Loved Enhanced Hordes by nojustgavin but stuck on 1.20.1?
This is the same mod you remember, made for 26.x for both Fabric and NeoForge.

✨ Features ✨

Zombies dig up reinforcements — aggro’d zombies, husks, and drowned standing on grass, dirt, sand, mud, or gravel will start a 10-second dig animation and spawn a fresh zombie out of the ground

Hordes physically stack — mobs of the same kind climb on top of each other instead of jamming the same tile, letting them pour over walls

Hordes break weak blocks — leaves, crops, ice, dripstone, moss carpet, melon stems, and bamboo all get torn through (mobgriefing-respecting)

Skeletons swap weapons mid-combat — bow ↔ empty hand to back away, crossbow ↔ golden sword based on whether allies are nearby, with a brief “thinking” cooldown between swaps

Zombified piglins fire flaming arrows — when they swap to a crossbow, the shot ignites the target for five seconds

Skeletons and spiders leap — if their target is more than two blocks above them, they jump-boost toward it instead of pathfinding around

No more skeleton friendly-fire — skeletons, strays, and wither skeletons stop killing each other with crossfire

Iron golems regenerate — when no enemy is in their sight, they passively heal at a configurable level (0–255 via /gamerule)

Iron golems deflect arrows — 60% chance to ignore arrow and spectral-arrow damage outright

Iron golems shockwave — when a golem hits anything that’s targeting a villager or another golem, all nearby attackers take 5 damage and get launched up

Iron golems are immune to wither, poison, and levitation — and self-extinguish out of lava

Midnight horde spawner — on a configurable nightly chance (1-in-N), 100 mobs ambush the player from a random direction in the dark

Manual horde commands

/horde [count] for a 30–80 block ring

/horde clump [count] for a tight pile in front of you, 

/horde clump at <player> [count] to gift the cluster to someone else

Tune everything via gamerule: horde_multiplying, horde_stacking, iron_golem_regen_power, horde_spawner_chance

Server-side only — no client install needed, works on any vanilla 26.1.2 client

❓ FAQ ❓

Why isn’t the dig animation triggering for me?
Three things have to be true: the zombie has to be aggro’d (got a target), it has to be standing on grass / dirt / sand / mud / gravel, and the horde_multiplying gamerule has to be on (it is by default). Babies don’t dig. The chance is rare per zombie per tick, so a small group might wait a while — try /horde to spawn 100 at once.

Will the midnight horde spawn on day 1?
Only if you’re standing in the overworld when day-time hits 18000 and the chance roll succeeds. Default is 1-in-20 nights. Set /gamerule horde_spawner_chance 1 to make it every night, or 0 to disable entirely.

Can I disable individual behaviors?
Yes — every major mechanic is gated by a gamerule. Set horde_stacking false to stop the climbing pile-up, horde_multiplying false to stop dig reinforcements, iron_golem_regen_power 0 to stop golem regen, horde_spawner_chance 0 to disable the midnight ambush.

Does it run on servers without clients having the mod?
Yes. All behavior is server-side AI / event logic. No client-side rendering, mixins-into-input, or HUD elements — vanilla clients can connect normally.

Does it work with other mob mods?
The horde behavior triggers off horde_hoard:hordes and horde_hoard:horde_grave_robbers entity tags. Modded zombie-equivalents won’t dig unless they’re added to those tags via your own datapack — which is a one-line entity-tag JSON.

Can I add this to my modpack?
Yes. MIT licensed.

📜 Credits 📜

Original Horde Hoard mod (Forge 1.20.1) by nojustgavin — this is a multi-loader port to Minecraft 26.1.2 (Fabric + NeoForge) with new midnight-spawner mechanics and command tooling on top.

🐛 Bugs & Support 🐛

Report issues on the GitHub issue tracker. Please include your loader (Fabric / NeoForge), loader version, and a latest.log.