Ancient Creature is a Minecraft mod about paleontology, fossil processing, genetic reconstruction, and bringing extinct animals back to life. Explore dig sites, recover fossils, rebuild ancient DNA, incubate embryos, and release living prehistoric creatures into the world.

[!WARNING] Ancient Creature is in early beta. Features are incomplete and bugs are expected. Creature behavior, balance, recipes, models, animations, world generation, registry names, save data, and other systems may change between releases. Back up important worlds before updating the mod, and do not assume beta worlds will remain fully compatible with future versions.

Current Features

Fossil ore, rock piles, suspicious blocks, and biome-specific archaeological dig sites.
Multiple chisels and fossil fragment types.
A multi-stage laboratory workflow using dedicated machines:
1. Clean recovered fossil fragments.
2. Identify their species.
3. Extract ancient DNA.
4. Sequence and complete the genome.
5. Create an embryo and fertilized ancient egg.
6. Incubate the egg to receive a baby creature capsule.
Fossil completeness, fossil damage, DNA integrity, and species identification systems.
Animated machinery with custom interfaces and processing sounds.
Baby creature capsules that remember the player who released the creature.
Capsule-released creatures will not target or retaliate against their owner.

Creatures

Triceratops

A defensive herbivore that normally wanders and grazes. It becomes aggressive toward nearby hostile mobs and players carrying weapons, then bellows and charges. While charging, it can break blocks included in the #ancientcreature:creature_destroyable block tag when mob griefing is enabled.

Tyrannosaurus Rex

A territorial apex predator with idle, walking, roaring, and biting animations. Adults hunt animals, hostile mobs, and survival players. A T-Rex roars when beginning an engagement, then sprints after its target and can smash tagged obstacles in its path. Babies do not hunt.

Megalodon

A giant aquatic predator with smooth three-dimensional swimming, an articulated tail, and a bite animation. Adults hunt aquatic creatures and survival players in the water, while babies remain non-aggressive. Its model uses a more elongated reconstruction rather than simply scaling up a modern great white shark.

Creature Ownership

Creatures released from baby creature capsules store the releasing player's UUID as their owner. Ownership persists after saving and reloading the world. Owned creatures cannot select, attack, or retaliate against their owner; this safety system does not otherwise tame them or replace their normal behavior.

Creatures created with commands or through other non-capsule methods are unowned.