Phantoms and Sanity

The concept of Phantoms is quite cool. No sleep, and your nightmares eventually enter the waking world.

But it turns out, that it doesn’t work well in practice in a game like Minecraft.

So we could rethink how they work to keep the aesthetic while also reducing the frustration. Let’s add a system and call it sanity. You can have between 10 and -10 sanity.

Beginning after 4 nights of staying awake, you get a -1 penalty to your sanity for every day you don’t sleep to a maximum of a -5 penalty.

And here’s how it keeps things less frustrating. Simple things like eating, keeping maximum health (or petting your pet maybe?) raise your sanity. So even if you never sleep, you will have usually around 2 or 3 sanity.

This way, you will need to be careless in other ways before phantoms will spawn. Low hunger, low health, triggering skulk shriekers, staring at Endermen, etc. could add temporary penalties.

These other ways of losing sanity will be unlikely to affect you if you sleep.

At -1 sanity, phantoms have a small chance to spawn at night. The chance of them spawning and the number that spawn increases for every sanity below 0.

If you sleep, if your sanity is below 0, it resets to 0. It also resets to 0 if you die.

For multiplayer, phantoms only attack low sanity players and if you enter a bed and stay in it for a short time, your sanity resets even if not enough players are asleep.

Sanity has no adverse effects aside from phantoms.

The sanity meter is added to reduce frustration, not add to it.