CityWorld: Zoo — the animals every zombie story walks past

Eight zoo animals, each from a scene you remember. The giraffes at the Salt Lake City overpass, and the lab monkeys that never turned. The zebra in the snare. The deer in the snow, and the herd on Fifth Avenue. The lions that took it. Shiva. The elephant from Raccoon City's zoo. And a bear, because every zoo has a bear.

They are ordinary Minecraft animals: a spawn egg each, they breed on their food, they wander, and the ones with teeth fight back if you hurt them. No new mechanics to learn, nothing to craft. They just live in the world, and in the ruins of a city, they make the zoo look like somewhere people used to go.

The animals

• Giraffe — five blocks tall, neck leaning forward as it walks, and it feeds: it finds a tree with leaves three to six blocks up, stands under the canopy's edge and puts the tip of its muzzle into the leaves to chew. It never breaks them. Shove one mid-mouthful and it bends its neck to keep eating.

• Rhesus macaque — a climber. Troops favour trees: a monkey picks a trunk, climbs the log it is holding, works round branches and overhangs, and once in the canopy it sits, scratches and eats, hand to mouth. It leaps gaps of up to five blocks between canopies and never takes fall damage.

• Zebra — herds on the savanna, a donkey's bray and a barking whinny. One in a hundred is a little bit different. You will know it when you see it.

• Deer — skittish. It grazes, flicks its tail, lifts its head to look, and bolts if you come near unless you are sneaking.

• Lion and tiger — they sit, they sniff (the tiger's whiskers twitch), and they hunt the way a fox does: a lion with a zebra or deer in view will, sooner or later, give chase. Tigers take deer, macaques and farm animals. Both guard their cubs: come within eight blocks of one and its parent comes for you, as a polar bear would.

• Elephant — two kinds. Cows are three blocks tall; bulls are three and a half with tusks. Calves are born tuskless and find out which they are when they grow up. Idle, an elephant curls its trunk and flaps its ears to cool off. Its knees bend.

• Brown bear — sways and sniffs the air, and defends its cub.

Every one has its own voice, cut from real recordings: the giraffe's hum, the macaques' chatter, the elephant's rumble, the lion's roar. Every animal has a walk whose stride matches its speed, so feet plant and push instead of sliding.

In the wild

They spawn naturally in the biomes you would expect, in herds and troops: giraffes, zebras, lions and elephants on the savanna; tigers and macaques in the jungle; deer in forests and taiga; bears in the taiga. No lions in the jungle.

All of it is a dial in config/cityworld_zoo-common.toml: natural spawning on or off, each species on or off, its spawn weight, its herd size and the biomes (ids or #tags) it spawns in. Hunting and cub defence are switches too, with the hunters' keenness and rest time beside them.

With CityWorld

Install CityWorld ReForged 6.4.0 or newer beside it and the city's zoos fill with them: giraffes behind a taller fence, an elephant in a big paddock or a sunken pit, lions on a savanna lot, macaques in the trees, a bear on the rockery. Each animal ships its own habitat and sign text; CityWorld's catalog picks from them and its own. No configuration. /cityfind lot zoo finds the nearest one.

Without CityWorld the animals are still here, in the wild and from the spawn eggs.

For other mods

They are plain Animals with vanilla goals, a standard constructor and the attributes a mob needs, so a mod that makes variants of creatures (an infected lion, say) can use them as-is. The entity-type tag #cityworld_zoo:zoo_animals lists all eight for spawn rules.

Requirements

There is a jar per Minecraft version, named for the one it was built against; take the one that matches your server.

Install on the server and on every client. These are new creatures, so a client without the mod cannot join. Commands for operators: /zoo status (which build this is), /zoo count [radius].

Credits and licence

MIT, by Sablednah. Source: github.com/Sablednah/CityWorld-Zoo.

All models, textures and spawn eggs are original work. The animal sounds are cut from recordings on Pixabay under the Pixabay Content License; the full list is in the jar at assets/cityworld_zoo/sounds/CREDITS.md. Nothing is taken from the games or films these animals remember.