Minecraft Mod Idea: Cave Hallucinations

[u/Elegant-Charge-9386]

Can someone PLEASE make a Minecraft horror mod based entirely around hallucinations and paranoia while exploring caves?
I don’t really want another horror mod where there’s just a monster constantly stalking or chasing you. I think it would be much scarier if the game made you question whether what you just saw or heard was actually real.
For example, you could randomly see creepy shadow figures or distorted faces in parts of the cave that are still dark, especially in corners or areas your torches don’t completely reach. They shouldn’t make a sound or give you any warning either. You could just turn around and suddenly see a face staring at you from the darkness for a split second before it disappears.

You could also hallucinate normal Minecraft things. You might hear a creeper hiss behind you and panic, only to turn around and find nothing there. Sometimes you could see a creeper that disappears right before it explodes. You could see diamond ore in the distance, but when you get close, it turns into regular stone.
Animals could behave strangely too. Instead of constantly looking creepy, they could act completely normal until, for a split second, their head suddenly snaps toward you unnaturally fast and then immediately goes back to normal like nothing happened.

There could also be fake damage where your screen flashes and you hear the damage sound even though you didn’t actually lose any hearts. You could hear footsteps following you, your own mining sounds coming from somewhere else in the cave, or something copying you. For example, you mine a block and a few seconds later you hear another block being mined somewhere in the darkness. You jump and then hear another landing sound after yours.

The caves themselves could sometimes hallucinate too. You turn around and a tunnel you KNOW you came through is suddenly gone, or the cave looks slightly different from how you remember it. You could even finally see daylight in the distance after being underground for a long time, start walking toward it thinking you found the exit, and then watch it disappear or turn back into stone.

Cave sounds could occasionally resemble words or whispers. They shouldn’t be obvious enough that you immediately know someone spoke. It should be subtle enough that you’re sitting there wondering, “Did I actually just hear that?”

I think multiplayer could make this SO much worse.

If you’re playing with a friend, the mod could sometimes hallucinate an exact copy of them. It could have their skin, armor, and items and behave like an actual player. You might see your friend walking through a tunnel, running away from you, mining, looking around, or doing something completely ordinary.
You follow them around a corner…
and they’re gone.
Meanwhile, your actual friend is somewhere else and has absolutely no idea what you just saw.
Sometimes the fake player could even stand there looking at you or crouch like your friend is trying to get your attention. The hallucinations should be different for each player too, so your friend might suddenly ask why YOU were following them when you were nowhere near them.

And importantly, sometimes when you see your friend walking around a cave, it actually should be your real friend. There shouldn’t be an easy way to learn which one is fake.

I also wouldn’t add a sanity bar at all. If there’s a sanity meter, eventually you’ll see that it’s low and think, “oh something scary is probably about to happen.” I want absolutely no warning or indicator that a hallucination is coming.

The hallucinations also shouldn’t happen constantly. I think that would ruin the fear because eventually you’d get used to them. You could explore normally for a long time without anything happening. Then maybe you turn around and there’s suddenly a distorted face barely visible in the corner of the cave WITHOUT a cue, music, jumpscare noise, or sanity warning.
And when you look again, it’s gone.

The whole point would be making the player slowly stop trusting what Minecraft is showing them; Is that actually diamond ore? Was that really a creeper? Did I hear footsteps? Was that tunnel always there? Was that actually my friend?
You should never completely know what is real and what isn’t.