Sanity: Psychological Devastation
Most horror mods for Minecraft rely on jump scares and loud noises. Sanity: Psychological Devastation takes a quieter, far more unsettling route. It gives every living entity in the game a sanity value, then lets that number slowly fall apart, dragging your perception of the world down with it. If you have ever wanted a survival experience where the real threat is your own mind, this add-on deserves a place in your mods folder.
What Makes This Mod Different
Sanity here is point-based, and it applies to every mob, not just the player. Players cap at 100 sanity, while other creatures cap at their maximum health. Low sanity corrupts what you see, what you hear, and eventually what comes for you. That last part is not marketing talk — the mod ships with three inner entities that exist purely to punish a fractured mind.
Passive and Active Sanity Sources
Your sanity shifts constantly based on what you are doing and where you are standing. Light and darkness, weather, water, hunger, nearby monsters, pets, music, the blocks underfoot, sleeping, breeding, trading, fishing, shearing, advancements and eating all feed into the system. This means a simple mining trip underground carries real psychological weight, and building a cozy, well-lit base genuinely pays off.
Psychic Damage and Status Effects
Psychic damage ignores armour by design. Only the Psychic Protection enchantment or a raised shield reduces it. The mod adds five status effects — Confusion, Mania, Mania Immunity, Inner Immunity and Psychic Drain — alongside three enchantments: Psychic Protection, Psychic Deprivation and Psychic Drain. When your sanity runs dry, any damage that goes past zero is converted one to one into true damage, which bypasses armour, enchantments, shields and effects entirely.
Items, Entities and Commands
The gear list is built around risk and reward. The Shadow Sword and Shadow Axe let you charge attacks to repair durability at the cost of sanity, though an off-hand shield takes priority. Anvil-based shadow refinement converts one Inner Clump into one level, one point of psychic damage and one XP level, capping at 100 with no XP penalty — hold Shift to consume every clump at once. You also get Inner Shard, Clump and Core, Stabilizer α, β and γ, a Garland, and spawn eggs for all three inner entities.
Those entities are the Rotting Stalker, the Sneaking Terror and the Screaming Crawler. They have no sanity of their own, and confusion and mania do nothing to them. Psychic damage works differently against them: with no sanity to drain, the full amount is multiplied by their resistance factor and then by 2.5, applied as true damage. The Screaming Crawler hunts players below 20 percent sanity, paths around obstacles with A* pathfinding, jumps ledges and explodes at close range, its eyes glowing in the dark. Two sanity gates protect a recovering player — at 75 percent or above it cannot track you at all, and between 50 and 75 percent its blast destroys no blocks.
Server owners and tinkerers get a full command suite: /sanity get, set, add, state, psychic, truedamage, resist, innerspawn, nospawn and config reload, plus /sanity hint for the four inner-voice pools. Those voices speak in the centre of your screen, with the deep pool reserved for the final five seconds before mania damage begins.
Minecraft Versions, Loader and Requirements
This build targets Minecraft 1.20 and 1.20.1 on Forge 46 and above. GeckoLib is mandatory: use 4.2 on Forge 46, or 4.8.4 on Forge 47.1 and newer. A mismatched pairing makes the game report a missing "geckolib" dependency, even though the real cause is the Forge version. Jade is optional and simply adds a sanity line to its tooltip. Note that this is an alpha test build, so mechanics, numbers, config keys and commands may still change between releases, and things may be unbalanced or broken. Back up your worlds before installing it.
If you would rather skip manual dependency juggling, the foxygame.net launcher handles it for you — its add-on catalog installs Sanity: Psychological Devastation in one click and keeps GeckoLib matched to your Forge build automatically.
How to Install
- Install Forge 46 or newer for Minecraft 1.20 or 1.20.1.
- Download GeckoLib and place the correct build in your mods folder.
- Download Sanity: Psychological Devastation and drop the jar into mods/.
- Optionally add Jade for a sanity readout in tooltips.
- Launch the game and confirm the mod loads without dependency errors.
There is also an optional companion diagnostic mod called SanityPD Probe. It changes nothing about gameplay and is not needed to play — it exists so client-side behaviour such as rendering, HUD and animation can be verified. Drop the jar into mods/ next to the main mod, read the log at logs/sanityprobe.log, and delete it when you are done. Press F4 to toggle its small overlay panel, and use /sanityprobe on, off or mark to control it.
Modpacks and Roadmap
You are free to include this mod in modpacks. The author is clear that this release is the framework rather than the finished game. Still to come are an equipment system with thinking-enhancement gear and self-imposed restrictions, a final encounter that the whole sanity system is being built toward, and more inner entities, items and sanity sources. The alpha label reflects exactly that.
Credits go to croissantnova for the original Sanity: Descent Into Madness, whose MIT licence and copyright notices are preserved in full, with art and audio collaboration from toujourspareil and Zapsplat. This version is maintained by Yaojihua, with parts developed using AI assistance.
Sanity: Psychological Devastation for Minecraft is not a mod you install for a quick thrill. It is a slow-burn overhaul that turns light, sound and isolation into survival mechanics, and it rewards players who plan ahead rather than panic. If you want Minecraft to feel genuinely hostile again, this is the add-on to try.