Furkin

Ever look at the stray wolf that followed you home and think: you deserve better than sitting at a fence post until I remember you exist?

Furkin is a lightweight companion pet framework for Minecraft Forge. Contract vanilla animals into companions that level up, learn skills, wear armor, and — because adventure is dangerous — can be brought back when they fall.

Before someone asks: cats and dogs are supported out of the box. They were the entire reason this got built.

Minecraft 1.20.1 · Forge 47.0+ · Java 17 · Zero dependencies · MIT

What you actually get

• Contract — One Furkin Contract binds any registered species to you. Consumed per use, and it does not require prior taming, so passive mobs work too.
• Skill tree — A shared trunk plus per-species branches. Dogs lean combat, cats lean scouting and support. 13 skills total, and it's fully data-driven: drop JSON into data/furkin/skills/ and /reload.
• Equipment — All four vanilla armor slots. Third-party armor fits with zero configuration; stats resolve through the vanilla attribute system.
• Travel pouch — A carry-along inventory that grows with the travel_pouch skill level, with shrinking, reclaiming and death-drop handling built in. Finally, someone else carries the cobblestone.
• Companion Record — One book that manages every pet you own: summon, recall, unbind, toggle combat mode.
• Revival — A companion that falls drops a soulstone. Pick it up and you can bring them home with every level intact. Expensive, but they were worth it.

Getting started

1. Craft a Furkin Contract (wool + paper).
2. Right-click a valid animal. It's yours now — no prior taming needed.
3. Craft a Furkin Record (contract + book) to summon, recall and manage companions.
4. Sneak + right-click your companion to open its panel — spend skill points, swap gear, or rummage through the pouch.
5. Regret your build? Craft a Respec Potion (contract + water bottle). No judgment.

The four items live in their own creative tab named Furkin (they still show up in creative search).

A companion that falls drops a Furkin Soulstone. For that you will want some wool… and a few flowers.

(Okay. Twelve flowers. It's a ritual, not a suggestion.)

Please read this part

• Right-click behaviour is taken over for your own companions. For animals that are bound to you, Furkin cancels the vanilla interaction and handles it: feed, open the panel, contract. The check is strict — it only applies to your own companions and to holding a Furkin Contract. Other players' pets and unbound vanilla animals are untouched. If you run another mod that also handles right-clicking your own cats or dogs, Furkin takes it first. This is intended behaviour, not a bug.
• Armor stats apply, armor visuals don't. Your companion benefits from everything it wears, but the armor is not rendered on the model — same as vanilla's default for most mobs. We compute numbers, not fashion.
• All tuning lives in a server-side TOML (world-level, synced automatically when you join a server). Current numbers are first-release values and may be rebalanced later.

For mod developers

Furkin doubles as a predecessor mod: depend on it, then register your own species, skill effect types, or react to level-ups through the public API.

FurkinApi.registerSpecies(EntityType.WOLF, ...);

Any registered species works. A zombie too, if you find it fluffy enough.:)

Public API = 7 types, all under com.wanancat.furkin.api. Everything outside that package — especially internal.* — is implementation detail with no compatibility promise. This release ships no standalone API jar, so treat that boundary as a convention rather than a compile-time wall.

Version scheme is MCVERSION-MAJORMOD.MAJORAPI.MINOR.PATCH. Compare the second segment (or call FurkinApi.getApiVersion()); it is currently 0, meaning the API is not yet a stability promise.

Compatibility

No mixins, no access transformers, no vanilla overrides, all IDs namespaced furkin:. Verified on a dedicated server, on a vanilla client with the mod alone, and alongside OptiFine 1.20.1_HD_U_I6 — which rewrites 412 vanilla classes, so it's a decent stress test.

Resource-pack style mods haven't all been walked through one by one. If something renders oddly, tell us.

Install

1. Install Minecraft Forge 1.20.1 (47.0 or later).
2. Drop furkin-1.20.1-0.0.1.0.jar into your mods folder.
3. That's it. No dependencies, no library mods, no config you must set first.

Feedback and bugs

Either channel works, whichever you find easier:

• Comments on this page (open, no account needed beyond CurseForge).
• GitHub issues: https://github.com/wanancat/furkin/issues — best if you want to attach a crash report, a log, or a reproduction you can keep editing.

Compatibility reports are especially welcome.

License

MIT. Free to use, modify and redistribute, including in modpacks and as a dependency.