Roost Reforged

Roost Reforged

Chickens in boxes, for Minecraft 1.20.1. A roost holds one chicken and turns it into a passive item source — no entity walking around, no eggs on the floor, no fence to repair. This is a 1.20.1 port of Roost 1.12.2 by Tim Wood Creates, with the whole chicken roster of Chickens 6.1.0 and MoreChickens 3.2.0 folded in.

Nothing else is required: the mod is self-contained, ships its own 143 chicken portraits, and adds no ore, ingot or gem of its own.

Three blocks and a catcher

The Chicken Catcher turns an adult chicken into a chicken item (64 uses). All blocks drop their contents when broken and accept hoppers on the faces the 1.12.2 version allowed. The breeder is the one addition: an extraction pipe on top of it can pull a parent back out, which is how you automate the 1/1/1 → 10/10/10 climb.

143 chickens

Every breed from the originals is here, with the original 16×16 sprite copied byte for byte:

• the vanilla chicken and the 46 resource chickens of Chickens 6.1.0;
• the 91 addon breeds of MoreChickens (Thermal, Tinkers', Botania, Ender IO, Mekanism, Draconic Evolution, Extreme Reactors, Tech Reborn, Immersive Engineering, Refined Storage, Base Metals…);
• the four easter eggs (cake, fireworks, grass block, banner) and the XP chicken.

Each breed asks a Forge tag for its product — the ore dictionary of 1.12.2 — and lays whatever item the installed mods actually provide. The nickel chicken lays Thermal's nickel; the copper chicken lays vanilla copper through Forge's own tag; Ender IO's renamed alloys and EvilCraft's own-namespace gem resolve through an ordered tag list. When no installed mod fills the tag, the breed lays a close vanilla stand-in (iron for the metals, amethyst for the crystals, gunpowder for the dusts) and the tooltip says exactly what the roost will produce, so nothing is a surprise.

Stats that matter

Every chicken item carries the Chickens stats — growth (lay speed), gain (1×, 2× or 3× output) and strength (how stats are inherited) — and its tooltip lists stats, parents, spawn type and product. The breeder climbs a pair from 1/1/1 to 10/10/10 the 1.12.2 way: strength-weighted average plus a small mutation, clamped at 10. The breeder knows 126 pairings, from the core Chickens tree to the deeper addon breeds (Black Quartz at tier 10).

Chickens in a roost or a breeder are alive enough to look it: the body sways and bobs, the head pecks, and a working pair clucks quietly now and then. Every box animates out of phase, so a wall of roosts does not move in lockstep.

JEI and Jade

Five JEI categories, on the original 1.12.2 backgrounds:

• Chicken Breeding — every pairing, with the breeder as catalyst, including pairs added by datapacks;
• Roost Output — the product with its gain multiplier, plus the real throughput: a full 16-chicken slot at the growth cap, which is the number that tells you how fast a roost actually fills;
• Henhouse Byproduct — the hay bale, the energy bar and the dirt left behind;
• Catching Chickens and Egg Throwing.

Every species is its own JEI entry with its own name and tooltip. Jade shows the housed chicken, the progress, the seedless state and the offspring odds on roosts and breeders, plus energy, hay and collected items on the henhouse. Both are optional and client-side: without them the mod is unchanged.

Made for modpacks

• config/roost_reforged-common.toml — roostSpeed, breederSpeed, disableEggLaying, the three 1.12.2 options, plus breederExtractParents for the top-face extraction.
• Seeds tag — roost_reforged:seeds ships with the four vanilla seeds and #forge:seeds; a pack adds its modded seeds to the tag and the breeder takes them.
• Roster filter — data/<namespace>/roost/roster.json decides which species exist for a pack: mode: "all" (default, all 143) or mode: "installed" (the 1.12.2 rule: the breed's mod, a real product, and parents that are listed too), plus hide / show lists. /reload re-reads it and syncs the result to players.
• Breed overrides — data/<namespace>/roost/breeds/*.json rewrites what a breed lays (lay, layTag / layTags, layFallback), its parents, spawn type, death drop and origin mods, merged by id over the shipped roster. Replacing the parents moves the breed in the tree, so its tier and breeding odds follow.
• Breeder recipes — roost_reforged:breeding JSON files add pairings without touching the mod, and they show up in JEI.
• Startup audit — at world start the whole roster is resolved against the loaded tags and written to the log: which mod fills which tag, which breeds fall back to their stand-in, which tags nobody provides, which origins are missing, and 0 with a broken product when everything is healthy. A packmaker sees a bad item in the log instead of in a roost.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.20.1, Forge 47.3.0 or newer, Java 17.
• Install on client and server.
• JEI 15+ and Jade 11+ are optional, client only.
• No dependency on Chickens or MoreChickens — this mod replaces both for 1.20.1. Do not install them alongside it.

Not ported

Honest list, so nobody buys a feature that is not there: no coloured eggs or thrown eggs, no per-species spawn eggs, no natural chicken spawning, no right-click-to-teach vanilla chickens (the easter eggs are creative-tab only), and Jade instead of WAILA / The One Probe. PARITY.md in the repository has the feature-by-feature table with the source file behind each line.

Credits

Original Roost by Tim Wood Creates. Chicken roster and artwork from the Chickens and MoreChickens mods by their authors.