Project Parasites

Project Parasites brings an alien outbreak to Minecraft 1.21.1 on Fabric. A meteor leaves a core that corrupts nearby terrain, makes the air toxic, and spawns parasites. Left alone, the outbreak spreads and stronger creatures appear.

Inspired by Scape and Run: Parasites. All code, models, textures, animations, and sounds in this mod are my own work.

Difficulty

Choose Normal or Extreme when you first enter a world. The choice is permanent; on a server, the first player chooses for everyone.

Normal gives you more time to contain the outbreak. Extreme enables adaptive enemies, block breaking, and extra spawns from deaths.

Setting	Normal	Extreme
Corruption speed	Half speed	Full speed
Maximum parasites	20	30
Adaptive AI	Off	On
Enemy block breaking	Off	On
Spawns from deaths	Off	On
Iron golem infection	Immune	Can be infected
Enemy health / damage	70% / 75%	100% / 100%
Infection recovery	3× faster	Standard
Outbreak waves	3–5	5–10
Meteors and bosses	Rarer and slower	More frequent

Corruption

Corruption progresses through four phases and keeps spreading while you are away from the area. In Phase 1, terrain starts changing and the air becomes toxic without hazmat gear. Phase 2 brings stronger parasites and outbreaks. By Phase 3, hive structures grow and bosses appear.

Creatures

Tier	Creature	Behavior
1	Crawler	Climbs walls and attacks in groups
1	Spitter	Shoots acid pools
1	Lurker	Hides and ambushes
1	Swooper	Dive-bombs from the air
2	Stalker	Flanks you and freezes when you look at it
2	Broodmother	Spawns smaller parasites
2	Infector	Infects vanilla mobs
3	Hivemind	Strengthens nearby parasites and coordinates slam attacks
3	Leviathan	A large, persistent boss that is immune to fire

Vanilla mobs, including zombies, cows, and villagers, can become infected. Iron golems can be infected on Extreme.

On Extreme, parasites respond to your tactics: frequent bow use makes them zigzag and close in faster, underground fighting increases cave spawns, and fire use builds their resistance. They also coordinate in swarms with different roles. Normal disables these behaviors.

Equipment

Start with Warding Torches to create safe zones, Antidote Potions, and a Noise Dampener. As you progress, you can make a Parasite Scanner with a HUD overlay, a Flamethrower, Decoy Blocks, Immunity Serum, and Hazmat Armor with 80% infection resistance.

Later tools include the boss-drop Parasite Bane Sword, Hive Destroyer, Purification Beacon, and Corruption Purifier. The purifier can shut down meteor cores.

Infection and events

Parasite attacks and toxic air increase infection. Its stages cause nausea, then slowness, then hunger and weakness, and finally Wither damage and blindness. Use hazmat gear and antidotes to manage it.

The first meteor arrives after five minutes on Extreme or ten on Normal, with more arriving later. Blood moons turn the sky red and increase corruption and spawns. Outbreaks send waves of parasites through areas with high corruption.

Configuration

Edit config/projectparasites.json to adjust corruption speed, spawn rates, difficulty, and individual creatures. Server admins can use /parasites commands for testing and management.

Please share bugs and feedback after trying the mod. This has been my largest project so far, and I'd like to hear how your world holds up.