Zombie Have Eyes

Zombie Have Eyes

Zombies can only see you if they can actually see you.

This server-side mod turns zombie encounters into a stealth game, rebuilt from scratch for modern NeoForge: zombies (and optionally other monsters) only start chasing and attacking a player when they have a direct, unobstructed line of sight. Stand behind a wall while a zombie stares at your last known position — it won't notice you, even if it's looking straight at you.

Vision rules

• Line of sight required. A mob can only lock onto a player it can genuinely see. No more zombies attacking through walls or fences.
• Mobs forget you — but they search. Break line of sight for a couple of seconds and the mob gives up the chase. Instead of instantly going idle, it walks to the spot where it last saw you and pokes around for a while. Stay hidden until it loses interest.
• Fair retaliation. A zombie you just hit can still swing back at you for a short window, even without line of sight — no cheap hit-and-hide exploits.
• Optional field of view. Enable a configurable vision cone to sneak up on mobs from behind, with a short-range "hearing" radius so you can't just walk right up to their back in silence.

Stealth

• Sneaking helps. Crouching players have a chance to go unnoticed, scaling with distance — hard to fool a zombie standing next to you, easy at range.
• Crawling is stealthier still. Crawling shrinks the range mobs notice you at and counts as sneaking for the notice roll.
• Terrain conceals you. Bushes, tall grass, leaves, crops, vines — foliage hides you. Eye height follows your pose: two-block grass hides you standing, short grass only while crawling. Modded foliage is detected automatically, and you can add blocks via the zombiehaveeyes:concealing datapack tag.
• Zombies are nocturnal. In open daylight they see only a fraction of their normal range. At night, darkness conceals you — but a torch in your hand removes that cover.

Zombies fight back

• Group alerts. A mob that spots a player — or gets hit by one — alerts nearby idle mobs. They don't aggro through walls: they get the player's last known position and come to investigate. Attacking still requires their own eyes.
• Light attracts. At night, mobs that see a glowing player (torch in hand, or standing in bright light) slowly shamble towards the light. No aggro until they're close enough to actually spot you. Douse the torch and slip away in the dark.

Compatible mods

• Zombie Awareness — its sound/blood/light investigation works untouched and pairs beautifully with this mod: zombies come to the noise, but attack only on sight. A config toggle (zombieAwarenessMode) decides whether ZA's omniscient hunters and see-through-walls senses bypass the vision rules or respect them.
• Enhanced AI — smarter combat AI stays; its extended sight and through-wall sensing are filtered down to real line of sight by default, or trusted via enhancedAiMode if you want them as designed.
• The Hordes — fully compatible out of the box. Horde waves march exactly as intended and wave mobs start attacking only when they actually see you. Wave mobs ignore group alerts so nothing distracts the march.
• Mob Amputation — cut a zombie's head off and it goes completely blind: it can't acquire a target, can't even swing back at whoever hit it, and drops the chase it was on. Group alerts still reach it — those are shouts, not sight. Note that Mob Amputation kills headless mobs after 5 seconds by default; set its headlessDeath=false if you want them stumbling around blind. Toggle with headlessMobsAreBlind.
• Crawl on Demand (and similar crawl mods) — crawling uses the vanilla pose, so crawl stealth works with no extra setup.

Installation

Server-side only — install on the server and vanilla clients can join without the mod. Every mechanic above has its own config section in config/zombiehaveeyes-common.toml and can be tuned or disabled independently.

Modpacks & usage

Free to include in modpacks, no need to ask first. Credit is appreciated but not required. Commercial use (selling the mod, or bundling it in a paid/monetized modpack or product) is not covered by this — reach out to discuss it first.