Formicary

Welcome to the colony...

Throw an ender pearl at a savanna anthill and fall into the Formicary: a layered underground world of packed soil, amber and glowing fungal gardens, worked by four castes of ant and ruled by a queen who does not tolerate visitors.

A dimension with a floor plan

Three stacked soil tiers, each darker and less forgiving than the last, threaded with resin seams, amber pockets and fungal gardens that light themselves. Colonies generate with chambers, a larder and a royal depth.

Ants reside here

Workers forage, soldiers respond to trouble, and ender ants blink around the deep tiers. The colony shares a temper: rob a comb in one chamber and soldiers elsewhere will take an interest in you. The deep tiers do not wait to be provoked.

Raise one yourself

Steal a larva, feed it, and it imprints on you.

• Tamed workers harvest crops and carry them to a chest you bind them to — including pumpkins, melons, and crops added by other mods.
• Tamed soldiers fight beside you and hold a post where you put them.

Find your way back out

The colony is easy to get lost in, so the Trail Pheromone lights the route you actually walked — a breadcrumb trail, not a pathfinder, so it is always a route that works.

A boss worth the trip

The queen fights in three phases, burrows, spits acid and calls her brood. She drops the two things worth having: the Royal Pheromone Gland, which becomes a horn that calls her own soldiers to your side, and the Queen's Crest, which arms the only two tools in the mod that sit above netherite.

Things to build with

Chitin armour, resin and amber blocks, brood comb, and three decorative families with stairs-and-slab sets.

7 entity types · 26 blocks · 41 items · 26 recipes · its own dimension and biomes

Getting started

1. Install NeoForge 21.0.167 or newer for Minecraft 1.21.
2. Drop the jar into your mods folder.
3. Find a savanna, find an anthill, throw an ender pearl at it.

Works on client and dedicated server. No other mods required, and no config to set up.

Notes

Every texture, mob model, mob voice and the mod icon in this project is produced by a script — there are no hand-drawn assets in the repository. It is MIT licensed and built in public.

Source, issue tracker and the full recipe book: github.com/Nogalj/formicary

Found a bug? Please open an issue and say what you were doing, what you expected and what happened. A world seed helps for anything about generation.