Super Contamination
Contact between a zombie and a living non-zombie entity can transmit an invisible plague. After a long silent incubation, with no detectable clinical sign, it inflicts escalating damage and hunger until the subject dies. Milk, the classic vanilla remedy, is explicitly neutralized against this plague.
Four transmission routes
| Vector | Conditions |
|---|---|
| Contact with a specimen | A blow landed on a living non-zombie entity. This is the main route, and the only one whose probability rises with the tier. |
| A Bomber's filth | The blast throws filth beyond its own lethal reach; the chance falls with distance and rises with how long the fuse burned. No blow is required. |
| Lingering pool | The filth left on the ground contaminates whoever stands in it, with no blow and no specimen present. One attempt per subject per pool. |
| Brewed potion | A Contamination potion is brewed from an awkward potion and rotten flesh. The pathogen then becomes a weapon, including in throwable form. |
The last three routes go through no damage event at all: armour, however complete, changes nothing about them.
Stage 1 · Latent
Infection chance on contact: min(45%, 2% + phase × 3.07%), i.e. 2% at
phase 0, up to
45%
(cap) from phase 15 onward. Once the subject is contaminated, nothing shows at all: no icon, no damage. The only clue is a brief slowdown
(-15%, 2 seconds) at the exact moment of infection. Then, every 5 to 10 in-game days, a roll gives a 2 to 10% chance to
trigger the symptoms; between two rolls the latency simply continues, so it usually lasts hundreds of in-game days. /effect clear also cures a latent subject:
even with no icon and no other active effect to remove, the command purges the plague state.
Stage 2 · Symptomatic
The plague has 5 severity levels, which rise every 1 to 2 in-game days (15 to 35% chance per roll), with an individual intensity randomized per subject (jitter ×0.7 to ×1.3, two subjects at the same level do not present the same clinical picture). At this stage:
- Damage, one pulse every 5 to 10 real seconds:
0.1 to 0.5 HP × intensity, plus an exhaustion (damage × 4.0) that drains hunger. - 4 independent episodes, each on its own timer: slowdown (-15%), jump blocked, weakened attack (-40%), and hallucination (the subject perceives other players as zombies).
- Subject in creative/spectator mode, the plague stays "frozen": level and icon persist, but no active effect triggers as long as the subject remains in that mode.
Milk does not cure. Unlike vanilla, a mixin redirects
the single removeAllEffects() call made inside
ClearAllStatusEffectsConsumeEffect.apply, and arms a thread-local marker
(ClearGuard) for the whole duration of that call. The plague state is therefore
never removed, there is nothing to reapply at the end of the tick. Only
/effect clear actually cures the contamination, a deliberate behavior, documented as
such, not an oversight.
Cure and death
Every 2 seconds, if the subject stays crouched, it has a 5 to 8% chance of complete cure, the only passive cure there is. On death, the entire plague state is wiped; if its silhouette reads as a biped (at least 1.75 blocks tall, at most 0.7 wide, at least 2.4 times taller than wide: player, villager, piglin, illager, witch, but also skeleton, enderman or a modded humanoid), it rises again instantly as a zombie (or zombie villager) on the spot, a direct vector of horde expansion. Zombies themselves can never be contaminated.
Configuration
| Field | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|
| contaminationEnabled | Enables the plague. | true |
| contamBaseChance | Base infection chance (phase 0). | 0.02 |
| contamPhaseScale | Chance bonus per phase. | 0.0307 |
| contamMaxChance | Infection chance cap. | 0.45 |
| contamSymptomMinDays / MaxDays | Delay between two symptom rolls while latent. | 5.0 / 10.0 d |
| contamDamageMin / Max | Damage per symptomatic pulse. | 0.1 / 0.5 HP |
| contamIntervalMinSec / MaxSec | Interval between pulses. | 5.0 / 10.0 s |
| contamMaxLevel | Maximum severity level. | 5 |
| contamCureCheckTicks | Cure roll frequency (crouched). | 40 (2s) |
| contamCureMinPct / MaxPct | Cure chance per roll. | 5.0 / 8.0 % |
| contamReanimateHumanoids | Reanimation into a zombie on a humanoid's death. | true |