Foxcrows

Participant MCreator x CurseForge ModJam 2024

Foxcrows are a mischievous vulpine-corvid hybrid that can now be found throughout the wilds of the Overworld!  These curious creatures have a love for shiny things which can only be surpassed by their love for cornbread!  The fastest way to a foxcrow's heart is through its stomach, and feeding them some of their favorite treats is a good way to make a friend for life.

Foxcrows have a knack for sniffing out treasure, whether it's buried in the dirt, or in someone's pockets!  Both wild and tamed foxcrows (unless they are sitting) will hunt for treasure, but though their quick wit and keen noses often lead them to reward, they are often just as likely to find bounty of their own as they are to take it from someone else!

Foxcrows can find a wide range of items buried in the ground, from seeds to ores to rarely even diamonds!  They can also steal a variety of goods from villagers, ranging from the typical emerald to items pertaining to a villager's profession.  But be forewarned-- though the rewards of such mischief may be lucrative, most villagers aren't fond of having their pockets picked!  Let your tamed foxcrows run rampant in town, and you may well find yourselves cast under suspicion from the villagers and their golems...

Foxcrows can also steal from players' hotbars (but will only take items defined by the list in the config).  Wild foxcrows can always decide to steal from a player, and tamed ones may steal from other players, but not their owner.  Foxcrows are smart enough to not stick around once they've got a prize in tow, and will rapidly fly away and keep running whenever their prize's true owner draws near!  However, even this instinct may be overpowered by the promise of a favorite tasty treat...

Tamed foxcrows can be rewarded for retrieving items by right clicking them with a liked or loved food item, which will cause them to drop their treasure and grab the food.  Treasure can also be taken from them by right clicking without a liked or loved food item.

The more a foxcrow is rewarded for retrieving items, the more often it will seek them out in the future, and the better the items it will tend to dig up.  However, if has its treasure taken from it without a suitable reward, it will become unhappy and seek out items less frequently.  Liked or loved items can be defined in the config (but must also be food items), and provide differing amounts of reward to encourage the foxcrow to bring back more items in the future.  Green sparkles indicate that a foxcrow loves the item it was given, while white sparkles indicate that it likes it.  Storm clouds, however, indicate that the foxcrow received nothing satisfactory in return.

This system can also be used to influence a foxcrow's tendency to steal.  Rewarding a foxcrow for bringing you stolen goods will make it more likely to seek out items, both by digging and by stealing.  Orange sparkles alongside green or white indicate that a foxcrow has been rewarded for stealing.  Taking the item without a reward will discourage the foxcrow from retrieving items, but will also discourage it specifically from stealing them.  Pale sparkles alongside stormclouds indicate that a foxcrow has been discouraged from stealing.

By carefully selecting which behaviors you choose to reward and which you choose to discourage, you can teach your foxcrow that crime doesn't pay-- or maybe you want to teach it to keep stealing.  That one's on you, you gremlin :P

Foxcrows in different regions display different wild colors and patterns.  There are four possible shades per area (three common colors and one mutated one), and each area also has its own unique pattern.  Foxcrows spawn with different colors in very cold or very warm biomes (which can be defined in the config), making for three possible color sets and a total of 12 wild shades.  In the cold, foxcrows will spawn with pale fur and the magpie pattern (based off magpies).  In arid biomes, they will spawn with sandy fur and the jay pattern (based off scrub jays).  In every other biome they will spawn with red fur and the raven pattern (based off raven and red fox coloring).

However, colors and patterns can be mixed through breeding, resulting in combinations which aren't find in the wild.  Every shade has a variant in all three pattern types, making for a total of 36 combinations.  Baby foxcrows will always inherit their pattern and shade from one parent-- unless they have a mutated shade, which has a high likelihood of randomizing back into a common one.  However, while foxcrows will usually inherit their type from one parent, occasionally they may mutate into the type which corresponds with the biome they are born in.  These factors can be utilized to boost the odds of acquiring certain combinations.

Corn is a new crop introduced alongside the foxcrows, and it is critical for making several of their favorite treats.  From sweet berry cornbread to corn on the cob, you'll use these recipes for taming, breeding, and training your foxcrows-- and likely munch on some yourself in the process!

Corn doesn't spawn naturally in the world, but farmer villagers will sometimes trade it, and foxcrows can sometimes dig up kernels.  Kernals (which can also be crafted from an ear) can be planted to get a corn stalk, which grows to be two blocks high.  Breaking or right clicking the top block will yield ears, depending on the maturity of the stalk top.

Like their terrestrial cousins, foxcrows are also fond of sweet berries and glow berries, and can pick both berries and corn from their respective plants.  They also love the taste of rabbit, which they hunt with great efficiency, swooping down on them from the sky.  These attacks are so efficient that they apply the looting effect, making them useful for rabbit farming.  They can also pick up food items off the ground.

Tamed foxcrows can be told to sit, follow, or wander by right clicking (note that if the foxcrow has an item, you will need to shift click to cycle command instead of clicking them).  While following they will perform most of their natural behaviors, and while wandering they are able to perform almost all of them (with the exception of stealing from their owner).  In addition to digging and stealing, foxcrows seem to have a particular curiosity regarding certain creatures, especially foxes and cats-- the latter of which sometimes frightens them.  They will not usually fly too high in the air, but building a safe aviary or leashing them is recommended if you wish to leave them wandering.  Should a wandering tamed foxcrow go astray (or should you wish to catch the attention of a flying wild one), the smell of sweet berry cornbread usually works wonders.  Right clicking with shears will remove any unwanted headgear.  I wonder what would fit on a foxcrow's head, though?  Hmm...

The mod comes with a number of advancements, most pertaining to digging and stealing.  Most are visible in the advancement menu.  There may be a few surprises, too... :)

That's about it for the mod guide!  I hope you enjoy having your own adorable, furry little menaces friends to cause mischief with!  Please feel free to let me know if you encounter any problems and I'll do my best to fix them, although this has been my first time using MCreator so I'm less versed in the particular nuances of its system.  And speaking of MCreator, if you've played my other mods, you may have noticed that this is a bit unusual for me.  I've been curious about MCreator for a while now, because while I primarily code in Eclipse, I got a lot of my coding origins years back while experimenting with other block-based software.  When the jam was announced, I thought this would be a good opportunity to try out MCreator for myself and see what I thought.  If you're interested in those personal notes, and the technical side of Foxcrows, you can read more in the segment below!

How much of Foxcrows was created using MCreator?

The entirety of Foxcrows is made within the MCreator program, but it's a hybrid between built in block based and custom elements.  Most of the Foxcrow class and AI is custom written code, as are the two corn blocks.  Most of the items, loot tables, advancements, etc. use MCreator's defaults.

I originally hoped to use the basic interface for the Foxcrow entity too and test out the block based AI, but I realized I didn't have a good method for setting up the variant system with the default settings, and I also made the mistake of making an entity that needed split navigation for ground and flying... oops.

MCreator general thoughts, from otherwise doing mostly script based coding:

MCreator does a good job at expediting the process of creating simple features like items, basic blocks and entities, loot tables, advancements, and suchnot-- which is honestly really nice, because while simple, setting them up can be a tedious aspect of coding.  I also think it shines in its ability to switch between viewing block/form based screens and the code behind them.  That's a really valuable tool when you are learning because it lets you see what the simplified logic is actually doing.

As an IDE, MCreator is serviceable, but doesn't quite live up to the raw functionality of a full IDE.  Custom elements (at least in the 2023.1 release) are also restricted to the main mod folder, which is a bit aggravating for organization.  There's a definite point when you get into custom code where it would just become easier to go fully script mode, and I have a feeling that's going to include most of my future projects.  But, if you are new to code or have a simple to medium level complexity project that won't require a ton of custom code, the IDE is nice to have as an option, and it works well enough for that intention.

I didn't really get to try out the global event block scripts for this project, unfortunately, so I can't comment too heavily on those.  Seems like a neat interface, though.

Best of luck to my fellow jammers, and happy birthday to Minecraft and MCreator!