Burrowers

Participant MCreator x CurseForge ModJam 2024

Villagers, Illagers, and now introducing: ¡Burrowers!

A hidden society of distant relatives of the villager has adapted to the lack of light underground by turning into molemen, hoarding any resources they find while tunneling and building their homes. They seem friendly enough, but... What could they be hiding?

This mod aims to utilize some of the newer Minecraft and MCreator features to bring a bit of life to the overworld caves. To make this possible, I teamed with my younger brother, RichyAp and we tried to add as much content as we could, opting for expanding on the game lore and gameplay while mantaining the vanilla feel. Aside from contributing many ideas, he worked on some of the assets and took it upon himself to build all of the structures featured in the mod. Without him this couldn't be possible, and it's always fun to do something together again!

Blocks & Items

Tough Roots & Rootwood

 The underground's main source of food. Break the roots that hang from the village ceiling to get a handful of them. While not having much nutritional value, you can find them really useful to build all the blocks and items you would expect from a new wood type, including Boats, Signs & Hanging Signs. 

Cave Fern

 A new vegetation block that can be potted and serves as decoration.
 

Lichen Lantern

 Burrowers don't really care for lights as glowing lichen grow rampant in their homes. But when they feel fancy, they hang a lichen lantern made from glass, iron, and said lichen. These emit a dimmer light than regular lanterns, but the glass exterior looks really good!
 

Cave Stew

 A nutritious meal made with a tough root, silver dweller meat, and any mushroom.

Haste Potion

 Haste potions can now be crafted by using either a dweller dung or its meat in an awkward potion over the brewing stand. There are also splash, lingering, and arrow variants.

Pottery Patterns

 Try to find the Wail and Memory pottery sherds! They seem designed by the burrowers, so what could these patterns mean for them? It also introduces a blank pottery sherd, which you can get by using the stonecutter with any other sherd.

Music Disc

 A new track called "Placebo", by my friend elgavira, listen to it here: Placebo on Youtube

Entities

The mod includes three different entities, all featuring custom sounds, animations and custom code for the AI, barter and trading system, all without requiring any other mods, not even geckolib! A lot of care went into these to make them feel as alive as possible given the limited time frame and my coding knowledge. The new creatures are the following:

Silver Dwellers

A bigger and domesticated silverfish. They are bred to help the burrowers build their villages and serve as a food source. They feed on different types of stone, and if they notice a stone block on the ground, they'll rush to eat it and will spit it out turned into its smooth variant. While doing this, they have a chance to drop a dung item. These creatures are neutral but will attack back any attacker, alerting other dwellers. They can be bred with live silverfish.

Silver Dweller Meat

 Dropped by silver dwellers. A viable food source.

Dweller Dung

 Functions like bone meal but for ore veins. Use it on an ore block to generate another one beside it. It generates murky ore blocks, which cannot be duplicated. It also has a chance to convert the original block into a murky one, but this won't affect its drop rates.

Murky Ore Variants 

 They have the same functionality as regular ores and deepslate ores. They only generate when you use the dweller dung.

Burrowers

The protagonists of this mod, featuring seven different variants! These creatures lurk underground in their own cities, mainly around their giant root trees. They may flee from you at first, but will stop running if you bring any fruit item in your hand. If you drop them any kind of fruit, they'll stop to inspect it and barter with you, playing a cute custom animation. The barter loot table is the following, ordered by rarity:

• Memory Pottery Sherd, Dweller Dung, Invisibility Potion, Invisibility Splash Potion, Emeralds, Shears, Murky Deepslate Redstone Ores, Silver Dweller Meat, Raw Iron, Rootwood Planks, Glow Lichen, Cave Fern, Raw Copper, Tough Root, Infested Deepslate Blocks, Clay Balls, Mud Blocks, Cobbled Deepslate

Chief Burrower

Meet the chief! In Burrower society, the wealthiest individual becomes the chief in charge of the town. You can find one per village, and they'll spend their time in the town market, where they store their goods. Unlike the regular burrowers, these won't chase any fruit themselves, but you can trade with them in a custom menu, featuring exclusive items and very useful trades. Here are the possible trades:

• Ender Eyes, Sculk Veins, Echo Shards, Lava Buckets, Silver Dweller Meat, Budding Amethysts, Glow Lichens, Placebo Music Disc, Cave Stews, Murky Deepslate Redstone Ores, Tough Roots, Deepslate Blocks, Wail Pottery Sherd, Infested Cracked Stone Bricks, Raw Gold, Sculk 

Burrower Village

The main event of the mod, a custom jigsaw structure with more than 25 possible pieces! They generate in taiga biomes deep under the surface. Full of loot to find and mysteries to uncover, the burrower village makes use of all of the tools MCreator provides to bring to the game a fun structure to explore. I wont spoil the content, so try to find all of the different rooms!

That's all!

Although it seems like a small mod, we made sure to put a lot of care and thought into all of the content. We spent the last month thinking every day about these creatures and how could they work in the Minecraft universe. Fun enough, I made the burrower model for the last MCreator modjam, in which I sadly couldn't participate. So, even if we don't end up winning, I wouldn't change this experience for anything. It has been a rough few years, but I haven't stopped working on the stuff i really like, even if it's adding bits and crumbs of content to my mods every once in a while. But working as a team and with a purpose has been very, very fun. I've improved and I plan on keep improving as I love this game and making content for it. 

Resources and final notes:

Curseforge (Curseforge page of the mod)

Modrinth (Modrinth page of the mod)

Kaupenjoe (Great general tutorials for minecraft modding introduction)

NorthWestTrees (Great jigsaw structure generation video guide)

GentlemanRevvnar (A very detailed jigsaw structure generation written guide)

MrCrayFish (For references on how to code a custom merchant)

Thanks to my brother Richy for spending a whole month working with me (It's not that easy).
To Fantasmiyo and Gavira for producing the best art and music for the mod.
Thanks to my friends Cruz, Key, and Neox for helping out whenever I needed it.

And thanks to the Minecraft Modding community for creating and keeping up my will to create.

- I love you all -