DEPRECATED

DEPRECATED

This world was deprecated. Something stayed behind.

⚠️ Public beta. There’s a lot of content and there will be bugs. Please report anything strange (the unintended kind) in the comments, ideally with your latest.log. Before posting a log, remove the lines containing --accessToken and --xuid.

DEPRECATED is a slow-burn horror mod for Minecraft 1.20.1 (Forge) with the look and feel of an old Alpha world. It doesn’t throw monsters at you. It waits. Then the window title changes. A sign appears behind you. Someone hums the same melody, far away. Slowly, the world stops feeling like yours.

You loaded an old save. A boy named Otto played in it, alone, for years. Then the game stopped updating, the world was marked deprecated, and something came to clean it up.

✦ The story

What to expect

When the game stopped updating, NULL came to delete this world. Right behind NULL comes the Doctor. NULL deletes what is sick; the Doctor cures it. He builds his house again for every new player.

The world keeps updating itself, though nobody updates it. Everything newer than Otto’s Alpha version (villages, villagers, the End) arrives here wrong.

Otto cut the memory of his first, burned house out of himself and threw it into the Nether. The part of him that tried to sail away to the edge of the world stayed in the water. His old classmate Kuba joined the server only once, on May 14, 2010, and his character never left.

Otto called everyone who came here Player 2. Now that’s you.

You’ll piece it together yourself, through structures, letters, memories, dreams, torn-out diary pages and an evidence board that connects the clues.

✦ What to expect

• A slow-burn haunting. The first minutes are quiet. It doesn’t stay quiet. Scares happen even if you ignore the story and just play at your own pace.
• A chain of 9 structures. Each clue arrives a different way: the window title, Roman numerals, a diary cipher, a compass, Morse code, a treasure map, a file in your game folder, glowing digits burned into the ground, hexadecimal. Coordinates always lead somewhere real.
• Your home becomes part of it. Sleep through a night and someone starts building around your bed: a mailbox with a letter every morning, a swing, a bench facing your door, a lighthouse, a graveyard of deleted worlds… Five of Otto’s old houses appear nearby, each bigger than the last.
• Memory portals. Ruined, colored portals show cutscenes of single days from Otto’s life, from a happy day 1 to the blood-red day 4380.
• Dream worlds. Sleeping can take you into eight handmade dreams, each with its own way out and a shard to bring back. Eight shards forge the Dream Blade.
• Four endings, and a second way to the last one: you don’t have to fight Otto if you bring him back what he lost.
• Never the same twice. Dozens of rare, randomized events with variants, a system that avoids repeats, and a hidden mood rolled every in-game day.

✦ They are still here

Entities

• Otto. Polite, old-fashioned, desperately lonely. He invites you over. Ignore him three times and see what happens.
• The Surveyor, the Broadcaster, Pip, the Hollow, the Seam, the Copy, NULL. What’s left of the old world. Each one has its own personality, voice and mechanic.
• The Twins. Two children, always together. They play far away, then come closer, chapter by chapter, all the way to a tea party with a chair set for you.
• The Neighbor (Dr Crow). One night someone moves in nearby. His house grows a floor every night. He’s polite, wears a beaked mask and never attacks. He also carries wrapped things home at night, saws in his shed and watches your window. One day you’ll get a dinner invitation. Don’t go down to the cellar for dessert.
• Strange villagers. They look almost like villagers. They never attack. They watch, mumble among themselves, hide in caves and in your own tunnels, and visit the Neighbor like old friends. Real villages slowly turn strange too.
• Burnt Otto. Otto’s evil half waits in the Nether. He watches from high ledges, stands on lava, hunts you through fire, puts your portal out and takes your bridge apart behind you. Beat him in a duel and he leaves something warm behind.
• The Drowned One. In deep water, something on the seabed is looking up.
• Six scare entities that come to you: one knocks and stands in your doorway, one hangs from the ceiling, one jumps out from behind corners, one sprints at you, one presses its face to your window, and a tall one moves only when you’re not looking.
• The Digger and the Changeling. One lives only in mines. The other hides in your herds. Both really try to kill.

You can talk to them. Just type in chat. They understand plain English and Polish, forgive typos, and offer clickable suggestions when they don’t understand you.

✦ A friend who stays: Kuba_2010

Otto’s old classmate, who still thinks it’s 2010, follows you like a real second player:

• He fights, throws you food, places torches, farms, mines, fishes, builds, tells jokes and adopts a cat.
• He goes on trips that get better with better-enchanted tools: Efficiency makes trips shorter, Fortune multiplies the loot.
• He gets scared. He remembers what you saw together. A frightened Kuba refuses trips, asks to go home, and may log out in a panic. He’ll follow you into the Nether if he isn’t afraid. If he really likes you, he guards your portal instead.
• He never spoils a scare. He only reacts to what you’ve already seen.

✦ Everywhere you go

• The Nether: Burnt Otto, notes from other “players” in fortresses and bastions, and a charred copy of your own house.
• The ocean: a shadow under your boat, Otto’s sunken house with a letter, and the hand that pulls you down.
• The End: endermen standing in rows behind you, words written in obsidian, credits for the players who “left”, and a YOU WIN that breaks.
• Weather: someone walks beside you in the rain, lightning shows figures in the field, and footprints in the snow lead to your door.
• Your past: your first bed turns up in a forest, candles mark where you died, and a light comes on in the house you moved out of.
• Blood Night: a red sky, dripping blood and the flying Twins.
• With friends: witnesses see only strange hints, fake messages arrive from friends who never typed them, and a friend waves from far away while really being somewhere else.

✦ Memory portals & dream worlds

Memory portals

Dream worlds

✦ They can hear you (optional)

Install Simple Voice Chat and the entities react to your microphone. They don’t react to your words, only to that you speak and how loud. The Hollow walks toward your voice. The Digger hunts screams. The Twins find you when you talk and, if you enable it, repeat what you said in a child’s voice.

Your voice is only kept in memory. It’s never saved and never sent anywhere. The echo feature is off by default.

✦ Settings

Everything can be changed in game under Mods → DEPRECATED → Config: four tabs, a tooltip on every option, and changes save instantly. There are presets (Calm / Classic / Nightmare / Recording) and a story-pace slider.

Almost every system can be switched off on its own: the Neighbor, strange villagers, the Nether, ocean, End, weather and multiplayer events, destructive events, fake chat, jumpscares, the companion, dream worlds, memory portals and the Alpha look.

Languages: English and Polish (follows your game language).

✦ Good to know

• Requires Minecraft 1.20.1 and Forge 47.x. No other dependencies. Optional: Simple Voice Chat.
• Best in single-player. Multiplayer works (each player has their own progress, home and companion) and has its own tricks, but the mod is balanced for playing alone.
• Death: by default you don’t die. You wake up in front of your bed and keep your items (noDeath). Most entities scare and push you around instead of killing. A few dangerous ones (the Digger, Burnt Otto in a duel, the Drowned One and others) deal real damage; turn this off with killers = false.
• Content warning: horror themes, blood, jumpscares, and flickering static and glitch effects. If flashing images bother you, turn off jumpscares and sky effects.
• Files: as part of the puzzle the mod may write small .txt notes into .minecraft/deprecated/. It never writes outside your game folder. You can turn this off with allowFileWriting.
• Optional AI chat for Kuba (an OpenAI-compatible API, such as a local Ollama) is off by default and does nothing unless you set it up yourself.
• Shaders: sky effects and planets usually work, but some shader packs may hide them.
• Commands anyone can use: /deprecated chat (what you can say), /deprecated hint (repeat the current clue), /deprecated board (evidence board), /deprecated buddy (call Kuba), /deprecated wake (leave a dream).

✦ Inspiration & credits

DEPRECATED is inspired by The Broken Script, the slow, unsettling, ARG-like haunting of an old Minecraft world, and by horror mods like From The Fog and Cave Dweller. It’s an independent project, not affiliated with any of them, and no code or assets were taken from them. All textures, sounds and music are original. The Neighbor is loosely inspired by the “plague doctor” archetype, but he’s an original character.

Made by Kut0sz, with help from Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, on programming, assets and writing.

✦ Ideas are welcome

Have an idea for an event, an entity, a structure or a scare? Post it in the comments. I read them all, and it might end up in a future update.

Don’t turn around.