Primordial Mobs

Six prehistoric creatures, a reworked Sniffer, and a reason to carry a brush everywhere.

Primordial Mobs takes the dinosaurs of Alex's Caves' Primordial Caves and rebuilds them as a vanilla-style survival feature: no new dimension, no new biome, no new ore. The animals of the deep past are archaeology. You find them the way vanilla tells you to find the past — with a brush, in suspicious sand and gravel — and everything else grows from there.

Requires Forge 1.20.1 · Citadel 2.6.0+. Optionally integrates with Alex's Caves (see below).

Finding them: the brush is the whole progression

Every vanilla archaeology site — desert wells, desert pyramids, trail ruins, cold and warm ocean ruins — can now give up something prehistoric:

• ~8% of brushed suspicious blocks yield a primordial relic: a Heavy Bone, a Tectonic Shard or an Amber Curiosity. Only things that could plausibly survive buried — never meat: fresh chops and Trilocaris tails come from the animals themselves.
• 2% yield something far better: the egg of one of the five dinosaurs. A successful vanilla Sniffer Egg roll is protected and is never replaced by this mod.

That is the only way in. Nothing prehistoric spawns on the surface, nothing spawns in a cave you have not dug for. Once you have one animal, you keep the species alive yourself: the dinosaurs lay eggs, and eggs hatch into babies — several species imprint on whoever is standing nearby.

The five

-Grazer

• Taming: Feed it a Tree Star (roughly one in three works).
• What it offers: A walking wall. It is rideable, heavily armoured, charges what threatens it and grazes its way across your farmland. Give one a Serene Salad and it passes its appetite for stone straight on to you: Haste I for four minutes.

-Logger

• Taming: Feed it a Tree Star.
• What it offers: The long-necked lumberjack and fisher. It shoulders whole trees over and they fall as logs, browses pewen pines, and fishes anything small out of the water — Trilocaris, cod, salmon, tropical fish and tadpoles — snapping it up in its beak. It is also rideable.

-Roarer

• Taming: You do not feed an apex predator. Stun it with a Primitive Club, then hand it a Serene Salad while it is dazed — and be ready to do that several times.
• What it offers: The best mount in the mod, with a roar on the special-ability key: a shockwave that stuns and scatters everything in front of you, with a cooldown meter above the crosshair.

-Drifter

• Taming: Feed it a raw or cooked Trilocaris Tail (roughly one in three), or hatch its egg beside you.
• What it offers: A flying mount with ascend, descend and dismount controls, a stamina meter, and a pack of its own kind that follows it.

-Stealer

• Taming: Catch a wild one relaxing (they doze off after a hunt) and hand it a Serene Salad, or hatch its eggs next to you.
• What it offers: A pack raptor that hunts with its siblings, opens doors, picks up dropped items and helps itself to unlocked chests. Keep it fed with Dinosaur Nuggets.

And a sixth, smaller neighbour: the Trilocaris, a prehistoric arthropod that spawns naturally in the water of Lush Caves. Scoop one into a bucket, or cook its tail — it is the Drifter's favourite food and the reason to explore a lush cave before you go dinosaur hunting.

The Sniffer, rewritten

Vanilla's Sniffer sniffs, digs and wanders off. Here it becomes a companion, and the sole gardener of the prehistoric flora:

• Tameable with a Tree Star, exactly like a Grazer or a Logger. Shift-click cycles wander → stay → follow. It is a companion, not a mount — you never ride a Sniffer.
• It digs up the mod's plants. Tree Star, Curly Fern, Fiddlehead, Pewen Sapling and Pine Nuts now come out of the ground under a working Sniffer, mixed in with the vanilla torchflower and pitcher seeds. They are not in the brushing table: no Sniffer, no prehistoric garden.
• The prehistoric mixtures work on it, and each one drives the digging: a Primordial Soup sends it straight back to work (vanilla makes a Sniffer wait ten thousand ticks between digs — the soup wipes that wait), a Seething Stew does the same and makes it forget the spots it has already dug, so it will work the same ground again, and a Serene Salad calms it and sends it to lie down. All three heal it and pass on their own effects, as they do for any animal.
• Three looks of its own — its normal coat, a retro hide (give it an Amber Curiosity) and a tectonic one (a Tectonic Shard) — plus the same recolour lottery as the dinosaurs.

Skins worth hunting for

Every dinosaur and the Sniffer carry three hides: their normal look, a retro one summoned with an Amber Curiosity, and a tectonic one forged with a Tectonic Shard — hand the item to the animal and it changes on the spot (hand it the same item again to change back).

On top of that, 15% of the animals that hatch or spawn are born as an exclusive recoloured variant — a second full palette for every hide, including the baby Grazer and the elder Stealer. Six looks per creature, and the rare ones stay rare.

Standard variants (15% chance):

Retro variants (Amber Curiosity applied to the 15% variants):

Tectonic variants (Tectonic Shard applied to the 15% variants):

Standard sniffer skin (right) and its 15% variant (left):

Retro sniffer skin (right) and its 15% variant (left):

Tectonic sniffer skin (right) and its 15% variant (left):

Everything else you will be building with

• Pewen wood: log, wood, stripped variants, branches, pines and a sapling that grows a full pewen tree. Pine Nuts are both a snack and a plantable sapling.
• Prehistoric flora: Tree Star, Curly Fern (also a lime dye source), Fiddlehead, Fern Thatch.
• Food: Dinosaur Chop and its cooked form, Dinosaur Nuggets, raw and cooked Trilocaris Tail, and the three prehistoric mixtures — Primordial Soup, Serene Salad and Seething Stew.
• Curiosities and tools: Heavy Bone, Tough Hide, Amber Curiosity, Tectonic Shard, the Primitive Club (which is what makes the Roarer taming possible), Bucket of Trilocaris.
• Five dinosaur eggs to breed with, six spawn eggs, and the Stunned effect.

Alex's Caves compatibility

Primordial Mobs was born from Alex's Caves, and the two are designed to run together. There is nothing to configure: on startup the mod checks whether Alex's Caves is installed, and if it is, it registers no content of its own — Alex's Caves owns the Primordial Caves — and becomes an overlay on that biome instead:

• The five dinosaurs become Grazer, Logger, Roarer, Drifter and Stealer, and so do their eggs and spawn eggs, in all 13 supported languages.
• Everything named after them is renamed with them: Alex's Caves' sound subtitles, cave paintings, advancements, Extinction Spear enchantments and the guide book pages. The Tremorzilla — a Tremorsaurus derivative living in the Toxic Caves — becomes the Roarerzilla, entity, spawn egg, egg block, advancements and guide entries included. The Atlatitan keeps its own name: it is not one of the five, and nothing of it is touched.
• Alex's Caves' own creature spawns get the 15% recoloured-variant chance, rendered with this mod's variant textures.
• The Grazer and the Logger behave as this mod's animals, not as Alex's Caves' wildlife. They can be tamed with a Tree Star (1 chance in 3), told to wander, stay or follow, and ridden, with the saddle sitting on the back rather than up the neck. A tamed one that is told to stay is genuinely parked: it does not slide when other mobs shove it, and its hitbox drops with its body.
• The Logger fishes for real: cod, salmon, tropical fish, pufferfish and tadpoles, not only the Trilocaris — swallowed whole with the same animation. Felling trees, nibbling pewens and the Primordial Soup fervour are Alex's Caves' own and work unchanged.
• Feeding a Serene Salad to a Grazer still grants Haste I for four minutes.
• Brushing vanilla suspicious sand and gravel still turns up Primordial Caves relics and the rare dinosaur spawn egg — a second, surface-level way into the same content.
• All of the Sniffer rework carries over, and the Sniffer now spawns naturally in the Primordial Caves in small groups, alongside the Grazer and the Logger. Down there it is only a passive animal: it does not sniff, and it does not dig plants out of the cave floor.
• Everything else of Alex's Caves is left untouched — its content, its recipes, its creative tab, its keybind, its loot, its spawn weights. Its other caves are none of this mod's business.

Because the animals stay Alex's Caves' own entities, nothing downstream breaks: the Roarerzilla egg recipe, the Extinction Spear, the dinosaur tags, its advancements and its guide all keep working, and worlds that already have Primordial Caves creatures in them carry on unchanged.

The mod registers under the same alexscaves: namespace either way, so a world built without Alex's Caves keeps working when you install it later, and vice versa.

Credits & license

Primordial Mobs is a derivative work of Alex's Caves by Alexthe668 and Noonyeyz and is released under the GNU General Public License v3. The full licence text ships in the jar and in the source repository. All original models, animations, sounds and textures are theirs; this mod prunes that work down to the Primordial Caves creatures, rebuilds their progression around vanilla archaeology, adds the recoloured variants and the reworked Sniffer, and integrates back with the full mod when it is present.

Additional credits inherited from Alex's Caves: LudoCrypt, _Ninni, PrismaticPinky, RenRen, Gatetoh, arby698, PlummetStudios, HolidayRaptor.

Requires Citadel by Alexthe668.