Villager Breeding

The problem it solves
Vanilla villagers can breed, but the bar is high. You need enough beds, someone to hand out food, and a long wait while they slowly stockpile bread. Village populations crawl, and farms end up littered with bread nobody eats.

This mod wires eating straight into breeding: food stops being inventory bookkeeping and becomes real breeding fuel. Drop a stack of bread on the ground and villagers will walk over, eat it, then go find each other — and suddenly the village is alive.

What villagers do
Villagers automatically notice any edible item within a certain radius, whether it is lying on the ground or stashed in another villager’s inventory. They walk over, pick it up and eat it, complete with chewing particles and eating sounds.

"Any food" really means any: bread, carrots, cooked meat and apples out of the box, plus anything a modpack adds — with no extra configuration required.

Food restores health according to its nutrition value, and any potion effects it carries still apply — a villager that eats a golden apple gets resistance and regeneration like anyone else. Villagers below full health will go looking for food to heal.

How breeding happens
Once an adult villager finishes a meal, and is not on cooldown, it starts looking for another adult nearby. The two walk toward each other, hold eye contact for a few seconds with the familiar heart particles above their heads, and a child is born.

Afterwards both parents go on a five-minute cooldown: no amount of food will make them breed again during that window. That keeps the population from exploding and lets it grow at the pace you actually feed them.

By default a child has a small chance of being a baby, otherwise an adult. This is configurable.

Babies grow up
When a baby villager eats, it has a chance to grow up instantly, with the usual growth particles and sound.

Like adults, it has a one-minute cooldown — meals eaten within that minute do not count toward the growth roll. It still ages faster with each meal the way feeding bread does in vanilla, so even unlucky babies will eventually grow up rather than getting stuck.

About cooldowns
Both cooldowns run on world time. Even if the chunk a villager lives in gets unloaded, the cooldown keeps ticking instead of freezing whenever a player walks away.

What you can do
Besides dropping food on the ground, you can right-click a villager while holding food to feed it a portion directly. It heals immediately, becomes eager to breed, and babies make their growth roll right away.

Right-clicking empty-handed still opens the trading menu as usual — feeding only kicks in when the item in hand is actually edible.

The in-game config screen
Open it from the config button on this mod’s entry in Forge’s mod list. Every option in the config file can be changed right there.

The screen follows the same translucent dark-grey panel style as Vein Rebirth, grouped into General, Food & Eating, Breeding and Baby Growth. Numbers use sliders and toggles flip with a click, while the right column shows the current value, allowed range and default. Changes apply immediately and are written to the config file when you close the screen.

Want breeding faster or slower? Adjust it here instead of editing files by hand.

Working with Jade
If Jade is installed, simply aiming at a villager shows its breeding cooldown, current state, the chance of a baby, and its feeding state directly in the Jade overlay. You get the same information without opening anything — just by looking at it.

Friendly to servers
All of the mod’s logic runs on the server; the client only displays. A server can install it and clients without it can still play normally — they simply miss the in-game config screen and the Jade overlay.

Spawn placement during dense breeding is handled safely too: newborns are always placed where they can actually stand, never wedged inside another villager or suffocating in a block.

Configuration
Every parameter can be tuned in the config file — food search range, feeding interval, breeding cooldown, baby growth chance and its cooldown, and more. Want it faster or slower? Change a number; no recompiling needed.

Compatibility
Built for Minecraft 1.20.1 on Forge. It has no hard dependencies on any other mod; it works with or without Jade.