Kindred

Features

Bond with any tamed pet

Look at one of your tamed pets, open the Companion menu (g by default), and bond to it.

Bonded pets are stored on you — not in the world. They survive logouts, chunk unloads, and dimension changes.

• Works with any ownable, tameable mob out of the box (wolves, cats, parrots, horses, donkeys, mules, llamas, camels, foxes, axolotls — anything that implements vanilla ownership, including modded mobs).
• Built-in compat for Petting – tame any mob, Jurassic Reborn, and Familiars Lib, so their pets can be bonded too.
• How many pets you can bond is controlled by the max_companion_bonds attribute, so skill and perk mods can raise it.
• Optional mount-only mode restricts bonding to saddleable mounts.
• Optional XP level cost per bond — makes bonding feel earned, with the cost previewed before you confirm.
• Optional datapack allowlist / denylist for species that should or shouldn’t be bondable on your server.

Summon & Dismiss with a keybind

One key summons your active pet (v by default). Hold it again while near the pet to dismiss them back to a safe place. Open the roster with another key to switch active pet, rename, reorder, or break bonds.

• Hold-to-confirm prevents misclicks — configurable hold duration for both summon and dismiss.
• Smart placement: pets within range walk to you naturally; farther pets teleport to a safe spot beside you.
• Refuses to summon when the space around you is obstructed (configurable).
• Summon while swimming (configurable), handy for aquatic pets.
• Cancels the hold if you take damage (configurable) — mirrors vanilla bow-draw / eating behavior.
• Optional cross-dimensional summons (defaults on) so your pet follows you to the Nether and back.
• Dismissing can be turned off entirely if your server wants pets to stay in the world.

Auto-Mount

Summon your horse and you’re already in the saddle. Rideable pets appear right under you and you’re mounted automatically.

• Toggle it per pet with the Auto-Mount checkbox in the Companions screen. On by default.
• Pets that take a saddle have to be wearing one, so you never end up on a mount you can’t steer.
• Works with horses, donkeys, mules, camels, pigs, striders, and modded mounts built on the vanilla riding interfaces.
• Sneak while the summon finishes to summon normally without mounting.
• Only mounts you when there’s room for both of you, so you won’t get stuck in a ceiling.
• Server owners can turn it off with a config switch, or exclude species with a datapack tag. Llamas are excluded by default since they can’t be steered.

Bring them back from the grave

By default, when a bonded pet dies, the bond doesn’t break — it just goes dormant. Summon them again and they respawn at your side, gear and all.

• Soft death: pet returns on next summon. Optionally add a revival cooldown to add some weight to death without going full permadeath.
• Permadeath mode: flip a config switch and death breaks the bond for keeps.
• Loot drops are off by default in soft-death mode, otherwise you could infinitely kill them for their loot, like leather. Re-enable for vanilla behavior, especially if you turn permanent death on.

Companions GUI

A clean inventory-style screen for managing your bonds.

• Live 3D preview of the selected pet.
• Set active, rename, reorder (▲ / ▼), and break bonds with a hold-to-confirm.
• Auto-Mount checkbox for rideable pets.
• Per-pet summon cooldown indicator.
• Respawn timer for pets in revival cooldown.
• “Limbo” / “Resting” state hints so you always know where each pet is. Limbo is where they go when they die, and resting means they’ve been dismissed from the world.
• Prefer the classic Minecraft look? Switch to the vanilla-style UI in the client config.

Extremely customizable

Server behavior lives in kindred-server.toml, and client options in kindred-client.toml:

Datapack control

Five tags let server owners and modpack authors tune the experience without code:

• kindred:bond_allowlist (entity types) — when non-empty, only species in this tag can be bonded and bond_denylist is ignored. Leave empty to fall back to denylist behavior.
• kindred:bond_denylist (entity types) — species that can never be bonded. Only consulted when bond_allowlist is empty.
• kindred:auto_mount_denylist (entity types) — rideable species that never get Auto-Mount. Ships with llamas and trader llamas.
• kindred:no_summon_dimensions (dimension types) — dimensions where summoning is blocked.
• kindred:no_summon_biomes (biomes) — biomes where summoning is blocked (great for boss arenas, dungeon biomes, PvP zones).

Bond capacity attribute

The number of pets a player can bond is the max_companion_bonds attribute. Its base value comes from the startingCompanionBonds config, and any mod that adds attribute modifiers can raise or lower it.

This replaces the old Project MMO integration. You can use the attribute with Project MMO perks to get the same effect, or with any other mod (Pufferfish’s Skills, etc.) to modify it.

Commands

For server admins and debugging:

/kindred claim                — claim the entity at your crosshair
/kindred list                 — list your bonds with indices
/kindred summon <index>       — summon a bond
/kindred dismiss <index>      — dismiss a bond
/kindred break <index>        — break a bond
/kindred active <index|none>  — set or clear the active pet

Translations

English and Simplified Chinese (thanks nil0bug).

Why Kindred?

Vanilla pets are fragile, stationary, and easy to lose. Existing pet mods either turn them into items (which feels weird) or add a stable system (which feels like extra inventory management). Kindred takes a different angle: your pets live on you, not in the world, kind of like Pokemon. They’re always one keypress away, they survive deaths, and the whole thing tunes from a config file so it fits any modpack — hardcore, casual, or RPG-progression.

Keybinds

Set them in Options → Controls → Kindred.

This mod was inspired by Callable Horses, which seems to not be moving past 1.20.1. I wanted to expand on it a little bit and include some new features and upgrades.