Animal Weights

Animal Weights

A husbandry mechanic for vanilla farm animals. Every cow, pig, sheep, chicken, rabbit, and mooshroom carries an integer weight (0–8) that responds to how well they’re kept — and that weight scales the meat, leather, and XP they drop when killed.

Suddenly your farm layout matters. Cramped pens of starving animals drop less. Roomy, well-lit, well-watered pastures with grass to graze produce fat, valuable animals.

Original concept: u/Axoladdy on Reddit.

How it works

Every in-game day at dawn, each target-species adult is evaluated against four living conditions in its surroundings:

| Condition | What satisfies it |
|—|—|
| Light | A block within 8 of the mob has brightness ≥ 14 (torch, lantern, full daylight). |
| Water | A water source or filled water cauldron (bucket-filled or rain-filled) is reachable from the mob — horizontally adjacent (or one block below) a cell it can walk to. Fences and walls block reachability. |
| Grazing | A grass or moss block is directly below a cell it can walk to. |
| Stretching | The mob has at least 6 walkable cells reachable around it (no fences or other farm animals blocking). |

The number of conditions met determines the daily weight change:

| Conditions met | Weight change |
|—|—|
| 4 | +1 (thriving) |
| 3 | 0 (plateau) |
| 2 | −1 (slipping) |
| 0–1 | −2 (suffering) |

Weight is clamped to [0, 8]. New mobs spawn at weight 1.

Drop scaling

When a target-species mob is killed, its primary drops and XP are scaled by its weight using an accelerating curve:

| Weight | Drop bonus |
|—|—|
| 1 | +0 (vanilla) |
| 2 | +1 |
| 3 | +2 |
| 4 | +3 |
| 5 | +4 |
| 6 | +6 |
| 7 | +8 |
| 8 | +11 (peak payoff) |

Primary drops by species:

• Cow / Mooshroom — beef (raw or cooked), leather
• Pig — porkchop (raw or cooked)
• Sheep — mutton (raw or cooked), any-colour wool
• Chicken — raw / cooked chicken, feathers
• Rabbit — raw / cooked rabbit, hide (rabbit’s foot is not scaled — it stays rare)

Sick state (weight 0)

A mob whose weight falls to 0 is sick:

• Slowness I is applied continuously.
• Breeding is blocked — both parents’ love state is reset if either is sick.
• Drops are penalised — each primary drop has a 50% chance of being removed entirely, and any stack that does drop is capped to a single item.

Babies

Baby animals are skipped from all of the above — no weight evaluation, no slowness, no drop scaling. Babies grow up in ~20 real minutes; the mechanic is meant for the long-term husbandry signal of an adult animal.

Compatibility

• Minecraft: 26.1.x
• Loader: NeoForge 26.1.x
• Required on: client and server (both sides need the mod installed)

Source & licence

GitHub: joseph-osullivan/animal-weights — MIT licensed.

Bug reports and PRs welcome.