Zombie Village

Your zombie minions become a self-organizing village. Spawn a Soul Well, hand out plots, and watch undead villagers clear terrain, build houses, take up professions, and trade with you.

Zombie Village is a NeoForge 1.21.1 mod that turns a chunk of the world into an autonomous undead settlement. You place the Soul Well; villagers do the rest — clear trees, level ground, lay stone, raise walls, fit doors, and light up. When a plot finishes, its builder takes a profession and starts working. A live HUD shows village headcount, role mix, soul reserve, and tier multiplier.

Getting started

Craft a Soul Well and place it where you want your village center.
Four Defenders spawn first; then Laborers claim surrounding plots.
Each Laborer clears its plot and builds the house on it.
When a plot completes, the builder becomes a working profession.
Right-click profession villagers to trade with them once their plot is finished.

Blocks

Soul Well — village hub. Anchors all villagers, tracks souls, holds shared storage, dispatches gate squads. Light level 15.
Soul Gate — remote outpost portal. Tethered to a Soul Well; garrison with defenders.
Village Stone — right-click to capture every villager you own; right-click again to release them. Survives your death.

Villager roles

17 roles total:

Laborer — generalist; clears plots, builds, gathers
Defender — patrols the village and fights hostiles
Working professions — farmers till and harvest crops, fishermen work the shoreline, shepherds shear/breed/cull a fenced animal pen, clerics heal wounded allies mid-fight, a butcher runs a fuel-free smoker
Salvage professions — toolsmiths, weaponsmiths, armorers, leatherworkers, fletchers, and librarians break crafted gear and books back down into their materials. Sneak-click a workstation, or drop items in an adjacent chest and let the village drain it.
Gate Guards + Gate Laborers — squads dispatched via Soul Gates to garrison remote outposts

Where you can build

Place a Soul Well anywhere — including inside a cave or deep underground. The mod classifies the environment automatically:

Surface — open sky overhead. Standard village; plots build on the surface.
Subterranean — closed ceiling overhead. Plots are excavated as underground rooms with patrolling guards — a fortified catacomb below your feet.

Soul Gates + remote outposts

Once your village has surplus defenders, right-click a tethered Soul Gate to dispatch a 5-villager squad through it. Guards hold the perimeter; the laborer gathers wood and ore in the area. Squads return automatically at sunrise. Click a gate to teleport home; eligible defenders come with you.

Interacting with the Soul Well

Right-click — open the Storage GUI (54-slot shared storage; everything the village gathers routes into it)
Shift + right-click — open the Gate Picker (every tethered gate shown as a clickable slot)
Right-click holding a Wand stronger than the well's current tier — consume the wand to permanently upgrade the village's power multiplier

Village persistence

If you break your Soul Well — accidentally, intentionally, or because you want to relocate — the village is not lost. The mod captures the well's complete state (build progress, souls, inventory, every villager's role and position, plot grid) into a per-player saved village blob the moment the well is removed. Place a new Soul Well at the same location to restore exactly; place it elsewhere and your inventory, souls, and live villagers come along, but the plot layout is rebuilt fresh.

Requires / compatible with

Minecraft 1.21.1
NeoForge 21.1.224 or newer
Java 21
Required mod dependencies:
- Freedom Lib 0.7.1+ — self-rescue and tunneling primitives villagers use to unstick themselves
- ZV-Houses 0.1.148+ — the surface and catacomb building templates
- Spells & Spellcrafting 2.12.0+ — the owned-minion / command framework the villager entity implements

Modpack authors

Tuned for large villages and long sessions — hostile crowd-control and chunk management keep the server responsive even with several outposts under siege. Ships with the Risen — Undead Army modpack.