Settings

Read this first

Where the file actually lives.

It is a server config, so where it lives depends on how you are playing. This catches everyone at least once.

How you are playing	The file
Dedicated server	config/zombiemod-server.toml
Singleplayer / LAN	saves/<world>/serverconfig/zombiemod-server.toml

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The file does not exist until you have loaded the world once, and per-world in singleplayer means the copy in config/ does nothing for a single-player world. If a setting appears to do nothing, run /zombiemod status first - it reports what the mod actually believes, which is the fastest way to find out you have been editing the wrong file.

Per-world in singleplayer is NeoForge's decision rather than the mod's, and it is the right one: these settings change how a world plays, so they travel with the save.

Nine switches can be flipped in-game without touching the file at all - see /zombiemod config.

[spawning]

How much of your world is ZombieMod's.

Setting	Default	What it does
enabled	true	Master switch. Off means every mob spawns exactly as vanilla would.
vanillaWeight	40	How strongly to leave a mob alone, weighed against the genera that could claim it.
logSpawns	false	Log every genus spawn to the console. Noisy; for tuning weights.
builtinGenera	true	Let the genera shipped with the mod claim spawns.

vanillaWeight, the one that matters

"Leave it as a plain zombie" is an ordinary entry in the same weighted draw as every genus. If your genera total 200 and this is 200, roughly half of all zombies stay vanilla. Set it to 0 and a genus claims every eligible spawn.

What the shipped genera add up to depends on where you are standing, because most of them carry spawn conditions. Measured in a fresh world at the default of 40:

Where	Genera eligible	Their weight	Stay vanilla
Surface, at night	9	114	26%
20 blocks down	31	254	14%
45 blocks down	35	266	13%

The default is deliberately low. If this mod is installed you should notice, and a plain zombie is what you get when nothing more interesting turned up - not the house style. It is not zero either: some ordinary dead is what makes the rest read as unusual. The table also understates how ordinary a crowd looks, because the Walker is itself a near-vanilla shambler at weight 35.

builtinGenera

Turn this off to run a pack of your own and nothing else. It affects the three weighted draws - natural spawns, horde waves that do not name their genera, and what a conversion raises - and nothing else. The shipped genera stay whole and usable by /zombiemod spawn, spawners, rituals and anything that names one explicitly. Your own datapack's genera are unaffected either way.

It is deliberately a switch rather than a "reset" datapack setting every shipped genus to weight 0. Such a pack has to list every genus by name, so it goes quietly out of date the moment a new one ships - and starts letting through exactly the thing it was installed to stop.

To silence a single genus instead, override that one file from a higher-priority datapack with "weight": 0.

[playerZombies]

When a player dies, their corpse gets up.

Off by default. This takes a player's dropped items and puts them inside a mob, which is a real gameplay decision and not one to make on someone's behalf just because they installed a mob pack.

Setting	Default	What it does
enabled	false	Raise a zombie wearing the dead player's skin at their death spot.
takeItems	true	The corpse carries what the player dropped; kill it to get your things back. Off and the items drop normally, leaving the corpse as a monument.
genus	zombiemod:player_zombie	Which genus a corpse uses as its template.
name	Corpse %P	Corpse name. %P is the player's name.
infectionAlsoRaises	true	A player who dies infected raises both: the corpse with their face and belongings, and a second zombie from the infection itself.

infectionAlsoRaises is a decoy mechanic - only the corpse has the loot, so killing the wrong one gets you nothing. Set it false if you would rather one death meant one zombie.

Admins can recover a corpse's items with /zombiemod corpse when it falls in lava or the void; the ledger records why an entry is still outstanding.

[claims] - FTB Chunks

Keeping ZombieMod out of somebody's base.

All of this is inert if FTB Chunks is not installed. It is linked by reflection, so there is no version pin and no hard dependency.

Setting	Default	What it does
respectClaims	true	Respect FTB Chunks claims at all.
noGriefingInClaims	true	Stop ZombieMod's mobs breaking or placing blocks inside claims.
inClaims	VANILLA_ONLY	What happens to spawns inside a claim: ALLOW (no special treatment), VANILLA_ONLY (genera never claim a spawn there, so you get ordinary mobs) or NO_SPAWNS (cancel the spawn entirely).

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A claim is not a safe zone, and this reads as a bug the first time. Mobs spawn outside a claim, walk in, and aggro normally - which is correct. Only spawning is affected.

VANILLA_ONLY is the default because keeping ZombieMod out of someone's base is this mod's business, while emptying it of vanilla mobs is not.

Worth knowing why the griefing setting exists at all: FTB Chunks protects explosions inside claims but does not cover general mob block-breaking, so NeoForge's griefing hook gets no answer from it and a claim does nothing against a Breaker. ZombieMod closes that from its own side.

[proximity]

Zombies placed just out of sight.

This is the 1.8 plugin's proximity system, and it is what made that world feel occupied rather than merely populated. Off by default - it is the one feature here that adds mobs beyond what vanilla would have made, and installing a mob pack should not silently change how many things are hunting you.

Setting	Default	What it does
enabled	false	Spawn genera near players regardless of vanilla's spawn table.
interval	100 20-12000	Ticks between attempts, per player. 100 is five seconds.
chance	0.5 0-1	Chance an attempt spawns anything at all.
minDistance	16 4-128	Closest it will spawn to a player.
maxDistance	32 8-128	Furthest it will spawn from a player.
nearbyCap	8 1-200	Stop once this many ZombieMod mobs are already near the player.
outOfSightOnly	true	Only spawn where the player cannot currently see the spot.

nearbyCap is the one number that decides whether this is atmosphere or a siege. outOfSightOnly matters more than it looks: the point is that they were always there, not that they appeared.

Note that proximity spawning ignores a genus's base-mob match, so a giant or golem genus given a weight above 0 will turn up on the landscape whatever vanilla would have done.

[hordes]

Nights when several of them arrive together.

Off by default, for the same reason as proximity spawning. Start one by hand with /zombiemod horde start regardless, and see hordes and bosses for what the four shipped events actually do.

Setting	Default	What it does
enabled	false	Let hordes start on their own.
checkInterval	600 100-24000	Ticks between checks, per player.
chance	0.08 0-1	Chance a check starts one.
cooldown	36000 0-1000000	Minimum ticks between hordes for the same player. 24000 is a full day.
cap	40 4-300	Never have more than this many horde mobs alive at once.
bellGlow	true	Ringing a bell makes nearby horde mobs glow.
bellRadius	48.0 8-256	How far a bell reaches. 48 is what vanilla uses for raiders.
glowAfter	1200 0-24000	Once the last wave is out, make survivors glow after this many ticks without a kill. 0 disables.
glowDuration	200 20-6000	How long that glow lasts. Refreshed while stalled.

cooldown is doing more work than it looks - rarity is most of what makes one memorable. cap is the safety rail: a wave that cannot place its full count simply places fewer.

glowAfter is measured from the last kill, not from the start, deliberately. A long fight you are winning is not the problem; hunting one straggler across a dark forest is. 1200 is tuned rather than guessed - in play it fires at about the moment a player gives up searching and starts walking back to a bell.

[infection]

A tainted herd.

A bite from a genus with the infect ability marks whatever it hits, animals included, and a marked thing rises when it dies whatever killed it. These settings are what lets it carry on - an infected cow has no genus, so it has no abilities, so without them the chain stopped at one animal.

Setting	Default	What it does
spread	true	Let infected mobs infect their neighbours.
interval	200 20-24000	Ticks between one infected mob's attempts to pass it on.
chance	0.25 0-1	Chance an attempt succeeds.
radius	4.0 1-32	How close is too close, in blocks.
toPlayers	true	Whether standing too near an infected animal can infect you.
milkCure	true	Right-click an infected animal with a milk bucket to cure it.

With the defaults, roughly one new case every 40 seconds per infected animal. The intent is that letting one infected animal near a herd is a mistake you get to watch unfold and still do something about, rather than an event you are simply told about. Milk is the something.

toPlayers is what makes a tainted herd genuinely dangerous rather than merely a loss of livestock. Milk cures you exactly as it does after a bite - the cure is "the marker effect is gone", and drinking milk clears effects. milkCure is the same cure aimed at something that cannot drink it itself.

[bestiary] - the ZombieDex

Who has met what, and who has killed what.

The record is kept in the world's saved data and is complete whether or not any of it is mirrored to a scoreboard - so turning the per-genus view on later shows a history that was being kept all along, rather than starting from zero.

Setting	Default	What it does
enabled	true	Record kills and encounters at all.
perGenus	false	Also keep one objective per genus, zombiemod.<genus>, holding your kill count.
info	MET	How much you have to have done to read a genus's write-up: MET (anything you have traded damage with), KILLED (only what you have actually put down) or ALWAYS (everything, from the first login).
hideUnspawnable	false	Leave weight-0 genera out of the roster entirely.
unspawnableRevealedWhenMet	true	...but let a hidden weight-0 genus appear once a player has met it.
hidden	[]	Genus ids left out of the roster regardless of weight.
hiddenRevealedWhenMet	[]	The subset of hidden that appears once met.

MET is the default because the entry is a reward for the encounter, and a checklist you can read cover to cover before meeting anything is not much of a checklist.

perGenus is off by default because it costs a scoreboard row per genus per player, and every row syncs to every client - fifty-eight genera on a busy server is a lot of packets for a checklist. On a small server it is nothing, which is who it is for.

hideUnspawnable turns bosses and summon-only genera from spoilers in a checklist into discoveries. With unspawnableRevealedWhenMet on, hiding them is a surprise rather than a hole - the dex grows when the boss does.

hidden is for the ones a server wants to stay rumours, for instance Herobrine. Anything hidden and not listed in hiddenRevealedWhenMet never shows in the dex at all, met or not - a true secret, which is a strong choice: a player can kill it and find no record.

Two objectives are always kept, and both are created on demand:

zombiemod.slain    total kills
zombiemod.genera   how many DISTINCT genera you have killed

/scoreboard objectives setdisplay sidebar zombiemod.genera

A ZombieDex entry printed in chat — A dex entry in chat, on a stock client. The screen version is a nicer window onto the same record.

[bounty]

What killing a genus is worth.

A genus carries a number; who pays it is a separate question.

Setting	Default	What it does
enabled	true	Pay out bounties at all.
objective	zombiemod.bounty	Scoreboard objective to tally into. Blank to disable.
announce	true	Show the payout on the killer's action bar.

There is no Vault on NeoForge - no abstraction every economy mod implements - so ZombieMod does not pick one for you. An economy adapter registers itself and gets called.

With no economy mod at all the scoreboard is the fallback, which is a real reward on a vanilla server rather than a number waiting for a dependency. The objective is only used if it already exists, so nothing appears on a server that never asked for it. Opt in with:

/scoreboard objectives add zombiemod.bounty dummy
/scoreboard objectives setdisplay sidebar zombiemod.bounty

[ghost]

The genus that wears somebody else's face.

It needs names, and there is no way to ask the server for every profile it has ever seen - the profile cache answers questions but will not enumerate. So there are two sources, added together: this seed list, and everyone who logs in.

Setting	Default	What it does
names	["jeb_", "Sablednah"]	Always available, whether or not they have ever played here.
rememberLogins	true	Remember players as they log in.
rememberDays	90	Forget a player who has not logged in for this many days. 0 never forgets.
skipBanned	true	Never wear a banned player's face.

A brand new server has nobody in the second list, so without a seed list the Ghost is faceless until somebody has played. That is what names is for. Names are resolved against Mojang, so they render for real on a vanilla client.

skipBanned is checked against the live ban list every time a face is picked, rather than when the ban happens - so it covers bans applied from the console or while the server was down, and un-banning somebody quietly puts them back in the pool.

Two names are best avoided: vanilla renders any entity named Dinnerbone or Grumm upside-down, and a Ghost wears the name as well as the face. The mod already declines to name a Ghost either of those, so it keeps the face and stays the right way up.