If you’ve read our features on Bloodbath Godzilla, wonderland.jar, or Dread Reborn, you might have realized we love good Minecraft horror here. We’re always on the lookout for good ones, but so far we haven’t tackled one with a reputation of being one of the best. Yes, it’s time to tackle The Broken Script. I’ll be aiming to explain how to install the mod, and give the edited highlights of my time spent with the mod, before offering my final thoughts on the whole thing.
Minecraft Mod Spotlight: The Broken Script
Time to talk about my experience.
Installing The Broken Script
One of the first mysteries you need to solve when dealing with The Broken Script is just getting hold of it. The mod attracted a lot of attention around its release for getting banned off of Curseforge, one of the main go-tos for modded instances. I’ll spare you the YouTube title-esque hype and say it’s not down to it being scary or gruesome, just trying to be a bit too immersive for its own good. In the past the mod could do some much more heavy duty things, like run commands on your PC, change your background, and even shut down your machine. This and other functions were enough to get it flagged as malware. While in the wider context of what the mod is going for it does make sense… it’s understandable that people were wary of that.
Some more toned-down versions with the controversial stuff removed appeared on Curseforge after, but eventually these disappeared to as the mod’s creator objected to them. Now, the official copy of the mod (with a few tweaks to make it less virus-like) is only available via Modrinth.
For my experience I installed the Broken Script Enhanced modpack, which has the mod and a very quality of life additions that make things a bit easier. The mod is best enjoyed in as close to a vanilla experience as possible, so I wouldn’t suggest being tempted by any kitchen sink all the horror modpacks.
My Experience Of The Broken Script
I came into The Broken Script deliberately without reading up on the lore or anything. I played it briefly some months back, but I’m largely doing it all without additional context to try and experience it as if I were an ordinary player. (We may do a lore article on it at some point, if this is well received.)
The first few days were… relatively uneventful. I spawned pretty near a village and decided to build a house on the top of a hill overlooking it. My usual preferred default in these kind of mods as it would give me some resources to lean on, and also give me a good view of the surroundings.
I gathered some wood and stone, and started the construction project. I’m not exactly a mater builder, but I wanted something I could get a bit of relative safety in as well as create a good viewing platform to survey the area for strange happenings. I know from my experience of wonderland.jar and nomoon that strange structures might start appearing.
A little way into my build, I was proved right, as after a creepy sound cue, a weird hovering cobblestone structure lit with redstone torches appeared a little way out from my build site. I made a mental note to build up to it an investigate when I had time… but other things would soon get my attention.
NULL
About twenty minutes in, I was joined by someone called NULL. Which is odd, as it was most definitely a single player world.
Another odd recurring phenomenon were these little storms of darkness that would appear and destroy blocks in their vicinity. One spawned in dangerously close to my house… but the building site was spared. RIP one of the pigs wandering nearby though.
Dream Travels
Things got really real around my third night. I was using one of the villagers’ beds, because my house wasn’t done and I’m an insufferable moocher.
I went to sleep and found myself… somewhere else. A barren grey corridor lined with windows, a water channel down the center. Looking out the windows revealed a grey sky, and similar buildings with dozens of identical floors. Beyond one a strange purple light glowed in the distance, but I had no way to reach it. So, I kept walking until- I crashed into a river with a splash. Then, I was standing next to the house I fell asleep in.
That morning, a house appeared on the other side of the river. There had been a few extra structures by then, disembodied walls and doors, odd things made of cobblestone. This looked like a whole player house. I decided I wanted to finish my house before I went to investigate… maybe I was just trying to put it off because it felt more menacing than the stuff I’d run into before.
I continued with the build, and managed to find some iron before I dared approach the strange house. In that time I’d found more odd structures, and spotted something watching me from the air, a shadowy figure hovering in place. Shortly after, it was gone. My next attempt at sleeping in a bed, in my newly constructed bedroom also took me to the eerie grey corridors once again, but I did fortunately make it back with all my stuff.
Eventually, with a complete-ish house, a shield, and an iron sword, I’d kind of run out of reasons not to explore the house across the river that was giving me a bad feeling.
As it turns out, my bad feeling was completely right.
???’s House
As I walked towards the house, sword in hand, my screen turned to static and let out a screech of white noise. When my vision returned, it became clear that this structure was a lot weirder than the previous ones. It appeared to be a player house. It was even labelled as one, though with a strangely redacted name. However it was partially destroyed, and the back was a mess of black blocks cut with red veins, and ones made of crackling static. I didn’t really want to touch the aberrant blocks, but I ventured inside regardless, and found chests that were… pretty normal. Wood. Fences. Slabs. Trees.
But also, two music disks. One was Mall. The other, the delightful [] that, if you have not listened to what that particular disk sounds like…. lucky you! I emerged from the house and found I was being watched again. On approaching the hovering figure, it did two hearts of damage then disappeared.
I returned to my home, curiosity somewhat satisfied. Unfortunately, after my visit to the corrupted house, things got a lot worse.
Here I Am
The night after my excursion, I didn’t go to bed. I was increasingly eager to build up further on my house, and I wasn’t in any hurry to have another visit to the forever corridor, so I decided to build through the night. As I was doing so, a horrible noise caught my attention, and I noticed a humanoid figure had appeared a little way from my house. Actually humanoid, not Minecraft player shaped. Its surface was a mat of fizzing static. The version number in the corner began to glitch out, flickering between the version, and the words ‘Here I Am’. Unsurprisingly, I decided not to see what it wanted.
After the entity’s appearance, things took a more aggressive turn. My sleep was interrupted less, but the entities became more aggressive. The mood of the world changed, with the sky becoming dull and the noise of wind permeating across the fields. It all felt very foreboding. The version text changed again, showing what appeared to be…. coordinates?
I needed to investigate, but preparing for a trip became increasingly difficult as the mod’s unfriendly entities made life more and more difficult. Night and day would abruptly swap. Water would spawn and rain on my house. At one point, I returned to my base at night to have a shadowy figure leap from the second floor, destroying blocks as it went. It reached me, killed me, and crashed my game.
Second World
Things continued to take strange turns in my original world, but at that point the old style generation was grating on me a little. The mod reverts you to old-style world generation by default, which is charming in some ways, but not really for me. I did some reading into the mod, and discovered I could actually turn it off, and ended up making a new world in the new style. Things took a pretty interesting turn there. First, me and the shadowy figure, presumably Null, seemed to be on much better terms for whatever reason. Shortly after its first appearance there, I found a chest with ten diamonds inside just sitting in the open. A peace offering maybe? I was definitely glad of them.
It didn’t seem to make things any calmer in the world thought, as at some point a huge glitching inverted pyramid spawned outside the tower I’d made my base and loomed there for some in-game hours. I was absolutely not about to go outside with that thing there, so I can’t tell what it would have done if I did, but I can’t imagine it was good.
I also ended up in a shiny dreamworld with the figure in the feature, who assured me I was safe, them promptly killed me. Charming.
Exploring The Broken Script WORLD 2 (A Very Different Thing From The Second World)
While I’d come into the mod fairly blind to avoid colouring my perspective too much, there was one secret I knew about from my early encounters with the game, and that’s WORLD 2. When I first played the mod as part of a modpack, before its departure from Curseforge, WORLD 2 already existed as a save when I loaded up the game. Now, it’s something you have to dig out of the mod’s files… or get a copy of it elsewhere and add it to your saves. This special Minecraft world is pivotal to the deep and disturbing lore behind The Broken Script which I don’t know enough about to get into, though installing WORLD 2 and poking around was enough to give me some idea.
You’re presented with what looks like your average early Minecraft clan server. A few buildings scattered about, warnings about not replacing the wheat in the wheat farm, complaints about the mob farm not seeming to work. If you explore further though, things become more disturbing. Signs scattered around imply that players keep mysteriously going away and never coming back, their friends asking anxiously for them to contact them in case they log into the server. You also start to see complete houses that look suspiciously like the destroyed ruins that appear in your regular world. You also discover that one of the server’s players was once named Null.
I won’t spoil all the secrets in WORLD 2, I’d suggest you go look for yourself, but it seems something terrible happened to the people in the server there, and you’re strolling through their last days. It’s got an eeriness and sadness to it you rarely run into in Minecraft horror.
Is The Broken Script Good?
Give or take, I have spent about ten hours on The Broken Script so far, and barely feel like I’ve scratched the surface of the mystery. There is a ton of content, and some Marianas Trench deep levels of lore that players have unearthed. It is a very extensive mod that you could easily make the center of a long playthrough, or effectively a multiplayer campaign. I do plan to bug my friends to see if anyone would be interested in suffering through it with me. Inevitably, as with any Minecraft mods, there is a bit of jank to be found, and sometimes things did break or present strangely. That said, it’s clear that a ridiculous amount of work and passion has gone into this free mod. If you are a Minecraft horror enthusiast, I think The Broken Script is an essential play.
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