LET’S PLAY: DWELLERS 2.0

WARNING: SOME OF THE SCREENSHOTS IN THIS FEATURE ARE GENUINELY HORRIFIC. WE ARE NOT JOKING, NOR HAVE WE BEEN SLEEPING GREAT SINCE TAKING THEM. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

We all know Minecraft is not-so-secretly the scariest game ever made. The horrible noise spiders make at night. The jump scare of a creeper sneaking up on you. The terrifying prices the cartographer charges for maps. So it was with a lot of extra-nervous trepidation that we decided to try the Dwellers 2.0 add-on by Panascais in the Minecraft Marketplace. 

We here at Minecraft.net hired the bravest writers in the world to go hands-on with this add-on! But they took one look at it and ran away screaming. Hmmm. Starting to think they weren’t as brave as their LinkedIn profiles claimed. And we’re starting to regret paying them six million dollars in advance. Ah, well.

This add-on actually gets off to a surprisingly start. We spawn in the Overworld with a book, a handy device for toggling settings, and a flashlight. Score! 

Still, we’re gonna have trouble surviving the night with these tools alone. So we immediately start the usual tree-punching and resource-plundering for putting together our first home. This would be a lot easier if we could stop ourselves from getting distracted by playing with the flashlight.

Uh oh. We seem to have spawned in the plains biome. Handy for getting a good look around, not-so-handy for gathering the wood we want to craft tools. So we swim on over to a forest biome. A nice swim, too. No scares yet!

Now we’ve got plenty of trees to plunder, but we’re wasting precious time. We really want to get a bed built before nightfall, so we can snooze through whatever horrors Dwellers has planned for us after dark. That means we’re gonna need wool. We find a poor sheep and prepare to get punchin’. Sorry, little fella!

Except we swiftly learn it's not a sheep at all. It’s an OH GOODNESS GRACIOUS ME WHAT THE HECK IS THAT

HFUSIDHGSKJDBGVJKGNSDVBJKSDBLVGSDFVKHS

Meet the sheep mimic, a slack-jawed jerk who quickly chases us through the biome. Perhaps it plans to craft us into a bed and see how we like it? We decide not to stick around to find out.

Somehow, we escape, whimpering behind a tree. Safe at last! Except… Did we leave our ominous red fog machine on? Wait a second… We returned that ominous red fog machine last week! That means there must be something sinister afoot!

Oh. Crumbs.

Apparently, something called the blood moon has risen. Call it a hunch, but we don’t think that’s a good thing. We sprint through the red fog, constantly bumping into zombies, spiders, witches, oh my. Surviving an entire night of these hostile horrors is hard enough without a red moon having a fog party - now it’s near impossible!

At last dawn breaks, after we’ve only died a few dozen times. OK, a lot dozen times. But we’ve got a better feeling about today. Because just a few feet away from our spawn point, we find a ruined portal. Which means a loot chest, one that contains… yes! A golden sword!

And as if our luck couldn’t get any better, we spot a familiar blue-robed beauty. Why, it’s our old pal, the wandering trader! Let’s see what they’ve got so we then rip them off and OH COME ON

To be fair, this is still less terrifying than what the actual wandering trader once charged us for a dandelion.

Yes, it’s another absolutely horrible surprise, but not a complete one. See, seconds before the Wandering Trader’s jaw decided to take a worrying visit to the floor, we heard it say “everything is normal here”. Quite a suspicious thing to say, no? Especially when your usual vocabulary consists of nothing but the word ‘hrrrm’...

With the fake trader slain, we immediately get back to our top priority - building that bed. We cautiously fight a few more sheep, golden sword at the ready in case they turn out to be more mimics. Turns out we needn’t have worried about that. We should be far more worried about this:

whimpers for a thousand years.

It’s awful anti-santa Krampus! Apparently this is who visits you at Christmastime if you’ve been bad this year, so maybe we shouldn’t have punched that sheep after all.

Dwellers’ jump scares are certainly a nasty hit to the nerves, but they’re far less cheap than we were expecting. Krampus, for example, is wonderfully built up with ominous sound design and the sudden presence of creepy crows. We also like how Krampus leaves a trail of snow behind after they’ve disappeared. They… they have disappeared, right?

Oh, and don’t bother trying to hide. The game makes very clear that isn’t going to work:

See?

So what can you do? Shine your flashlight at them? Well, yes, but a far more effective way to tone this one down is to play around with the creepy cog in your inventory.

Don’t be put off by its nasty red eyes and creepy smile. It genuinely is here to help! It lets you adjust the difficulty, toggle some of the scarier effects, and even decide what horrors show up:

This has to be the worst dinner party guest list in history 

Honestly, a lot of this stuff is too intriguing to switch off. What’s the ‘Bed Jumpscare’ or ‘The Unseen Death Signs’? What’s ‘The Watchtower Shrine’ that we can build with the crafting table? (we were too freaked out to build it and find out). And what kind of add-on lets you find a grave, mine it, and then place it next to your house? 

Admiring our new grave, Mr Pig? Please don’t be another mimic D:

We’d love to explore further but we think we’d be better off weeping in a nice bright room for a while instead. If you’re made of braver stuff than us (almost definitely), look up Dwellers 2.0 by Panascais in the Minecraft Marketplace or click this line of lovely green text to be taken to its Marketplace page. Best of luck! Now if you’ll excuse us, we just heard a nice whistling sound that we want to investigate. It must be good news!