Mods / Enemies in Underground Darkness Only
- Tags:
- Author:
- AmethystZhou
- Side:
- Both
- Created:
- Dec 27th 2025 at 9:02 PM
- Last modified:
- Dec 28th 2025 at 2:56 AM
- Downloads:
- 2399
-
Latest release (for Vintage Story 1.20.0-pre.0 - 1.21.6, outdated):
Enemies_in_Underground_Darkness_Only_v1.0.1.zip 1-click install
Sick and tired of drifters swarming your base at night? Getting sniped by bowtorns out of nowhere on adventures?
This mod limits the spawning of lore enemies (drifters, bowtorns, and shivers) to only underground and in darkness!
But why would I use this mod when there are several other similar ones? Here's how it works exactly:
- It simply modifies the .json files of drifter, bowtorn, and shivers like similar mods.
- Changes the max light level these enemies can spawn from 7 (vanilla) to 2.
- Also changes the type of light level from "only block light" (vanilla) to "max light level". This means all light sources (including sunlight), not just those from blocks (such as torches and lanterns) count toward the light level to prevent enemy spawning.
- Tweak the max and min Y-level these enemies can spawn.
You'll encounter the stronger tier enemies as you go deeper, and the three enemies have the same 5 tiers (there's also the stilt and bellhead shivers that are special and only appears in a rather narrow height range)
The 5 common tiers of all three enemies have the exact same pattern of spawning heights. And the lowest tier ("surface") are allowed to spawn from 0.85× sea level all the way to 2×! This mod changes that to from 0.55× to 0.92× sea level to make sure they only appear in caves.
The spawning height of higher tiers enemies are also tweaked slightly:
Exact values (vanilla => modded):
Surface: 0.85× to 2.00× => 0.55× to 0.92×
Deep: 0.22× to 0.89× => 0.25× to 0.80×
Tainted: 0.10× to 0.55× => 0.10× to 0.52×
Corrupt: 0.00× to 0.35× => 0.00× to 0.35× (not changed)
Nightmare: 0.00× to 0.23× => 0.00× to 0.23× (not changed)
Changes max light level to 4 and the max Y-level of surface-tier enemies to 0.9× sea level. Also changes loot to drop immediately without having to harvest the corpses, and the corpses to decay in 0.1 hours.
Rift-beasts belong underground, Monsters spawn only undergound, and Buried Hostility:
All three do the same: changes max light level to 4 and the max Y-level of surface enemies to 0.98× sea level.
Removes the surface-tier enemies from the spawning pool completely.
not updated to 1.20/1.21
| Mod Version | Mod Identifier | For Game version | Downloads | Released | Changelog | Download | 1-click mod install* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.0.1 | enemiesinundergrounddarknessonly | 2304 | Dec 28th 2025 at 2:56 AM | Enemies_in_Underground_Darkness_Only_v1.0.1.zip | 1-click install | ||
|
removed game version dependency | |||||||
| 1.0.0 | enemiesinundergrounddarknessonly | 95 | Dec 27th 2025 at 9:24 PM | Empty | Enemies_in_Underground_Darkness_Only_v1.0.0.zip | 1-click install | |
Does anyone else think there needs to be a mod that does the opposite of this? The above ground drifters are so easy you can kill them with stone weapons. Meanwhile the underground drifters are practically impossible to fight in vanilla without cheesing the fuck out of the game mechanics with every lame trick in the book. Even with muzzleloader firearms and late game armor it's impossible to fight them off. You would need fucking machine guns and grenades and a whole entire military industrial complex pumping out boatloads of munitions to kill them all and at that point you might as well play Factorio instead.
The underground drifters are overpowered and cheesy and even with mods it's borderline impossible to deal with them unless you do things that would be considered cheating. Removing drifters removes what little combat there is in the game. Would be nice to be able to remove the underground drifters and keep the above ground ones.
This mod is a good alternative for 1.22. Thats what I've used and you can edit config too
does this work in 1.22?
Will this be coming to v1.22? 😊
AmethystZhou would love a patch for the new version <3
From125 Thanks for pointing it out, added!
there`s also buried hostility, in case you wanna add it to the list of the similar mods
n8r I'm glad to hear that! 😄
AmethystZhou Happy to report it was likely a fluke! Rifts are off and the world height is either default or one notch above, but I think it may have just been some drifters that were already spawned/loaded before installing the mod. So far, ive had no new run ins so it seems to be all in order now!
n8r I don't think so, I just checked the other mod and it just changes the max light level for the enemies without touching the y-levels. These are rather simple JSON patches so I'm fairly certain they should function as intended.
A couple of possibilities - 1) If you are on the default 256-block world height, sea level is y-110, and the 0.92× height limit would be y-101, so if there's a deep cave it can certainly reach below the height limit. 2) Do you have rifts turned on? It's possible they are spawning from a rift in the cave.
If it's the former then try putting some light sources in the deeper part of the cave. With a light limit of 2 you can cover a lot of area with not too many light sources. Let me know if this helps!
If I understand this correctly, should this completely prevent all enemies from spawning in caves above sea level? I wanted to make a hillside base, but theres quite the sprawling spaghetti cave near the ideal spot, and even with this mod on, drifters are still spawning in these caves, despite being far above the sea. The only other mod I have enabled that edits spawns is 'Light Level One' - im unsure if this could be overwriting the spawns
Kilain No, those are separate!
Does this happen to alter/disable the spawning of drifters during temporal storms?
Nexii The default setting is "only block light" which means only lights from blocks (torches, lanterns, etc.) will count toward the light level, and "max light level" is any light including sunlight. Either way, if the light level of the specified type is higher than the limit (I changed it from vanilla's 7 to 2), then the enemies won't spawn. Hope that helps!
Could you explain what the type of light level change means?
Squambles No, the spawning height is calculated in relation to sea level, which itself is tied to the world height (sea level is about 0.431x world height). So if you change the world height, everything will scale accordingly.
If I were to adjust the world height setting during world creation, would that impact this mod? Like if I raise the world height, does what the mod considers sealevel stay the same, or adjust based on the increased world height?
Ah yes, the rust creatures do spawn quite a bit in above ground caves regardless.
LostTexan If you turn off "lore content" then they won't spawn, but turning off rifts doesn't prevent the spawning. I know this because I turned off rifts at world creation but also mistakenly disabled lore content. I haven't seen any enemies, but as soon as I turned lore content back on they started spilling out of a dark cave next to my base 😂
I'm fairly certain having rifts turned off does something similar to this. I don't remember seeing any lore creatures above ground when I had them off.