Hostile Water Monsters

This modification adds various hostile creatures inhabiting aquatic environments to Minecraft. Each of them possesses unique behavior, appearance, and drop system, with some changing their characteristics depending on the biome.

River Guardians

These creatures represent smaller and weakened versions of ocean monument guardians that sometimes drop fishing trophies. They spawn in rivers, ocean bottoms, lakes, ponds, and flooded caves.

There are four varieties of river guardians, each with their own habitat preferences, diet, and aggression level. These creatures are territorial and will fight other river guardians, especially of different species, to the death, except during rainy weather. They also attack large creatures intruding into their territory. Starting from version 1.0.0.9, iron golems now attack river guardians when possible.

Regular river guardians have reddish skin with yellow spines. They spawn in temperate waters and hunt cod, squid, and small creatures such as pigs, chickens, rabbits, and children near water.

Icy river guardians have ice-blue color with reddish spines. They inhabit cold waters and hunt salmon, squid, chickens, rabbits, and children near water. This is the least aggressive species of river guardians.

Fiery river guardians spawn in warm or hot waters. They hunt cod, squid, chickens, rabbits, and children near water and are the most aggressive among river guardians.

Albino river guardians inhabit deep dark places and hunt cod, child zombies, and bats near water. They are more aggressive than regular river guardians but less aggressive than fiery ones.

River Guardian Drops

River guardians drop fish meat, sometimes fishing junk or treasures, and river guardian scales. Scales can be used by modpack creators to implement custom quests and recipes. They can also be crafted into prismarine crystals or smelted into purple dye. River guardian glands temporarily grant underwater/night vision for a short time.

Slippery Biters

These small and medium hostile fish spawn in temperate and warm humid areas, around sunken ruins and ships, and rarely in swamps. They are usually solitary but protect each other when attacked. They are aggressive towards players who come too close. They can be heard by their characteristic teeth chattering before becoming visible.

Sometimes they may spawn in a larger, slightly more dangerous form. They deal moderate damage and represent more of a hazard than a threat in small numbers.

Special Attacks

Slippery biters swim slowly but possess the ability to suddenly slip behind the player from a short distance without warning. This can turn a small easy battle into a serious threat if there are other slippery biters nearby. Starting from version 1.0.0.9, they have a short cooldown between uses of this ability.

Starting from version 1.0.0.9, iron golems now kill slippery biters when possible.

Slippery Biter Drops

Slippery biters drop fish meat, sometimes fishing junk and rarely fishing treasures. They also drop slippery biter glands and slippery biter scales. Scales can be used by modpack creators to implement custom quests and recipes. Scales can also be crafted into prismarine scales or smelted into light blue dye. Slippery biter glands provide a short random teleport, similar but not identical to chorus fruit, and also provide some nutrition.

Gurty

Gurty Video

Gurty Features

Gurty is a small or medium spiny amphibious creature. They are moderately aggressive in bright light and aggressive in darkness and during rain. Before becoming angry, gurties sometimes make warning sounds to scare off approaching creatures. When a gurty becomes angry, parts of its body begin to glow from within, and spines deploy from its back. Spines deal thorn damage to melee attackers when deployed. Note: It's difficult but possible to sneak up behind a gurty without provoking its anger!

Habitat

Gurties typically inhabit beaches and swamps. But less frequently, they can be found near rivers and ponds. Sometimes they are found in flooded caves.

Behavior

Gurties move slower on land and are quite agile in water. They spend their days playing and hunting in water, often scouring the bottom for a while and then rising to the surface. At night, they wander both on land and in water. Gurties will likely look different (and possibly behave slightly differently) in desert/savanna, cold biomes, underground caves.

Nesting

Gurties are nesting creatures. Their nests look like a clump of dense brown grass. Fishing trophies drop from nests. Gurties periodically return to their nests, usually right before dusk and immediately after dawn. Gurties pursue and kill anything they see near their nests that doesn't escape. When they die, the nest crumbles and disappears.

Combat

By default, gurties deal moderate damage and have moderate health. But their thick skin and rubber-like protective layers provide them significant damage reduction from explosions and projectiles. They are immune to poison and have a weak poisonous bite. Gurties deal slightly more damage in water. Iron golems instinctively hate gurties, although villagers have learned a secret trick that prevents gurties from ever attacking villagers. Gurties ignore wandering traders but can be harsh on llamas.

Gurty Drops

Gurties drop leather, disgusting raw rotten flesh, tasty pork-like meat when they burn to death, and gurty guts—which are custom quest/ingredient items, can be crafted into string, and which are edible food that can be eaten anytime without slowing movement.

Gurty glands are edible food that grants water breathing for a short time.

Poisonous Watersnakes

These small and medium hostile green snakes spawn near ponds, rivers, and swamps. They are solitary. Their hides can be combined to make leather.

Watersnakes prefer to keep their distance and spit poison. The poison spit has a kickback—very weak melee damage that can finish off a severely weakened enemy.

However, watersnakes also have a poisonous bite that deals solid melee damage.

Watersnake Drops

Watersnakes drop scaly hide that can be smelted into a small piece of leather. Four such pieces can be combined into a normal piece of leather. They can be crafted into cyan dye.

Watersnake glands are edible food that grants a short burst of super-fast swimming.

Configuration

Configuration file parameters allow you to set how common hostile water mobs are in the mix.

Weight 80 is "common", weight 40 is "uncommon", weight 10 is "rare". But if they are the only mobs in a structure or biome, this doesn't matter.

Spawn cap 17 means "there can only be 17 in the entire game". If there are no other water monsters at all and hostile water mobs seem too common, you may want to reduce this to 8-10.

Slippery biters have a limit of one per chunk (though they may move together after spawning).

River guardians have a limit of one per chunk and are hostile to each other unless it's raining.

["Hostile Water Mobs"."Hostile Water Mobs - General"]

There are two general parameters. Block light level allows blocks emitting light to block spawning. These include torches, lanterns, lamps, etc. This is a way to make player areas safe.

#blockLightLevel from light emitting blocks that prevents spawn
#Range: 1 ~ 15
blockLightLevel = 7

#Debug Level: 0 = Off, 1 = Log, 2 = Chat+Log
#Range: 0 ~ 2
debugLevel = 0

["Hostile Water Mobs"."Hostile Water Mobs - Gurty"]

Gurty parameters.

#gurtySpawnCap
#Range: 1 ~ 100
gurtySpawnCap = 9

#gurtyBaseDefense
#Range: 2 ~ 10
gurtyBaseDefense = 2

#gurtyBaseHitPoints : note- this doesn't seem to work.
#Range: 0 ~ 100
gurtyBaseHitPoints = 18

#gurtyNestDistance
#Range: 2 ~ 15
gurtyNestDistance = 6

#gurtySpawnWeight
#Range: 0 ~ 500
gurtySpawnWeight = 80

["Hostile Water Mobs"."Hostile Water Mobs - Slippery Biter"]

Slippery biter parameters.

#slipperyBiterSpawnWeight
#Range: 0 ~ 500
slipperyBiterSpawnWeight = 80

#slipperyBiterSpawnCap
#Range: 1 ~ 100
slipperyBiterSpawnCap = 17

["Hostile Water Mobs"."Hostile Water Mobs - River Guardian"]

River guardian parameters.

#riverGuardian attack SoundRange in meters. default is 17 meters. 0 turns off attack sound unless the river guardian is attacking the player.
#Range: 0 ~ 24
riverGuardianSoundRange = 17

#riverGuardianSpawnCap
#Range: 1 ~ 100
riverGuardianSpawnCap = 21

#riverGuardianSpawnWeight
#Range: 0 ~ 500
riverGuardianSpawnWeight = 80

#riverGuardianPreysOnVillagerChildren = true
riverGuardianPreysOnVillagerChildren = true

["Hostile Water Mobs"."Hostile Water Mobs - Watersnake"]

Watersnake parameters.

#watersnakeSpawnWeight
#Range: 0 ~ 500
watersnakeSpawnWeight = 80

#watersnakeSpawnCap
#Range: 1 ~ 100
watersnakeSpawnCap = 17

["Hostile Water Mobs"."Mod Structure Boost - Add Zo,Sk,W0"."16 to modded structures"]

#modStructureBoost
#Range: 0 ~ 100
modStructureBoost = 10

#squidSpawnBoost
#Range: 1 ~ 100
squidSpawnBoost = 10

#dolphinSpawnBoost
#Range: 1 ~ 100
dolphinSpawnBoost = 10

#salmonSpawnBoost
#Range: 1 ~ 100
salmonSpawnBoost = 15

#codSpawnBoost
#Range: 1 ~ 100
codSpawnBoost = 15

["Hostile Water Mobs"."Mod Structure Boost - Add Zo,Sk,W0"."Hostile Water Mobs - Experimental Nether Spawn Fix"]

These boosts restore zombified piglins and ghasts to all Nether biomes.

#ghastSpawnBoost
#Range: 0 ~ 100
"ghastSpawnBoost " = 30

#zombiePiglinSpawnBoost
#Range: 0 ~ 100
"zombifiedPiglinSpawnBoost " = 25

Additional Mod Options

In modified Minecraft, you may notice that certain normal mobs disappear in a modified environment. The reasons for this are technical, but this mod has some options to restore certain mobs to a more normal frequency. The essence is that if Minecraft has only 1 mob in an area, they give it a weight of 1 instead of the 20/50/100 they give when there are multiple mobs. This means that even if you add one new mob with a weight of 20, normal mobs go from being 100% common to being 4% common. This mod increases the spawn rates for cod, salmon, dolphin, and squid closer to normal. This part is a work in progress, and within a few days, there will be a way to disable it. But it was working very well in testing.

This same code also gives the option to restore zombified piglins as a common feature and ghasts as a less common feature of all Nether biomes as they used to be. You can set this to "0" now to disable these Nether spawns. The default for Nether will be set to 0, starting from the fall 2021 release. This has been replaced by "Spawn Biome Utility".

This feature will be enhanced to allow controlling the desired spawn rate for biome categories with overrides for specific biomes for any mob. It may be broken out as a separate mod once it reaches a certain size (except for the four default fish, which will remain in the Hostile Water Monsters mod). This new mod will be called Spawn Balance Utility.

This feature also adds small numbers of cod to rivers and swamps, making them a bit more lifelike. There are few enough that it should have no performance impact.

The 1.16.5 release means an update to all our mods, so the schedule for Tentacled Horror is pushed back.