Federation Of Kaos: Outbreak Protocol

Survive an outbreak that is paying attention.

Outbreak Protocol is the pressure layer of the Federation Of Kaos modpack. It owns the infected: a roster of common zombies and seven Special Infected, what they hear, how they coordinate, and an Outbreak Director that turns your noise into hordes and ends quiet stretches on its own schedule. On your side it owns infection, a 24-hour clock that ends with you rising as a zombie in your own gear, the cure chain, and a few survivor tools: a safety dome, a bedroll and a gate into the Lost Cities.

Difficulty never comes from bigger numbers. The Director changes when, how many and which, never health or damage, and every horde can be traced to something you did.

It comes with:

• Infected that hear sprinting, mining, gunfire and explosions, and gather into herds 👂
• Four common infected and seven Special Infected, each with a tell and a counter 🧟
• The Outbreak Director: a noise budget, a tension meter, horde events and a guaranteed respite 🎚
• Hordes of up to 60 that arrive from out of sight, with a heat meter so you can watch them coming 🌊
• Infection with a 24-hour clock, symptoms in stages, and an undead transformation 🩸
• A cure chain: Penicillin, Nutrient Broth, the Outbreak Vaccine and the Vaccine Injector 💉
• The Perimeter Beacon safety dome, the Sleeping Bag and the City Waystone ⛺
• Forge-only, with every integration optional and a per-world config for every number 🧩

👂 The infected hear you

Every zombie is infected: vanilla zombies, husks, drowned and modded zombies all get the Outbreak behaviours, never spawn as babies, and do not burn in daylight. They investigate noise. Walking is silent. Sprinting, breaking blocks (stone is louder than dirt), gunfire and explosions each carry a radius, and a Screamer's howl carries furthest of all. When one infected finds a target, idle infected nearby join it; noise targets chain the same way, and idle infected drift together into herds. At night they move 25% faster.

The four commons read at a glance: the Shambler (vanilla), the fast and fragile Runner, the aggressive Infected Feral, and the slow, tanky Outbreak Zombie whose bite infects six times out of ten. All four spawn in every overworld biome, day and night, and player-placed light still spawn-proofs an area.

🎚 The Director: noise has consequences

The Director is a server-side pacing system in the spirit of Left 4 Dead's AI Director, with two inputs that are kept deliberately separate:

• The noise budget is yours. Every noise you make adds to it and it decays over time. Sprinting alone can never summon a horde; about a minute of continuous stone mining can; around sixteen unsuppressed shots in twenty seconds will. Suppressed fire costs a quarter as much, and energy weapons cost nothing. When the budget overflows, a horde fires, anchored on the last loud noise rather than on you, so running from the sound of your own gunfire works.
• The tension meter is the Director's. It reads nearby infected, damage taken, low health, infection and specials, and drives a BUILD_UP / SUSTAIN / FADE / RELAX cycle. After any horde comes RELAX: a guaranteed quiet window where the Director spends nothing. In BUILD_UP, long quiet stretches climb a ladder, cheapest first: a patrol nudge, a trickle of one or two infected, then a single Special Infected.

Hordes start at 24 infected at night (up to 60 for a group), arrive out of sight 32 to 56 blocks away over ten seconds, walk in with a shared destination, and clean themselves up when the event ends. They never spawn inside a Perimeter Beacon dome and never force chunks to load. Players within 96 blocks share one Director, one budget and one set of caps, so a group is not four times the spawns.

You can see it all: a NOISE heat bar above the food row fills as you get loud, a low roar and a chorus of zombie voices mark the moment a horde fires, Something heard that flashes under the crosshair, and the bar becomes a pulsing HORDE bar while the event runs. During an event, noise costs nothing, so fighting the horde never calls the next one.

🧟 Seven Special Infected, each with a tell

Specials are placed by the Director, capped per type, and announced before they can hurt you. Each wears another mob's body so its silhouette is the warning, and each has one hard counter that is a skill or a resource, never a stat check.

• Brute (golem frame, 55 HP): breaks doors in two seconds on any difficulty and charges after a roar, slamming you into walls. Sidestep and punish the overshoot.
• Screamer (hound frame, 14 HP): howls on sight. Three completed howls, fifteen seconds apart, bring a horde; the second marks your position. Between howls it rushes you once and runs. Kill it before the third howl.
• Stalker (enderman frame): cloaked and near silent until it is close, then a hiss and a pounce that pins you for two seconds. Shoot it out of the air, or make it miss and it lies exposed.
• Spitter (creeper frame): arcing acid that leaves a pool on the floor, and it aims at the feet of anyone who stands still. Move.
• Lasher (drowned frame): a wet, rattling cough you can hear across a building, then a tether from up to 24 blocks that reels you in. Break line of sight, shoot it, or have a teammate cut the line.
• Bloater (ravager frame): no real damage, only bile. Retch or death-burst marks you for 30 seconds, every idle infected within 96 blocks beelines to you and a horde follows you. Its burst also takes the cover around it. Kill it at range, and wash bile off in water.
• Death Bat: a burning bat the size of a dog that dives, bites and sets you alight, placed in packs of three. Water does not put it out, fire cannot hurt it, and it explodes when shot down, so drop it away from your wall.

Control effects never stack and never last more than two seconds (the Lasher's tether breaks the moment line of sight does). No special can push, pull or pounce you into lava, water or the void. While anyone in your group is badly hurt, the Director places no specials at all.

🩸 A bite starts a clock

Any infected hit that lands may infect you, from 7% for a vanilla zombie to 60% for an Outbreak Zombie. Then the clock runs: 24 in-game hours. No symptoms for the first six, then Slowness, then Infection Sickness and extra hunger at twelve, worse at eighteen. At 24 hours, or the moment you drop to half a heart, you die and rise as an Undead Survivor wearing your gear, with four times a zombie's health. Your real gear stays in your corpse.

• Penicillin (bread and a brown mushroom) and Nutrient Broth (water, sugar, bone meal) each add six hours back. Neither is used up when you are not infected.
• The Outbreak Vaccine (broth, penicillin, an injector) cures after a three-second held injection.
• The Vaccine Injector (vaccine plus injector) cures and grants 30 real minutes of immunity. Take it before a fight.

Infection Sickness is its own effect, not Poison: milk, poison immunity and generic cleanses do nothing. Only the vaccine chain cures, and an infection readout on the HUD shows the stage and the countdown.

⛺ Survivor tools

• Perimeter Beacon: a craftable safety dome. No hostile mob spawns within 32 blocks of it, from the beacon's level upward. One active beacon per player; placing another moves your dome. Mobs can still walk in, and the Director never places anything inside one. Right-click it to trace the dome in particles.
• Sleeping Bag: skips the night like a bed but never sets your respawn point. A camp, not a home.
• City Waystone: a gate between the Overworld and the Lost Cities dimension. Into the cities it finds a city centre; back out, it returns you to the gate you used. Needs Lost Cities, and its recipe needs TaCZ.
• Accessories screen: with Legendary Survival Overhaul installed, a ring-icon button on the inventory opens head, necklace, two ring, body, belt and charm slots, so LSO's wearables work without Curios.
• Toasted Bread and the Field Ration, a recipe for gunpowder (flint, two sugar, three charcoal) and leather smelted from rotten flesh.

In structures from Survival Instinct, Outbreak also seeds chests with rare TaCZ guns and Kaos Protocol gun parts, and the Brute, Screamer, Spitter and Stalker drop gun parts on top of zombie loot when those mods are installed.

🛠 Commands and config

• /outbreak director status | tension | phase | budget | horde | special | specials | reset (operators): read the Director's state, force a phase, set the budget, or call a horde or a specific special for testing.
• world/serverconfig/fok_outbreak_protocol-server.toml holds every number: infection chances and timings, noise radii and weights, spawn weights per infected, herd and group behaviour, the Director's budget, tension, phase and ladder values, horde sizes and placement, the per-type special caps and cooldowns, and each special's own tuning. directorEnabled and specialsEnabled switch the Director and the special roster off per world. Night light attraction and wandering patrols ship off by default and can be switched on.

✅ Requirements

• Minecraft 1.20.1 with Forge 47 or newer. No required dependencies.
• Optional, found at runtime: TaCZ (gunfire noise, the City Waystone recipe, gun loot), The Lost Cities (City Waystone travel), Legendary Survival Overhaul (Accessories screen, loot), and the Federation Of Kaos mods below.
• Install on both the client and the server; the versions must match.

Part of Federation Of Kaos

Outbreak Protocol is the threat in the Federation Of Kaos modpack, a post-apocalypse survival shooter set in ruined Lost Cities. There it sits on top of Legendary Survival Overhaul, which owns thirst, temperature and limb damage, and it is wired into the other FOK mods: Kaos Protocol reports silencer-aware gunfire to the noise system, Carry Pack's Quiet Straps lower your sprint noise, Augment Protocol's Life Support III suppresses infection symptoms without stopping the clock, Kaos Missions borrows its hordes and domes, and Kaos Hunter's Broker sells the Vaccine Injector. Other mods may mitigate an Outbreak system; none may switch it off. It runs on its own in any Forge 1.20.1 pack, and you are welcome to include it in yours.