ZombieMod — reforged for NeoForge

Build your own undead. ZombieMod turns zombie types into datapack files — health, size, colour, face, and above all AI — so a coward that flees on sight, a stalker that watches you from across the valley, and a climber that comes over the wall are all just JSON. It ships with 61 of them already written, drawn from the genre canon.

A full NeoForge rewrite of the 2013 ZombieMod Bukkit plugin, rebuilt from the ground up for modern Minecraft.

Your players do not need to install anything. ZombieMod registers no entity types of its own, so every genus is an ordinary vanilla mob wearing changes a vanilla client already knows how to draw. Tested for real, twice, with an unmodified client off the Mojang launcher.

What arrives in your world

Not a mob pack — a cast. Every one of these is in the box:

• Speed horror — the Runner, fast and fragile and dark-only. The Volatile, which owns the night surface and leaps.
• The classic shamble — the Walker, slow and tough and knockback-resistant. The Swarmling, half-size and trivial alone.
• Special infected — a Boomer that swells and bursts and blinds the room, a Smoker that keeps its distance and drags you in, a Hunter that climbs walls and pounces, a Spitter that will not melee you at all, and a 120 HP Tank that only lives deep underground.
• Fungal — the Clicker, near-blind at ten blocks and hits like a truck. The Stalker, which stands dead still and watches from forty-eight blocks and never once approaches.
• Herobrine. Weight 1, rare on purpose, zero damage, no attack goal. He watches. He only moves while you are facing away, he leaves if you get within six blocks, he blinks the instant an arrow lands, and a quarter of the time he simply is not there any more. He cannot hurt you. That is the point.
• The wall-eaters — a Breaker that chews through dirt, glass, doors and planks when it cannot reach you, and a Big Breaker that eats deepslate too, so hiding in the deep dark stops being hiding.
• Zombies that were people — Townsfolk, Commuters still holding the shovel someone handed them at the end, Field Hands, an Apothecary still carrying what they were mixing, and a Vault Dweller whose suit still fits and whose smile never left.
• The Ghost, wearing the name and the face of a real player who has actually played on your server.

…and thirty-odd more: Ender Zombies that blink in behind you already facing you, a Weaver that cobwebs the ground under your feet, a Zomborg that learns what hurt it and stops taking it, an Archer built on a skeleton so you can see it draw, a Lazer that burns you down a red hitscan beam, a Howler that fires the Warden's sonic boom, and a Nightstalker that runs from you in daylight and hunts you after dark.

Faces

Fifty-one of the sixty-one wear a real face, rendered on an unmodified client, because a genus can carry a player-head texture in its JSON. It is the single thing that makes a crowd read as a cast rather than a palette swap — you recognise a Clicker before you are close enough to be in trouble.

The systems underneath

Build your own

A genus is one JSON file in a datapack at data/<your_pack>/zombiemod/genus/<name>.json. Run /reload and it is live — no restart, because genera are a datapack registry and vanilla's own reload picks them up.

{
  "name": "Coward",
  "base": "minecraft:zombie",
  "weight": 30,
  "health": 14.0,
  "speed": 1.25,
  "scale": 0.9,
  "clear_goals": true,
  "goals": [
    { "type": "zombiemod:avoid_entity",  "priority": 1, "target": "player", "distance": 12.0 },
    { "type": "zombiemod:random_stroll", "priority": 7, "speed": 0.9 }
  ]
}

That is the whole coward. What you have to work with:

• 12 goal types — vanilla's own pathfinder goals, pulled apart and recombined. Avoid, melee, bow, watch, stroll, float, and targeting by ear or by block.
• 21 abilities — effects, healing, lightning, explosions, creeper-style fuses, shockwaves, leaps, drags, summons, block-breaking, projectiles, cobwebs, infection, conversion, a real guardian beam, particle hitscan rays, adaptive resistance and teleport.
• 15 spawn conditions — biome, dimension, height, light, sky, depth below the local surface, time of day, moon phase, land claims and CityWorld districts — composable with any_of and not.
• Any vanilla mob as a base. Husks, drowned, skeletons, zombie villagers, giants, iron golems.
• Attributes, equipment, faces, navigation swaps — climbing, swimming, amphibious.

Goals, abilities and conditions are all registries, so another mod can add its own types without ZombieMod knowing it exists.

→ Full genus reference, every field, and guides to building your own roster: sablecraft.co.uk/zombiemod-reforged

Balance, deliberately

The shipped roster does not take over your world, and it does not politely hide either. "Leave it as a plain zombie" is an ordinary entry in the same weighted draw as every genus, weighted by vanillaWeight — default 40, settled by play rather than guessed.

Because most genera carry spawn conditions, the mix is depth-dependent, measured in a fresh world:

Raise it for a mostly-vanilla world, drop it to 0 and a genus claims every eligible spawn, or set builtinGenera = false and run nothing but your own.

Plays well with others

• FTB Chunks — claims are respected. Genera stay out of them, and ZombieMod's mobs will not break blocks inside one. (Worth knowing: FTB Chunks itself does not cover general mob block-breaking, so a claim does nothing against a Breaker until ZombieMod closes it from this side.) Linked by reflection, completely inert without it.
• Corpse — with player zombies on, the body gets up instead of lying there, and when somebody kills it, it goes down as a proper Corpse body holding everything it carried — no five-minute despawn, safe from lava and hoppers. Optional, and inert without it.
• CityWorld — genera that key off districts, lots and wildness, so Commuters haunt the high streets and Harvesters work the farms. Also optional, also inert without it.

Commands

/zombiemod list and /zombiemod bestiary are open to everyone; the rest is op-only. /zm is an alias for all of it. /zombiemod spawn <genus> puts one where you are looking, /zombiemod status tells you what the mod believes its settings are, /zombiemod observe lets you stand in a fight and take no damage while remaining a completely normal target, and /zombiemod horde start calls one in.

→ Every command and every setting: sablecraft.co.uk/zombiemod-reforged

Requirements

There is a jar per Minecraft version, named for the one it was built against — take the one that matches your server.

Install on the server. That is all. No dependencies, and nothing your players have to do — they can join on a stock client from the Mojang launcher and meet every one of the sixty-one. Installing it client-side as well is optional and adds the ZombieDex screen; people with and without it play together on the same server.

Credits and licence

ZombieMod is licensed under MIT.

• Original ZombieMod Bukkit plugin by Sablednah, 2013.
• This NeoForge rewrite by Sablednah.

Full docs, genus reference and guides: sablecraft.co.uk/zombiemod-reforged Source, issue tracker and full port history: see the GitHub repository.