Dead-Signal MC

The broadcast stopped on the fortieth day

Before that it repeated the same four sentences: stay indoors, do not approach the infected, boil your water, wait for collection.

Nobody came.

Dead Signal is a zombie-apocalypse survival pack for Minecraft 1.21.1 / NeoForge, built around one idea: the cities are still standing, still full, and still where everything worth having is.

Three rules that are not vanilla

The dead do not burn in daylight. Zombies, husks, drowned and zombie villagers are all immune. Morning is visibility, not safety — there is no hour when the map is empty and no threat you can wait out. Zombie spawn rates are doubled on top of that.

They dig. Zombies break blocks up to hardness 3. That line runs straight through the middle of everything you would normally build with: dirt, wood, glass, wool, cobblestone, stone and deepslate all go; iron doors, iron bars and obsidian hold. The shape of a base here is a cheap outer wall that costs them time, and one door that does not open.

Water and wounds kill more survivors than teeth. You have a thirst bar and you cannot drink from your hands. An untreated bite becomes an infection on a timer, and your armour is what decides whether a hit infects you at all.

A city on your horizon

The Lost Cities builds ruined blocks into the ordinary overworld. No world type to pick, no separate dimension — walk far enough in any direction and the ground turns to street. Loot chests on every floor, a rail network underneath, highways between cities, and the densest spawns in the game.

Loot is instanced per player, so on a server the friend who logged in at six has not emptied the city before you got there.

295 quests, 28 chapters, English and Russian

The quest book is the map of the pack, not a checklist bolted onto it. It opens with an eleven-page primer that teaches the three rules above before your first night, and ends by rebuilding a transmitter and putting something better than "wait for collection" on the emergency channel.

Tasks accept the whole family, not one arbitrary variant. "Sixteen logs" means sixteen logs of any species, stripped or not, vanilla or modded. "A canteen" means a canteen of any material. That is FTB Filter System doing the work — hover a task to see exactly what counts.

Firearms that you have to build

Scorched Guns is not a crate of free rifles. It is a production chain: sulfur and niter out of the ground, powder through a macerator, casings pressed from ingots, rounds assembled at a gun bench — and designs gated behind blueprints you have to find in buildings, which is what makes looting a city the tech tree rather than a side activity.

Black powder first: a flintlock, a musket, a blunderbuss, one shot at a time into a doorway. Then frames, parts and cartridge weapons. Then the attachments that turn one gun into three — of which the silencer matters most, because the dead route towards sound and an unsuppressed rifle inside a city calls in everything for a very long way.

Armour runs from cloth and scrap up through Fracture Point's full ballistic chain — raw fibre woven into kevlar, kevlar pressed into plates, Level IIIA through Level IV ceramic and composite — and ends at a powered exo suit.

The tape, and the tower still transmitting

Two things here are not a mod. They were written for this pack, so that the name means something in the world and not only on the title screen.

Five tape fragments carry the last transmission. They drop from the things that were standing in front of a speaker when it stopped, and which fragment drops is gated on your day counter — so the tape you find on day 4 is the beginning of the story and the one you find on day 70 is the end. The broadcast assembles itself roughly in order no matter how you play, with no scripted events at all. Right-click a tape to play it; the transcript goes to your chat and the tape stays in your hand. Splice all five into the Broadcast Archive, which is what the finale asks for.

And you hear it. The pack's four radio sounds were generated with numpy the same way its art was generated with PIL — noise through moving formant bands, tape wow and flutter, two carrier tones beating a few hertz apart. No sample is taken from anywhere, and there is deliberately no speech: it reads as a voice through a bad radio without ever being a language.

And the emergency channel never stopped. On certain mornings the tower repeats itself into an empty country and you hear one line of it at dawn. It is not a reward and not a mechanic — it costs nothing, gives nothing, cannot be interacted with, and gets quieter and stranger as the days climb. Day 2 is an instruction. Day 44 is a chair moving.

Horde nights

Every few nights the dead stop wandering and start navigating. Undead Nights paths waves of horde zombies to you — not your light, not your noise — until morning. Elites arrive later and take real damage to put down; demolition zombies are a walking hole in whatever you were standing behind.

/hordeinfo tells you when the next one is due.

Between them: fifteen biome zombie variants as the ordinary background, mutants that break a prepared position, and Scorched Guns' own war still going on beside yours in laboratories, trenches and a citadel.

Also in the box

• Every screen is the pack's own — the early loading window before the game even starts, the title screen with its ruined-city panorama, the loading screens, a quarantine-tape button skin and a matching quest-book theme. All of it drawn for this pack.
• Create and Create Crafts & Additions for rebuilding industry, because the ammunition line has to keep up with the horde.
• Chipped, Macaw's doors, windows, roofs and bridges, Sophisticated Backpacks and Storage, Waystones (renamed to relays), Corpse, Comforts, Farmer's Delight, Rationcraft, Tough As Nails, Serene Seasons.
• Simple Radio — two people clearing a building from opposite ends is a completely different operation from two people in the same room.

Before you play

Two mods have third-party distribution switched off by their authors, so CurseForge is not allowed to hand them to a launcher. The CurseForge app pauses during installation and asks you to fetch them yourself; most third-party launchers skip them silently instead. Both .jar files go in the instance's mods folder:

• Entity Culling — a rendering optimisation; the pack runs without it, slower
• Loot Beams: Refork — a beam of light over dropped items; cosmetic

Neither changes gameplay, and everything the pack actually depends on installs normally.

Dedicated servers are not supported in 1.0.0. On NeoForge 21.1.248 a dedicated server fails to boot the full mod set with a mixin error. The client is unaffected — single-player and LAN work normally.

Credits

Every mod is installed unmodified from its author's published release; the full list is in the pack's modlist.html. All pack art — panorama, wordmark, loading screens, button skin, quest-book skin, the twenty-eight chapter banners and the four radio sounds — was generated procedurally for this pack and contains no third-party asset of any kind.