Zombies Eat Animals

Zombies can now hunt animals for food, eat dropped meat to recover health, and gain additional maximum health. Unprotected livestock and animals in the wilderness may therefore become part of a zombie's food chain.

The mod also automatically supports many modded animals by checking their loot tables, while datapack tags and configs give modpack authors direct control over the system.

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Zombie Growth and Rewards

Depending on configuration, zombies can:

• Gain additional maximum health from repeated feeding
• Become persistent after eating and stop naturally despawning
• Drop additional loot based on the maximum health they gained
• Receive temporary Resistance effect after eating rotten flesh

The maximum amount of health growth is configurable, including an additional cap for Hard difficulty. This means a zombie that survives and feeds for a long time can become both more dangerous and more rewarding to kill.

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Configuration

Most aspects of the system can be adjusted.

Hunting

• alwaysHunting — Zombies continue looking for prey whenever normal hunting conditions allow it
• berserkerHunting — Enables a more aggressive hunting mode that bypasses normal hunting limits
• huntCooldownTicks — Cooldown between successful hunts
• huntCapForADay — Maximum hunts per zombie during one Minecraft day
• huntCapForADayTotal — Maximum total hunts by zombies in the same level during one day
• huntFollowDistanceFactor — Multiplier applied to zombie follow range while searching for prey
• doNotAttackZombieHorses — Prevents zombies from targeting zombie horses

Eating and Growth

• enableEatFoodItems — Enables eating dropped food
• recoveryPerNutrition — Controls health restored from food nutrition
• maxHealthBoostCap — Maximum additional health zombies can gain from feeding
• maxHealthBoostCapHardModeAddition — Additional health-growth cap in Hard difficulty
• eatCooldownTicks — Cooldown between eating actions
• rottenFleshGiveResistance — Allows rotten flesh to grant temporary Resistance

Persistence and Loot

• zombiesBecomePersistentAfterEating — Zombies that have eaten will no longer naturally despawn
• zombiesDropMoreLoot — Adds bonus loot based on health gained through feeding
• hpLootRatio — Controls how much gained maximum health is required for additional loot rolls

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Datapack Support

The mod uses tags to control zombie food and hunting targets.

Zombie Food

zombieseatanimals:zombie_food

Any item in this tag can be eaten by zombies.

data/zombieseatanimals/tags/items/zombie_food.json

Force Hunting Targets

zombieseatanimals:zombie_target_animal

Entities in this tag are always considered valid hunting targets.

Prevent Hunting

zombieseatanimals:not_zombie_target_animal

Entities in this tag are never hunted.

Target selection follows this priority:

1. Entities in not_zombie_target_animal are never hunted.
2. Entities in zombie_target_animal are always valid targets.
3. Otherwise, the mod checks whether the entity's loot table can drop an item in zombie_food.

For most modpacks, adding compatible food items to zombie_food should be enough. The entity tags are mainly intended for cases where explicit overrides are needed.