Cold, Thirst and the World

Since 1.62.0 staying alive takes more than outrunning what hunts you. You get cold, you get thirsty, the seasons turn, and the world itself moves: rain leaves puddles, rivers flood and running water eats at the land. None of it touches the story's own places.

Most of this is built into the mod. The puddles, the erosion, the streams, the seasons and the workstation scenes come from other people's mods that the modpack brings in; they're credited on the credits page.

Warmth

A little dial sits over the middle of your hotbar, its needle swinging from frost-blue to red, with a chevron over it while you're warming up or cooling down. Your warmth eases toward what's round you:

• Where you are: the biome, the season, the sun and the night, rain and snow, how high up you are, and deep water.
• What's near you: fires, lava, campfires, furnaces, torches and lanterns warm you; ice and snow chill you.
• What you wear: leather keeps the cold out; any armour helps a little.
• The haunting: the air goes cold round the things that walk in the dark, and colder round the Watcher. The Flesh in you is a fever.

Thirst

A row of drops sits over your food bar. It drains a little all the time and more as you work (sprinting, fighting, digging), and faster in the heat. You go parched, then dehydrated, and then it kills you the way hunger does: on Easy it stops at five hearts, on Normal at half a heart.

Drinking

• Water bottles, milk, honey, stews, melon, berries and apples.
• Look straight up into the rain.
• Crouch at the water's edge with empty hands and hold use: you drink from your cupped hands.

Tainted water

Water that isn't clean may leave you Tainted: you get thirsty faster and feel queasy (without the nausea effect's swimming screen), and your drops go murky.

The Canteen

When it's off, and turning it off

Nothing about warmth or thirst changes in Creative, in Spectator, on Peaceful, during a cutscene, or in the story's own places (the Hub, the Stalls, the Vault and the Other Side). While a workstation scene plays, the gauges step aside with the rest of the screen.

The settings are in config/statichollow-vitals.properties, made the first time a world starts:

# Static Hollow - the cold and the thirst
# thirst: true/false - the thirst bar, drinking, Tainted water
thirst=true
# temperature: true/false - warmth, cold and heat
temperature=true
# thirst_drain: how fast you get thirsty (1.0 as made; 0.5 half as fast)
thirst_drain=1.0
# damage: how hard thirst, freezing and heatstroke hurt (1.0 as made; 0 never)
damage=1.0

On a server it's the server's config folder that counts. The idea comes from Tough As Nails; none of its code is used.

The seasons

The modpack has Serene Seasons (unmodified, with Static Hollow's own settings in config/sereneseasons), and the mod fits itself to it:

• Summer days are hot and winter is bitter; the tropics have their wet and dry seasons.
• The hound packs come more often through the winter dark, and the things in the woods walk more in autumn.
• The fog closes in and goes the colour of frost in winter, amber in autumn and a pale haze in summer.
• The Watcher notices each season turn.

Every sound, where it is

Since 1.61.1 every sound in the world sounds like the place you're in. A few times a second the mod feels out what's round you: how far away the walls are, how much is open to the sky, and what it's all made of. Stone, metal and glass throw sound back; wood less; earth and sand less again; snow, wool, leaves, moss and the Flesh hardly at all.

• A cave rings and booms for a second or two. A great cavern's tail runs on for seconds and sound comes back off its far walls as an echo. A stone cellar is short and hard, a wooden room warmer, a wool one dead, a forest a soft close wash, open ground almost nothing. Walk from one into another and it changes smoothly with you.
• The further off a sound is, the more of it reaches you as the place's echo. Through walls it's muffled, more so the more there is between you; far off, the air takes the top off it.
• Under water everything is heavy, dull and boomy, and a sound from under the water is muffled the same when you hear it from above. In the Dead Water the echo follows the water: longer and darker the deeper you go.
• Music and the menus' sounds are left alone. It works the same on Forge and Fabric, with or without shaders.

Sound Physics Remastered is still in the modpack but switched off in its settings, since it would do it all a second time. To use it instead, set enabled=true in config/sound_physics_remastered/soundphysics.properties; the mod's own then steps aside.

Puddles and floods

Puddles & Floods (PigCart's) leaves puddles in the rain, under drips and where water runs, and rivers flood their banks. Static Hollow's own water stays on top of it. It also has to be on a server, so the puddles that water, drips and potions leave work there too. Forge has no build of it for 26.3, so the Forge pack carries a port made for it.

Water that wears the world away

Water Erosion (13rac1's, ported to 26.3 for this pack) lets running water dig creeks deeper, cut banks back and dig in under waterfalls. Earth crumbles down to gravel and sand, and stone by running water goes mossy. Only running water erodes, so still water and the deep oceans cost nothing. The pack's settings keep buildings standing and leave the story's places alone (config/water-erosion.properties).

Streams (Fabric)

The Fabric modpack has Streams: Reflowing (NiceJohn's, unmodified): streams that follow the land down to lakes, rivers and the sea, with whitewater and drifting leaves. It makes its own settings in the config folder the first time; if new chunks are slow to appear, pick a lower quality preset there.

Workstations as scenes

Cinematic Interactions (Southware's, in a build made for this pack) turns crafting tables, furnaces, anvils, grindstones, stonecutters, looms, enchanting tables, brewing stands, lecterns, bookshelves, jukeboxes, campfires and beacons into first-person scenes: you lay the ingredients on the table, load the furnace by hand and hammer at the anvil. Its pages, chimes, hums, the beacon's tuning and the hammer sound like an old house and a dying radio, and its film bars come in with an edge of static.

Falling stars and Channel Zero

At night shooting stars streak over the sky, and now and then a small one comes down somewhere near you. Mine the Fallen Star it leaves for Star Static: "A splinter of the dead channel over the world. It's still warm. It crackles if you hold it to your ear." The first one earns Fallout.

Channel Zero is a remote that calls things down out of the sky. It's Creative-only for now, with no recipe yet. Point it at the ground and press it; crouch and press it for the next channel:

It makes craters only where the TNT game rule lets things blow up. If it isn't pointed at a block it says "No signal. (Point it at the ground.)", and too near your own feet, "Too close - you'd be under it."

Small things that share a space

Seven sets of little things that fit one to four to a block space, each piece turned to face whoever put it down. Place one on another to add a piece; break it and one piece comes off. You'll find them out in the Hollow's own country, on the deep sea floors, on the rig, in the cathedral's crypts and at the altar's pilgrim stones.

The idea of small blocks sharing a space comes from Olaf's Relatively Placed Blocks; nothing of it is used.

Wearing heads

Since 1.60.0 every creature head can go on your head. It goes on over your own (yours is hidden under it), the edges of the screen darken as you look out of it, and its own kind notice you from only half as far off.

The rest of the world

• The oceans go down to about 2,000 blocks below the waves, and the Hollow has five places of its own in the Overworld. New worlds only: see the Hollow's own country.
• The Ender Dragon is always the Infested Ender Dragon since 1.61.1: see the turned.
• The music is all the mod's own: see the soundtrack.