Baby Steps (+Nautiluses)

A Backporting Mod to bring you the cutest Baby Models

· · · · ─ · · ─ ·✶· ·✶· ·✶· ─ · · ─ · · · ·

Saw the latest Snapshot's new baby models and couldn't wait to bring them home? No? Well, I did, so here they are. This mod does a few specific things, the first and main being replacing the baby versions of many vanilla animals with custom models. This is something that will be added to vanilla Minecraft later into 2026, and you can read about it here. However, if you don't feel like waiting, or if you're stuck in 1.20 like me and know your only option is backporting these features, I got you covered.

On top of that, I was requested to add the nautiluses that I had lying around on another mod of mine, so here they are now. They can be tamed, bred, have custom armors and baby models, and they spawn in the overworld. The only thing missing so far is their zombie version, but I can get to that later on. I personally think they're a really cool addition and I hope you all enjoy them just as much!

This Snapshot brings a game changer (kinda) of an item: the Golden Dandelion. This flower can be crafted with a dandelion and some gold nuggets, and it can be given to any baby animal to stop their growth indefinitely, essentially making them stay as babies until you use it again. Ever wanted some cute baby mobs that wouldn't just become adults after a while? Took them 15 years, but Minecraft's finally making it a thing.

It now adds ALL the baby animals up to the Snapshot 6! It's sadly missing the cold and warm variants, as well as the wolves', but I talk about that later on.

Dolphins and squids actually needed a lot of work because, as you might know already, they can't breed or have babies in the base game, unlike most animal mobs. Part of this update implied adding many of the methods that make mobs age up to them through mixins, so here's to hoping they won't collide with other mods. It's important to note too that, while the Snapshot added their babies (and so did I), they didn't give them breeding options, so these babies can only spawn in the wild, although I didn't have time to do so too, since I've been trying to directly go for implementing breeding, but as of right now, you can only get their babies by spawning them with the /summon command and the Age NBT tag, like:

/summon minecraft:squid ~ ~ ~ {Age:-24000}

Golden Dandelions do work on them though.

The last relevant change that the Snapshot is adding is that they remade the models and animations for both adult and baby rabbits, being the only animal that got their adults rebranded along with the babies. I always thought vanilla Minecraft rabbits weren't very cute, but these are much better, in my opinion, so of course they'd make it into this mod.

As for the things that would be coming next, it depends on the reception this mod gets and any comments I might receive, but vaguely speaking, we have 3 options:

• I actually implemented all of this as part of another much bigger, private mod, but I thought others might want these babies too so I decided to make a standalone. The thing is, in that original implementation, I also added compatibility with the animal variants in the vanilla game, from the mod Vanilla Backport, and then I stripped all that for this version. If I get permission from the author, or if I can figure out how to properly build the compatibility, I will enable the baby variants for cold and warm environments too, as well as the Armadillo babies.
• In the time I was updating the mod, Mojang uploaded the 7th version of the Snapshot, which now is also adding baby models for zombies, villagers, piglins and such. Pretty much every human-like mob that's not a skeleton (who knows why). I can backport them too if anyone's interested, but they're definitely not animals so I'm not sure how much extra work they will be.
• If you somehow end up looking at the code of my mod, you'll see there are pieces of the breeding mechanics for Dolphins and Squids. Again, these are not even part of the Snapshot yet, but I'd like to add them because I feel like it's an important piece still missing. The only problem is it means a lot of code has to be adapted.

--- ✦          ✦ ---