Naturalist: Animals, Taming, and the Net
Naturalist adds 24 animals and their variants to Minecraft, designed to slot seamlessly into the vanilla world. This guide covers what it adds and how to interact with them.
New wildlife
The mod's animals aim to feel like part of vanilla, and you will find them interacting with each other and the world around them. Some are tameable, giving you companions, while others fill out the ecosystem of their biomes with realistic behavior.
The Net
Naturalist adds a Net (its own catching tool) for capturing small creatures, letting you pick up and relocate wildlife rather than only fighting or breeding it. This makes building an animal collection or moving a creature to a safe spot practical.
Getting started
Explore a range of biomes to find the mod's 24 animals and their variants, watch for the ones that can be tamed, and keep a Net handy for catching the smaller creatures. Because Naturalist is built to blend with vanilla, its animals feel like a natural extension of the world rather than a separate system.
The 1.21.1 build is roughly twice the mod
Naturalist's two lines are not the same size. Every cooking category doubled between them:
- Crafting — 45 recipes on 1.21.1, 27 on 1.20.1
- Smelting — 17 and 9
- Campfire Cooking — 15 and 8
- Smoking — 15 and 8
- Stonecutting — 12 on both
- Net — 1 on both
The 1.20.1 build is a pre-release (5.0pre4) against a finished 2.0.3 on 1.21.1, and the recipe counts show it. If you are choosing a version for a food-focused pack, the newer line has close to twice the cooked items.
Four ways to cook, all equivalent
Smelting, smoking and campfire cooking carry near-identical counts because most of the mod's meat can go through any of the three. A campfire is the cheapest and works from the first day, so there is rarely a reason to wait for a furnace.
The Net is one recipe
There is exactly one Net recipe, and it is the mod's single specialised category. Everything the net does — catching and moving small creatures — runs through that one craft, so it is the first thing worth making.
Items, not blocks
141 pages across 114 items and 27 blocks. The mod is overwhelmingly things you pick up: animal drops, foods and the tools that handle them.
No structures
Naturalist generates no worldgen structures. Its animals live in ordinary biomes, so finding them is a matter of travelling to the right climate rather than locating a dungeon.
Ant
Fur
Rat