Storage tiers are boring, have three animals instead
BuiltNeoForge1.21.1
Status
1.0.0; 91 tests, job loops ran on a live server; never watched
Mod loader
NeoForge
Minecraft
1.21.1
Who installs it
Everyone on the server needs it
🦝 What it is
Instead of upgrading your chests, you hire animals. Tame a Lugger, a stout capybara with saddlebags, and it walks your farm chest to your base chest all day, whether or not you are watching. A Gleaner, a crow that is slightly too big, picks dropped items off the ground around its home chest, and a Tender, a busy little raccoon, keeps furnaces fuelled and snack chests topped up. You give orders by pressing a Waybill, a paper item, against chests and handing it over. There is no GUI, no filters and no sorting, on purpose.
You set up one route as an experiment and by the weekend there is traffic. Six Luggers trundle the same path from the wheat farm, queue politely at the base chest, and one of them is stuck at the fence gate again, puffing grey smoke until you fix the corner. The crow patrols the mob farm and pockets what the grinder spits out. The raccoon does its rounds, tops up the furnace coal, restocks the by-the-door snack chest, and feeds the other two on the way past. None of it needs you. All of it is worth standing on the roof to watch.
👥 Playing with friends
Critters run server-side while everyone watches; a Gleaner will not snatch a freshly tossed gift
⚠️ Before you install
The AI has run on a headless server but no human has ever watched it, and the models, skins and animations have never been rendered at all. Expect programmer art and possible pathfinding oddities in 1.0.0.
⏱️ Your first 5 minutes
New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.
Craft a Waybill: paper, string and an ink sac, shapeless.
Find a wild Lugger and win it over with golden carrots. The odds are one in three, like a wolf.
Press the Waybill against your farm chest: 'Pickup noted.' Then against your base chest.
Hand the Waybill to the Lugger: 'The Lugger knows the way.' The paper is used up and the work begins.
Go do something else. The route runs whether or not you are watching.
Craft Saddlebags from leather and string and use them on the Lugger for two extra stacks of capacity.
🔁 How it works
The waybill is the whole interface
Press a Waybill against a chest to note it, press it against the next, hand it to a tamed critter, and the paper is consumed. Every acknowledgement arrives on the action bar in the mod's clipped courier voice. Each critter wants a different shape of route: a Lugger takes exactly one pickup and one stop, a Gleaner only needs a home chest, and a Tender takes a supply chest and up to eight stops. Sneak with an empty hand to unassign a critter and get a blank waybill back.
Tip: Waybills deliberately stack to one. Routes are documents, not ammunition.
Three critters, three jobs
The Lugger hauls chest A to chest B, six stacks at a time, eight with Saddlebags, with no filters and no opinions; throughput scales by taming more Luggers. The Gleaner patrols 16 blocks around its home chest and pockets whatever is lying on the ground, one stack in its beak, but never anything a player dropped in the last two minutes, so tossing a friend an item is safe. The Tender tops things up from a supply chest and only ever delivers more of what a slot already has, or fuel into a fuel slot, because deciding what belongs where would be sorting, and this mod does not sort.
Tip: Tame with golden carrots, bread and sweet berries respectively.
Nothing ever gets lost
The one hard rule: an item is always in a container, in a critter, or visibly on the ground, never in limbo. A full destination means the Lugger sits beside it and retries. A destination destroyed mid-trip sends it home to put the cargo back. Both ends gone and the bags empty onto the grass at its feet. Killed while laden, everything drops. A chunk unloading mid-route just means the cargo rides along in the critter's own save data. An unreachable chest earns confused smoke and a long cooldown, so failure is something you can see rather than something you have to notice.
Tip: Repeated smoke at the same corner means the route is unpathable there. Fix the corner, not the critter.
Upkeep is charm, not a chore
Each critter has one feed slot. Fed means brisk, 25 percent faster, with the occasional happy sparkle. Unfed means slow and sulky, never dead, never on strike. Build a Feed Bag from planks, a hay bale and an iron ingot and they help themselves between errands; a Lugger route can keep the trough stocked, and a Tender refills the other critters' feed slots, so once one is on staff the herd feeds itself.
Tip: One Tender plus one Feed Bag makes the whole operation self-sustaining.
Livestock, properly
The critters are leashable, sittable and breedable, and a foal inherits its parent's owner. A sitting worker pauses its job. Tamed critters never despawn. Wild strays spawn in biomes controlled by a datapack file, so packs can move them.
Tip: Sit a critter before renovating its route; it holds its cargo patiently.
Works with your other mods, by construction
Every container the critters touch is reached through the standard item-handler capability and nothing else: no hardcoded classes, no compat list. Any modded chest, barrel, drawer or machine that exposes one just works, including mods that do not exist yet. A furnace's fuel slot is recognised by behaviour, a slot that refuses dirt but accepts coal, not by knowing what a furnace is. Two item and block tags ship empty for pack authors: one for things a Gleaner must never pick up, one for containers no critter may touch.
Tip: Quest items and grave markers belong in the packmentality:gleaner_ignores tag.
🎒 Items & blocks
Lugger
A stout capybara with saddlebags. Walks one route, chest to chest, six stacks at a time, all day.
Where: Found wild; tamed with golden carrots.
Gleaner
A crow that is slightly too big. Patrols around its home chest and pockets dropped items, one stack in its beak.
Where: Found wild; tamed with bread.
Tender
A busy little raccoon. Keeps up to eight stops topped up from a supply chest, and feeds the rest of the herd.
Where: Found wild; tamed with sweet berries.
Waybill
The route document. Press against chests to mark them, then hand to a critter. Consumed on assignment.
Where: Shapeless: paper, string, ink sac.
Saddlebags
Used on a Lugger for two extra stacks of carrying capacity.
Where: Crafted from leather and string.
Feed Bag
A trough the critters help themselves from between errands.
Where: Crafted from planks, a hay bale and an iron ingot.
📜 Lore
Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.
The courier's voice
Every acknowledgement is written like a stamp on a delivery slip: 'Pickup noted.' 'Stop 3 noted.' 'The Gleaner has moved in.' 'The Tender is on rounds: 4 stops.' The critters never speak; the paperwork speaks for them.
The traffic is the point
The item transport is the excuse. Six Luggers trundling the same route and queueing politely at the chest is something no hopper line will ever do for you, and the mod's whole design bends toward making the workforce visible: cargo rides in view, failures smoke, and a fed courier walks with a spring in its step.
🎁 Jokes & trivia
Bits you might miss
Mark a chest in the Nether on an overworld waybill and the action bar objects: 'That's a different world entirely.'
A Lugger facing a full destination chest sits down beside it, looking annoyed, and retries.
Taming a Tender grants the advancement 'Small Hands, Big Plans'.
An unfed critter is slow and sulky, never dead and never on strike. The union negotiations concluded before release.
The Tender only refills a feed slot that is completely empty, because topping off a nearly full one forever read as anxiety rather than diligence.
The first advancement is titled with a shrug: 'Draw up a waybill. Somebody has to carry all this.'
The Gleaner will pick your death pile clean but will not take a stack a friend tossed you seconds ago. It has standards, and a two-minute rule.
From the workshop
The first build froze every critter the moment its owner walked through a portal: vanilla's sit goal treats 'owner in another dimension' as 'no owner'. It was caught on a server with nobody online, and a test now fails the build if the vanilla class ever comes back.
Headless verification moved 1,152 items with four Luggers on one route, with zero duplication and nothing on the floor, and a Tender fuelled a real furnace that actually smelted.
The verification trick: forceloaded chunks tick mobs even on a playerless server, which is how an animal AI mod got proven without a single player online.
Every tuning number, from the six-stack capacity to the 25 percent fed speed bonus, lives in one source file and is deliberately not exposed as config until a human has felt it.
Fuel slots are detected by offering behaviour, not by class: NeoForge 1.21.1 keeps real furnace fuels in a data map, and the obvious-looking static fuel table in vanilla code is a decoy.
❓ FAQ
Can the critters die?
They can be killed like any tame animal, and everything they were carrying drops on the spot. They never starve, never despawn once tamed, and hunger only ever makes them slow.
Do they sort my items?
No, and they never will. The Lugger moves everything, the Gleaner collects everything, and the Tender only ever adds more of what a slot already holds. Sorting is your job.
What happens when a chest fills up or gets destroyed?
The critter retries, carries the cargo home, or as a last resort drops it visibly at its feet. The design rule is that an item is never in limbo.
Does it work with modded storage and machines?
Yes, by construction: anything exposing the standard item-handler capability works, with no compat list to be on. A live test against big storage mods is still owed, but the mechanism is the standard one.
Is there a config file?
No commands and no config at all. Every number lives in one source file until playtesting decides which ones deserve exposing.
What do I need to install?
NeoForge 21.1 or newer on Minecraft 1.21.1, on both server and client. Server-side logic with a client renderer.
🖼️ Images
GleanerLuggerTenderFeed Bag
⚒ Crafting recipes
Feed BagSaddlebagsWaybill
⬇️ Get it
Status: The jar compiles and the author has tested it himself, but it has not had a real playtest yet.
Install NeoForge for Minecraft 1.21.1. The
install guide walks through this assuming no prior knowledge.
Drop the mod's .jar file into your mods folder.
Everyone on the server needs it.
Launch the game with that loader's profile selected.
📦 Where is the file?
This wiki documents the mods; it does
not host them. Builds live in the project's own repository under
mc-pack-mentality/build/libs/.
