Setup Casual Coop

Casual Co-op

For a group of friends who want zombies to be part of the world without dying every night. Days stay safe for the first ten days, waves are small, there are no baby zombies, lit bases are safe, and the first blood moon cannot happen before day 15. Nothing ever breaks your builds.

Read Before You Start if this is your first guide.

Commands

Run these in order:

/za preset casual
/za bloodmoon startday 15
/za spawn nightmax 20

• preset casual sets the slower waves, the 10-day daylight grace, no baby zombies, light protection, and mild events.
• bloodmoon startday 15 keeps the first two weeks free of random blood moons. The preset alone uses day 7.
• spawn nightmax 20 keeps nights to at most 20 zombie-class mobs around each player, so dark nights do not get crowded.

Block breaking, block placing, towering, and animal hunting stay off unless you turned them on before. To make sure:

/za breaking off
/za placing off
/za towering off
/za hunt off

Config File

Edit with the server stopped. These are the values the commands above set:

# [dayspawning]
enableDaySpawning = true
enableDaytimeSpawning = true
daySpawnInterval = 180
daySpawnChance = 0.25
zombiesPerSpawn = 1
maxDayZombiesPerPlayer = 30
spawnRange = 30
minSpawnDistance = 12
spawnAttemptsPerZombie = 10
requireOpenSkyForOverworldSpawns = true
daylightSpawnStartDay = 10
maxBlockLightForSpawning = 0
# [variants]
enableZombieVariants = true
babyZombieChance = 0.0
# [nightspawning]
enableNightBoost = true
nightSpawnMultiplier = 1.25
maxNightZombiesPerPlayer = 20
# [horde]
enableHordeEvents = true
hordeStartsAtDusk = true
hordeIntervalDays = 7
hordeStartChance = 0.25
hordeDurationMinutes = 6
hordeSpawnMultiplier = 2.0
hordeZombiesPerSpawn = 3
eventSpawnInterval = 30
# [bloodmoon]
enableBloodMoon = true
bloodMoonChance = 0.05
bloodMoonStartDay = 15
bloodMoonSpawnMultiplier = 3.0
bloodMoonZombiesPerSpawn = 2
# [scaling]
enableDifficultyScaling = true
scalingStartDay = 10
maxScalingDay = 75
maxSpeedBoost = 0.1
maxHealthBoost = 6
maxArmorChance = 0.15
maxWeaponChance = 0.1
# [blockbreaking], [blockplacing], [towering], [animalhunting]
enableZombieBlockBreaking = false
enableZombieBlockPlacing = false
enableZombieTowering = false
enableAnimalHunting = false

What To Expect

• Days 0 to 9: no custom waves in daylight. At night, every 9 seconds each player has about a 31% chance (25% times the 1.25 night boost) of one zombie spawning at least 12 blocks away, inside the 30-block spawn range.
• From day 10: single-zombie waves come in daylight too, at 25% every 9 seconds, up to 30 zombie-class mobs around each player by day and 20 by night. Zombies start getting slightly stronger.
• Light protects you: custom waves only spawn in complete block darkness, so a torch-lit base and its surroundings stay clear of new waves. Zombies can still walk in from the dark, and vanilla spawning follows its own rules.
• Hordes: scheduled hordes also wait for the 10-day daylight grace, so day 7 is skipped. From then on, every 7th day (14, 21, 28, ...) has a 25% chance of a horde at dusk. For 6 minutes, waves are checked every 1.5 seconds at twice the chance with 3 zombies each.
• Blood moons: from day 15, 5% of nights. Waves are three times as likely with 2 zombies each until dawn.
• Difficulty: from day 10 to day 75, zombies gain up to 10% speed and 6 health (3 hearts), and up to 15% wear armor and 10% carry a weapon.
• Groups: every player rolls for waves separately, so four players spread out see four times the zombies. The cap counts every zombie-class mob within 30 blocks of each player, vanilla ones included, so a group standing together shares one crowd.
• Dying: spawns near a player who just died are halved for 30 seconds.

Tuning

To make it...	Run
Even calmer	/za spawn chance 0.15
Safe in daylight for longer (hordes wait too)	/za spawn daylightstart 20
Safe in daylight forever	/za spawn daytime off (see Night-Only Zombies)
Free of hordes	/za events off
Free of blood moons	/za bloodmoon off
A bit more exciting at night	/za spawn nightmax 30
Burn zombies in sunlight like vanilla	/za burn on
Stop zombies getting stronger	/za scaling off
Quieter (no spawn sounds or smoke)	/za spawn effects off

The mercy period after a death is set in the file: deathCooldownSeconds (5 to 600) and cooldownSpawnReduction (1.0 stops custom spawns completely during it) in [deathcooldown].

Undo

/za preset standard brings back the normal balance, including the normal night cap and blood moons from the first night.