Oreling

Feed them stone. Harvest their ore.

Oreling adds small rock-eating creatures that turn stone into ore. Other resource-creature mods give each creature one fixed output. Here what you feed it decides what it produces, its body shows what it has digested, and a diet bred into a lineage becomes a strain.

How it works

1. Find. Wild Orelings live underground: Stone Orelings in caves, Deepslate Orelings below y 0, Granite Orelings in mountains. They are shy and never hostile. Bait (raw ore, coal, redstone, lapis) calms them.
2. Catch. Throw an Oreling Ball at one. The ball opens, draws the creature in, shakes three times and clicks: the catch never fails. The full ball keeps that exact creature, with its traits and history.
3. Raise. Use the full ball on a Quarry Pen and fill the pen with blocks to eat, by hand or with a hopper.
4. Harvest. Orelings leave Concretions, one element each. Grind them in the Mortar into raw ores, redstone, lapis, diamonds and more.

The Oreling Ball

• A copper and stone ball with an iron band, crafted four at a time (copper, iron nuggets, redstone, stone). Empty balls stack and are reused.
• Throw a full ball anywhere to let its creature out where it lands, or use it on a Quarry Pen or a Nursery to put the creature in.
• Sneak-use an empty ball on a pen to take a creature back out. Its button glows amber when a creature is inside.

You compose the menu

Every block carries minerals: stone a little iron and copper, deepslate more iron and some redstone, ore blocks a strong dose of their metal. Each species absorbs some elements better than others, so the output is what it ate × its affinities. A menu of several rock families wastes less food: 16 blocks per Concretion with one family, 8 with four or more.

The body tells the diet

Metal veins, lumps of coal, lapis and redstone, quartz needles, cut diamonds and amethyst clusters grow on an Oreling’s three back plates as it absorbs minerals. Redstone, amethyst and diamond crusts glow. You can read your herd without opening a screen.

Breed strains

• Nursery: two Orelings and a meal give a larva after 2 minutes.
• Strains: parents fed mostly one element found a strain of it; 80% of its Concretions are that element, and it breeds true.
• Crosses: rarer strains come from cross recipes (shown in JEI). Diamond and emerald need elder parents.
• Stars: metabolism ★ ×1 to ★★★★ ×3, sometimes gained when two parents share their stars.

Learn by looking

No wiki needed. Hold the Miner’s Lens and look at a block (its minerals), an Oreling (what it absorbs) or a pen (each creature’s next Concretion and, in plain words, why the pen is slow). Affinities start as “?” and are revealed when you see a creature wearing that ore. The Naturalist’s Journal keeps everything you have found in a species × element grid.

Quarry Pen

• 6 creatures simulated as data, not entities: big farms stay lag-free.
• Hopper input and output, a production bar, well-being from light, temperature, humidity and health.
• Upgrades, one per family: Speed I–III, Misting, Heater, Chiller, Shade, and for creative worlds the Creative No-Food Upgrade (food is never used up).

Details

• An advancement tab, from the first Oreling Ball to Speed Upgrade III.
• Sounds with subtitles for Orelings, the Oreling Ball, the Mortar, the Nursery and the Miner’s Lens.
• Oreling Balls can turn up in mineshaft and dungeon chests.
• English and French.

Built for modpacks

• Data-driven: species, elements, block profiles, Mortar outputs, balance and cross recipes are datapack JSON, reloaded with /reload.
• Biome tags oreling:spawns_<species>_oreling decide where each species lives. Recipes and bait accept common tags (c:ingots/copper, c:dusts/redstone…).
• Quarry Pen, Mortar and Nursery are built from vanilla block textures, so resource packs restyle them.
• Per-world server config with global multipliers for rate, food and breeding cost.
• Optional JEI (diet, Mortar and cross pages), Jade (pen, Nursery and creature tooltips), Create (crushing, milling) and Mekanism (crushing).
• Killing an Oreling drops nothing. The mod rewards care, not hunting.

Requires: NeoForge 1.21.1 and GeckoLib.