What makes a good horror mod for Minecraft? I guess being scary is a good start. It’s also something that a surprising amount of mods seem to fail at. In part it’s because a lot of mods (looking at you, nearly every dweller mod) thinks that surprising it the same as scary.
Some gangly screaming cryptid running up to me at Mach 3, scaling a 50ft wall and immediately elbow-dropping me into the death screen is surprising… but not that scary? After once or twice, it just becomes and annoying interruption while you’re trying to build your garden’s ornamental water feature. Good horror mods however, manage to give the whole game a looming sense of dread. When done correctly, they can leverage the already kind of liminal space of a Minecraft world, into something genuinely threatening.
One horror mod that does this especially well, is wonderland.jar, an expansive, backrooms-esque hellscape hiding within a seemingly normal world.
Minecraft Mod Spotlight: wonderland.jar
What Is wonderland.jar? (Spoiler Free)
The mod wonderland.jar is a horror mod that adds a significant number of new worlds and entities that will change your player experience. I’ll go light on specifics about the exact contents here, in case you don’t want to be spoiled. We’ll just say that you may find you’re not alone in your world. You may also find, after certain actions, you’re not in your world at all. In those incidences, you’ll need to find your way back, and it’s not easy. For the vibe, think Backrooms, mixed with LSD Dream Emulator, mixed with The Broken Script, and you’re about there.
My Experience Of wonderland.jar
Now I’ve explained the general principle, I can go into my fairly average experience of the horror. From here on out there will be spoilers of the worlds, entities, and general unsettling events that take place as a result of the mod. If you want the full experience with no idea what you’ll run into, we’d suggest playing the mod before you read this. If you’re just eager to get a taste of what it’s like before you start playing though, you’ll find it below.
The First Days
The best, or worst thing about wonderland.jar is that the horror creeps up on you. I started my world to try out the mod, and everything was pretty normal. Deceptively so. I loaded in close to a small village and got to work on a small house just outside. The first couple of days passed quite normally.
It was around the fourth or fifth day, as I wandered off looking for some new trees, that I saw something like a player model, standing on a hill in front of me, looking like its face was censored out. I decided shortly after that, that that was enough exploring for the day.
A little after that, the chat messages began. Someone with no username started sending messages in the chat. (In single player.)
These weren’t just threatening chat messages, either. I could ask some questions and get responses. Just not responses that made it any easier to sleep at night. My messages are in bold, the other ‘player’s’ come in backwards, as shown.
Logs
Hello?olleHWho are you?dneirf_ruoYWhat do you want?pleh_ruoYHow can I help?wonk_t’nod_IWhere are you?uoy_gnihctaW
A some point, I was returning to my house with some materials, and looked towards the hill it sat next to to find a grotesquely elongated figure, like a player character model, stretched out. It hung in the air over the hillside, swaying slightly from side to side. It didn’t attack or anything. Just floated there. Somehow that felt kind of worse.
Despite these unnerving events, I built my house, made a nice checkerboard floor pattern, and spent most of my time looking around for iron ore, which seemed unreasonably sparse for an area with so many caves.
At one point, I was digging down into one of the deeper caves, and I watched as something started mining out of the cliffside below me. Heard the pickaxe noises and watched as one, then two blocks disappeared. I decided I did not want to know what was going to step out of this new tunnel, and quickly left.
It was a little after that that the dreams started.
The First Dream
One night, I headed to my bed. Things had been odd, but not much stranger than usual.
I went through the normal going to sleep animation. When I woke up, I wasn’t in my house. Instead, I was standing on a misty landscape, filled with rows and rows of blocky cobblestone buildings, all identical. In between them, large cobblestone crosses, like grave markers, had been cut out of the ground and stood up next to them. There were no trees. No wildlife. Only infinite rows of abandoned houses and grave markers. I walked through dozens of rows before… I was back in my player house. This turned out to be my first, surprising visit to one of the mod’s alternate worlds. It wouldn’t be the last.
Inconsistency
After this, the regular world got stranger. Each morning I’d find new structures that weren’t there before. In one place, a brick pyramid in a cave halfway up a cliff. Another, a cobblestone bridge across the river that stopped just short of my house’s garden. Further downriver, past the village, a tower appeared in the water, with a record player on top. Breaking into it revealed a chest with a record that played unsettling sounds. I felt very watched.
Still, I foolishly kept going to sleep as normal. The dream town was weird, but nothing that frightening, and it was over pretty quickly.
Then, one night, I woke up in another weird liminal space.
This time, I wasn’t transported back. I wandered along endless one-block wide walkways in a featureless void full of floating blocks. My one instruction was on a sign in front of me when I arrived.
JUMP JUMP JUMP
Eventually, with no sign I was getting back home any other way, I jumped.
Wonderland
I landed in a field of wheat. All of it was, sadly, not harvestable so I couldn’t obnoxiously horde it for infinite bread. The field extended right to the render limits in both directions. There was a windmill in the distance, which was the only visible landmark. It was quiet and uneventful, but had that liminal space dread to it that made me eager to leave. After a little bit of wandering about, I found a portal, and went to the next creepy dreamscape.
Only just realized looking at this screenshot now, there’s another entity on the left, just inside the fog.
Beyond the portal was a forest… kind of. Grass ground, and trees… that were all arranged into a perfect grid shape. It wasn’t reassuring. The fog was thick, and as I soon discovered as I started exploring, I was not alone. An impossibly tall, headless figure stood watching me from the end of the mist. I didn’t know what it would do if I got any closer, and decided I had no interest in finding out.
Eventually, I found a house with a bed, and hoped, foolishly, that if sleeping in a bed got me into this mess, then surely sleeping in a bed would get me out of it.
This turned out to be a mistake.
The Entity
Screenshots get a bit less common from here on out I’m afraid, mostly as after this point, I’m running for my life a lot of the time.
The next place I found myself was a snowscape at night. In front of me was a towering tree, lit up with different colors. At the foot of it were chests, with a bunch of valuable items. As the Minecraft loot goblin I am, I immediately started stuffing my inventory with everything I could carry. Shortly after though, my relative good mood at finding treasure was obliterated when I climbed the tree, and saw a tall, dark figure ambling towards me across the snowscape. Tall as two people, with three eyes in its face and no other features. The sound changed and eyes flashed on my screen.
I booked it across the snow.
Minecraft horror rarely gives me much pause, but the lack of any house to run back to, any cliffs to dig into… it got me more worried than usual. So when I found a house with a portal in, I threw myself into that without too much thought.
The next area was a house. Well, the kind of house that seems to have no notable exit, not enough lights, and the sound of something opening and closing doors. I wandered there for a while, and didn’t even see what snuck up on me, until-
The Bottom
The next place was hell. A black sky, endless stone, and, to my increasing dread, the same tall, three-eyed sin against god that had chased me across the snowscape. Now with far fewer options and just about nowhere to hide. So instead, I ran away, through endless corridors, the thing in hot pursuit as I looked one way and the other for literally anything to get myself out of the situation. Eventually, one of the side chambers in this enterally generation nightmare contained a pit in the floor, surrounded by suspicious red stains. It was about as unsettling an exit as you could get, but anything seemed more appealing than letting the gangly hellspawn get me, so death pit it was.
I found myself in more dark, bedrock hallways. On the upside, there wasn’t some gangly demon giving chase. I moved out of the first room, rounded a corner, and came face to face with a portal. Well, might as well…
Then, I was stood on my bed, in my house, next to the village. It was an ordinary Minecraft morning, and the chickens were making a racket.
Out Of Wonderland (For Now)
A regular visitor, now.
As of my last session, I’m back in the regular world, with my house, items, and half a dozen chickens.
It is decidedly not over.
Things aren’t the same. Events are even stranger than before. More entities have infiltrated the overworld, and these are much more aggressive than before my escape from Wonderland. Nights have become a potentially-lethal experience, with things flinging open doors and staring through my windows. I had to build a new floor on the house, only accessed by ladder. Still, getting near the windows or ceiling risks getting within the reach of the monsters outside. Sleeping risks another trip through Minecraft’s backrooms, but that’s starting to feel inevitable.
One way or another, Wonderland won’t let you get away.
How To Play wonderland.jar
If the story of my trip through Minecraft purgatory made you think ‘I want to do that’, then you’re probably wondering how to play the mod. It’s available both on Curseforge, and Modrinth at the moment. You can probably find multiple modpacks that have it, though I was using Curseforge, and my modpack of choice was A Virtual Wonderland.
I hope you found all of this as interesting to read as I did to make. This feature turned out a bit more extensive than I initially planned, but it was nice to have a chance to talk about a genuinely interesting mod. If you have read this, I’m delighted. More readers help us make more content like this, which I love making. If you’re interested in reading some more features, we have one on the best horror games on itch.io, which might interest you if you’re playing creepy, liminal Minecraft mods.
The post Minecraft Mod Spotlight: wonderland.jar – Liminal Space Hell appeared first on Gamezebo.
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