Chat, Mention, and Status Effect Sounds in the Sounds Mod
Sounds adds audio feedback to many actions that are normally silent, and this guide covers the chat, mention, and status effect categories. Everything here is configured through the mod's own interface, and each sound entry can be previewed before you commit to it.
Chat Sounds
The mod plays distinct effects for different chat activities. There is a sound for typing or deleting characters in the chat input bar, a separate one for receiving a chat message, and a third for when someone mentions you in a new message. Typing sounds are exempt from the cooldown system, so they always play.
Two settings control how chat audio behaves:
- Enable Chat Sound Cooldown — turns the cooldown on or off for chat sounds. When active, a given sound plays only once per cooldown period. Typing sounds are not affected.
- Chat Sound Cooldown — the length of that cooldown period, measured in seconds.
There is also Ignore System Messages, which decides whether system messages are skipped when chat sounds play.
Mentions
A mention sound fires when your name or keyword appears in a new chat message. The list of keywords that trigger it is configurable, so you can add whatever terms you want to be alerted by. The mention sound sits alongside the general received-message sound, meaning a message that mentions you can trigger both.
Status Effect Sounds
Four separate entries cover status effects, split by whether the effect is positive or negative and whether you are gaining or losing it:
- Positive Status Effect Gain
- Positive Status Effect Lose
- Negative Status Effect Gain
- Negative Status Effect Lose
Each one is a sound effect played at the moment the corresponding event happens. One related option, Ignore Silenced Status Effects, controls whether effects that have been silenced and show no HUD icon are skipped when these sounds play.
Cooldowns and Item Sounds
Chat sounds share a cooldown system with item sounds, though the two are configured separately. Item sounds have their own pair of settings:
- Enable Item Sound Cooldown — when on, an item sound plays only once per cooldown period.
- Item Sound Cooldown — the duration of that period, in seconds.
The chat cooldown settings described above work the same way but apply only to chat, and never to typing.
Filters for Empty Slots
Two options decide whether empty slots are skipped when sound effects play:
- Ignore Empty Inventory Slots — covers inventory slots generally, and also applies to the hotbar drop sound because of how item dropping is handled internally.
- Ignore Empty Hotbar Slots — covers hotbar slots only, and does not include the hotbar drop sound for the same reason.
If you want dropping from an empty hotbar slot to stay quiet, the inventory slot option is the one to toggle.
General Sound Options
Every sound entry in the mod shares a common set of controls. You can preview the effect, choose whether it should play at all, set its volume, set its pitch, and supply the sound event ID that identifies which audio is triggered. A lower pitch produces a deeper tone; a higher pitch produces a squeakier one. There is also an option for making the played sound depend on the item, block, or action involved, so the game picks the event based on the type of thing in use.
If a sound fails to play, the mod reports that an error occurred while trying to play that sound and asks whether the sound event ID is valid. The same check applies when previewing.
Interface Notes
Sounds adds a button to the vanilla sound mixer screen that opens its config screen. Hide Button In Sound Mixer Menu removes that button if you would rather it not appear. A separate debugging option, Enable Verbose Sound Type Logging, writes detailed information about block sound types to the console.
If both Sounds and QualitySounds are present, the mod shows an incompatibility notice asking you to remove QualitySounds, since Sounds already covers its effects and keeping both causes conflicts, duplicated sounds, and possible crashes.