ZV-Houses

Hand-crafted houses, furniture, and decoration blocks — build any of the 14 surface houses in survival with the in-game Blueprint system, or install alongside Zombie Village and let the villagers build them for you.

ZV-Houses is a NeoForge 1.21.1 mod for building well-designed houses. As of version 1.0, it runs fully standalone: craft a Blueprint, choose from 14 houses in a stonecutter, place it in the world, and deposit the materials to have the house rise block by block in the materials you supplied. Installed alongside Zombie Village, the same templates are also what villagers build in the auto-generated villages.

Blueprint: build houses in survival

1. Craft a Blueprint — eight paper around a single blue dye (or lapis lazuli) crafts a blank Blueprint.
2. Choose a house — put the Blueprint into a stonecutter and pick from the list of 14 houses. Each option shows the house's footprint size.
3. Place it — right-click the ground to set down a Blueprint Station. A white wireframe marks the exact space the finished house will occupy — walk around and inside before committing.
4. Deposit materials — open the station and fill its slots. Each slot's count shows red while it is short and turns green once satisfied. Only the structure costs materials; furniture, decoration, and workstations are included free.
5. Build — when every slot is green, press Build. The house rises from the ground up in the materials you supplied. A built house is permanent.

Build it your way. Deposited materials substitute within their family — any log for any log, any grey stone (tuff, andesite, cobblestone, deepslate, diorite…) for another, and so on. Mix materials across slots and they all appear in the finished house, so the same house can be built many different ways.

Portable. A Blueprint holding materials shimmers and its tooltip shows “Materials X / Y”. Break the station and the Blueprint returns to you with its contents intact — carry a half-stocked build and finish it elsewhere. (Only pressing Build is irreversible.)

What is in the pack

Surface buildings

A variety of above-ground homes and workplaces — cottages, cabins, a tavern, blacksmith, bakery, fishery, farmhouse, barn, estate, longhall, manor, townhouse, and more. Each has its own footprint and interior layout so no two houses in a village feel identical.

Subterranean rooms

Underground villages assemble from a full set of interconnected rooms:

• Six universal building families across five connection categories (PLUS, T, L, I, DEAD_END) so any layout the placer generates has valid geometry — every archway leads somewhere real, no orphan doors.
• Single-category specialties — barracks, library, smithy, villa, warehouse
• Three vertical stair bridges — how the catacomb changes floors
• Two visual styles — _ybr (Yellow Brick Road: tight interiors, defined rooms) and _ofp (open floor plan: fewer walls, more contiguous space). A village uses one style or the other, not both. _ofp is the current default; issue the ZV command /zv templateset ofp|ybr before placing your Soul Well to switch (the choice locks in at Soul Well placement).

Custom furniture + decoration blocks

Tables, benches, counters, shelves, hearths, shingles, thin wood panels, openable wall shutters, and more — the blocks that give each building its character. In a Zombie Village build, the builder opens each shutter as it places it, so villagers path straight through instead of getting walled out mid-build.

How it works

1. Zombie Village decides where to place buildings (surface vs subterranean, which categories).
2. ZV-Houses supplies the NBT templates for those slots.
3. The templates auto-extract to world/generated/zvhouses/structures/ on first server start.
4. ZV villagers build them cell by cell, laborer by laborer.

Requires / compatible with

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1.224 or newer
• Java 21
• No hard mod dependencies — installs cleanly.
• Designed for use with: Zombie Village. Without ZV installed, the mod loads but has nothing to do — no player-facing UI, no craftable items, no world generation.

Modpack authors

Safe to include. No configuration, no client-server split (everything is data + block registrations that ship on both sides), no world modification unless ZV is also present. Ships with the Risen — Undead Army modpack.

Credits

House designs are original to this project, adapted from freely-licensed builds, or inspired by designs shared publicly by community creators.

Particular thanks to AxianErve on YouTube — several of the surface buildings draw on their designs, used with permission.

License

All Rights Reserved. Free to use for players and to include in modpacks. See LICENSE.md in the source repo for the full grants.