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.
Note: There are no labels above the animals in the actual mod, this is what it would look like
Cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, rabbits, and mooshrooms all get an integer weight from 0 to 8, shown above their head. New mobs spawn at weight 1.
A freshly-spawned animal wandering the world starts at weight 1, vanilla drops, vanilla XP, no sickness. In open terrain wild animals usually plateau here
Stuff a herd into a tiny pen with no light, no water, and no grass and their weight ticks down every in-game day. At weight 0 they turn sick — Slowness I, no breeding, and their drops get capped and culled.
Give an animal light (≥ 14 brightness), water (a source block or filled cauldron it can reach), grass to graze on, and at least 6 walkable cells around it, and it gains weight every day at dawn. Three of four conditions plateaus it; all four push it to 8
A well-kept pen converges on weight 8 and stays there. This is what "thriving" looks like.
Kill a weight-8 cow and instead of 1–3 beef you get +11 extra primary drops on top of vanilla. The curve is accelerating, so weights 7 and 8 are where the real payoff is.
You get a lot more drops