Setup Night Only

Night-Only Zombies

For worlds where daylight means safety and nightfall means trouble. The mod sends no custom waves during the day, zombies burn in the sun again like vanilla, and nights, hordes, and blood moons stay dangerous. This works on top of any preset.

Read Before You Start if this is your first guide.

Commands

Run these in order. Skip the first line if you want to keep your current balance:

/za preset standard
/za spawn daytime off
/za burn on
/za events dusk on

• preset standard (or casual or hardcore) sets the overall balance. Presets turn daytime waves back on, so it must come first.
• spawn daytime off is permanent night-only mode for custom waves.
• burn on lets zombies burn in sunlight, so the night's survivors die at dawn instead of roaming all day.
• events dusk on makes scheduled hordes arrive at nightfall. It is the default; it matters because night-only mode pauses hordes that are set to arrive at dawn.

Config File

Edit with the server stopped:

# [general]
preventSunBurn = false
# [dayspawning]
enableDaytimeSpawning = false
# [horde]
hordeStartsAtDusk = true

preventSunBurn = false means zombies do burn. If you also want the Standard balance, apply the values from the preset table on Home or run /za preset standard before editing.

What To Expect

• Daytime: no custom waves in the Overworld or any dimension with a day and night. Vanilla zombies spawn and burn as usual.
• Dawn: zombies standing in sunlight catch fire. Zombies with a helmet, in water, or in shade survive, the same as vanilla. Scaled zombies wear armor more often on later days, so some will make it through the morning.
• Night (Standard): every 6 seconds each player has a 75% chance (50% times the 1.5 night boost) of 2 zombies, up to 50 zombie-class mobs around each player. Lit areas stay protected.
• Hordes: every 5th day has a 50% chance of a horde at dusk that lasts about the night.
• Blood moons: 15% of nights, five times the wave chance with 4 zombies each.
• Admin commands: /za events start only works at night in this mode. /za bloodmoon start during the day waits for nightfall.
• Nether and End: not affected by daytime rules. They have their own switches, /za spawn nether and /za spawn end, both off by default.
• /za spawn daylightstart no longer affects waves in night-only mode, but it still holds back scheduled hordes until that day: day 1 with Standard, day 10 with Casual.

Tuning

To make it...	Run
Keep night crowds smaller	/za spawn nightmax 30
Allow bigger night crowds	/za spawn nightmax 80
Hit harder at night	/za spawn amount 3
Keep zombies alive in daylight (they still stop spawning)	/za burn off
Make hordes rarer	/za events interval 7
Make every 5th night a horde	/za events chance 1
Remove blood moons for the first weeks	/za bloodmoon startday 14
Make nights spawn waves more often	/za spawn nightmultiplier 2.0

/za spawn nightmultiplier <1.0-10.0> (nightSpawnMultiplier in [nightspawning]) sets the night boost; 1.0 means no boost. /za spawn nightboost off turns it off.

Undo

/za spawn daytime on
/za burn off

Daytime waves come back, still waiting for daylightstart if one is set.