Blogust #3: What makes minecraft horror scary?

11 Aug 2026

It’s a little hard to imagine minecraft as scary. It’s minecraft! Sure, there’s jumpscares every once in a while, but it’s hard to picture feeling dread while chopping down the same trees you’ve cut down a thousand times before. Lots of cool map and mod makers have been trying to, though, and I think they’ve succeeded!

Recently me and a friend of mine have been playing a minecraft horror modpack. It’s scarier than I thought it was going to be, to be honest. I’ve discovered two things that make it less scary:

1.) Putting on my own music instead of the game music. This one is pretty self-explanatory. It gives me something to take me out of the atmosphere.

2.) Adding in technology mods. This one surprised me! The second I started going down the familiar road of making the first set of Thermal Expansion machines, the low-level dread I felt while playing lessened. It tells me that I just need to follow these steps, and then I’ll be safe. There’s a familiarity to it.

I think a lot of what makes the pack work is the unfamiliarity. I usually only play on the same 1.7.10 that I’ve been tinkering with for a decade (I FEEL SO OLD WRITING THAT), and now I’m playing a modpack on 1.20.1 filled mostly with mods I don’t know. Even the mods I recognize have new features and textures. Whenever I get a weird message in chat, or spot a random creature, I have no idea what it means or what might happen. That’s scary! If I’d played with these mods before, maybe I’d know why there’s a creepy eyeball that appears when I go to sleep, or which creatures correspond to the concerning text written in the subtitles. The feeling that something very bad might happen can only exist because I do not yet know the rules on when something very bad can happen. The sheer number of different mods makes it very difficult to figure out the rules for any one mod, let alone enough of them that I feel confident in my environment.

All that being said, the real horror in modded minecraft is trying to get it to run correctly without crashes. Now there’s something I’ll never figure out the rules behind.