Shadows Remnant

Something on the other side of every shadow wants out.

Shadow’s Remnant is a horror mod. Under the Overworld there’s a second one, the same world block for block, made of shadow. It’s called the Umbra. Things live down there, and they’ve found out that a living body is the best place to hide.

You can’t kill them. You can run, stay in the light, and work out what went wrong below. Later on you get to decide who fixes it, and what you give up for that.

There’s nothing to craft to get it started. Install it, play normally, and give it a few in-game days.

How it goes

Slowly at first. For a while nothing happens. Then a block flickers black. A villager stops and watches you. You hear one footstep more than you took. It gets worse over time, and faster at night, underground and when you’re on your own.

Rifts. Eventually tears start opening in the air at night, and they pull. Get too close and the world goes dark around you and you’re on the other side. There’s no loading screen, the switch happens right on screen. Anyone standing nearby sees you get dragged into the tear.

The Umbra. Your world, black and silent, only faint outlines of light. It keeps up with the Overworld, so what you build up top shows up down there a moment later. Somewhere a pale light marks the way back. Something will be coming for you before you reach it.

Remnants. Six kinds. They can’t be hurt. They don’t move while you’re looking at them. Look away and they’re closer. They climb walls and don’t make a sound when they walk.

If one catches you, it doesn’t kill you. It climbs in. From then on you’ve got a passenger only you can see. It talks to you a lot, and it’s more scared than you are. It changes how you look, and other players will notice.

Then it opens up. A bell that takes you across when you choose to go. A castle the Remnants can’t get into, with candles that are slowly going out and a few people who never left. Something huge sitting on the horizon. And under all of it, places where things end up when the world is done with them.

Endings. Some of them only settle things between you and whatever’s riding you. Four of them change the world for everybody on the server, and each of the four comes from someone different, has its own questline and leaves the world in a different state. Once one of them happens the other three are gone for good.

I’d rather not say more than that. Most of it is better found in game.

Multiplayer

Works in singleplayer, LAN and on dedicated servers. It has to be installed on the server and on every client. Whatever happens to a player is visible to the people around them: someone getting pulled into a rift, someone sinking into their own shadow, a scar growing across someone’s face.

Config

config/shadows_remnant-common.toml (server) has every threshold and timer: how quickly things escalate, how often anomalies and rifts show up, whether rifts swallow nearby mobs, whether doors open on their own, whether the mod goes quiet on Peaceful, and more.

config/shadows_remnant-client.toml has effect strength, a reduced flashing mode, a switch for the post-processing shaders, view distance in the Umbra, a resolution setting for the heaviest effects (turn it down on a weaker GPU), and whether scripted scenes are allowed to move the camera.

Ops get a /shadows command that can trigger pretty much any part of the mod. Handy for testing or for running an event on a server. /shadows phase <player> 3 skips the slow start, for example.

Photosensitivity warning

There are flashes, screen shake, flicker and sudden darkness. If that’s a problem, turn on reducedFlashing in the client config before you start.

• Shader packs (Iris, Oculus) don’t play well with the mod’s own post-processing. With a shader pack on, the mod switches to simpler overlays. Everything still works, it just looks plainer.
• The Umbra only copies changes made after the mod was installed. Anything you built before that won’t be mirrored.
• Adding it to an existing world is fine. Taking it out of a world you’ve played with it isn’t something I’d recommend.
• The big creatures further in are drawn with heavy shaders. A mid-range GPU is fine, very old or integrated ones might struggle there. The resolution option in the client config helps.

Beta

This is a beta, so expect rough edges and balance changes between versions. If something breaks, leave a comment with your Minecraft version, loader and the log (logs/latest.log or the crash report) and I’ll look into it.

Fine to use in modpacks.