Grim Shadow

Your enemies leave more than loot behind.

Grim Shadow is a dark-fantasy mod for Minecraft 1.20.1 Forge. Reap creature shadows and borrow their abilities, care for unusual wildlife, experiment with alchemy, and eventually confront PLAYER — an opponent built around your own equipment and combat habits.

Version 0.2.0 brings those systems together through laboratories, crystal trading, and shadow-powered travel.

Build a fighting style from stolen shadows

Finish creatures with Grim Shadow weapons for a chance to harvest their shadows. Place special shadows in compatible weapon sockets to build your own set of abilities. Their charges are finite, and changing weapons does not bypass ability cooldowns.

Choose from five combat weapons:

• Scythe — heavy swings, crop harvesting, and two shadow sockets.
• Shadow Scythe — extended reach and three sockets.
• Reaper Sickle — fast single-target combat and one socket.
• Crescent Fang — successive hits on the same enemy reward a focused combo; it has no shadow sockets.
• Ravenwing Scythe — a heavy three-socket evolution with its own Umbral Cleave enchantment.

Eight creature shadows offer explosions, web tethers, teleportation, ground slams, sonic attacks, phantom dashes, warnings of nearby enemies, and a temporary shadow horde. Some also grant conditional passive abilities, such as gliding in darkness or extra armor when wounded. Defeating PLAYER unlocks a separate reward shadow.

A small ecosystem with a life of its own

Raise caterpillars, watch cocoons hatch, and discover three kinds of moth. Moths visit Shrape bushes, gather around soul lanterns, and seek shelter from rain. Wildlife rests, reacts to predators, and interacts with its surroundings.

The Gloam Jumper is a small jumping spider with four variants. Offer it land meat to tame a companion that can defend you. Feeding jumpers can also produce Gloam Web, a source of silk for your experiments.

Anemone Boxers inhabit reefs and deep oceans. These little crabs are territorial, but raw fish can make an individual trust you. They cannot be tamed like jumpers.

Alchemy you can experiment with

Grow Shrape, prepare syrup, brew potions, and turn Gloam Silk into Gloam Fluid in a water-filled cauldron.

At the Sciencebench, destroy moving particles to transmute compatible liquids. Reverse potion effects, turn Darkness into Holiness, or refine Gloam Fluid into Portal Fluid. Bottle an unfinished experiment to obtain both original and opposite effects, then return later to continue from the same progress. Instant-effect potions are excluded.

Create Shadow Crystal Clusters from amethyst, Shrape, and Gloam Silk. Mine them for shards used in crafting and trade. Cauldron hints tell you what you are making and how the brew is progressing.

Explore, trade, and make a way through

Search for Portal Laboratories in five variants, collect their supplies, and recover Circuits for the Gloam Conduit. Circuit is available as laboratory loot but remains a WIP crafting component, with no recipe of its own.

The rare wandering Grim Merchant buys and sells supplies for Shadow Crystal Shards. Reach its highest trade level to purchase a map leading to a Portal Laboratory.

• Gloam Conduit: one device, two fluids. Gloam shots suppress attacks or create temporary darkness; Portal shots establish a network of up to four portals. Manage two linked pairs, choose temporary or permanent portals, and travel between the Overworld, Nether, and End. Portals work on walls, floors, and ceilings.
• Shrapax: hold to charge, inspect your private trajectory, then release to travel through a delayed shadow-and-soul transition. Six charge stages and a configurable preview color help you choose your landing point.

Face what you taught to fight

Discover the Creeper, Spider, Enderman, Iron Golem, and Warden Shadows to craft the Grim Sigil. The ritual separates you from your body and begins the PLAYER encounter.

This boss wears your equipment and draws on your most-used active shadow abilities. Defeat it to reclaim your body. Encounter progress survives saving and restarting; the three additional creature shadows are not required to begin the ritual.

Also included

• Custom weapon enchantments and crop harvesting with automatic replanting.
• Connected Shadow Blocks and wall-mounted Scythe Holders.
• Darkness, Glowing, Absorption, Paralysis, and Holiness potions, with supported splash, lingering, and tipped-arrow variants.
• JEI brewing integration, progression advancements, English and Russian text, and the Enemy in Shadow music disc.
• Configurable creature spawning, shadow drops, ability balance, and other gameplay settings.

Installation

• Minecraft: 1.20.1
• Loader: Forge 47.4.10 or newer 47.x
• Java: 17
• GeckoLib: 4.8.4 or newer compatible 4.x, required on client and server
• Player Animator: 1.0.2-rc1 or newer compatible 1.x, required on clients only
• JEI: optional, for recipes and brewing

Install Grim Shadow and its required dependencies in your instance's mods folder. The mod supports singleplayer and dedicated servers; clients and servers must use matching Grim Shadow versions. Back up existing worlds before updating.

Configure singleplayer through Mods → Grim Shadow → Config. Server owners use config/grimshadow-common.toml.

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