Dogs Unleashed

Good dogs. Big adventures. Dogs Unleashed is an open-source Fabric mod that adds five new dog breeds, a fetch system, dog beds, graves, a full advancement tab, and more. Every dog is unique. Every bark has its own personality. Your wolves have been carrying the team long enough.

Time to expand the pack.

Alpha Release

This mod is currently in alpha testing and we would love to hear your feedback! Any feedback that you have for us, please open an issue on the GitHub repository.

Who's This For

Builders who want a Shiba Inu curled up on their cherry-wood porch while they landscape.

Explorers who want a Husky howling at the full moon from a frozen peak.

Survival veterans who want a proper fetch system, dog beds their pets actually sleep in, and a grave marker when the worst happens.

Anyone who has ever looked at a vanilla wolf and thought "this is great but what if it was a wiener dog?"

What You Get

Five New Breeds

Each breed has its own stats, spawn biomes, coat variants, and bark sounds. They are not reskins. They are fully animated with GeckoLib, each with idle, walk, sit, sleep, shake, head tilt, and tail wag animations.

Husky

Dachshund

Beagle

Golden Retriever

Shiba Inu

The Command Wheel

Vanilla wolves have one move: sit. Our dogs take real commands. Right-click any of your tamed dogs to open a radial command wheel with eight options:

Hover a sector to see its name, click to command. The active command is highlighted, the world keeps running behind the wheel, and number keys 1-8 work as shortcuts. Your dog barks and wags to acknowledge, and commands persist across saves, restarts, and dimension changes.

Fetch (Yes, Actual Fetch)

Sneak-right-click your dog with a fetch item to enter play mode, then throw it and watch your dog:

1. Chase the projectile as it arcs through the air
2. Retrieve the item from where it lands
3. Return it to you and drop it at your feet

Full chase AI, carry animation, the works. Three fetch items are supported:

The frisbee glides roughly three times further than the tennis ball before landing, making it the best fetch item for open terrain.

Leads That Behave

Clip a vanilla lead onto your dog and the AI gets out of the way:

• No tug-of-war: follow and heel AI pause while leashed, the lead is the walk
• No mid-walk naps: a leashed dog never auto-sleeps, and one that was snoozing in bed wakes up the moment the lead clips on
• Fetch handoff: sneak-right-click a leashed dog with a fetch item and the lead drops before play mode starts (turn off Drop Leash on Play Mode to keep the lead on instead, which pauses fetching until the lead comes off)
• Collar-matched rope: the lead rope tints to your dog's collar color, so walking the whole pack stays readable

Dog Beds They Actually Use

16 dye colors. Craft one, place it, and assign it to your dog by sneak-right-clicking the dog then right-clicking the bed. Your dog will:

• Auto-sleep at night when within 32 blocks (clear weather required)
• Stay asleep until you wake them with a right-click of the bed or a new command from the wheel
• Refuse to auto-sleep again if you wake them before morning (respect)
• Unassign with a sneak-right-click of the bed if your dog gets too big for it

Every breed uses its curled "sleep" pose in bed. Tiny loaf, giant loaf, same nap energy.

Husky Howling (Full Moon Only)

Huskies do not bark. Instead, they howl. And only on nights with a full moon (moon phase 0). The howl lasts 4.5 seconds with a 30-second cooldown. Stand on a frozen peak at midnight with your Husky and watch the animation trigger on its own. It is the most atmospheric thing in the mod.

Dog Graves

When a tamed dog dies, a grave appears near the death location with the dog's name and a flower matching their collar color. Mine it with a pickaxe to preserve the grave as an item with full NBT data (dog name, UUID, collar color). Place it anywhere as a memorial.

The grave avoids spawning on top of their bed. Because even in death, they want to be near home.

Advancements

The Dogs Unleashed advancement tab tracks the full pack experience: taming your first dog, collecting every breed, hearing a Husky howl, finishing a fetch return, seeing a dog sleep in bed, preserving a grave, and taming a Shiba Inu.

Collar Dyeing

Right-click any of your tamed dogs with any dye to change their collar color. All 16 Minecraft dyes are supported. Coordinated squad, colour-coded pack, rainbow chaos — your call.

Taming, Breeding & Naming

Tame dogs with raw or cooked meats and bones (1-in-3 chance per feed). On tame, a naming screen opens so your new friend gets a proper name immediately. Over 200 built-in name suggestions or type your own.

Breeding is same-breed only. Both parents must be tamed and not sitting. Puppies inherit their owner's UUID (preferring the player who clicked). Breeding roll tables include rare coat variants you will not find in the wild.

Loyalty Across Any Teleport

Dimension hop and your dogs follow. Portal, end portal, weird command magic, whatever: every alive tamed dog comes with you, unless it is sitting, sleeping in bed, or holding a Stay or Guard command. Long-distance teleports within a dimension (16 blocks or more) bring them along too, and they always arrive on safe ground beside you instead of inside the floor. Flying? They land on the ground beneath you. If you teleport somewhere with no safe footing at all, like into solid terrain, they stay safely where they were. Pet Manager summons are different: an explicit summon always delivers the dog, using your exact position as a last resort.

Pet Manager

Press the configured keybind to open the Pet Manager screen. Filter by breed, alive or deceased status, or search by name. Each living dog's row carries a Summon button that brings them to you from anywhere, even across dimensions: the system loads their chunk, finds them, and delivers them. Clicking a row opens that dog's Pet Details screen, with a large 3D portrait, their breed makeup as percentages, their named coat variant and how rare it is (Common through Epic, with the actual roll odds), stat bars comparing their breed's max health, speed, and attack against the best in the pack, their current health and last known location, a preview of their closest family, and the door into the full family tree. A footer link at the bottom of the screen opens the controls screen so you can bind the keybind without digging through menus.

Family Trees & Ancestry

Every puppy permanently remembers both parents, and that ancestry survives death, despawns, and dimension hops. From any dog's Pet Details screen, open their interactive family tree: generations laid out like a human family tree, with mates side by side and litters hanging under their parents, every dog rendered with its live 3D model. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, and click any relative to expand their side of the family: grandparents, cousins, nieces and nephews, the whole dynasty. Deceased ancestors stay in the tree, and you can re-focus the tree on any relative, even one owned by another player. Dogs bred before this feature recover what their entity still remembers (at most one parent), so old bloodlines show up as best they can.

Inspecting Any Dog

Sneak and right-click any dog that is not yours, wild or another player's, and a floating details card pops up over the world: their portrait, name, owner (or Wild), breed makeup, named coat and its rarity, health, age, and breed stat bars. Handy for scouting a rare coat before you spend the meat taming it, or checking out a dog on someone else's leash. Click anywhere or press Escape to dismiss it.

Breed-Specific Barking

Every breed has its own bark sound set. Dachshunds have 14 different bark sound files — the most vocal of the pack. Beagles have 2, Goldens have 5, Shibas have 1. Dogs bark when you hold food nearby, when their health drops below 30%, when they have a target, or just because (1 in 7200 chance per tick, roughly once every six minutes).

Little Details

• Head tilting when you hold taming food nearby. It is impossible not to smile at.
• Tail wagging when you hold food or just because they love you.
• Shaking after leaving water — 20 tick delay, 22 tick animation, splash particles.
• Floof. So much floof.

Quick Start

1. Install Dogs Unleashed, Fabric API, and GeckoLib into your mods folder.
2. Launch the game, join a world, and find your first dog in its spawn biome.
3. Tame it with meat, name it, grab a tennis ball, and try fetch.

That is it. No config files to edit. No server setup required.

Controls

Leash interactions use vanilla leads with no extra keybinds: clip a lead on to walk a dog (its follow and auto-sleep AI pause while leashed), and sneak-right-click a leashed dog with a fetch item to drop the lead and start fetch in one motion (see Drop Leash on Play Mode under Settings).

The keybind ships unbound so it never steals a key you already use. The first time you launch the game with the mod installed, a one-time toast reminds you to bind it, and the Pet Manager screen carries a footer link that jumps straight to the controls screen. The reminder is tracked in config/dogs-unleashed/client-state.json, so it only ever shows once per installation.

Settings

Open the settings screen via the cog button in the top-right of the Pet Manager, or via Mod Menu (if installed). All settings are server-authoritative and editable in singleplayer or by operators on a multiplayer server. Operators can also edit via /dogsunleashed config.

Spawn rates are percentages of the mod's default spawn weights, not absolute spawn chances. The actual encounter rate also depends on what else spawns in each biome's creature pool, which varies by modpack.

Vanilla passive spawning is gated by a shared creature cap that stays full in explored terrain, so dogs would normally only spawn when new chunks generate, and never at all alongside mods like Cobblemon whose creatures keep the cap saturated. The Cap-Independent Spawner, on by default, periodically spawns a small wild pack near a random player in a matching biome, in the overworld only, honoring the spawn rate multipliers, the doMobSpawning gamerule, and its own cap of 4 untamed dogs within 64 blocks of the player. Untamed dogs it spawns despawn again when no player is near, so the world doesn't fill up; taming makes them permanent as usual. Disable it to limit dogs to vanilla natural spawning.

The config file lives at <world-save>/dogs-unleashed/server-config.json and can be hand-edited while the server is offline.

Command

/dogsunleashed status
/dogsunleashed config spawn <true|false>
/dogsunleashed config spawnrate <0..500>
/dogsunleashed config spawnrate <breed> <0..500>
/dogsunleashed config capindependentspawning <true|false>
/dogsunleashed config graves <true|false>
/dogsunleashed config autosleep <true|false>
/dogsunleashed config autosleeprange <4..128>
/dogsunleashed config barkvolume <0.0..2.0>
/dogsunleashed config howlvolume <0.0..2.0>
/dogsunleashed config reset
/dogsunleashed list <player>
/dogsunleashed summon <player> <petId>
/dogsunleashed find <petId>

The pet management subcommands are for operators inspecting and recalling a specific player's dogs server-side:

All subcommands require operator permission level 2.

Mod Menu (optional)

If Mod Menu is installed, Dogs Unleashed appears in the Mods list with the same settings screen. Mod Menu is not bundled and not required.

The mod tile links out to Modrinth, the GitHub source and issue tracker, the releases page, and Ko-fi. The Configure button opens the settings screen described above:

Languages

Dogs Unleashed ships with translations for breed names, screens, commands, and chat feedback in:

Want your language in the pack? Translation PRs are very welcome! Copy en_us.json, translate the values (keep the keys and %s placeholders intact), and open a PR. Spotted a typo or an awkward phrasing in an existing translation? Please open an issue so we can fix it.

A few things to leave untranslated in the command.dogs-unleashed.* strings, since operators type them literally: command names (/dogsunleashed, status, config, list, summon, find), config option identifiers (spawn, graves, autosleeprange, barkvolume, ...), literal argument tokens (<true|false>, <player>, <petId>, range markers like <4..128>), and the pet descriptor field labels (id=, dim=, pos=). Translate only the surrounding prose. The longest, most idiom-heavy strings are the settings tooltips, so phrasing-polish PRs there are especially appreciated.

Compatibility

• Minecraft: 1.21.1
• Loader: Fabric 0.16.5+
• Fabric API: 0.107.0+1.21.1 minimum
• GeckoLib: 4.7+
• Java: 21
• Environments: Dedicated server and integrated server, fully multiplayer

Dependencies

Open Source

Dogs Unleashed is open source under the MIT license. Built with love and treats ❤️

If Dogs Unleashed made you smile on a long survival night, a star on GitHub or a coffee on Ko-fi means the world.