Adorable Mochi Pets

0.20.0 — a bug-hunting release

No new features. This one is entirely about things that were quietly wrong, most of them found by playing with the dragon.

The dragon on the ground

Riding felt right; standing, walking and following did not — and it turned out to be four separate faults, not one.

• It used flight physics while standing on grass. Flight friction stores speed, so a tap of W launched it and letting go slid it for metres. Flight now only starts when you press jump; on the ground it is a land mount, and leftover flight momentum is damped on touchdown.
• A standing dragon's body chased its head. Minecraft turns a mob's body to follow its gaze — charming on a small pet, absurd on an eight-block dragon that pirouettes because you walked around it. Its head is free now; its body is not.
• It could not step up a single block. Mobs step 0.6 by default, horses step 1.0. Every stone edge and stair cancelled its path and it lurched sideways looking for another route.
• It could not fit through a door. Anything wider than one block asks the pathfinder for a two-block-wide route. Its collision box is now narrower than a doorway; the drawn dragon is unchanged and clicking it is as easy as before.

Following on foot also got its own goal instead of the small-pet one: it re-plans often and looks for a walkable waypoint when the direct route is blocked.

Sitting on it

• The dragon was narrower than you. Its body is 1.5 blocks wide in model space, which at the old scale came out at 0.42 — thinner than a player. It is now sized so the back sits at about saddle height, and grows with its level.
• Your body did not turn with it. Vanilla only does that for its own mounts.
• The saddle point was the wrong end of the dragon — above the entity origin, which lands near the base of the tail. You now sit between the shoulder spines.
• The drawn body no longer lags a third of a second behind your mouse (a deliberate weight effect for a boss that never lands, and exactly wrong for something you are strapped to).

It learned to stand, walk and rest

The Ender Dragon is a boss that never touches ground, so its model has no ground poses at all. It has them now: standing (feet planted, wings folded, slow breathing), walking (diagonal leg pairs, weight shifting through the body, a delayed sway down the tail) and resting (legs folded, neck lowered, wings tucked). The neck and tail are built from the dragon's flight trail, which is flat on the ground — so both hung there like a stick; they carry their own motion now.

Poses also blend. The ground pose used to snap on in a single frame the moment it landed, so legs, wings and body jumped. Landing, taking off and stepping off a ledge are real transitions.

Your Mochi stops being a skeleton when the zombie is on top of it

Entering the archer form was smart; staying in it was not. Leaving only checked whether the target was still in bow range, so a shot that started at twelve blocks carried on while the zombie walked up and pressed against its face — the pet backing away instead of biting. A ground target that closes in and stays close now ends the archery, and the skeleton form drops immediately instead of lingering. Against something you genuinely cannot bite, or with Sniper stance on, the commitment is unchanged.

Abilities that collided with each other

• A dragon that landed in water also became a dolphin. You saw a dragon, but archery switched off, swimming physics fought the flight code, and you kept Dolphin's Grace permanently.
• Sitting did not cancel guarding or a bed assignment, so a guard told to sit was both — and once stood back up it refused to follow you, with nothing to explain why.
• Whistling a guard just made it walk back to its post. Calling a pet is an order to come.
• Turning the dragon form off in mid-air dropped you without slow fall — fatal from altitude.
• A shoulder pet turned into a dragon kept its shoulder physics: no gravity, no collision.
• Flying ravens planted torches in mid-air, dolphins mined ore underwater, and a ridden dragon hoovered items off the ground.
• A saddle let you mount an exhausted dragon that an empty hand correctly refused.
• Unequipping a backpack could drop its contents 200 blocks away.
• A ridden pet could be shoved around by other mobs.
• Free-falling counted as flying and burned the dragon's flight tank.

Quieter in the background

The shoulder-pet layer no longer queries the world once per frame per player, combat re-targeting no longer scans a 48-block box every tick, and pets loaded in the same chunk no longer run their heavy scans on the same tick as one another.

---

231 unit tests, clean build on both Minecraft versions.