Sensory Abyss V3.5

The world takes a sense from you. Everything you learn after that is how to survive without it.

Forge 1.20.1 is 3.5 and NeoForge 1.21.1 is 2.5. Both should have the same content.

• Discord: https://discord.gg/nAKVcFCJR3
• Bug reports: https://bugs.sensoryabyss.workers.dev
• Shaders: you don't need any. The mod's own lighting engine runs out of the box.

What This Mod Is

Sensory Abyss is a horror overhaul that turns survival progression upside down. You don't grow into a hero. You start broken, permanently, in one specific way: at character creation you lose your Sight, Sound, Smell, Touch, Taste or Mind for good. The mod is about what you use in its place.

The Six Afflictions

The Blinded: Sight

The world is The Pale, a bone grey mist. Your footsteps clear paths through it that slowly close, loud noises clap it open, and holding G breathes it back around you. You live on Eyes. Mark an enemy, Gouge it, and slot its eyes into your Eye Wheel. There are 60+ kinds: Warden eyes see heat through walls, Enderman eyes find strongholds. Wear one long enough and it roots for good.

• Radient: cast your sight out as lanterns, light-traps, steerable eyes and swarms. Every mote you have out makes you dimmer.
• Shade: send out copies of yourself to walk, swap places with through walls, or strike from all at once. Bright light burns them away.

The Deafened: Sound

Sound reaches you only through what you stand on. Stone carries it, wool kills it, and in water or open air there is none. You carry the Bone Drum and the Death Whistle, and the music you write on a real staff is the spell: the melody draws the shape, and each note's mark says what happens there. How loud you play decides what answers.

• Dissonant: wrong notes on purpose. Even your mistakes are music.
• Harmonic: echoes and held notes that carry one charge into everything of its kind, and into your allies.

The Anosmiac: Smell

You can't smell toxins, so your body becomes a forge for them. A harmful effect you survive can leave a Scar that turns it into a resistance, an immunity or a volatile Bad Mix.

• Sporeweaver: claim ground and channel spells into the earth through your Druidic Focus. Ultimate: The Land Answers.
• Miasma Walker: brew debuffs you've survived into vials to throw or drink. Ultimate: Catastrophic Reaction.

The Numb: Touch

You can't feel pain, so you wear the world. Hold your absorb key over almost any block, vanilla or modded, and it plates onto you as armour. How hard the block is sets your shell, your strikes, what you can mine and what carrying it costs. Nothing is gated: you can wear obsidian on day one, but it will inconvenience you.

• Monolith: raise Boulders, Walls, Pillars and Cages from the block you wear. A magma pillar burns. Ultimate: Monolith.
• Shardborn: carry four weapons at once, each one's ability landing the other's attack. Ultimate: Shardstorm.

The Unfed: Taste

Food gives you nothing. You live by devouring creatures or eating their hearts, and each kind you eat builds Mastery. Spend it on permanent stats, or Gorge to put on a creature's body, with its strength, its digging and its attacks.

• Apex Hunter: win Hunt Trials to unlock up to 18 mutations. Ultimate: Apex Ascendant.
• Necromancer: design undead minions at The Table and summon them with blood and chalk. Ultimate: The Dead March.

The Shattered: Mind (rebuilt in 3.5)

What you lost is your mind. Every day it picks two afflictions and makes them true of you, and low sanity makes them worse. Ten gods are watching. The Shattered has no subclass. You build it through where you stand with each god.

• Belief and denial: each god has a number from −100 to +100. Do its work and it rises. Kill its herald or burn its materia and it falls. Both ends change you: believe in the Tide and you swim faster on less air, deny it far enough and you sink.
• Halls: pray in a god's hall to bind it and take its effigy. Once bound, the god gives you work and sends its herald, as a gift or as an attack.
• Ten abilities of the mind: Migraine, Intrusive Thought, Phantom Pain, Outburst, Déjà Vu, Compulsion, Suspicion, Amnesia, Hysteria and Projection. Drag gods onto them, and how far you believe or deny each god decides what it adds.
• Apotheosis (ultimate): for one minute, the god you love most and the god you hate most lend you their heralds' moves.
• Ascension: at ±100, a believer is led into the herald's domain for a trial and a blessing, and a denier is dragged in to kill a bigger herald.

The Ten Gods (new in 3.5)

Each god has a hall somewhere in the world, including in modded biomes, and a herald that roams its places. Every class gets something from a herald: eyes, a rare glyph, an essence, a material or a trail. Every class except the Shattered can also worship at a Shrine, taking a boon on its hits and paying a cost.

The World

• Horror Director: paces the dread around your stress and the hour, with footsteps, doors and whispered names that only you hear. Hunters track you by sound and scent, not sight.
• Sanity: hit zero and you wake in bed with a permanent Scar. There are 40 Maladies, including phobias, and each one changes how the world looks.
• Scent and noise: trails draw predators and wash off in a cauldron. Everything you do makes noise that mobs react to.
• Light runs out: candles gutter, campfires need stoking, and below Y=0 only strong light holds back the dark. A Ritual Brazier wards your base.
• Seasons: a 60-day year turns the leaves, freezes the water, and speeds up or slows down your crops.
• Bodies and food: bodies stay where they fall and rot. Drops are normal but you can butcher them at a table for more (drops for food will be removed eventually for full butcher mechanic), and store your food or it spoils.
• New in 3.5: seven armour and tool sets, two new ores, new crops, and quest lines for your class and the world.

Magic and Progression

• 80+ spells in five sense schools, learned from grimoires and rituals. Charge them up, or Overclock them for more output at a higher cost.
• Corruption comes in five bars, one per sense. Push one deeper for raw power.
• 20 levels of choices, from stats and subclass to ultimates and a Transcendence ritual at 20.
• Pets and parties: give a tamed wolf or cat a class, and share spells with your party.

Settings

• Two difficulty dials: Class Pace sets how fast you progress, and Mob Threat sets how dangerous mobs are, from Easy to Expert.
• Hub and wheels: hold C for abilities and R for spells. K opens the Abyss Hub. Every key can be rebound.
• Lighting: HDR, SSAO, shadows from every light and light shafts, running alongside Embeddium and Sodium. Switch it with /salighting.
• Servers: allow_classless_players lets players keep all five senses while the world still comes for them.

From the Developer

This is a living project, and I'm open to criticism and new ideas. Join the Discord for roadmaps and polls. If you design a feature and DM it to me, it can go to an anonymous community vote, and if it passes I'll build it and credit you.

Pick a sense to lose. Learn to live without it.