Petting Mod — Guide

Taming

Taming is performed with Golden Wheat, the mod's universal taming item. To attempt a tame, crouch and right-click the target mob while holding Golden Wheat. Simply holding Golden Wheat also grants a movement speed boost (about 1.25x) to nearby animals, helping you herd them.

Taming is chance-based, with a default success rate of roughly one in three (about 33%) per attempt. Several optional rules can change the odds and requirements:

• Health scaling - When enabled, a mob with lower current health is easier to tame, so weakening a creature first improves your chances.
• Health threshold - Some mobs may need to be brought below a certain health percentage before they can be tamed at all.
• Kill requirement - A mob type may require you to defeat one of its kind at least once before any of them can be tamed.
• Custom taming items - Specific mobs can be configured to require their own taming item instead of, or in addition to, Golden Wheat (for example bones for skeletons or gunpowder for creepers).

Mobs can be grouped into categories that share a taming limit, allowing a cap on how many pets of a given type a player may own.

Movement and Riding

Pets can be ridden across land, air, and water. Land, flying, and swimming speeds each start at a base 1x rate that can be adjusted, and holding the sprint key while riding gives roughly a 1.3x speed boost.

While mounted, movement uses the standard directional keys with the mouse controlling facing. For flying or swimming mounts, the jump key ascends and the descend/back key lowers the mount, and idle fliers and swimmers hold their altitude with neutral buoyancy rather than sinking or falling. Riding can require a saddle or be allowed without one, depending on configuration, and pets that normally cannot fly or swim can be set to do so.

Pet Inventory and Equipment

Every pet has its own inventory, opened by the owner with a crouch and right-click. A typical pet inventory provides four armor slots (helmet, chestplate, leggings, and boots), two hand slots that can hold items such as a sword or shield, and around fourteen general storage slots for carrying items.

The mod auto-detects which equipment a given mob can use, so compatible pets can wear armor and wield weapons to boost their effectiveness in combat. Global bonuses to base armor and armor toughness can also be applied to all pets.

Combat Behavior

Pets are neutral and passive by default, but their combat behavior can be switched on with specific items:

• Aggressive Mode (activated with a sword) - The pet attacks whatever its owner attacks.
• Defense Mode (activated with a shield) - The pet retaliates when it is attacked.
• Guard Mode (toggled with a cookie) - The pet protects its owner, defending against threats that target them.

Pets also provide aura protection, clearing nearby hostile entities that are targeting the owner. Owned pets will not harm each other - mutual pacifism extends even to projectiles between them - and an option can prevent pets from ever damaging their own owner.

Bosses receive special handling. A tamed Wither stops firing skull projectiles while idle but can be ridden and fire on command; a tamed Ender Dragon hides its health bar and can be ridden into battle; and a tamed Warden has its anger toward the owner and other pets continually cleared. Tamed boss health bars can be hidden to keep the screen clean.

Protections and Healing

Tamed pets gain strong survivability. All pets are immune to fall damage, fire, and lava damage, so they can follow you through dangerous terrain without dying to the environment.

A sitting pet slowly regenerates health while resting - by default it recovers about 1.0 health (half a heart) every 40 ticks, or roughly every 2 seconds. Combined with the boss and warden handling and the option to prevent owner-to-pet damage, this makes long-term companions easy to keep alive.

Pet Bed

The Pet Bed is a block that binds a pet to a permanent respawn point. To use it, right-click the bed to enter binding mode and then right-click a pet to link it; right-clicking the air cancels binding.

Once a pet is bound to a bed, death is no longer permanent. If the pet would die, its death is cancelled and it is instead teleported back to the bed, fully healed and sitting, giving the pet an effectively infinite respawn. This lets you keep a treasured companion indefinitely, even through dangerous fights.

Entity Conversion

Some mobs can transform into other forms - for example a zombie converting into a drowned. When a tamed pet undergoes such a transformation, its companion data is preserved through the change.

The new form keeps the same owner, retains any custom name, and maintains its AI and combat modes, follow and teleport distances, equipped items and saddle, and any pet bed binding. As a result, a transformed pet remains your loyal companion exactly as it was before, with no need to re-tame or re-equip it.