Zombie Hordes

Loved Enhanced Hordes by nojustgavin but stuck on 1.20.1?
This is the same mod you remember — rebuilt from the ground up for Minecraft 26.1.2, running on both Fabric and NeoForge.

Zombie Hoards turns the dumbest mobs in the game into something that hunts you. Zombies dig reinforcements out of the ground. Hordes stack on top of each other to climb walls. Skeletons swap their weapons mid-fight. Iron golems regenerate, deflect arrows, and shockwave anyone hurting a villager. And every so often, at midnight, a hundred of them clump up in the dark and come for you.

Zombies dig up reinforcements — aggro’d zombies, husks, and drowned standing on grass, dirt, sand, mud, or gravel will start a 10-second dig animation and spawn a fresh zombie out of the ground

Hordes physically stack — mobs of the same kind climb on top of each other instead of jamming the same tile, letting them pour over walls

Hordes break weak blocks — leaves, crops, ice, dripstone, moss carpet, melon stems, and bamboo all get torn through (mobgriefing-respecting)

Skeletons swap weapons mid-combat — bow ↔ empty hand to back away, crossbow ↔ golden sword based on whether allies are nearby, with a brief “thinking” cooldown between swaps

Zombified piglins fire flaming arrows — when they swap to a crossbow, the shot ignites the target for five seconds

Skeletons and spiders leap — if their target is more than two blocks above them, they jump-boost toward it instead of pathfinding around

No more skeleton friendly-fire — skeletons, strays, and wither skeletons stop killing each other with crossfire

Iron golems regenerate — when no enemy is in their sight, they passively heal at a configurable level (0–255 via /gamerule)

Iron golems deflect arrows — 60% chance to ignore arrow and spectral-arrow damage outright

Iron golems shockwave — when a golem hits anything that’s targeting a villager or another golem, all nearby attackers take 5 damage and get launched up

Iron golems are immune to wither, poison, and levitation — and self-extinguish out of lava

Midnight horde spawner — on a configurable nightly chance (1-in-N), 100 mobs ambush the player from a random direction in the dark

Manual horde commands

/horde [count] for a 30–80 block ring

/horde clump [count] for a tight pile in front of you, 

/horde clump at <player> [count] to gift the cluster to someone else

Tune everything via gamerule: horde_multiplying, horde_stacking, iron_golem_regen_power, horde_spawner_chance

Server-side only — no client install needed, works on any vanilla 26.1.2 client

❓ FAQ

Why isn’t the dig animation triggering for me?
Three things have to be true: the zombie has to be aggro’d (got a target), it has to be standing on grass / dirt / sand / mud / gravel, and the horde_multiplying gamerule has to be on (it is by default). Babies don’t dig. The chance is rare per zombie per tick, so a small group might wait a while — try /horde to spawn 100 at once.

Will the midnight horde spawn on day 1?
Only if you’re standing in the overworld when day-time hits 18000 and the chance roll succeeds. Default is 1-in-20 nights. Set /gamerule horde_spawner_chance 1 to make it every night, or 0 to disable entirely.

Can I disable individual behaviors?
Yes — every major mechanic is gated by a gamerule. Set horde_stacking false to stop the climbing pile-up, horde_multiplying false to stop dig reinforcements, iron_golem_regen_power 0 to stop golem regen, horde_spawner_chance 0 to disable the midnight ambush.

Does it run on servers without clients having the mod?
Yes. All behavior is server-side AI / event logic. No client-side rendering, mixins-into-input, or HUD elements — vanilla clients can connect normally.

Does it work with other mob mods?
The horde behavior triggers off horde_hoard:hordes and horde_hoard:horde_grave_robbers entity tags. Modded zombie-equivalents won’t dig unless they’re added to those tags via your own datapack — which is a one-line entity-tag JSON.

Can I add this to my modpack?
Yes. MIT licensed.

📜 Credits

Original Horde Hoard mod (Forge 1.20.1) by nojustgavin — this is a multi-loader port to Minecraft 26.1.2 (Fabric + NeoForge) with new midnight-spawner mechanics and command tooling on top.

🐛 Bugs & Support

Report issues on the GitHub issue tracker. Please include your loader (Fabric / NeoForge), loader version, and a latest.log.