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.