Animal Fun: Marine Mammals & Oddities

The whales, the seals, and everything in the sea that is not a fish. Twenty-eight animals for Bedrock's oceans, rivers and shores - from a blue whale ten blocks long to a poison dart frog a fifth of a block across - each built to its real size, each breathing the way the real animal breathes, and ten of them speaking with recordings of the real thing.

Animal Fun expansion · Minecraft Bedrock 1.21.100 or newer · no experimental toggles · 29 languages

This is an expansion pack. It needs Animal Fun - Land (the base pack) v1.54.0 or newer. The base pack owns the settings menu, the Field Guide, taming, riding and the spawn controls, and without it this pack registers nothing. Install that first.

Four great whales

The biggest animals in Minecraft, at the size they really are. The blue whale is ten blocks long and the sperm whale nearly as long; the humpback is seven and a half, and the orca is a five-block predator that hunts in a pod of two to four. Pods of orcas, belugas, narwhals and river dolphins swim together, and every swimmer tips nose-up to climb and nose-down to dive.

Even the orca gives a grown sperm whale a wide berth - but a calf of any of the three great whales is fair game.

Narwhal, beluga, river dolphin and manatee

The narwhal and beluga are Arctic animals and spawn only in cold and frozen water. The Amazon river dolphin is pink and lives in rivers and swamps, hunting fish where no ocean animal goes. The manatee is a slow, gentle grazer of warm and lukewarm seas and swamps.

Six that come ashore

The walrus, the elephant seal, the leopard seal, the sea lion, the harbor seal and the sea otter swim like seals and walk like seals: they leave the water, haul out and rest on the beach, and go back in when they are ready. The platypus and the marine iguana do the same.

• The elephant seal holds its breath for twenty minutes - longer than anything else in the pack, the sperm whale included.
• The leopard seal hunts alone. It takes fish, cephalopods, harbor seals - and, if you have Animal Fun: Birds installed, penguins.
• The walrus hunts octopus, and hits hard at 8 damage a bite.
• The sea otter and the harbor seal are the timid ones, and scatter from what hunts them.

Bulls and cows

The narwhal, the walrus and the marine iguana roll a sex when they spawn, and it changes the model. A narwhal cow has no tusk. A walrus cow's tusks are shorter. A female marine iguana carries a smaller crest and dewlap.

And the oddities

The other fourteen are the animals that are not fish and not quite anything else.

Cephalopods

The giant squid spawns only in the deep ocean, below y=42. The octopus crawls the sea floor as well as swimming, and can leave the water altogether. The cuttlefish hunts fish and crustaceans, and the nautilus drifts in deep water and drops its own shell.

Drifters and crawlers

The horseshoe crab, mantis shrimp and sea star do not swim at all. They walk the sea floor and wander up the beach, the way the real animals do. The mantis shrimp is a hunter with a punch - 7 damage from an animal with 8 health. The jellyfish simply drifts, in schools of up to five.

Reptiles, amphibians and a platypus

The sea snake and the marine iguana are reptiles that went to sea. The toad, the poison dart frog and the fire salamander are land amphibians of swamps, jungles, forests and taiga that swim when they have to. The platypus lives on riverbanks and in swamps, as at home in the water as out of it.

Don't touch

Four of them are venomous to the touch. Walk into a poison dart frog and it hurts you. The venom only ever harms players and hostile monsters - never another animal, never its own kind - and it switches off while the animal is being ridden.

Built to the right size

Every species is scaled against its real animal. A player stands 1.8 blocks tall; the blue whale is more than five of them nose to tail, and the poison dart frog is a fifth of a block you could lose in the grass. The small animals are life-size too, with a floor of 0.4 of a block so you can still find them: a nautilus or a mantis shrimp fits in your hand.

Breathing is real

Twenty of the twenty-eight breathe air, and they have to come up for it. Each one carries an air supply scaled to its real animal's dive, from thirty seconds for a poison dart frog to twenty minutes for an elephant seal. An animal running low on air swims for the surface to breathe.

The other eight breathe water and never drown: the octopus, giant squid, cuttlefish, nautilus, jellyfish, sea star, horseshoe crab and mantis shrimp. The toad, dart frog and fire salamander breathe through their skin as well, so they never drown either. A stranded whale, dolphin or manatee dries out on land, like a vanilla dolphin, and recovers once it is back in the water.

They hunt, and they are hunted

Eleven species hunt other animals out of the box, and the prey knows it: the harbor seal, sea lion, sea otter, narwhal and beluga flee from predators instead of standing to be eaten. No animal in the pack goes after players by default - until you change that yourself.

Every species can be set in /af:menu to one of six behaviors: passive, hunting animals, hunting players at night, hunting players at any hour, or hunting animals and players together, at night or always. So a server that wants its orcas to be a real danger can have that, and a creative builder can have a peaceful aquarium.

Four coats

Every animal rolls one of four coats when it spawns - untinted more than half the time, otherwise a variation in that species' own colors: an octopus runs red to brown, a dart frog through its blues, while an orca or a beluga only turns a little lighter or darker and stays black-and-white or white. The jellyfish and the sea star never vary. About one animal in seven spawns as a baby.

What they drop

Five raw meats, all this pack's own, and every one cooks in a furnace, a smoker, a campfire or a soul campfire. Whale meat cooks to 10 hunger - the most filling food in the pack - and the rest run from 5 to 8.

• No meat from the jellyfish, the sea star or the three amphibians - the amphibians are toxic.
• Bones come from the vertebrates only. The cuttlefish is the exception, and keeps one as a cuttlebone.
• Signature drops stay: a nautilus shell from the nautilus, ink sacs from the octopus, giant squid and cuttlefish, slime balls from the jellyfish and amphibians, prismarine shards from the horseshoe crab and sea star, and kelp from the marine iguana.
• Experience scales with the animal - one to three from a small one, six to fourteen from a great whale, and more for breeding them.

Taming, breeding and riding

Feed an animal its food to tame it - a one-in-three chance a feed - and the same food breeds it. The fish-eaters take cod, salmon or tropical fish; the blue and humpback whales, the manatee, the jellyfish and the marine iguana take kelp, dried kelp or sea pickles; the amphibians take spider eyes, sweet berries or kelp; and the sea-floor crawlers and the platypus have a mix of their own.

Riding is off by default on all 28. The machinery is wired on every species, and turning one on is a single switch in /af:menu. A ridden animal moves the way it moves on its own - the walkers ride like a horse and the swimmers steer through the water at their own speed - using the saddle and harness.

Where they live, and what they sound like

Everything spawns where its real animal lives. Cold and frozen oceans get the narwhal, beluga and walrus; warm and lukewarm seas get the manatee, octopus, mantis shrimp and sea snake; the deep ocean holds the great whales, the giant squid and the nautilus; rivers and swamps get the river dolphin and the platypus; and the amphibians keep to swamp, jungle, forest and taiga.

Ten of the thirteen voices are real recordings - NOAA's whale and seal archives, the Alfred Wegener Institute's orca and leopard seal, Fisheries and Oceans Canada's walrus, and the US National Park Service. The blue whale is heard at NOAA's ten-times playback speed, because its real call is too low for an ordinary speaker to reproduce. The other three are designed: the cephalopods, jellyfish, sea star and sea snake get a bubble because they make no sound of their own, and the toad and poison dart frog kept their synthesized calls.

Every one has a page in the Field Guide

The base pack's craftable Field Guide fills itself in from this pack - no setup, no extra item. Every species gets its own plate, with what it eats, what it hunts, what it drops and how tough it is.

Some of the commands

Anything you spawn, tame or saddle stays. Only naturally spawned wildlife despawns, so the population keeps cycling while your aquarium stays put.

Twenty-nine languages, and the rest of the family

Every species, spawn egg and food is named in all 29 languages Bedrock supports - including the careful ones, like the languages that already spent their only word for "squid" on the vanilla squid. The /af:menu screens themselves stay in English.

330 species across five packs, all sharing one base pack and one settings menu:

New in v1.10.4

• Vibrant Visuals. The pack no longer holds a world at Fancy graphics, so Vibrant Visuals can be switched on. Whales, dolphins, seals, cephalopods and amphibians have a wet sheen; the sea otter and platypus stay matte. Every other resource pack in the world has to support Vibrant Visuals too - update all five Animal Fun packs together.
• The marine iguana's legs are joined on, and the Field Guide pictures and placards are redrawn to match how the game draws the models.

New in v1.10.3

• Five animals remodeled: a round, coiled, tiger-striped nautilus shell; a cuttlefish with a rounded mantle, a fin skirt the whole way around and W-shaped pupils; a domed moon jelly with its four rings; a stout, low sea otter; and a giant squid with a round mantle, a ring of arms and huge eyes. The poison dart frog has its black spots.
• The small animals are life-size, with hit boxes to match.
• Pods swim together, and swimmers tip up and down as they climb and dive.

v1.10.2 kept whales off dry land and let stranded ones dry out, stopped the amphibians drowning and hunting the mantis shrimp, gave every species its own colors and spawn egg.

Installing it

1. Install and activate Animal Fun - Land, the base pack, first.
2. Import Animal Fun - Marine v1.10.4.mcaddon and activate both its behavior pack and its resource pack in your world. Pack order does not matter.
3. No experimental toggles. Achievements stay on.
4. After updating any Animal Fun pack, exit the world and go back in before judging the result. Animals hold their old state until a reload, and it looks exactly like "the update didn't apply".

On a dedicated server, update world_behavior_packs.json and world_resource_packs.json for the new version. The pack folders are named AnimalFunMarine_Behavior and AnimalFunMarine_Resource, with the version in the pack name rather than the folder.

If something is wrong

• Nothing from this pack appears in /af:menu. The base pack is not installed, is not active, or its script is not running. This pack cannot show a menu of its own.
• A species never spawns naturally. Settings live in the world, so a new world starts at the defaults - check the species is enabled and its frequency is not at zero.
• Saddling does nothing. Reload the world, then check riding is switched on for that species in /af:menu.
• Two name labels at the top of the screen. Another add-on is drawing its own look-at label - Massive Trees does by default. Set its label to Only this pack's trees, or set Animal Fun's entity tag to Plain text or Off in /af:hud.

Audio credits

Ten voice families are cut from real field recordings: trimmed, band-limited, level-matched and re-encoded. Pitch is applied at play time, not on disk.

Public domain - US Government work

NOAA, Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Passive Acoustics Branch - public domain · NOAA Fisheries, Sounds in the Ocean: Mammals. Humpback whale song (whalesong, the Humpback Whale); sperm whale clicks (click, the Sperm Whale, Narwhal and Amazon River Dolphin); harbor seal roar (bark, the Harbor Seal and Sea Lion).

NOAA / Castellote - public domain · NOAA Fisheries, Sounds in the Ocean: Mammals. Beluga calls (chirp, the Beluga and Manatee).

Public domain - credit requested

NOAA PMEL Acoustics Program · pmel.noaa.gov/acoustics. South Pacific blue whale call, published at 10x speed (moan, the Blue Whale).

US National Park Service, NPS Sound Gallery · nps.gov/subjects/sound/gallery.htm. River otter, Canyonlands National Park (chitter, the Sea Otter, Horseshoe Crab and Mantis Shrimp); Couch's spadefoot toad, Saguaro National Park (bleat, the Fire Salamander).

Used with credit - contributed recordings hosted by NOAA Fisheries

Van Opzeeland, Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) - killer whale (orca, the Orca) and leopard seal (trill, the Leopard Seal).

Sjare, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) - walrus (grunt, the Walrus, Elephant Seal and Marine Iguana).

Insley - northern fur seal (bark, the Sea Lion's second call).

What is still synthesized

bubble, croak and peep are designed for this pack, and no third-party material is in any of them. Where no recording of a species exists, a related animal stands in - the narwhal and river dolphin speak with sperm whale clicks, the manatee with a beluga, the elephant seal and marine iguana with a walrus - and the full list ships inside the resource pack as CREDITS.md.