AdvancedCreatures

✦ Overview

AdvancedCreatures brings fully animated, living 3D wildlife, mythical beasts, and world bosses directly into Minecraft without requiring any client-side mods, resource packs, OptiFine, or third-party launchers.

Powered entirely by native vanilla BlockDisplay and Interaction entities combined with a high-performance server-side kinematics engine, your players experience custom-modeled entities with fluid keyframe animations, autonomous AI, and rideable mechanics—using an unmodified vanilla Minecraft client!

With Version 1.3.0, AdvancedCreatures bundles 30+ default creature models and mythical bosses that automatically extract on first startup, paired with the flagship Natural World Spawning Engine, distance LOD performance optimizations, and a free web-based 3D modeler.

★ Key Features

🦴 1. Smooth Skeletal Keyframe Animation Engine

• Native 20 TPS Animation Loop: Runs fluid multi-track animations (Idle, Walk, Run, Attack, Hurt, Death, Sit, Fly, Swim) with smooth quaternion rotation interpolation.
• Hierarchical Bone Rigging: Complex parent-child joint constraints allow realistic multi-segment limbs, flapping wings, waving tails, and expressive head tracking.
• Dynamic Look-At Controllers: Heads track nearby players within realistic angular neck constraints.

🧠 2. Intelligent Autonomous AI & 3D Physics

• Single Vanilla-Style Hitbox: Standardized to a unified interaction collider per creature, ensuring swords, bows, and projectiles register cleanly from any angle (front, sides, and behind).
• 3D Underwater Marine Navigation: Whales, orcas, and sharks navigate true 3D depths with neutral buoyancy waves. Includes smart shore avoidance that prevents marine animals from beaching or hopping onto dry land, plus automatic flop recovery if pushed ashore.
• Aerial Raptor Flight Dynamics: Eagles, toucans, and sparrows tuck their legs and tilt into realistic horizontal aerodynamic postures while soaring. Raptors circle high above prey before executing high-speed aerial hunting dives.
• 1-Block Smooth Terrain Climbing: Land animals naturally step up 1-block terrain elevation changes without snagging or needing awkward jumps.
• Living Predator-Prey Ecosystem: Carnivores actively hunt natural prey species (including other custom wildlife). Features an integrated hunting satisfaction cooldown to prevent nonstop bloodbaths.

🏇 3. Interactive Gameplay & Immersion

• Rideable Mounts: Saddle and ride large wildlife (giraffes, bears, elephants, orcas) with realistic on-top seat positioning and directional steering.
• First-Person Spectator Camera: Shift into spectator mode and right-click any animal to see the world directly through its eyes at true eye height.
• Baby vs. Adult Lifecycle: Supports baby scaling, distinct juvenile AI behaviors, and dedicated chick models (e.g. ducklings and penguin chicks).
• Taming & Companionship: Tame animals with preferred diet items, command them to sit/stay, and have them defend you in combat.
• Clean Wild Aesthetics: Nametags are hidden by default for wild creatures to preserve survival immersion.

🐉 4. Mythical World Bosses

Challenge your players with massive multi-phase boss encounters featuring custom BossBars, combat abilities, and particle soundscapes:

• Infernal Dragon: Scorches the earth with explosive fireball barrages, magma ring eruptions, and devastating airborne swoops.
• Cerberus: Underworld guardian that unleashes triple-headed dark soulflame breath, earth tremors, and aggressive close-range lunges.
• Ancient Colossus: Massive stone juggernaut with shockwave ground pounds, seismic fissures, and heavy knockback resistance.

🌍 5. Natural World Spawning Engine

• Biome & Environmental Filters: Spawn wildlife naturally using whitelist/blacklist biome rules (PLAINS, SAVANNA, *FOREST*, DESERT, OCEAN, etc.).
• Celestial & Lunar Triggers: Control spawns based on day/night cycles, storm/rain weather, and moon phases (e.g., nocturnal predators stalking during full moons).
• Altitude & Lighting Rules: Restrict subterranean crawlers to deep caves ($Y < 0$) or mountain raptors to high peaks ($Y > 120$).
• Herd & Pack Formation: Naturally spawns animals in family groups with organic scale variation (e.g., 0.85× to 1.15× scale) for visual variety.
• Vanilla Mob Replacement: Optionally replace a percentage of vanilla spawns with custom animals (e.g., replace 40% of taiga wolves with custom wildlife).
• Smart Anti-Grief Placement: Strictly forbids wildlife from spawning on tree leaves, canopies, or artificial player building blocks (slabs, stairs, roofs).

⚡ 6. Enterprise Performance & Optimization

• Distance LOD (Level of Detail): Optimizes entity display complexity over long distances.
• Crowd Density Compression: Automatically condenses mob render counts in densely packed areas to protect client frame rates.
• Animation Distance Culling: Suspends animation math when creatures are outside player view distances.
• PersistentDataContainer (PDC) Storage: Health, scale, taming, custom attributes, and ownership survive server restarts, world reloads, and chunk unloads without corrupting entity data.

🦁 30+ Included Out-Of-The-Box Creatures

All default .creature models are bundled directly inside the plugin and auto-generate into your plugins/AdvancedCreatures/models/ directory on first startup:

🛠 MobForge: Free 3D Web Studio

Create, edit, and animate your own custom creatures directly in your browser: 👉 https://mobforge.mipcraft.eu/

• Interactive 3D Viewport: Build models out of cubes with real-time translation, rotation, and scale tools.
• Minecraft Block Painter: Paint faces using authentic, built-in Minecraft block textures.
• Visual Rigging: Drag and drop bone hierarchies and set rotation degree clamps.
• Timeline Keyframing: Create smooth multi-track walk, run, idle, and attack cycles.
• AI & Goal Builder: Configure walk speeds, jump heights, diet, attack damage, and behavioral goals.
• One-Click Export: Save directly to a .creature file, drop it into your server's models/ folder, and spawn it instantly!

⌨ Commands & Permissions

Permission Node: advancedcreatures.admin (Default: OP) Aliases: /creatures, /animal, /animals

⚙ Installation & Setup

1. Make sure your server is running Paper, Purpur, or Spigot 1.20.4 or newer (Java 17+).
2. Download AdvancedCreatures-1.3.0.jar and place it into your server's plugins/ directory.
3. Start or restart your server.
4. The plugin will automatically generate the plugins/AdvancedCreatures/ folder and extract all 30 default models.
5. Join your server and run /creature spawn orca or /creature spawn infernal_dragon to see them in action!

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Do players need to install any client mod or texture pack?
A: No. AdvancedCreatures uses Minecraft's native BlockDisplay entities. Every player connecting with an unmodified vanilla client sees full 3D models and smooth animations.

Q: How is performance compared to Armor Stand mob plugins?
A: BlockDisplay entities have virtually zero tick overhead compared to legacy armor-stand models. Models do not execute client-side entity AI ticks, and our server engine includes distance LOD, animation culling, and crowd compression to keep TPS at 20.0.

Q: Can creatures take damage, knock back, and fight back?
A: Yes. Every creature is paired with a single vanilla-style Interaction entity hitbox. They register sword, bow, and projectile damage from any angle, flash red with hurt animations, take knockback momentum, and can retaliate against players or prey.

Q: Do custom animals persist after server restarts?
A: Yes. Every creature saves its location, health, scale, baby state, and taming ownership into Minecraft's native chunk PersistentDataContainer (PDC). They automatically restore when chunks load.

Q: Can I build my own custom animals and bosses?
A: Yes. Use the free browser studio at https://mobforge.mipcraft.eu/ to build and animate models, export the .creature file, and place it into plugins/AdvancedCreatures/models/. Run /creature reload to load it instantly.