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 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

1. Craft a Soul Well and place it where you want your village center.
2. Three Defenders spawn first; then Laborers claim surrounding plots.
3. Each Laborer clears its plot and builds the house on it.
4. When a plot completes, the builder becomes a working profession.
5. 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
• 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.
• Trading professions — butcher, mason and cartographer. Each claims its workstation, wears its own outfit, and trades with you; dedicated labor behavior for these three is still to come.
• 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 well is placed inert, and you choose what it becomes: right-click it (owner only) and pick Village or Catacomb. A depth hint suggests one of the two, but both options work at any depth. Command alternative: /zv soulwell mode village|catacomb.

• Village — a standard surface settlement; plots build above ground.
• Catacomb — plots are excavated as underground rooms with patrolling guards — a fortified warren 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

Two live builds. Pick the file that matches your Minecraft version — they are not interchangeable.

For Minecraft 26.1.2 — zombievillage-5.x.x+mc26.1.2.jar

• Minecraft 26.1.2 exactly. This build pins that version and will not load on 26.1.3 or later.
• NeoForge 26.1.2.99 or newer
• Java 25
• Required: Freedom Lib 1.0.0+, ZV-Houses 1.0.4+, Spells & Spellcrafting 2.12.74+

For Minecraft 1.21.1 — zombievillage-4.57.xxx.jar

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1.224 or newer
• Java 21
• Required: Freedom Lib 0.10.1+, ZV-Houses 0.1.148+, and Spells & Spellcrafting — this build declares no minimum for Spells; only current 2.12.x releases have been tested.

What each provides. Freedom Lib supplies the self-rescue and tunneling primitives villagers use to unstick themselves; ZV-Houses supplies the surface and catacomb building templates; Spells & Spellcrafting supplies the owned-minion / command framework the villager entity implements.

All three are hard requirements. Zombie Village will not start without them — this is not a soft integration. They must also come from the same line as Zombie Village itself: mixing a 26.1.2 build with a 1.21.1 dependency will not work.

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.

Credits

Village buildings are placed from the ZV-Houses template set — designs original to that 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.