What is new in Araz beta.2 and the 26.3 build

Araz 1.0.0-beta.2 is now available for Minecraft 26.3. It is the same beta.2 release that went out on 15 September 2026 for the other versions, rebuilt against the new game internals on 21 September 2026. The biggest change in beta.2 is that the creature shows itself far less often.

beta.1 feedback kept coming back to one point. Araz turned up every minute or two, and horror that is always on stops being horror. In beta.2 every path that can put it in front of you passes through one shared cooldown, with four minutes of silence as the default minimum.

The rest of the update is about what it does with all that watching. It now writes things down and lets you read the notes. You can hide from it, buy three days of quiet at the Altar of Araz, and tune the whole mod from an in-game settings screen.

How often does Araz appear in beta.2?

Every appearance path now goes through one gate: ambient encounters, door and window visits, the hanging ambush, the mining glimpse, abductions and bed visits. Once it has shown itself, it stays gone for at least 240 seconds. In beta.1 each of those paths ran on its own timer, so on a bad night they stacked.

The numbers below are taken from the Araz CHANGELOG.md entry for 1.0.0-beta.2.

Ambient mischief that does not spawn the creature is untouched. Phantom sounds, lights going out, footprints and ransacked chests happen as often as before. The atmosphere stays, the creature just stops being everywhere.

It keeps records: signs, the Observation Log and death markers

In the mod's story its task was to watch the things that walk and write down how they walk. beta.2 is the update that lets you read what it wrote.

• Record signs. Some nights it plants a sign near your bed or your door with a line from its notes, such as 14 TIMES / YOU OPENED IT.
• Observation Log. A new item, found in the abandoned camp chest. Read it and it tells you in its own words how many nights it watched, how often you met, what it has learned from you and which abilities that unlocked. It is reusable and always current.
• Death markers. Where it kills someone it leaves a skull and a sign reading ONE WHO WALKED / STOPPED HERE. On a server your friends will find it.

I am still recording.

Observation counters no longer stop at the threshold that unlocks an ability, so the signs and the Observation Log show real numbers instead of capped ones.

Can you hide from Araz now?

Yes, hiding is new in beta.2. During a hunt, crouch, stay still and stay in the dark for three seconds and it loses sight of you. It does not work once it knows you well, and it does not work on Blood Moon nights.

You also get a warning before it arrives. While it is within roughly 28 blocks, animals, ambience and music fall silent on your client. The world going quiet now means something, and it happens before you have seen anything.

The silence ritual: a soul lantern and three diamonds

In beta.1 the Altar of Araz had one use, the invitation, which made it come more often and hunt harder. beta.2 adds the opposite, and it is not free.

1. Build the altar

   Soul sand in the middle with a soul torch on top, and an amethyst block on each of the four diagonal corners, level with the soul sand. Type /araz altar in chat to print the layout.

2. Bring the price

   Hold a soul lantern in your main hand and keep three diamonds in your inventory.

3. Right-click the soul sand or the torch

   The lantern and the three diamonds are consumed. It keeps away for three days.

If you are missing part of the price, the altar tells you so: a soul lantern in hand, three diamonds in your bag. The invitation ritual still works the same way, with an empty hand or any other item.

Possession that other players can see

A possessed player now glows, leaks dark smoke and mutters, so friends on a server can tell that something is inside you. Possession itself is unchanged: your movement locks, your inventory shuffles, and your own legs carry you at your iron golem. In beta.1 all of that was invisible from the outside.

The story can no longer get stuck, and /araz help

Essence of Araz is now in the portal ruin chest. Its only source used to be killing the creature, which flees below half health, so the story could stall before The Last Line could be forged. Ruins that already exist in beta.1 worlds get one Essence added once.

/araz help reads your progress and tells you your next step, whether that is the camp, the records, the ruin, the essence or the altar. /araz altar prints the altar layout and its three uses. Both commands are English in every one of the mod's 12 languages.

Two placement bugs are fixed with it. The abandoned camp and the portal ruin were never built for players in creative mode, so the given coordinates showed only stone. They now build in any game mode, while the arrival scene and the chase still only start in survival. Standing on the surface above the ruin also counted as arriving, which started the chase and spawned the guard 40 to 60 blocks below inside solid rock. You now have to be inside the ruin.

Power awareness for modpacks and overpowered gear

If your gear is far beyond vanilla, from hero mods, modded armor, huge health or a sword that hits for hundreds, it notices and says so. The line is: You are not normal. Then neither will I be.

From that point on each encounter scales to you. It gains health based on your attack power, up to 1500 extra, plus harder hits, armor and toughness, and an armor-piercing strike worth a share of your maximum health. No single hit can take more than 20% of its health. Vanilla gear is not affected, including full netherite with Strength II. The toggle is gucOlcekleme.

Settings, light mode and photosensitivity mode

beta.2 adds an in-game settings screen through Mod Menu and Cloth Config, both optional. Every option sits in three tabs, Features, Pacing and Accessibility, and is saved straight to config/araz.json. Without Mod Menu the config file still holds everything, and existing config files are upgraded in place with the new keys written at their defaults.

Light mode removes attacks, jumpscares, executions, possession, abductions and ambushes while the story still plays out. Photosensitivity mode removes the growing flash, the glitch bars and the pulsing overlays, and keeps the face and the colour wash. Both are listed under the Accessibility tab.

The Minecraft 26.3 build and how to update

The 26.3 release carries the same beta.2 content with no gameplay changes. Entity types, sign text, coloured blocks such as carpets, and the loot number system all changed in 26.2 and 26.3, so those parts of the mod were rewritten. The Araz changelog lists the rest of that build as follows.

• GeckoLib 5.5.6 or newer is required on Minecraft 26.3.
• Fixed: the spawn egg texture was missing from the mod file.
• The 26.1.2, 1.21.10 and 1.20.1 builds stay available and are unchanged.
• Fabric only. There is no Forge or NeoForge build, and Fabric API is required on every version.

To update, take the old Araz jar out of your mods folder and drop the new one in. Existing worlds keep working, because nothing in the mod touches world generation. A portal ruin built in a beta.1 world gets an Essence of Araz added once, and camps that were already built stay where they are.

Bug reports and sightings go to the Araz Discord. Downloads are on Modrinth and CurseForge, and the mod page is spicesfire.com/araz.