THIS IS NOT DWELLER SLOP NOR PNG SLOP!

This uses a real blender 3D model and has a neural network coded into the .jar file.

The Hunter

The Hunter

There is one of them.

It doesn't spawn in groups. It doesn't wander around looking for something to do. It won't lose interest because you walked 40 blocks away and stood behind a tree.

It picks you, and then it comes.

How it works

Every three in-game days it starts hunting. The first one lands on day 3, so you get a little while to get set up first. You'll know when it starts, because the game tells you.

The approach begins up to a thousand blocks out. That far away it isn't a real entity yet (nothing would tick, your game would just eat itself), so it moves as a position on the map until it's close enough to matter. Then it actually turns up.

Once it's near, it stops walking at you in a straight line. It looks for cover. It works out what you can and can't see from where you're standing, stays out of torchlight, and holds a distance where it can watch you without being obvious about it. If you're inside a house, it will come through a window.

It learns you

This is the part that took the longest.

There's a small neural network in the mod, written from scratch with no libraries, that watches how you move and predicts where you're about to be. It uses that to cut you off instead of chasing your back. It costs about 8 microseconds a tick, so it isn't going to hurt your framerate.

It also keeps notes on you. Which direction you run when you panic. Whether you always end up back at the same base. How often you turn around to check behind you. How long it takes you to notice it standing there. If you have a habit, sooner or later it will mention it.

It's about five blocks tall, and it knows it

Your door is two blocks. It doesn't just climb over that problem — it gets down and crawls through, and there's a different crawl depending on how much headroom it has. Watching it fold itself down to fit under a ceiling and then stand back up on the other side is the thing most people notice first.

It climbs walls when it needs to get up somewhere. It swims, and it's faster in water than you are. There isn't really a direction that works.

Fighting back

You can kill it. It's not easy and it isn't supposed to be.

Every 30 damage staggers it, and it drops for six seconds. Don't get excited — you can't hit it while it's down. That's its recovery, not your opening. You're going to be at this a while.

If you manage it, it drops a Hunter's Tooth. One tooth and one stick makes a Hunter's Sword: 9 damage, 2.5 attack speed, repairable with more teeth. Stronger than anything vanilla, because you can't farm the ingredient. There's one Hunter, it comes every three days, and it has to die first.

There are also flares to keep it back and a disruptor to blind its tracking, if you'd rather not fight it at all.

Other things worth knowing

• Everything it does is hand-animated. Walking, running, climbing, swimming, crawling, three different flinches when you hit it, and a kill animation you'll see more than you'd like.
• Its head tracks you independently of whatever else it's doing. It can be mid-swing, mid-crawl, mid-anything, and still be looking directly at you.
• You can't place or break blocks during a hunt. No sealing yourself in a dirt box.
• Everything goes dark once it's within 30 blocks.
• Four difficulty tiers, and pretty much every number is in the config. Speed, distances, how often it hunts, whether it hunts at all.

Optional: it can actually talk

If you want, you can hook it up to an AI model and talk to it in chat. Press O in game and pick a provider (Google AI Studio, Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic, or anything OpenAI-compatible). It knows what it is and it stays in character.

You bring your own API key. It's off by default and the mod works perfectly well without it, so ignore this section entirely if it isn't your thing. Your key is stored in the mod config folder, not inside your world save, so it won't get dragged along if you share the world.

Coming soon

The Stalker. A second one. Different rules. That's why the creature in this mod got renamed to the Hunter — the name was being saved.

Tools and dimensions and a new entity other than the hunter or stalker

Forge 1.20.1. Singleplayer and servers. Headphones recommended, and I'm sorry in advance.