Sensory Abyss

Sensory Abyss V3.4

The world takes a sense from you. Everything you learn after that is how to survive without it.

Official Links & Information

Discord: https://discord.gg/nAKVcFCJR3

Shader: the native lighting engine runs out-of-the-box as is not compatible with oculus, embeddium, iris, sodium, etc. (will be updated at some point to run along side if I can)

A Note from the Developer

This mod is an evolving, living project. Visuals are continuously updated, bugs are actively hunted, and mechanics are fine-tuned as players explore the design space. I am wide open to criticism, suggestions, and brand-new ideas. If something feels off or unrewarding, let me know. If you want to see a specific feature, share it.

In the Discord, I share development roadmaps, run polls on upcoming features, and chat directly with players. If you design a feature you’d love to see in the mod, send me a DM! I regularly bring player concepts to community polls (kept anonymous by default to keep voting unbiased). If it passes, I’ll build it and give you full credit.

What This Mod Is

Sensory Abyss is a horror-flavored overhaul that inverts traditional survival progression. You don't start weak and grow into a hero—you start broken, permanently, in one specific physical way. The core gameplay loop revolves around building a specialized playstyle around that loss.

At character creation, you select an affliction. Whichever you choose, that sense is gone for good: Sight, Sound, Smell, Touch, Taste, or—if you are seeking total punishment—All Five.

What replaces your missing sense is where the mod truly begins.

The Six Afflictions

1. The Blinded — Lost Sight

The world around you is reduced to The Pale, a luminous, bone-grey mist. There are no magical minimaps or sonar pings. To navigate, you must clear the milk: your footsteps forge temporary paths through the fog that slowly silt closed, loud noises send out a sudden clap of clarity, and holding G allows you to physically inhale and exhale to clear 4 to 22 blocks around you.

Your primary currency is Eyes. Striking an enemy marks them with Victim-Sight for 60 seconds. Tapping C (Gouge) rips their eyes out to be stored in your inventory or slotted into your Eye Wheel. Discover over 60 unique eye types—ranging from Warden eyes that track heat through walls, to Enderman eyes that locate strongholds, to Phantom eyes that pinpoint unslept players. Wear an eye long enough and it permanently roots into your skull. Boss eyes are claimed through dedicated Extraction Rituals, and all discoveries are tracked in your Vision Codex.

Motecraft: Cast your sight outwards as physical motes of light—deployable lanterns, light-traps, steerable wandering eyes, locust swarms, or light-anchor teleports. The catch: every active mote drains your ambient brightness, leaving you dimmer.

Shadowcraft: Send out physical manifestations of your self. Command walking copies, swap places with shadows through solid walls, deploy sentinels, or launch simultaneous strikes from every copy at once. Bright light burns your copies away.

1. The Deafened — Lost Hearing

You are not silent —you are deaf. Sound reaches you only by conduction, climbing up through whatever you are standing on: low, muffled, and directionless. Stone carries it, wool kills it, and water and open air are total blackouts. Underneath sits a ringing that rises in pitch as something unlit closes on you.

You carry two instruments—the Bone Drum (struck) and the Death Whistle (blown)—and the sheet you write is the spell. Real notation on a real staff: the melody's contour draws the geometry, and the mark on each note says what happens there. Playing it is the cast; its length is the casting time. How loud you play decides what matter answers you at all, and Vibration is your resource—a loud room closes your timing windows, so a bad place to play is a great place to perceive.

Six of the seven note marks are earned at Resonance Shrines, by playing them the shape they ask for. Songs fill a ten-slot Library per instrument; play one cleanly enough and you learn it By Heart, and the wheel fires it for you.

Dissonant: The discord. Built on wrong sound—deliberate near-misses, off-beats, distortion, inversion and the tritone. Even your mistakes are music.

Harmonic: The ensemble. Built on resonance and repetition—echoes, held notes, and sympathetic links that carry one charge into everything of its kind, and into your allies.

1. The Anosmiac — Lost Smell

You cannot smell toxins, miasmas, or spoiled air, so your body has transformed into a living forge for them.

Beyond managing debuffs, you utilize the Scar System (2–5 customizable slots). Surviving harmful status effects unlocks permanent Scars that convert those debuffs into resistances, immunities, or volatile "Bad Mixes," all managed within your Scar Ledger and Scar Codex.

The Druid: Operates on Verdure (Nature's Health). Claim territory, channel spells directly into the earth using your soulbound Druidic Focus, and imbue wild seeds into specialized spell-seeds to alter the battlefield. Ultimate: The Land Answers.

The Vial Alchemist: Extract debuffs you've personally survived at The Still to brew volatile, throwable, or drinkable vials. Store your concoctions in your Vial Belt (B) for instant access. Ultimate: Catastrophic Reaction.

1. The Numb — Lost Touch

You cannot feel pain, pressure, or temperature, so your body wears the world instead. Hold your absorb key over almost any block—vanilla or modded—and it plates onto you as visible armour. Nothing is gated: you can absorb obsidian on day one, and it will wreck you.

Everything comes from the block itself. Its real hardness and blast resistance become one density figure that sets your shell's strength, your unarmed damage, what you can mine, and what carrying it costs. Shell takes the hits and mends slowly out of combat; Stress is what your body can carry, and any ability used over capacity tears your own shell. Hold right-click with both hands empty to Brace, and a hit goes to the shell whole.

Eight kinds of matter—Verdant, Organic, Frost, Stone, Crystal, Infernal, Metal, Hollow—each carry their own strike and their own way of failing you. Progression is breadth: distinct blocks worn per type, and a block worn long enough is mastered for a token that permanently doubles a stat.

Monolith: The mason. Wear two blocks at once and bend the world out of them—raise a Boulder, Wall, Pillar or Cage from the block you wear, so a magma pillar burns and an ice wall is slick. What you raise stays raised, and you command it from across the room. Ultimate: Monolith.

Shardborn: The forge. Four weapons carried at once—Twin Shards, Fang Daggers, Greatmaul, Splinter Thrower—paired across two keys, no wheel to open. Draw your stance and the mouse belongs to the weapon: its ability lands your other weapon's attack at the point of impact. Ultimate: Shardstorm.

1. The Unfed — Lost Taste

Food provides no nourishment. You survive solely by devouring the creatures of the world. Devouring an entity builds Mastery for that species, which acts as both a spending currency and a progression track.

Spend Mastery to claim permanent passive stats (health, armor, damage, speed) or engage in a Gorge. Gorging wraps your body in the target creature, giving you its physical attributes, mining capabilities, and a dedicated attack moveset (V / Hold V). You can Degorge safely on command at any time.

Evolution: Prove your dominance in Hunt Trials across the world (including dedicated Proving Grounds structures) to unlock up to 18 body-reshaping mutations. Scale your power through Glut, deploy husk decoys, or spawn a Twin to carry an alternate build. Ultimate: Apex Ascendant.

The Vial Rite: Design custom undead minions at The Table by spending Mastery points, then seal them into self-replenishing ritual vials. Summon your armies anywhere using blood and chalk. Ultimate: The Dead March.

1. The Shattered — Lost Everything (getting reworked 3.5 forge/2.5 neo)

All five afflictions, at full intensity, all the time. Permanent blindness, deafness, numbness, anosmia, and hunger loss. You switch your active sense routing using dedicated keys (Z for Eye Rites, P for Instruments) to cycle which toolkit your action keys drive.

Shattered does not pick a standard subclass. Instead, its progression relies on fusing lost senses together through specialized Shattered-only augments and a global Resonance Attunement. At Level 20, Shattered caps with Convergence, weaving all five tracks into a single unified toolkit.

Note: In multiplayer, server admins can enable allow_classless_players in the config. This adds a Decline button at selection, allowing players to keep their five senses while remaining fully exposed to the world's horror director, seasons, lighting, and environmental hazards.

Universal Mechanics & Systems Dual-Dial Difficulty Options

Difficulty is decoupled into two fully customizable settings:

Class-Pace Difficulty: Adjusts progression rate, resource costs, and class mechanics.

Mob Threat Level: Scales mob health, damage, detection range, and spawn counts independently across four tiers: Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert.

Controls: Radial Wheels & The Abyss Hub

Ability Wheel (Hold C): Radial menu for class abilities. Select and release to cast, or bind individual keys for power-user control.

Spell Wheel (Hold R): Radial menu for active magic spells.

Vial Belt (B): Quick-access menu for brewed alchemy.

Instrument Stance (V): Raises active instruments for Deafened players or opens creature attack wheels for Unfed players.

Abyss Hub (K): Opens your central management panel—character sheet, subclass mastery, journal, codexes, grimoire, pets, and party systems.

Built-in Native Lighting Engine

Sensory Abyss features a fully custom, built-in rendering engine active out-of-the-box (will be updated more over time):

Dynamic HDR relighting and atmospheric color grading.

Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO), custom shadow mapping, and volumetric light shafts.

Integrated scene post-processing.

Toggle between renderers under Video Settings (Automatic, Sensory Abyss, External) or via the /salighting command. (An optional companion shader pack is available on CurseForge for Oculus/Embeddium users but will no longer be getting updates so it will be missing features but it is still available).

Dynamic Seasons

The world operates on a 60-day seasonal cycle (~80 real-world hours per in-game year):

Visual shifts: Foliage turns dynamically species-by-species, water crusts into ice, and off-biome snowfall occurs.

Agricultural impact: Crop growth accelerates in Spring and slows down in Winter.

Greenhouse mechanics: Placing glass ~8 blocks above crops creates a microclimate that acts one season warmer.

Corruption & Five-Sense Tuning

Corruption is divided across five distinct per-sense bars (Sight, Sound, Smell, Touch, Taste), visible on your HUD and cycled using N. Deepening individual sense corruption unlocks raw power at the cost of severe physical afflictions. Level 8, 15, and 19 progression milestones allow you to further deepen specific sense tracks.

Light, Fuel, & Scent Countermeasures

Nothing provides infinite light or protection:

Light Sources: Candles gutter and extinguish, campfires require stoking, jack-o'-lanterns burn out, and End Rods fizzle outside The End.

The Ritual Brazier: Anchors bases and projects a customizable warding radius (15 to 60 blocks) using up to 3 warding slots.

Scent Masking: Scent masking is a temporary utility window used to break actively pursued trails. Craft T1 consumables like Herbal Sachets, Mud Daubs, Cinder Pouches, and Sporecap Pouches to mask your presence.

Senses-Based Magic

Discover over 80 unique spells across five distinct sense schools through grimoires and physical world rituals (altars, pedestals, chalk marks):

Sight: Radiance, shadow manipulation, spectral decoys, mirror images, and eclipses.

Sound: Sonic shockwaves, resonance markers, banshee wails, and harmonic shields.

Touch: Glacial frost, ice manipulation, frozen armor, and mobility anchors.

Smell: Volatile toxins, spore clouds, pheromone manipulation, and corrosive sprays.

Taste: Hemomancy—blood siphons, coagulation shields, crimson avatars, and needle storms.

Spells feature scalable VFX that visually intensify as you charge them, and can be Overclocked for higher output at greater cost.

The Horror Director & Maladies of the Mind

An active AI director monitors your stress levels, local time, and recent encounters, cycling through distinct phases:

Psychological Audio: Spatial footsteps, opening doors, whispered names, and dead-silent zones route privately to specific players.

Maladies of the Mind: Sanity is a dynamic system. Reaching zero sanity causes your character to collapse, waking up in bed with a permanent mental Scar. Experience 15 distinct Maladies—such as Hallucinosis, Nyctophobic Dread, The Shakes, Fixation, The Fog, or The Hollow—each altering visual grading and world perception.

Active Hunters: Entities like The Stand Stalker (a shifting mannequin-forest hunter) actively track players through sound and scent profiles rather than standard mob sight ranges.

Sleep & Dream Cycles: Bed upgrades (dreamcatchers, stuffed animals, ward totems, fragrant herbs) alter sleep quality. Poor sleep causes negative status effects to bleed into the following morning.

Sensory Simulation Layer

Underneath the class mechanics lies a physical simulation:

Scent Trails: Decaying, six-tier smell trails (from trace to acrid) pool in chunks, mark heavily used armor, and attract predators. Wash off scent using cauldrons or break trails using smoke bombs.

Acoustic Falloff: Five-tier sound profiles drive entity reactions. Diegetic breathing becomes audible when panicking. Mobs exhibit a Night Stare behavior—pausing and turning toward sounds before attacking.

Item & Food Decay: Unprotected food rots in inventory and containers (spoilage pauses when servers are empty). Gear wears down through regular use, granting unique perks while increasing curse risks during enchanting.

Pets, Parties, & Progression

Pets: Tame wolves or cats and assign them specialized pet classes with distinct augment trees, stat rolls, and behavioral AI (tracking by scent, holding Dread, or executing stealth kills). Dedicated commands override class AI.

Party System: Built for seamless co-op and team PvP. Party members pass offensive spells through one another, while healing and support abilities prioritize allies automatically.

20-Level Progression Tree: Character growth includes stat choices (L2/7/12/17), subclass selection (L3), combat styles (L4), subclass passives (L5), augments (L6/10/14/18), corruption path deepens (L8/15/19), ability modifiers (L9), specialization paths (L11), ultimates (L13), mastery (L16), and late-game Transcendence rituals (L20).

Final Words

Pick a sense to lose. Learn to live without it.

Suggestions, bug reports, and feedback are always appreciated. Join the Discord to submit ideas, report issues, or follow active development updates!