The game scores itself live on note blocks, and every monster brings its own theme
Most games play you a soundtrack that somebody recorded. This one writes the soundtrack while you play, using the note block sounds Minecraft already has. Walk faster and the music speeds up, step into a desert and it changes key, and every monster that can see you adds its own little tune, played from exactly where that monster is standing. The idea is that after a few nights you stop scanning for the creeper and simply hear where it is.
You load a world and a flute pad, a bass note and a slow harp fade in behind everything, quiet enough that you forget they are there. Then you start running and the whole thing leans forward with you. Somewhere off to your left a low didgeridoo says zombie, and it says it from your left, not from the middle of your headphones. A drum kit you never noticed arriving is suddenly playing. Four rising pling notes climb the bar from behind your right shoulder, and they get louder, and you turn around before you have consciously worked out why.
Runs on your machine only, so it works on any server including vanilla ones. Only you hear it.
New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.
Three layers follow you everywhere: a flute pad doubled by chime, a bass line, and a harp arpeggio whose density tracks your movement. Standing still gets you two notes a bar; sprinting gets running 16ths. Tempo comes from what your body is doing (72 BPM still, 63 sneaking, 96 walking, 126 sprinting, 140 on elytra, plus 14 in combat) and it is eased in gradually rather than switched.
Every hostile mob within 24 blocks that has line of sight on you adds its leitmotif to the mix, played positionally from the mob itself rather than from the music. Three motifs can sound at once and the highest priority wins the slots, so the creeper and the warden always cut through. The warden is the exception that ignores line of sight entirely, because so does the warden.
The creeper's line is chromatic, not in the key: four pling notes climbing a semitone each across the bar, so it never resolves and never blends in. Its volume ramps up as it closes on you, and inside 30 percent of the scan radius four more notes join in between the first four. The bar gets busier as the thing gets nearer.
Your biome picks the key and mode. Deserts and badlands are E phrygian dominant, dark forests A aeolian, caves D dorian, swamps D dorian, oceans and beaches G mixolydian, snow G lydian, jungles C pentatonic major, the Nether F locrian, the End B phrygian, the deep dark A locrian, and mushroom islands whole tone. Crossing a border does not lurch: the new key has to hold for eight seconds, then the modulation lands on a phrase boundary with the pad dropping out for the pickup bar. Night darkens bright modes to aeolian at the next phrase.
The kit is completely silent when you are calm and assembles piece by piece as danger rises, with a snare fill into every phrase turnaround once you are in combat. Danger is a single number built from how many hostiles are near, how close, and how dangerous each type is; the four bands are calm, uneasy, danger and combat. Hostiles you cannot see still count, at 35 percent weight.
Events interrupt. Taking damage fires a dissonant three-note pling cluster immediately, deliberately off the grid, because pain does not wait for the next beat. Killing a threat resolves the fifth down to the root on a bell, played at the corpse. Dawn is a rising flute figure and dusk a descending chime with a bass note under it. The first time a mob gets line of sight on you it plays its announce phrase, plus the vanilla note block mob-head sound.
After roughly 24 bars of calm the band takes a rest of 6 to 12 bars, fading out over four beats and back in over two. Resting is only allowed while things are genuinely quiet. Danger wakes the whole ensemble instantly, mid-rest, which means the music starting again is itself a warning.
Three files appear in config/thescore on first run: engine.json owns volumes, tempos, swing and thresholds, biomes.json owns the biome-to-key rules, and motifs.json owns every mob's leitmotif note by note. Edit, then run /score reload in game. No restart and no rebuild. A broken file never silences the game; the mod falls back to defaults and tells you which file failed and why.
Didgeridoo, three low notes every other bar: root, third, root, an octave down. Slow and unbothered.
Where: Any zombie that can see you. Husks, drowned, zombie villagers and zombified piglins all sing the zombie part.
Xylophone, high on the fifth, clattering in threes twice a bar. It sounds like bones because it is bones.
Where: Any skeleton in line of sight. Strays and bogged share the voice.
Four pling notes climbing a semitone at a time, outside the key so they can never settle. Louder as it closes, and four extra notes appear once it is genuinely near.
Where: A creeper with line of sight on you. Priority 10, so it outranks almost everything else.
Snare, eight quiet taps grouped in clusters across the bar. Nervous rather than threatening.
Where: Spiders and cave spiders.
Two 'bit' notes, both doubled a few cents out of tune, the second of them a tritone above the root.
Where: An enderman that has noticed you.
Banjo, a quick 5-6-5 figure and a low third. The only comic voice in the roster.
Where: Witches.
Chime, falling from two octaves up through the seventh, fifth and third. It comes down at you because so does the phantom.
Where: Phantoms, which means three nights without sleeping.
Cow bell, four square hits a bar with a fifth on beat three. A patrol you can hear coming.
Where: Pillagers. Vindicators and evokers march to the same bell.
Two didgeridoo notes on the root, every single bar, at full volume. Priority 100 and the only motif that does not need line of sight.
Where: Wake a warden. It does not need to see you for its theme to start playing.
The zombie's instrument with the interval that used to be banned in church music sitting in the middle of it.
Where: Wither skeletons in a nether fortress.
Three flute notes spread across four bars. It plays a quarter as often as anything else, so it feels like it is drifting.
Where: Ghasts in the Nether.
Bell on the fifth, twice, then a note outside the scale. Bright and wrong.
Where: Blazes.
Root, fourth, root, an octave up on iron xylophone. Metallic and evenly spaced, like something scanning.
Where: Guardians in an ocean monument.
Three unpitched thuds on the root. It is a bouncing lump and it sounds like one.
Where: Slimes and magma cubes.
Guitar, two low notes every four bars. Any hostile the motif file has never heard of gets this.
Where: Modded mobs, or any hostile the motif file does not list. Delete the default motif and unknown hostiles go silent instead.
Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.
The conceit is that there is a small ensemble somewhere just out of frame, watching, and that it is not allowed to lie to you. It never plays a note about a monster that has not actually seen you. When it goes quiet for a few bars it is because nothing is happening, and when it comes back in a hurry, something is.
Every other mob is given a scale degree, so a zombie groans in tune whether you are in a desert or in the snow. The creeper is written in raw semitones instead, which means it is out of key everywhere by design. It is the one voice in the score that never belongs to the music it is interrupting.
No. It runs entirely on your own copy of the game, so you can use it on any server, including vanilla ones. Nobody else hears it.
Its notes are note block sounds, so they ride the vanilla Jukebox and Note Blocks volume slider. Turn that down to balance it, or set masterVolume in engine.json.
That is the design goal. The motif plays at the mob's actual position, gets louder as it closes and adds notes when it is near. Whether a human can actually do it is exactly the thing nobody has tested yet.
The band plays about 24 bars and then rests for 6 to 12, and the percussion is completely silent while you are calm. Danger cancels the rest instantly.
Yes. motifs.json holds every mob's notes on a 16-step bar; edit it, run /score reload, and audition your change with /score demo. No restart.
It only reacts to mobs that already have line of sight on you, so it never tells you about something that has not noticed you. The warden is the deliberate exception.
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-the-score/build/libs/.
Mod by Bulletpies. Every sound in it is a vanilla note block sample.