# 🐕 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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**Made with ❤️ for the Minecraft community**
*Part of the Vanilla Outsider Collection*
