiStep stops navigation, clears the target, zeroes horizontal velocity, and hard-resets the swell fuse to 0 each tick. The swell reset uses a tiny mixin accessor (CreeperAccessor) because the swell field is private and setSwellDir(-1) alone only decrements one per tick — too slow against an already-mid-explosion creeper.
Custom explosion: another tiny mixin (CreeperTickMixin) wraps the private Creeper#explodeCreeper() invocation inside Creeper#tick. For weeping creepers, redirects to WeepingCreeperEntity#explodeWeeping() which fires a cosmetic-only explosion (Level.ExplosionInteraction.NONE = no block damage) and applies vanilla creeper damage scaling only to players in radius. Vanilla creepers are unaffected.
Tint: overrides LivingEntityRenderer#getModelTint(state) with a per-channel ARGB multiplier. Keeps the vanilla creeper texture path so resource pack retextures still apply through the tint.

Both mixins target very small bytecode footprints in vanilla Creeper.class. Should play nice with anything that doesn't itself redirect the same private invocation.

Requirements

Minecraft 26.1.x
Java 25
Fabric Loader 0.18.4+ with Fabric API, or NeoForge 26.1+

License

CC0-1.0 — public domain, do whatever you want with it.

Source

https://github.com/kestalkayden/weeping-creeper