Vivarium Zoo

Turn the enclosures you build into a real zoo.

Fence in a meadow, dig a moat, build an aquarium or a haunted house: Vivarium looks at what you actually built and tells you how well your animals live there. Give every species the ground, light, roof, company and food it wants and it thrives and breeds. Keep zombies, skeletons, endermen and ghasts behind glass and bars where they stay calm. Then put up a zoo till and let visitors pay for the best-kept animals, every morning.

1. Enclosure sign: Hang it on the outside of any enclosure. It walks the area like an animal would and reports its size, border, roof, light and ground. Holding a sign shows the borders of nearby enclosures, coloured by what holds the animals in: fences, walls, glass, bars, ditches or open holes.
2. Welfare: Every species has five needs: space, habitat, food, group size and company. Happy animals show hearts and breed, stressed ones look for a weak spot to break out. The report names what is missing.
3. Feeding trough: Fill it with what the animals eat, inside the enclosure or through the fence. They eat on their own, one item per animal per day.
4. Hostile mobs: Monsters get a safety value. Catch every danger of a species (sunlight, shooting, climbing, exploding, teleporting, flying …) and they stay calm: no attacks, no explosions, no griefing. Catch them with the transport cage.
5. Zoo till: Rates all enclosures around it by rarity, group size, mood and variety and pays out at every sunrise.

• 65 vanilla species with their own profiles, from cows to sniffers, axolotls, ghasts and shulkers, and more than 140 species from other animal mods (see below).
• Enclosures are judged by what stands in the world:
  • Fences, walls, glass, bars, dry ditches (ha-has) and lava as borders, holes that only small animals fit through.
  • Ground from 13 kinds of substrate, average light, roofed and shaded share.
  • Rescans by themselves a few seconds after you change something.
• Special houses:
  • Aquarium: deep tanks, tanks filled up to the glass roof, tanks with an open rim for fish only, and visitor tunnels through the water.
  • Haunted house: a dark roofed house with glass fronts keeps zombies, skeletons, spiders and creepers calm.
  • Nether house: piglins and hoglins on nether ground don't turn into zombies.
  • End house: the teleport anchor keeps endermen and shulkers inside.
  • Aviary: bars and glass keep parrots, bees and phantoms under the roof.
• Transport cage that catches any mob, monsters by day or when weakened.
• Animal trader: a new villager profession at the feeding trough that sells cages, food and, when experienced, rare animals in cages.
• Info board: decorate around your enclosures with paths, benches, a snack stand and plants for more visitors.
• Zoologist's journal that records every species you discover, with everything it needs.
• Break-outs: stressed animals and badly kept monsters break weak border blocks, the alarm bell rings and the escaped mob glows.
• Breeding only when the animals are happy.
• Zoo rating with rarity, group bonus, mood and a variety bonus; daily payout in emeralds.
• In-game handbook with recipes and numbers that match the server config.

Vivarium brings its own species profiles for three popular animal mods. They load only when that mod is installed, so nothing else is required. Every species gets its habitat, group size, space and dangers, and eats from the feeding trough what you would breed it with.

• Naturalist – 47 species: elephants, giraffes, lions, tigers, zebras, rhinos, hippos and bears for the safari, alligators and capybaras at the river, butterflies, fireflies and birds in the aviary, sharks, whales, rays and jellyfish in the aquarium.
• Alex's Mobs Continued – 88 species: grizzly bears, gorillas, kangaroos, snow leopards, moose, bison, crocodiles and anacondas, hummingbirds and bald eagles, orcas, cachalot whales, giant squids and mimic octopuses, plus creatures for the Nether and End houses and monsters such as the bone serpent, the farseer or the murmur with their own dangers.
• Friends&Foes – 8 species: penguins, mooblooms, crabs, glares, maulers and the rascal, the barnacle in the aquarium and the wildfire in the Nether house.

Any other animal or monster can be shown too: it gets a generic profile from what the game knows about it (water creature, flyer, climber, burns in daylight, shoots …) and draws a few visitors. A datapack with a proper profile under data/<mod>/vivarium/species/ rates it like a vanilla animal; /reload reads it.

• Event-driven: enclosures are measured only when blocks change, and one light welfare check per loaded enclosure runs every few seconds. Nothing loads chunks.
• No natural spawns inside enclosures, so a dark haunted house doesn't fill itself.
• Configurable: enclosure size, welfare thresholds, feeding times, calming, break-outs, zoo radius and payout are set in a synced server config.
• Datapack-friendly: species are JSON profiles, /reload picks up changes, and datapacks can add their own animals.
• English and German.

• Payout in economy mods instead of emeralds, starting with Tradery.
• Monsters worth more at night.

• Minecraft 26.3 with NeoForge 26.3.0.48-beta or newer.
• Required on both server and client.
• No other mods needed. Optional: Naturalist, Alex's Mobs Continued, Friends&Foes.