- Edition
- 1.21.11, Fabric
- Subject
- Holding a shelter against a horde that learns
- Licence
- MIT
A siege manual, for anyone sleeping outdoors
LethalBreed
They read the distance between you and them, and they close it. Over the top, under the floor, straight through. A wall buys you seconds, and this manual tells you how many.
What a wall buys you
Nothing in this mod goes through stone. Everything eats it. The only question worth asking a material is how many seconds it holds, and the answer is one division.
A zombie standing against a block adds 0.04 points of progress per tick, divided by the hardness of the block. At 1.0 the block falls. That is the formula the server runs, copied here without rounding.
Breach calculator
The mod's shipped defaults
How many bodies fit in front of the breach
The wall does not lose to one zombie. It loses to the sixth.
Every extra breaker on the same block adds 0.6 to the multiplier, and the sum is bounded at 4.0. The bound lands on the sixth body: past that, the queue behind buys them nothing, and that is your one piece of good news for the night.
What sets the number is not the size of the horde, it is the geometry in front of the block. A corridor one block wide presents a single face. Open ground presents eight.
| Material | Hardness | Alone | Current passage | Saturated, six bodies |
|---|
They go over, and the sky closes nothing
A tall wall does not push the horde back, it asks it to build a staircase. It knows how.
The distance field does not read a face as a refusal, it reads it as a cost. When the cost of going round beats the cost of building, the zombie puts a block under its feet, steps up, and does it again. A tower two blocks wide changes nothing in that sum: it lengthens it.
What changes it is an overhang. A ledge sticking out one block forces the column to step sideways, and a column that steps sideways falls into nothing.
They dig, and water does not stop them
Moats are the trap that looks like a plan. They do not swim, that much is true. They fill.
Water is not a wall to the distance field, it is a buildable cell. A flooded trench does not send the horde away, it points at a place to put blocks, and it turns your ditch into a bridge while you are looking somewhere else.
What actually works fits in one sentence: a moat stops nothing if it has a floor. What stops them is the void under the bridge, because a block placed over nothing falls with whoever placed it.
Counting the nights
Difficulty does not follow your progress, it follows the clock. Thirty minutes of world, one phase more, whether you built or slept.
Each step pulls up health, damage, speed, the number of zombies out at night and how often their waves come. Every one of those curves has its own ceiling, and a hard cap above it: a zombie will never one-shot a player in full armour.
Phase ladder
Curves from ProgressionConfig
Telling the unusual apart
Eight variants, each unlocked by a phase. None of them is a final tier: the last arrives at the eleventh and the others keep coming all the same.
The share climbs with the counter, from one zombie in twenty at the start to one in three at the ceiling. What really changes from the sixth phase on is not their number, it is that two different ones turn up in the same wave.
Putting the manual in the world
Two files in a folder, and the first night already looks nothing like the one before it.
- Install Fabric for Minecraft 1.21.11, then Fabric API.
- Drop the LethalBreed jar into
mods/. - Run it once, close it, then open
config/lethalbreed.jsonif you want to change anything. It is all in there, and the in-game settings screen writes to the same file.
The distance field is solved on the graphics card when there is one, and falls back to the processor without changing anything in the game when there is not. A dedicated server with a card in it uses that too.