Your base is lit, walled, safe. Look up
At night, small groups of hostile mobs parachute in, aimed at exactly the places normal spawning cannot touch: lit courtyards and sky platforms. The canopies appear fifty blocks up and take twenty seconds to come down, in plain view the whole way, and the cloth color always tells you what is hanging under it. You can shoot them down, shove them aside with wind charges, hide under a roof, or screen your base with campfire smoke. It happens at most about one night in three, because it is meant to be a moment, not a siege.
You are in your courtyard at night, safe the way you have been safe for a hundred days, and something makes you tilt your head back: three dark shapes against the moon, swaying, drifting toward you. Twenty seconds. The white one is already shooting at you, so that one first: the arrow connects, the canopy folds, and a skeleton drops forty blocks into a thud and a scatter of bones. The grey one lands by your crafting table and it is an ordinary fight. The small one turns out to be a baby zombie on a chicken, and you watch it descend the whole way because some things you have to see land. Afterwards you pick a Salvaged Chute out of the wreckage, climb to the roof, and step off, because fair is fair.
Players within 32 blocks share one roll and one stick; the server's config decides everything.
New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.
Mobs arrive in sticks of two to four at once, then nothing. The roll is 35% per night, at most one stick per player per night, with two guaranteed quiet nights after one lands on you: roughly one drop every three nights. Sticks start at two mobs, grow to three on day 15 and four on day 30, and stop there.
The landing zone is a ring 8 to 24 blocks from a player: candidate blocks must be sky-visible, lit to level 8 or higher, solid underneath and clear above. Never within six blocks of a player, never within five of an occupied bed, never while you are asleep, underground, or in a thunderstorm. If fewer than three candidate spots exist, there is no drop that night and no cooldown is consumed.
Grey is a zombie, or a husk in the desert. White is a skeleton or a stray, and it is already shooting on the way down. Brown is a spider. Green is a creeper, never anything else, never before day 10 and never more than one per stick. Small grey is a baby zombie, sometimes already mounted on a chicken. The table never lies, so a sky full of chutes becomes a priority list instead of a panic.
Any projectile hit pops a canopy and the rider free-falls, which from height is the whole fight; the wreckage drops a Salvaged Chute on top of normal loot. A roof, glass included, is total immunity: chutes only land under open sky. Any lit campfire clears a column eight blocks across, sixteen on a hay-bale signal fire, and chutes re-target around the smoke. A wind charge shoves a canopy about ten blocks sideways. Water landings are harmless for the mob, which now swims in your moat instead of standing in your kitchen.
The reward for shooting instead of hiding. Held while falling, it slows your descent and steers by look, three uses, counted on the durability bar. It is a held item rather than a chestplate, so you cannot fight while parachuting; the clumsiness is the price of the ride. Two spent chutes and four string craft a fresh one, so skeet has an economy.
One config line sets the temperament: LIGHT is 25% with no creepers, NORMAL is the numbers above, SIEGE is 50% with a one-night cooldown and sticks up to five. Every individual number can still be overridden underneath the preset, and everything runs on the server, so on a server the server's config is the only one that matters.
The parachute itself: a three-block cloth dome the mob rides down at a fixed rate, drifting in from outside your walls so it crosses your view. It has its own hitbox, pops to any hit, and drops string and wool if it lands intact.
Where: You do not get it. It gets you, at night, from fifty blocks up.
A player-usable parachute with three uses: hold it while falling to drift down gently, steering with your view. The durability bar is the jump counter.
Where: Drops from any canopy you pop out of the sky. Two spent chutes and four string craft a fresh one.
Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.
Somebody up there has concluded that well-lit real estate is a provocation. The operation is disciplined: small sticks, spaced nights, payloads matched to biome, and a strict rule against jumping into thunderstorms. They cannot see through campfire smoke and they will not commit before the fourth day, which suggests doctrine, which suggests a manual, which suggests this has been planned for some time.
No document explains the chicken. A baby zombie exits the aircraft mounted, descends mounted, and lands mounted, and the chicken appears to have volunteered. Analysts have stopped asking.
Completely. Chutes only land under open sky, so any roof, including glass, is 100% protection. For a courtyard you refuse to roof, lit campfires clear an eight-block column each, sixteen on a hay-bale signal fire.
Yes. The grace period is measured in world days, so a day-200 base skips the grace entirely and gets its first roll on the first qualifying night.
No. No drops while you are in bed, none while you are underground with no sky access, none during thunderstorms, and never within five blocks of an occupied bed.
Set preset to LIGHT, NORMAL or SIEGE in config/paratroopers-common.toml, then override any individual number underneath it. SIEGE exists for the people who asked.
Install it on both. The scheduler, targeting and canopy physics all run on the server, so on a server only the server's config matters; the client's half is seeing and hearing the thing.
Never. No chat, no bell, no title, no boss bar. The canopy against the sky and its own soft cloth-flap sound are the only warning you get, and that is the design.
Status: The jar compiles and the author has tested it himself, but it has not had a real playtest yet.
.jar file into your mods folder.This wiki documents the mods; it does
not host them. Builds live in the project's own repository under
mc-paratroopers/build/libs/.
Bulletpies