🐕 Better Dogs

Make Wolves Worthy Companions. Smarter, Safer, Livelier.

Every Minecraft player knows the pain: you spend hours finding a wolf, tame it, and five minutes later it jumps into lava or walks off a cliff. Better Dogs overhauls wolf AI to make them effective partners. Powered by a high-performance Event-Driven AI Scheduler, they act efficiently without sacrificing performance.

Part of the Vanilla Outsider Collection — mods that refine the vanilla experience with modern standards.

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✨ Features

🧠 Personality Intelligence

When tamed, wolves develop one of three permanent personalities:

• 💢 Aggressive: The Guardian. Proactively attacks hostile mobs and scouts ahead. Emits red dust particles (0xFF3333) on patrol.
• ❤️ Pacifist: The Healer. Avoids combat unless you are hurt. High health, low damage. Emits green/teal dust particles (0x00FF88) on patrol.
• ✨ Normal: The Classic. Balanced stats and standard vanilla-plus behavior. Emits gold/yellow dust particles (0xFFD700) on patrol.

🛡️ Tamed Wolf Guard Mode

Right-click a tamed wolf with a bone while sneaking (Shift + Right Click) to toggle Guard Mode (consuming exactly 1 bone) and anchor the wolf to its current spot. Guard Mode is locked to the owner.

Guard Mode Particles: To help you easily identify a patrolling or guarding wolf's personality from a distance, they emit tiny, custom-colored dust particles only while actively in Guard Mode (no particles are emitted during normal following or sitting):

  

• Patrol Patterns:
  • Aggressive: Paces in a circular/polygon shape along its outer perimeter sweep (80% range), pausing to scan outward for threats.
  • Normal: Sentry posture at the guard post (range = 0), or radial patrols outward and back (range > 0).
  • Pacifist: Close protective orbital circular pacing around the post.
• Auto-Targeting & Chase Caps: Normal and Aggressive guards automatically attack hostiles within their range but are capped from chasing targets too far to prevent them from being lured away.
• Watchdog Alarms & Alert Stance: Pacifist sentinels whine, freeze in a pointing/alert stance facing the direction of detected threats, and emit warning note particles when hostiles approach, applying Regeneration and Resistance to owners/allies if enabled.

📄 Wolf Ownership Transfer (Adoption)

Easily transfer ownership of your tamed wolves to other players using standard, vanilla-only Paper:

• Pending Adoption State: Shift + Right-Click your tamed wolf with a sheet of Paper to put them up for adoption. The wolf will sit down, halt pathfinding, clear all aggression, and emit a beautiful, sparkling trail of Rose Pink particles.
• Claiming the Wolf: Any non-owner player can right-click the adoptable wolf with an empty main hand to claim them as their new companion, instantly triggering heart particles and mutual overlay notifications.
• Safety Checks: The adoption state is automatically cancelled if the wolf takes any damage, or if the owner simply right-clicks the dog again normally to cancel, preventing accidental claims.

📏 Dynamic Follower Spread Scaling

Follow/spread spacing of wild and tamed wolf packs scales dynamically based on the number of active followers:

• Spacing increases mathematically based on the square root formula: $f(N) = \text{multiplier} \times \sqrt{N - 1}$ to prevent visual overcrowding.
• Fully configurable via 4 native GameRules: bd_tamed_pack_spread_multiplier, bd_tamed_pack_spread_max, bd_wild_pack_spread_multiplier, bd_wild_pack_spread_max.

🤝 Advanced Social AI

• Social Bonding (Affinity): Dogs form relationships within their pack. Socializing builds trust and reduces accidental infighting.
• Adult Correction: Aggressive adults discipline misbehaving puppies, preventing death loops.
• Pack Genetics: Puppies inherit personality traits and stats from their parents.
• Litter System: Wolves can produce multiple puppies in a single breed — each with independent personality rolls and stats.
• Unrelated Mate Prioritization: Tamed wolves will prioritize breeding with unrelated pack mates in range to prevent accidental inbreeding. If no unrelated options exist, they will fallback to related mates.
• Selective Ground Food Refusal: Some selectively bred or tamed-from-birth lineages can persistently refuse to eat food scavenged from the ground, ensuring they only eat when fed directly by their owner. Toggleable via game rules.

🛡️ Smart Survival AI

• Cliff Safety: Wolves detect fatal drops and airborne targets, stopping dangerous chases.
• Hazard & Magma Block Avoidance: Wolves intelligently pathfind around lava, fire, drowning hazards, and magma blocks.
• Collision & Push Safety: Tamed wolves colliding with a sitting, guarding, or endangered packmate (facing a cliff, lava, or magma hazard) immediately halt their navigation to prevent pushing them into danger.
• Creeper Awareness: Wolves flee from hissing Creepers!
• Dog Feeding: Tamed dogs scavenge dropped raw or cooked food from the ground to restore health — no manual feeding required.
• Dynamic Whimpering Thresholds: Low-health whining/whimpering is dynamically scaled based on the wolf's maximum health (< 50% max HP) instead of a fixed threshold, preventing Runts and puppies from whining constantly when healthy.

📡 Behavioral Specialization

• Scouting: Aggressive dogs proactively range ahead to clear your path.
• Silent Alarm: Pacifist dogs emit a high-pitched whine and freeze to point toward nearby monsters.
• Select-and-Ride Command System: Sneak-right-click a tamed wolf with a standard Stick to command them to sit or ride inside vehicles, mounts, boats, minecarts, or modded chairs, forcing a proper visual sitting pose.
• Gift System: Loyal dogs bring you treasures based on their personality.
• Debug Tools: Use /betterdogs debug to test pack interactions and behaviors (Locked behind OP permissions and a safety GameRule).

🌤️ Immersive Events

• Zoomies: Dogs burst into hyperactive sprints in the morning or when it starts raining — pure joy!
• Restored Soundscapes & Group Howl: Restored the atmospheric vanilla pack howl audio files as a registered sound event. Under a full moon, wolves trigger pack-wide howling sessions that spread to nearby pack members.
• Storm Anxiety: Thunderstorms make dogs anxious — they whine, tremble, and pace nervously until the storm passes. This is highly dependent on their personality: Pacifist dogs are extremely prone to anxiety, Normal dogs have standard chances, and Aggressive dogs are completely immune.

🏰 Wild Wolf Territoriality

Wild wolf packs are now dynamic, territorial entities led by a dominant leader:

• Territorial Probability Matrix: Pack interactions now utilize a complex, personality-driven matrix. No two disputes are the same!
• Dynamic Outcomes: Depending on leader personalities, packs may Merge (Dominance based), engage in War (1v1 Duels or Pack Combat), or peacefully Retreat to maintain their own borders.
• Configurable Instincts: Use GameRules to fine-tune exactly how Aggressive, Normal, and Pacifist leaders react to each other.
• 1v1 Leader Duels: If a dispute escalates to War, leaders engage in a cinematic 1v1 duel to settle dominance.
• Yield & Merge: Defeated packs yield and merge with the winning pack, allowing for the natural formation of massive wolf colonies.
• Wild Personality AI (New Default): Out of the box, wild pack members exhibit unique behaviors (like Aggressive hunting or Pack Retreats) while anchored to their leader.
• Dynamic Spawning & Reinforcements: When a pack goes to war or is challenged, nearby wild wolves can spawn or join as reinforcements to defend their pack's territory.

💻 Server-Side Optional & Client Gating

• Server-Side Optional: Better Dogs is fully compatible with vanilla clients! Vanilla clients can connect to servers running the mod without installing it.
• Dedicated Server Support: Client-only rendering logic is isolated to prevent classloading crashes on headless dedicated servers.
• GUI Config Integration: Fully supports configuration GUI integrations via ModMenu + Cloth Config in singleplayer mode.

  

• Production Stable: Fully compatible with high-performance engines like C2ME, ensuring safe multi-threaded AI execution.
• Performance Hardened: All AI logic is performance-optimized using DasikLibrary 1.8.0, ensuring zero console spam and smooth server TPS even with massive packs.

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⚙️ Configuration (Native Game Rules)

[!IMPORTANT] Config vs. In-Game GameRules: The global configuration file only defines default values for new worlds at creation time. If you have already created/opened a world, changing the config file will have no effect. You must change the settings in-game using the Edit Game Rules UI screen or the /gamerule command. No messy config files. Better Dogs uses the Native Minecraft Game Rules system. All 50+ mod parameters are grouped into a dedicated "Better Dogs" category in the official UI.

💡 Too many rules? If the game rule screen feels cluttered, we highly recommend installing Collapsible Game Rules. It will automatically group the new Personality Matrix settings into clean, expandable folders!

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☕ Support

If you enjoy the Vanilla Outsider collection, consider fueling the next update!

🇮🇩 Indonesian Users: SocioBuzz and Saweria support local payment methods (Gopay, OVO, Dana, etc.) if you want to support me without using PayPal/Ko-fi!

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📜 Credits

Role	Author
Creator	Dasik (Rifaditya)
Collection	Vanilla Outsider
License	GPLv3

📦 Modpack Permissions:
You are fully allowed to include this mod in any modpack. However, cross-platform redistribution of this mod's files is strictly prohibited—modpacks hosting or distributing this mod must be published on the same platform (e.g., Modrinth modpacks on Modrinth, CurseForge modpacks on CurseForge).

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