Hollow: The Stalker

The Hollow

A horror mod for Minecraft 1.21.1 on Fabric. One entity, 18 events, and a lot of sound.

It doesn't wander around like a normal mob and forget about you. It picks a player, works out how to get to them, and then does it: through your walls if it has to, over your tower, into the mine you're hiding in. Most of the time you hear it long before you see it.

What's in it

• 18 events, from a full multi-minute hunt down to a single sound in a cave
• 6 jumpscares, plus two fake ones that exist to make you doubt the real ones
• A custom model, 5.7 blocks tall, with 21 animations
• 20 sounds, all positional, so you can hear which direction it's digging from
• 530 config options
• Works in singleplayer and on servers, coop, everywhere.

How it actually hunts

This is the part that matters, so here's what's going on under it.

It doesn't know where you are. It remembers the last place it saw or heard you, and walks there. It only updates that when it gets new information: line of sight, you sprinting, you splashing through water, you taking damage, you breaking a block. If you stand still and shut up, it goes to where you were and searches around, which is a very unpleasant thing to watch from a hole in the ground.

When something is in the way, it doesn't give up and path around forever. It picks the block in front of it and mines through, one at a time, with the cracks showing and the sound carrying through the stone. Bridging gaps and pillaring up works the same way. Wall yourself in and you've just given it a job to do.

If you go up, it climbs. Pillar up in the open and it comes up your pillar rather than building its own, and it climbs slower the closer it gets to you, which is worse. If there's genuinely nothing to climb, then it builds.

It's 5.7 blocks tall, so it can't fit in your basement standing up. It goes down on all fours instead, and the tunnels it digs are only 2 blocks high, so the thing coming down the corridor at you is far too big for the hole it's coming through.

In water it swims properly, under the surface rather than bobbing on top of it, and it's faster than a boat. Rowing away doesn't work as well as you'd hope.

Its chase speed is rolled fresh every encounter, with a catch-up if you get too far ahead, so you can't learn one pattern and rely on it forever.

There is one thing that buys you time. Look it straight in the eye from a distance and it'll sometimes back off and go hide for a bit before it comes back. There's a cooldown on it, so don't plan around it.

And when its next hit would actually kill you, it stops and takes a moment first.

It won't wreck your world

I get why people are careful with mods that break blocks, so:

• It cannot break chests, barrels, shulker boxes, spawners, or anything else with a block entity. Not configurable, not a "rare chance", it just can't.
• It respects the mobGriefing gamerule. Turn that off and it stops touching blocks entirely.
• The events that look like they're wrecking your base mostly aren't. The False Walls that seal your mine shaft are a client-side illusion, nothing is ever placed. The bedrock room from The Grab is built in solid stone away from anything you own, and every block is put back afterwards.

The events

Hunts:

1. The Encounter – spawns 40 to 50 blocks out and comes for you. Runs for minutes.
2. The Jumpscare – follows you silently, one block behind, until you turn around.
3. The Rocket – spawns in plain sight a long way off, laughs, and then charges you.
4. The Peek – the door you just opened has something behind it.
5. The Flash – about a fifth of a second, then gone. You won't be sure.
6. The Grab – screen goes black, you hear something sprinting at you, and you wake up in a sealed bedrock room with it standing there looking at you. It can't kill you down there.
7. The Nightmare – go to sleep and the night doesn't skip. Piano, thunder, a countdown, and then a minute of being chased in your own sleep.

Presence:

1. The Watcher – stands completely still somewhere in your view. The second you notice it, it's gone.
2. Paranoia – the minute or so after that. Footsteps, doors, digging in the distance. None of it real.
3. The Lurker – circles your base and never attacks. Get it centred in your view and it laughs and disappears in black smoke.
4. The Visit – you get home from a long trip and your door is open, your torches are out and there's a block on your bed you didn't put there. Nothing is missing. Nothing attacks you.
5. The Impostor – someone joins with your name and your skin in the tab list.
6. The Congregation – every animal within 40 blocks stops, turns its head to you, and follows you with its eyes as you move. Then they all go back to eating grass at the same instant.

Doubt:

1. False Walls – the tunnel behind you is bricked up. Mine through it and there's more wall. Walk up to it and it's not there.
2. The Poltergeist – doors and chests near you opening and closing on their own.
3. The Whisperer – a voice, while you're deep in a mine.
4. Adrenaline – heartbeat, sudden blindness, and this time the things closing in on you are real mobs.
5. Cave ambience – occasionally, a sound out of a cave that isn't there.

Two of these never fire back to back. After any event there's a gap before anything else is allowed to happen to you, because a horror mod that goes off constantly stops being one after about an hour.

Config

One JSON file with 530 keys, reload it in game with /hollow reload. Every event has an on/off switch, and past that you can change spawn distances, chase speeds, how long it takes to break a block, how far it can see and hear, how often events happen, jumpscare timings, every volume, and the list of blocks it's allowed to touch.

There's also a command for every event (/hollow grab, /hollow nightmare, and so on) so you can fire them on demand instead of waiting days for one, plus /hollow anim <name> to play any single animation if you're tuning things.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.1, Fabric Loader, Fabric API
• GeckoLib 4.7 or newer. It's a required dependency, so the CurseForge app will pull it in for you. Installing by hand, grab it yourself.
• On a server, it needs to be installed on the server and on everyone's client. The model, textures and sounds don't get sent to vanilla clients. All the actual behaviour runs server-side.

Warning

Jumpscares, loud sudden audio, and long stretches of being followed by something you can hear and can't see. If you've got a heart condition, give this one a miss.

Play with headphones. Most of this mod is sound, and without them you're missing about half of it.