Moo Materials

Feed a cow a lump of coal and it becomes a coal cow. Milk it with an empty bucket. Breed the rest of the table out of the ones you have.

Resource cows, in the spirit of the old Chickens mod - 88 kinds across seven tiers, from coal to awakened draconium. None of them spawns in the world. Every single one is bred, and the herd you end up with is the one you worked for.

Getting in

Hand an ordinary cow coal, flint, sand, a clay ball, a snowball, cobblestone, an oak log or one of the five basic dyes, and it turns into that cow. That is the only way in - everything above tier 1 has to be bred, so a diamond cow can never be bought with a diamond.

Milking takes an empty bucket. The bucket is the tool, not the goods: it stays in your hand and the resource goes into your inventory. Unless the resource is a bucket - the lava and water cows hand theirs over and keep yours, because one bucket must not be worth any amount of iron.

Four stats, and all of them inherited

Crouch with an empty hand to read them off an animal. A calf starts at the average of its parents; strength buys the chance of a point more, and there is always a chance of a point less - so a herd only climbs while somebody is choosing which cows get to breed.

Breeding is a chance, never a promise

Every pair in the table names one calf and the odds for it, and every point of the parents' strength adds two percent on top. A failed roll costs you nothing but the wheat: the calf simply takes after one of its parents. JEI shows the whole tree - which pair makes which cow, with what chance, what a cow gives when milked, and which resource starts which cow.

The barn: breeder, nursery, stall

Three blocks, one step each, and the output of one is the input of the next - so hoppers run the line on their own.

• The breeder turns two cows and two wheat into a calf, with the same odds a pasture would give.
• The nursery raises calves. What it costs is time, nothing else.
• The stall milks up to sixteen cows of one kind at once, and every cow in it counts.

All three work from the same numbers a live cow does - a stall is never better than a pasture. Each has a feed slot: wheat is never needed, it only doubles the pace while it lasts. One ear is worth 30 seconds, a hay bale nine times that, and nothing is eaten while there is nothing to do.

A catcher rod - two sticks and a lead - turns a cow into an item and back, stats and all. It holds 64, so a whole herd moves in one trip.

And when a cow has done its work, it is still a cow: smelt one into steak in a furnace, a smoker or over a campfire. A calf makes one, a grown cow two to four by its gain.

Cows for the mods you already have

All 25 resource chickens of the old Chickens mod are covered, plus the sixteen vanilla colours, which mix by the real crafting recipe - orange from red and yellow, magenta from purple and pink. On top of that, cows appear for whatever else is in your pack:

Mekanism osmium, tin, lead, uranium, fluorite, sulfur, bio fuel, steel, bronze and the alloys up to the atomic one · Create zinc, andesite alloy, brass, rose quartz, refined radiance, shadow steel · Applied Energistics certus quartz, silicon, sky stone, fluix · Ender IO redstone, energetic and vibrant alloy, soularium · Modern Industrialization titanium, platinum, battery alloy · Industrial Foregoing plastic, pink slime · Immersive Engineering coal coke · Draconic Evolution draconium, and awakened draconium as the top of the whole tree.

What several mods share - aluminium, nickel, silver, electrum, constantan and the metals above - is asked for by tag, so one cow serves whichever of those mods you have. And a cow whose resource is missing is not there at all: not in the creative menu, not in any pair, not in a lucky strike. A pure vanilla pack sees exactly 47 cows.

Everything else

Every kind has its own hide, drawn from its resource, and its own spawn egg tinted in the same two colours. With Jade installed, looking at a cow shows its four stats, the chance a calf improves and how long the udder still needs. Packs can turn every yield up or down with one setting.

Discord

Questions, bug reports, ideas, or just want to show off your herd? Join the Discord - that is where I answer fastest, and where the next version gets shaped.

How it was made

Built with Claude Code. Every design decision is mine.

Requirements

NeoForge 21.1 or newer for Minecraft 1.21.1. Server and client, singleplayer and multiplayer. JEI and Jade optional; every supported mod is optional.