Bulletpies · wiki

Mob Director

Something scores how frightened you are and paces the night against you

BuiltForge1.21.1
Status
v1.0.0 jar, build green; the newest feature slate is unplaytested
Mod loader
Forge
Minecraft
1.21.1
Who installs it
The server only (players join normally)

What it is

In normal Minecraft, monsters appear at random. This mod takes that job away from the dice and hands it to a program that watches you. Once a second it scores how much trouble you are in (damage taken, monsters nearby, darkness, low health, how long you have been hiding in one place) and uses that number to run the night in three beats: build-up, peak, then a deliberate quiet stretch so the next wave lands harder. It only goes on the server (or your own game), and friends can join with nothing installed.

The first thing you notice is how empty the calm is. Vanilla scatters monsters everywhere; this thing owns the population, so during a quiet stretch there are about two of them anywhere near you, and both are standing somewhere on purpose: a shape just past your torch line, something in the cave mouth you were walking toward. Then a night comes where the sounds do not add up. A knock on your door with nothing outside. Two zombies at the edge of your light, facing you, not attacking, for half a minute. Mining sounds inside a wall you are certain nothing is behind. And on the night it finally erupts, you get a Warden roar and a ring of things converging from every direction at once, none of which appeared where you were looking.

👥 Playing with friends

Players within 48 blocks share one cycle: one roar, one horde at the group centre

⚠️ Before you install

  • Darkness-based AFK mob farms stop producing while population ownership is on.
  • Sieges break player-placed blocks before regrowing them. If that is not for you, turn siegeBreaching off.
  • The newest feature slate (population ownership, tiers, the daylight rule, the Miner, the Nether) is build-verified but has not been playtested.

Your first 5 minutes

New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.

  1. Put the jar on a Forge 1.21.1 server, or in the mods folder of your own game. Nobody else needs it.
  2. Start a survival world on Normal or Hard and play the first night the way you normally would.
  3. As an operator, run /mobdirector status to see your phase and your intensity score ticking.
  4. Smelt an iron ingot. That advancement is what ends the grace period and switches the real Director on.
  5. Wall yourself in and camp a full night, then read the sign it leaves outside your door.
  6. Impatient? /mobdirector horde forces a peak on yourself within a second.

How it works

Intensity, and the three beats

Once per second, per player, the Director scores your intensity: damage taken, hostile mobs within 24 blocks, darkness, being below 40% health, and camping in one spot. Quiet time decays it. Build-up erupts into a Peak when intensity crosses the threshold or the forced-peak clock runs out; the Peak ends when the horde is nearly dead or its timer expires; then Relax runs 120 to 300 seconds of fast decay. Dying puts you into a long Relax as mercy.

Tip: The default tuning aims for roughly one peak every one or two nights. Most nights are dread, not combat.

It owns the population

In the Overworld it cancels vanilla's random natural hostile spawning entirely and places every monster itself, on a phase-aware budget of around two near you in Relax, filling toward six plus two per threat tier during Build-Up, and none during a Peak because the horde is the population. Each placement is chosen with intent (a shadow past your torchlight, a seed on the road ahead, a cave pocket, occasionally a follower behind you) and runs the same fairness check the hordes use: never in your view cone with a clear line to your eyes, never in your own torchlight.

Tip: Set replaceNaturalSpawning to false for additive mode: vanilla spawning plus the Director. The farm-server setting.

The tier ladder

The arsenal is floored by your actual advancements and never drops once earned. Fresh spawn is grace: small hordes, no forced peaks, no specials, no sieges. Smelting an iron ingot unlocks forced peaks, Runners, Screamers and grudges; mining a diamond unlocks Brutes, sieges and the Miner; ancient debris unlocks veteran waves. On top of that, your current armour value scales wave size between 0.7x and 1.3x, and the zombies and skeletons it sends arrive in leather, then iron, then the occasional enchanted piece.

Tip: Stripping your armour shrinks the wave, it does not make the Director stupid.

Nothing happens in bright sun

Standing on the surface in daylight (skylight 12 or more, not thundering) means no peaks, no ambushers, no dread. But the day is borrowed: intensity keeps accruing (capped at 1.5x the peak threshold) and the forced-peak clock simply pauses, so everything you built up is waiting at dusk. A peak that legitimately starts at night is allowed to finish past dawn.

Dread between the waves

Most of the mod is the space between fights. During Relax at night: two or three Watchers stand motionless 20 to 30 blocks out for 20 to 40 seconds and then walk away; a single bang lands on one of your doors with nothing behind it; three to six stone-breaking sounds play inside a wall six to ten blocks away where nothing is digging. Camp behind walls through an unbroken peak and it leaves a waxed sign outside your door, placed the moment you look away, with a cave rumble to point you at it.

Mobs that play better

Creepers stalk like Weeping Angels. They look away and stroll casually while you watch them, close the distance when you do not, and drop the act inside six blocks so the vanilla hiss takes over. About 6% of zombies shriek on first sight of you and call a mini-horde, once per life. A zombie that locks onto you groans your position to every idle zombie within 16 blocks. Skeletons back off to reopen the range when you close, then keep shooting. Spiders lie dead still in the dark until you are within eight blocks. Zombies work wooden doors, if mobGriefing is on.

Tip: Every one of these has its own config toggle if a particular trick wears out its welcome.

The Miner

Camp underground long enough at tier 2 and a zombie with a pickaxe spawns 12 to 25 blocks away in a pocket with solid rock between you, and audibly digs toward you. It only breaks plain stone, never opens water or lava, never exposes an ore, never sets off a gravel cascade, and every block it takes is written to a ledger and grows back. The sound through the wall is the point.

Sieges, and the no-grief guarantee

Keep camping with a grudge-holding horde outside and a breacher walks up in an iron helmet, bangs on your wall as a warning, then chews a small crawl hole and comes in, baby zombie first. It only ever happens with mobGriefing on and only through blocks a player actually placed; natural terrain is immune. Every block any part of this mod breaks is ledgered and regrows a few minutes later, and the regrow loop runs even if you disable the mod mid-siege.

Tip: Killing the breacher cancels the breach.

Items & blocks

Runner

A fast, fragile zombie that is quicker than you, with 14 health. Turns up out in front of a wave.

Where: Horde special from tier 1, and the whole roster of a Runner Rush peak.

Screamer

A zombie that shrieks the first time it sees you, spikes your intensity and calls a mini-horde onto your position. Once per life.

Where: Rolled onto roughly 6% of zombies at tier 1 and up.

Brute

50 health, immune to knockback, iron axe and chestplate. It absorbs the plan you had for the wave.

Where: Horde special from tier 2; the backbone of a veteran wave.

The Miner

A pickaxe zombie that spawns out of sight underground and digs toward you through solid stone, loudly. Everything it breaks regrows.

Where: Tier 2, underground, after a couple of minutes of build-up, with mobGriefing on.

The Breacher

The siege specialist: iron helmet, iron pickaxe, a warning bang and then a two-block crawl hole through your wall, with a baby zombie following it in.

Where: Camp behind player-placed walls during a peak with a grudge against you.

The Watchers

Two or three zombies that stand 20 to 30 blocks out, facing your base, completely still, for half a minute. They never attack. Then they walk back into the dark.

Where: Once per Relax at night, about a third of the time.

Message signs

Waxed oak signs left outside your door after a peak you refused to fight, placed only while you are looking away. "WE SAW YOU / HIDING / / WE'LL BE BACK" is the friendly one.

Where: Camp through an unbroken peak for more than a minute.

The Stare

In the Nether Wastes, every zombified piglin within 24 blocks turns its head to watch you for a few seconds, and then goes back to what it was doing. None of them aggro.

Where: Walk the Nether Wastes after your visit grace expires.

Warped Forest sanctuary

The one biome where the Director has agreed nothing will ever happen. A calm music cue tells you so when you arrive.

Where: Find a Warped Forest.

Lore

Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.

It is keeping notes

The signs stop being generic once it has something to say. They start counting the horde members you buried this night, and the nights you have gone without sleeping. "NIGHT 7 / STILL AWAKE / / WE KNOW" is not a random line from a pool; it read your save file.

The Nether notices you

Down there it does not hunt; it acknowledges. You get a few minutes of grace on arrival, ended by a single low sound. The Soul Sand Valley is its home ground and the only place it attacks in force. The Basalt Deltas mostly ignore you, apart from the knocking in the columns. And the Warped Forest is sanctuary, absolutely and permanently.

Jokes & trivia

Bits you might miss

  • One of the signs reads "WE COUNTED / YOUR TORCHES" and, on the last line, "ALL OF THEM".
  • Signs only materialise while you are looking somewhere else, with a cave rumble to make you turn around.
  • Sometimes there is no Miner at all, just three to six stone-breaking sounds inside a wall, and nothing behind it.
  • The Warped Forest is guaranteed safe forever, and the mod plays you gentle music to confirm it.
  • Stalker creepers do not freeze when you look at them. They look away and take a casual stroll sideways.
  • Helmets are handed out deliberately rarely, so that a few zombies who do not burn are still walking around in the morning.
  • A siege breacher wears a droppable iron helmet and carries a droppable iron pickaxe, so the thing sent to punish you for hiding is also a loot delivery.

From the workshop

  • Damage is measured by polling each player's health once a second rather than by listening to damage events, which is a deliberate dodge around Forge 52's damage-event API.
  • An entire second act was built and then cut: a boss zombie called the Herald, an evoker called the Speaker, a final Ravager called the Old Hunger, plus a rotten-flesh tribute system you could pay to buy off a night. The code is parked in attic/ and does not compile into the jar.
  • Pillager patrols are the one vanilla spawn it cannot suppress; Forge 52.1.15 offers no hook for them, so they still turn up either way.
  • Mob AI is re-injected on every chunk load on purpose, because goals are not saved to the world file but attributes are. One-time random rolls are stored as entity tags so they survive a reload.
  • A design rule kept the whole thing near-vanilla: no new mob types, ever. That is what killed a proposed support mob called the Witch Doctor.

FAQ

Do my friends need to install it?

No. It is server-side only, and completely unmodded clients can join a server running it.

Will it break my mob farm?

Darkness-based AFK farms rely on the random spawns it cancels, so they go quiet. Spawner-block and portal farms are unaffected. Set replaceNaturalSpawning to false to keep vanilla spawning alongside the Director.

Will it wreck my base?

No. Sieges and the Miner respect the mobGriefing rule, only break blocks a player placed, and every block is written to a ledger and regrows. The regrow runs even if you disable the mod, and uninstalling leaves nothing behind in your save.

Is this just 'more mobs'?

The opposite, most of the time. It owns the spawns, so quiet stretches are emptier than vanilla; the pressure is concentrated into the nights it decides to use.

Where do I tune it?

Per world, in serverconfig/mobdirector-server.toml, generated on first load and hot-reloading when you edit it. Start with the single aggression knob (0.5 to 2.0) before touching anything else.

Does it fight with other mob mods?

It only ever touches minecraft: mobs, and never suppresses spawner blocks, structures, raids or reinforcements.

Get it

Status: The jar compiles and the author has tested it himself, but it has not had a real playtest yet.

  1. Install Forge for Minecraft 1.21.1. The install guide walks through this assuming no prior knowledge.
  2. Drop the mod's .jar file into your mods folder.
  3. The server only (players join normally).
  4. Launch the game with that loader's profile selected.

📦 Where is the file?

This wiki documents the mods; it does not host them. Builds live in the project's own repository under mc-mob-director/build/libs/.

Bulletpies. MIT licensed. Forge 1.21.1 (52.x), Java 21.

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