Sensory Abyss

The world takes a sense from you. Everything you learn after that is how to survive without it.

Official Discord — https://discord.gg/nAKVcFCJR3

A note from the developer

_This is my first mod, and it's still very much in progress. Visuals are being reworked over time, bugs are actively being hunted, and mechanics are being tuned as players find the rough edges. I'm wide open to criticism, suggestions, and new ideas. If something feels bad, tell me. If you want a feature, tell me that too. The mod will keep growing.

In the Discord I post what's planned, run polls on what people want to see added, and you can talk to me directly about how things feel, bugs, anything. I like the direction the mod is going, but reworks, new subclasses, new mechanics — none of it is off the table. If you want a feature you designed yourself in the mod, DM me; I'll bring it to a poll, and if it lands you get full credit. (I keep the polls anonymous because I think known names skew opinions — but if you want credit attached when I post, just say so.) _ What this mod is

Sensory Abyss is a horror-flavored overhaul that inverts vanilla progression. You don't start weak and get stronger. You start broken, permanently, in one specific way, and the game becomes about building a playstyle around the loss.

At character creation you choose an affliction. Whatever you pick, something is gone for good. Sight. Sound. Smell. Touch. Taste. Or, if you're feeling brave, all five.

What replaces the lost sense is the point of the mod.

The six afflictions

The Blinded — lost sight

The world is white fog. Your body replaces sight with echolocation, a constant sonar ping that highlights nearby entities in color-coded pulses. Beyond that, your skin drinks in light and darkness: stand in bright light to fill your Light bar, stand in the dark to fill your Dark bar, and cash each one in for permanent stat upgrades.

Radiant — light-pool AoE pressure. Searing pulses spam wide damage; supernovas burst and blind everything in range.

Shade — dark-pool precision assassin. Shadow-strike dashes to your target; Blackout creates a dark zone that grants stealth and supercharges Echo Vision.

The Deafened — lost hearing

You don't hear the world anymore, you steal its sound. Hold a key near living creatures and your body drains the noise out of them, filling your Resonance bar. That stolen Resonance fuels your abilities: shockwave cones, sonic pulses, ground slams, resonance bursts. What you steal also shapes what you become — sounds fall into five categories (aggression, predator, percussion, anguish, ambient), and each category evolves a different ability as you drain more of it.

Frequency Rider — kinetic shooter. Bouncing Echo Shots ricochet between enemies; Resonant Dash phases through fights. Combat builds Frequency stacks that scale movement speed, fire rate, and damage.

Harmonic — supportive song auras. Toggle Valor / Solace / Tempo to buff allies, build Crescendo on damage taken, and chain Cone-Pulse-Wave to trigger a Finale.

The Anosmiac — lost smell

You can't smell poison anymore, so you've become it. Your body adapts to everything it touches — toxins, gases, miasmas, spores — first surviving them, then thriving on them, eventually weaponizing them. The catch: adaptation is universal. Overuse a beneficial potion and your body builds tolerance to that too. Every consumable is a strategic decision.

Sporeweaver — toxic botanist. Grow plants from your body that change species based on the debuff active on you. Verdant Cataclysm roots a 12-block area while every plant in range auto-Blooms.

Miasma Walker — toxic exhaler. Inhale debuffs you carry and exhale them as zones with unique behavior per debuff type. Miasmatic Collapse deploys every mastered zone simultaneously in a 16-block burst at 2× debuff rate.

The Numb — lost touch

You can't feel pain, pressure, or temperature. Your body compensates by absorbing the materials around it. Hold a key on a block and become stone, iron, lava, obsidian, diamond — one material active at a time, each with its own element (earth, metal, fire, frost, crystal, organic, void) and its own adaptation curve from Raw to Mastered.

Both Numb subclasses gain Element Forging — your absorbed-material history physically forges itself into bound gear that grows with you. Five visual stages, tied to your total lifetime absorbs, that change as new material tiers unlock.

Monolith — defensive tank. A four-piece bound armor set (Crown / Carapace / Greaves / Treads) auto-equips and cannot be removed. Vanilla armor is silently refused. Fortify, Encrust, and Petrify scale with material tier; armor stacks up to T5 Exotic at full mastery.

Shardborn — offensive DPS. Twin bound swords appear in your hands and cannot be dropped or lost on death. Damage scales with your absorbed materials — but only while a Shardborn blade is in your main hand. Each blade is its own click: the mainhand swing leaves a short window where a second click fires the offhand manually. Material Strike, Shrapnel Burst, and Cataclysm punctuate the loop.

The Unfed — lost taste

You can't eat food. Food does nothing for you. Instead you scan the creatures around you, rip their essences out, and slot them into yourself. A creeper's HP, a witch's spell, a warden's damage — stack them, swap them, combine them. You are whatever you last consumed, and the more essences you burn through, the more slots and charges you unlock.

Apex Predator — hemokinetic hunter. Three blood-stances on [1] / [2] / [3] (Striker / Reaver / Drinker), each rebinding your V and C abilities to a different blood-magic technique and applying a different passive (solo damage / multi-target carve / lifesteal). Apex Form activates all three stances' passives simultaneously for 15 seconds.

Death Commander — necromancer. Raise minions from nearby corpses, command them mid-fight, and dismiss them for AoE explosions. Army of the Dead summons an undead horde from every corpse within 20 blocks for 60 seconds.

The Shattered — lost everything

All five afflictions, at full intensity, all the time. Permanent blindness, permanent deafness, permanent numbness, permanent anosmia, permanent hunger loss. You cycle which sense is "active" on a keybind, and that routing decides which toolkit your action keys run. No subclass. No specialization. The versatility is the class, and the difficulty is keeping five systems in your head at once.

(Shattered is still getting a rework — the five afflictions are staying, but it needs balance work now that the other classes' subclasses got their overhauls. It's playable as-is, and if you update mid-save your data, level, and progress carry over, and you'll be offered the new options.)

One more multiplayer note: if your group runs other RPG mods and one player wants a different class system entirely, server admins can enable allow_classless_players in the config. Then players get a Decline button on the selection screen, sit out the affliction system, and keep all five senses. The rest of the mod — senses simulation, food spoilage, horror director, magic — still works for them. Off by default, because the mod is designed around having an affliction.

Difficulty

There are four scaling modes. Medium is the baseline — no scaling either direction, the version of the mod I tune everything against. Easy softens it for newer players. Hard and Painful crank pressure, spawn rates, and horror intensity past where the baseline sits. After the recent rebalance, all four tiers shifted one step harder; the old Medium became the new Easy, so if "normal" used to feel comfortable, expect more bite.

Magic, built around senses

Magic is organized into five schools, one per sense, over 85 spells total. Spells are learned through rituals you draw in the world — altars, pedestals, chalk marks on the floor — and tracked in a grimoire. Mana, cooldowns, and spell mastery are all real.

Sight — radiance, shadow, spectral decoys, mirror images, eclipse magic. Sound — sonic weapons, resonance markers, banshee wails, harmonic shields. Touch — ice, frost, glacial mobility, frozen armor. Smell — toxins, spores, pheromone control, corrosive sprays. Taste — blood magic. Siphons, coagulation, crimson avatars, needle storms.

The horror layer

The mod ships with a real horror director, not a random jumpscare plugin. It reads your stress, the weather, the time of day, and what the world has thrown at you recently, and moves between phases:

Reprieve → Unease → Dread → Surge → Aftermath

What you hear changes with the phase. Ambience thickens. The mix gets wrong in specific, authored ways — footsteps where nobody is, doors that open on their own, a voice calling a name that isn't yours, a zone of absolute silence you walked into without noticing. Most of the time the mod is quiet. When it isn't, it's because something decided it shouldn't be.

Scares are rare by design. The horror is personal — whispers and private sounds route to you alone, never to the whole server. If something tells you it's coming from another player, that's a real player who's online right now.

Cursed items Some things ask if you'll carry them. Say yes and they don't let go — four soulbound items bind on accept and have to be cut off at a Ritual Altar with the Severing Rhyme. Real ritual, real components, not a menu option. The bindings give you something. They also take something. Worth it is your call.

Sleep and dreams Sleeping isn't a skip button anymore. A real dream cycle runs while you're under — quality is determined by what's in your bedroom, what's been done to you, and what you've done to yourself. Dreamcatchers, stuffed animals, cursed dolls, ward totems, fragrant herbs — each bed upgrade pulls dream quality in a different direction. Bad sleep bleeds into the morning. Good sleep is rarer than you'd want.

Hunters Specific horror entities exist outside the normal mob roster, and the director chooses when to seed them. They aren't replacement skeletons. They follow you, react to your senses, and end you on their own terms. The Shadowchild has stages; reaching its final stage means something. The Mimic doesn't spawn — it replaces.

Sanity A real bar that responds to what you see, hear, smell, and live through. It frays the world around you in tiers, not on a slider, and the highest tier doesn't ask before it kicks the door in.

The Labyrinth Past a certain point in the late game, the world opens into a place that wasn't on the map. The endgame ritual at the Ritual Altar can resolve in different endings; dying without the Crown flips the ending toward Fracture. The Crown Shard is the lever, banishment is one of the outcomes, and what you carry in determines what walks out.

A real sensory simulation under the hood

Underneath the horror and the classes is an actual simulation layer:

Scent trails you leave behind, decaying over time, blown around by wind, readable by mobs and by you.

A six-tier smell model — from trace to acrid — drives mob behavior, marks armor that's been worn too long, and pools in chunks the way a real smell would.

Vibrations from footsteps and impacts with realistic falloff. A five-tier sound model decides who hears what at what range.

Sound tracked as something the world emits, not just what the client plays. Diegetic breathing when you're scared, audible from outside your own head.

Weather and wind that feed into scent dispersal and the horror pacing.

Body response — heart rate, panic, and weight as real numbers that affect what you can do.

Distortion zones that warp a specific sense in a specific area.

Counters and countermeasures. Scent decoys, noise decoys, tanned leather, padded leather, sound-dampening blocks, flower-forest scrub, cauldron submerge to wash off scent, inventory contamination from carrying the wrong things, scent decals on the ground you can actually see.

Pets

Tame a wolf or a cat and pick a pet class for them — each with its own AI, stat table, and augment tree. Each class shapes the pet for a different job: holding a corner of Dread, tracking by scent, fading on command, lining up the kill so you don't have to. Stats roll on tame — build-driven, species-flavored, tier-scaled.

Commands take priority over class AI. Tell them to hold a position and they hold it.

Party play

The mod supports full multiplayer — PvP, PvE, or co-op — with a party system that exists for one main reason: telling friend from foe.

Form a party with other players and your abilities stop hurting each other. Your offensive spells pass through your teammates. Your healing and support abilities treat them as valid targets. Outside the party, everything works like normal — enemies are enemies, PvP is PvP.

Simple idea, but it's what makes a class-based horror mod actually playable with friends, or a PvP server where your party is genuinely your party and everyone else is fair game.

Lore

There is one. It's never explained to you.

What you'll find: numbered Lore Pages dropped by specific bosses, by the Stitched, and tucked into chests in the right places. Keystone poems unlocked at class and subclass milestones, collected in a Lore tab in the journal. None of it tells you what's going on. It tells you what someone, once, used to feel. Pull enough pages, run enough rituals, and the shape is there.

Optional companion shader pack

For the full atmospheric experience, the companion SenAbyssShader pack is on CurseForge — a modified Complementary Unbound (used and credited per the Complementary License) tuned specifically for this mod. Requires Oculus and Embeddium.

If you have a shader loader installed and the pack isn't there, the mod pings you in chat on join with a download link. If you're on a mod version below 1.9 that in-chat link won't be correct; the pack is here: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/shaders/senabyssshader

What else is in the box

Food corruption — food spoils in the world, in containers, and in your inventory. There's a preservation system. Spoilage pauses while nobody is online, so leaving for a day doesn't rot your stockpile.
Item corruption — long-worn gear wears down into the horror economy. It gives perks for use, and raises the chance of curses when you enchant it.
Environmental decay — wood rots in the open over time. (Not expanded on much yet.)
20-level progression tree — stat picks at L2/7/12/17, subclass at L3, combat style at L4, subclass passive at L5, augments at L6/10/14/18, corruption paths at L8/15/19, ability modifier at L9, spec path at L11, ultimate at L13, mastery at L16, transcendence at L20.
Subclass-specific Transcendence — at L20, every subclass has its own three picks. No more shared finale. A real choice between three real builds.
Late-game transcendence ritual — performed at a Ritual Altar with the required components. The L20 choice only unlocks after the ritual completes.
Dozens of consumables, accessories, and tools — flashlights with real batteries, smoke bombs that break scent trails, blood vials, sanity herbs, echo flares, scent decoys, noise decoys, blessing powder, fragrant herbs, dampening blocks.
Full HUD customization — every overlay is repositionable in-game, themed to the same parchment-and-cult-journal aesthetic the rest of the mod runs on.

Who this mod is for

People who want their character to feel like a specific person with a specific broken body.
Pick a sense to lose. Learn to live without it.

Feedback, bug reports, and ideas are welcome. This mod gets better when you tell me what doesn't work.