Instinct - Husbandry Overhaul

Instinct 1.0.0-beta.1 is the first public release — an animal husbandry overhaul for Fabric 1.21.1. Pets stop walking into lava, earn rank for the years they put in, and go down instead of dying; livestock carry a bloodline worth tending. It adds no new animals and takes no vanilla recipe away. Everything below is new. This is a beta: the systems are complete and tested, but they have not had a public soak yet, so back up a world before adding it to one you care about.

Added

• Pets that look before they leap — tamed wolves, cats, and parrots treat lava, fire, and cactus as walls when they pathfind, and give a lit creeper a wide berth. The follow teleport is suppressed while you are falling, swimming in lava, or gliding, so your wolf never materializes into the hole you are falling down.
• No more friendly fire — your own damage never lands on your own pets: the arrow that overshoots, the splash potion, the TNT. Other players' hits are untouched.
• Shoulder parrots that stay put — through jumps, short falls, and scratches. They come down on a deliberate double-tap sneak instead of the first time you hop a fence.
• Veteran pets — every pet counts the in-game days since you tamed it, including days spent waiting at home, and becomes Seasoned, Veteran, then Venerable. Each rank adds health and attack damage, and teaches it something an old animal would know: a warning when a monster sets its eye on you, ducking your sweeping blade, and steadying the young so nearby pets age faster.
• Quality genetics — livestock carry a bloodline grade from ordinary through sturdy to prime. Breed near a hay bale and the offspring is likely to climb a grade; breed in a crush and it risks slipping one. Prime stock yields more beef, leather, and wool, and lays faster.
• Perks and the Pedigree Treat — newborns of graded stock inherit hardy, fleet, fertile, or placid, biased toward their parents' when the pen is well fed, so a tended bloodline stabilizes line by line. A Pedigree Treat guarantees the next offspring is born prime.
• Flocking, herding, and droving — hold the right feed and the matching animals form a flock behind you, holding a loose spacing instead of shoving into your back. Lead enough of them and your own pets fall in behind to press the stragglers along. Pets press, never bite. Flocks swim rivers in formation, and a following pet takes your boat's spare seat.
• Predator watch — leave a pet on Stay near your livestock and it watches the fence line, breaking up a fox on the chickens or a wolf on the sheep. Any pet guards; a cat turns a fox as a wolf does. A predator with no pet stationed nearby behaves exactly as vanilla.
• The Feeding Trough — a craftable block that holds a stack of feed and breeds the herd while you are away. Hay bales convert on insert, hoppers fill it, comparators read it, and it stops starting new pairs once the pen is crowded so a passive farm cannot quietly become a lag machine.
• The Command Whistle — copper and bone, speaking to every tamed pet in earshot. Toggle the pack between Stay and Follow, send them at a target, round up a herd, hold a patch of ground, or take a lost-pet census that reports distance and bearing for every pet beyond earshot — including the dimension for one you left in the Nether.
• Downed, not dead — lethal damage downs a pet instead of killing it. It waits indefinitely, across saves and logouts, until you revive it with a golden apple or a Vet Kit, at the cost of one veterancy rank. Tamed mounts go down the same way. A downed cat, parrot, or pup can be carried clear of the fire, which costs no inventory slot but slows you down.
• Keepsake collars — fire, lava, and the void remain final, and a pet lost that way leaves a collar engraved with its name and the rank it earned.
• The Kennel Post — place one where your animals belong and point the whistle at it, and a Stay order sends your homed pets walking back to settle there instead of dropping them wherever you happened to be standing. A pet that goes down beside its post recovers on its own, no item spent and no rank lost.
• Modded animals welcome — any modded animal that behaves like a vanilla one joins automatically. Mods and datapacks opt species in or out with a single tag entry, add their feed to the trough, and set product yields with one small data file. No code and no dependency, and server owners get the final word in the config.
• Advancements — Old Friend, Best in Show, Back from the Brink, and Pack Leader hang under an Instinct root.
• Configuration — every system toggles independently from Mod Menu and Cloth Config or by hand.