ZombieMod ReForged

2026-09-11. Room to breathe: zombies leave again instead of piling up, a boss lets you walk away, and nothing reacts to a player who isn't there.

Fixed

• A boss could crash the server. If a player moved out of range of a boss's health bar while the boss was still alive, the server stopped with a "Ticking entity" crash naming BossBars.update. It went unnoticed because it never happens during a fight: you stay near a boss until one of you is dead. It took a flight, a mass teleport and a Borg Queen dropped far below the player to find it. Running, flying or teleporting away from a living boss would all have done the same, as would the boss falling or being knocked far away.

  Fixed, and a boss bar that fails for any other reason now logs once and lets the fight carry on without its bar, instead of taking the world down with it.

• Zombies piled up without limit, and the server slowed to a crawl. One test world held over two thousand when it was finally cleared. The mod's own spawning was capped; vanilla's was being defeated.

  Every ZombieMod zombie was marked persistent the moment it spawned, so it would never despawn. But vanilla's mob cap does not count persistent mobs — it deliberately ignores them, because a persistent mob is normally one a player has chosen to keep. So each zombie that became one of ours vanished from the cap's count, vanilla saw room and spawned a replacement, that one became one of ours as well, and none of them ever left. The world filled indefinitely.

  They now despawn the way vanilla zombies do, and count toward the cap like vanilla zombies do. Still kept, deliberately: player corpses, which carry someone's inventory; bosses; and a horde's zombies while the horde is still running, since one despawning would end it early. Name-tag one to keep it, exactly as in vanilla.

  Upgrading a world that already has them. The old flag is saved into each zombie, so the ones already out there stay until you clear them. Run these once as an op — they remove persistent mobs of the five kinds ZombieMod zombies are built on:

  /kill @e[type=minecraft:zombie,nbt={PersistenceRequired:1b}]
  /kill @e[type=minecraft:husk,nbt={PersistenceRequired:1b}]
  /kill @e[type=minecraft:drowned,nbt={PersistenceRequired:1b}]
  /kill @e[type=minecraft:zombie_villager,nbt={PersistenceRequired:1b}]
  /kill @e[type=minecraft:skeleton,nbt={PersistenceRequired:1b}]
  

  A line that answers "No entity was found" is not an error — there were simply none of that kind to clear. On a test world, zombies, drowned and skeletons all had some; husks and zombie villagers had none.

  Things to know before you do:

  • It only reaches loaded chunks. Zombies in parts of the world nobody is near are untouched, and will be back when those areas load. Run it again somewhere else, or ask players to.
  • It also catches player corpses. A corpse killed this way drops what it was carrying where it stands, rather than losing it — but that may be somewhere nobody is. Check /zombiemod corpse list first; anything outstanding can be re-issued from the ledger.
  • It catches anything of those types that a player name-tagged, and any boss a player summoned. If your server has pets like that, add distance=..128 and run it somewhere they are not.

• Zombies no longer react to vanished players. A Boomer was detonating beside staff who had vanished through SableCraft Standards — and a crater with no visible cause gives a hidden player away as completely as being seen would.

  Standards already stops mobs targeting someone vanished, which is why this only showed up on a few abilities. The Boomer's fuse never consults a target: it asks who is standing within its trigger radius, and a vanished player was answering. Every ability that sweeps an area — the fuse, and anything aimed at nearby_players — now treats a vanished player the way it already treated spectators and creative-mode players: present in the world, but not someone to react to.

  Proximity spawning and hordes do the same. Neither will pick a vanished player: no crowd quietly accumulates around staff standing in an empty field, and no horde starts on somebody nobody can see. A horde already running when its player vanishes ends the way it does when they log out — the bar comes down and nothing more is sent, while whatever had already spawned stays in the world. Vanishing walks away from a fight rather than rewinding it.

  Nothing to configure, and nothing changes on a server without Standards installed.

Added

• Every jar says which build it is, and the mod says so at startup. A version number answers "which release"; during development that is a different question from "which bytes", and it is a sharper one here than in most mods because a release ships three jars that differ only in a +mc suffix. The startup line and /zombiemod status now both read like this:

  ZombieMod ReForged 3.4.0+mc1.21.11 (build 1946c37a on master, 2026-09-10T07:49:34Z)
  

  A -dirty suffix on the commit means that jar was built from uncommitted changes. The same four values are on the jar manifest as Build-Commit, Build-Branch and Build-Time, so a jar can be identified from a shell without loading it:

  unzip -p zombiemod-3.4.0+mc1.21.11.jar META-INF/MANIFEST.MF | grep Build
  

  What it is for is bug reports. A stamp inside a jar says what is on disk; the startup line says what actually ran, which is the question a report needs answered and the one that could not be answered before. The format is shared with the other SableCraft mods, so a server owner running several of them reads the same line from each.

  The stamp can never stop the mod loading: a missing or corrupt one degrades to unknown, and the build tolerates git being absent, as in a source zip.

Changed

• The ZombieDex opens with Z, not J. J is JourneyMap's full-screen map, and a mod that common should not have to be rebound to make room for a zombie pack. Vanilla binds nothing to Z.

  If you already had ZombieMod installed, you will still be on J. Minecraft saves every key binding, defaults included, so an existing install keeps what it had. Change it under Options → Controls → Key Binds → Open ZombieDex.

Requirements: Java 21 for the 1.21.11 jar, Java 25 for the 26.x jars.

Install on the server. Your players do not need the mod — a stock client can join and meet every genus. Installing it client-side too is optional and adds the ZombieDex screen.