In my Minecraft mod spotlight series so far, I’ve covered a few individual mods. This week I’m trying something a little different and looking at a modpack instead. For the uninitiated, modpacks are curated selections of mods intended to create a cohesive major rehaul to the game. In some cases, it can feel like playing a completely different game. Here, the object of my curiosity is Dread Reborn, an extensive modpack made with the specific intent of giving you the heebie-jeebies. So, was I scared, should you play it? Time to find out.
Minecraft Mod Spotlight – Dread Reborn Modpack
Let’s go.
What Is The Dread Reborn Modpack?
Full of spooky guys.
Dread Reborn is a Minecraft Modpack assembled to turn Minecraft into a horror game, essentially. It appears to air to be a cohesive set of spooky mods with the intent of giving you an unsettling and oppressive experience, as you find yourself lost in a wilderness brimming with monsters and unsavoury characters. There are some famous, or infamous mobs in here, like an improved version of the Cave Dweller. There’s the creepy little stalker The Knocker (not The Obsessed this time), and there’s the mod I have a very antagonistic relationship with, The Man From The Fog. (I’m not a fan, and not because I think it’s scary.)
The entities in the modpack include, but are not limited to.
Assimilated DwellerBetter Cave DwellerDISTURBEDGhost PlayersThe AnomalyThe Man From The FogThe KnockerThe Midnight Lurker
My Experience With Dread Reborn
Serious cows.
Full disclosure before we begin. I played the earlier versions of the modpack (before the ‘Reborn’ got added to the title image) back a while ago, and I wasn’t a massive fan. I spawned somewhere incredibly foggy but otherwise indistinct, made a house out of a hole in a cliff, avoided venturing very far because it was near impossible to see anything, until something that shrieks and runs around rocked up and instakilled me. That is, I didn’t find it all that scary.
Booting up Dread Reborn, I noted that the fog was, most definitely, back. I noted it with some dismay. I will say for anybody who is similarly not a fan of a really short render distance and finds stumbling around in misty woods more aggravating than atmospheric, there is a packaged shader option that eliminates it entirely. You can switch to that and get a much prettier view of the world and its horrors. The majority of the screenshots I used are done with those shaders, for the sake of having a little more to show you.
Regardless of my feelings on fog or lack of it, I did find the visuals (when I could see them) pretty neat in general. The modpack uses a modified version of the Patrix texture pack, which looks great and gives everything a less toony, more PS1 horror game vibe that really compliments the game, especially with the extra animations. You will occasionally see a not-included mob wandering about in all its cartoon glory, but generally it looks very nice. The only major downside of the textures is it’s definitely harder to find ores, but that might appeal to you.
Making Camp
Dread Reborn starts you off with a class selection. This determines your starting equipment. Naturally, I picked the one with the gun, as that seemed the most useful item I could have in the cryptid-infested woods. And it’s pretty much always woods. As far as I can tell, this modpack spawns you in a forest. I tried about five times and always ended up in a hilly, wooded area.
In the one I stuck with, I wandered for a short period before finding a village. The villages in Dread Reborn are… odd. Regular villagers are missing, but Guard Villagers, individuals with armor and weapons, wander around listlessly. It makes the village feel a lot more tetchy.
I still stole their stuff.
A little beyond the village, I found a watchtower. These structures are a mod made for the modpack and they are a great pick for a base. The non-ruined variant comes with all the basic crafting conveniences, a bed, and storage with some useful things inside. They keep you elevated away from the beasties, and they’re visible from a long way off. (Fog permitting.) I moved into that quickly and got settled in. The modpack includes Farmer’s Delight, which comes with a cooking system and scattered wild crops. Weirdly enough, between the dangers, and the hunger/thirst mechanics, I felt into more of a cosy game cycle than I would normally. Fishing, foraging for vegetables, cooking things in a cooking pot. It would be very relaxing if not for the monsters.
Spooky Happenings
Uh… hey there Steve,
I was pleased to find that I wasn’t immediately swarmed by creepypasta monsters as soon as the sun went down. In fact, I got through the first night with minimal horrible things. Over the first few days, my door opened on its own a few times, that was about it. One important thing about Dread Reborn is that the modpack disables most normal hostile mob spawns, so the place is eerily quiet a lot of the time.
Occasionally, I’d be walking and the view would darken, strange particles floating across the corner of my viewpoint.
One night I tried falling asleep to see something looming over the bed, peering at me.
Then, one morning, I found a dead body outside my house, its head stuck on a pole. Huh. It spawned on ice, and was impossible to remove so I had to get used to be unpleasant piece of garden decor for the the rest of the playthrough. It came with horrible dripping noises, and an ominous message about the stench of decay when I got close.
After a little while, nighttime would often bring strange creatures lurking around the bottom of the tower. Most were easily avoided if I returned home before nightfall. Some of the more troublesome ones came in more unpredictable forms…when it rained. One of the mods included in Dread Reborn is Beware The Rain, which summons nasty things when rain starts. This means that there’s never a zero chance of getting caught in some horrible situation. I made some pretty panicked runs back to the tower with small spider creatures nipping at my ankles.
The Inevitable Instakills
My experience started pretty subtle… but it didn’t entirely stay that way. I was a few days in before my first death, when The Knocker charged into my house and stabbed me to death in my kitchen. Rude.
The second was an incident with a Fear The Rain entity ‘Vapor’, that I cannot for the life of me work out how to counteract. Spooky sounds started while I was in my house. A scary face popped up, and I died. Huh.
A few of the entities in the modpack, especially Vapor who would become an ongoing menace to me, do suffer from the problem of being able to inexplicably kill you in ways that are very difficult to counter. While that might seem scary on paper, there was kind of a lack of tension to it given I was pretty sure I was going to get stomped as soon as I got their cues, and just checked to make sure I hadn’t changed my spawn point. In my opinion, these also make it pretty unsuitable for hardcore runs without tweaking some of the mode, as a sudden unpredictable demise with permadeath would be pretty rage-inducing.
I Cast Gun
Don’t mind the stains.
The modpack also includes the TaCZ Gun mod. I had a rifle from my starter kit that proved pretty hand for sniping The Horrors from the comparative safety of my watchtower. The downside was the limited ammunition available to me. So, filled with dreams of a plentiful supply of monster-killing rounds, I set out to put together an ammo crafting bench and set it up in my little base… only to realize something with increasing dismay. There were no regular mob spawns. No regular mobs meant no creepers. No creepers meant no gunpowder. Ano gunpowder meant no bullets. There might be an alternate source that I didn’t find during my time with the modpack, though the only way I could find to get gunpowder was looting other lookout towers, which often involved going far out of the way, and would get progressively less worth the returns over time. This was a little sad as the gun mechanics provided by TaCZ seemed really solid, and sometimes taking potshots at the cryptids was an entertaining way to spend a night while waiting for The Knocker to come stab me again.
Is It A Good Modpack?
All in all I enjoyed playing Dread Reborn, especially once I’d made a few tweaks to suit my own playstyle. It does suffer from a few of the Minecraft horror pitfalls, where things with scary faces instakill you. It does, however, bring with it a unique vibe that gives it a very different experience, almost like a completely different game compared to vanilla Minecraft. If you want to feel like a lone (or group) or survivors in a monster-infested wilderness, waving shotguns at the skinwalkers in the trees and telling them to get off your lawn before going back to check on the honey cookies in the over, then Dread Reborn might be for you. I’d recommend looking at it as a set of features that you can enable or disable as you see fit, so you can tailor it to your tolerance for fog, certain monsters, and anything else.
You can find it on Curseforge.
Hope you enjoyed this feature! I’ve also done one pretty recently on The Obsessed, and there are more in the works as we speak.
The post Minecraft Mod Spotlight: Dread Reborn Modpack appeared first on Gamezebo.
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