Penned In

Penned In keeps your farm animals inside a single block. They’re saved as data instead of live mobs, so you can run big breeding and produce farms without the entity lag. Each pen changes its look to suit what’s inside, the animals move about in it, and it does the breeding, milking, shearing and butchering for you.

Features

• One block, a whole herd. Each pen holds a herd of one kind, up to 128 animals. Pens tick in batches, so a field of them costs almost nothing.
• Pen tiers. A new pen is Wooden and holds 16 vanilla animals. Upgrades take it to Iron (32), Gold (48, and mobs from other mods), Diamond (80) and Netherite (128). Use an upgrade on a placed pen or craft it with the pen item, and the animals stay inside. Pens made before tiers existed count as Netherite, so nothing gets smaller.
• Every farm animal. Cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, mooshrooms, goats, rabbits, armadillos, turtles, sniffers, hoglins and pandas.
• Any other mob that breeds on food, including modded animals (in a Gold pen or better): llamas, horses, foxes, axolotls and more. Each one is stored exactly, keeping its coat, genes, stats, chest, armour and owner.
• A design for each animal. There are 12 farm pens (Pig Sty, Chicken Coop, Sheep Fold, Dig Site, Nether Pen and more) plus 18 designs for other mobs. Use the arrows in the pen’s screen to change the look.
• Pens for wild animals. Aquarium Tank, Penguin Pool, Rocky Haul-out, Ice Shelf, Bird Cage, Dog Kennel, Cat House, Savanna Enclosure, and dinosaur paddocks with a Cliff Roost for pterosaurs and a Long-Neck Paddock where sauropods stretch up to a tall tree. Each mob gets the right one automatically.
• Live miniatures. The animals look around, shuffle and hop. Sheep graze, swimmers bob behind the glass, birds hop along their perch, and pens with mixed colours or variants cycle through them.
• Automatic breeding. Put food in the food slot and ready pairs breed on their own. Spare food speeds up the babies.
• The tool slot does the work. It shears sheep (each keeps its colour), milks with buckets, makes mushroom stew with bowls, and brushes scutes off armadillos with a brush.
• Natural produce. Chickens lay eggs, armadillos shed scutes, sniffers dig up seeds, baby pandas sneeze slimeballs and baby turtles drop scutes as they grow.
• Optional butchering. Put a weapon in the weapon slot and set a Keep number. Only adults above that number are taken, never babies or named animals. Looting, Fire Aspect and modded knives (Farmer’s Delight) all work.
• XP is kept, not wasted. Breeding and butchering XP mends Mending gear in the slots, fills glass bottles with Bottles o’ Enchanting, and otherwise stays stored in the pen.
• Hopper Pen. Craft a Gold pen (or better) with a hopper. Hoppers and pipes can feed it from any side. Place it on a chest or barrel and products drop straight in.
• Set every side. A Hopper Pen’s Sides panel shows all six faces and what’s attached to each. Set each side to Off, Items, Milk, liquid XP or Input. Milk and XP sides fill a tank touching them, and pipes from Pipez or any other mod connect to every side. It uses whatever liquid XP your pack has.
• Input sides. An Input side pulls food, glass bottles, tools and weapons from the chest or pipe touching it, only taking what the pen can use. Toggle which of those each side takes.
• Pen Settings Card. Copy a Hopper Pen’s side settings onto a card and paste them onto as many other Hopper Pens as you like. Sneak and right-click in the air to open the card and set each side by hand.
• In-game guide. New players get the Penned In Guide, a short picture book that explains everything. Craft another any time.
• See it at a glance. Look at a pen to see adults, babies, breed timer, grow time, stored XP and more. Jade and WTHIT are supported, and comparators read how full a pen is.
• Pick it up and it keeps everything. Like a shulker box, a picked-up pen keeps its animals, slots, outputs and XP. The item’s tooltip lists what’s inside.
• Easy to fill. Right-click an animal with the pen item, or lead a group up to a placed pen. Use a lead on the pen to let one back out.
• Configurable. Pen tiers and their sizes, timers, XP storage, which mobs and mods are allowed, a size limit and more can be set in the server config, or in-game from the mod’s Config screen in a singleplayer world (on 1.20.1 too). A client config controls the info panel and ambient animal sounds.
• Works with modpacks. Tags control which mobs can be penned, which design a mob gets, which weapons can butcher and which items are never output.

Crafting

• Animal Pen (Wooden): fence, hay bale, fence over three planks
• Iron Upgrade: 8 iron ingots around a hay bale
• Gold Upgrade: 8 gold ingots around an Iron Upgrade
• Diamond Upgrade: diamonds in the corners and gold ingots on the sides, around a Gold Upgrade
• Netherite Upgrade: as the Diamond Upgrade, with a netherite ingot at the top, around a Diamond Upgrade
• Upgrading a pen: pen + the next upgrade (shapeless), or use the upgrade on a placed pen
• Hopper Pen: Gold (or better) Animal Pen + hopper (shapeless)
• Pen Settings Card: book + hopper + comparator (shapeless)
• Penned In Guide: book + wheat (shapeless)

All recipes appear in the recipe book.

Versions

Available for Forge 1.20.1 and NeoForge 1.21.1 and 26.1.2.

In English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Modpacks

You’re free to include Penned In in any modpack. It’s MIT licensed.