Getting started

Ancient Creature is a path from a buried bone to a living creature. You dig up a fossil, clean it, work out what it belongs to, pull its DNA, build a complete genome, grow an embryo and hatch it.

Install

1. Install Fabric with Fabric API, or NeoForge, for Minecraft 26.1 or newer.
2. Put the Ancient Creature jar in your mods folder.
3. Optional: add JEI to see every machine step in game, and Jade to check eggs and creatures by looking at them.

The whole journey

1. 1Dig➜
2. 2Clean➜
3. 3Identify➜
4. 4Extract DNA➜
5. 5Sequence➜
6. 6Grow an embryo➜
7. 7Incubate➜

Each machine does one job and passes its result to the next. Every machine accepts hoppers, so the whole lab can be automated once you have the pieces.

Your first creature

1. Make a chisel. Fossils only drop when mined with a chisel. A stone one works, but it adds only 6% to fossils from plain fossil ore and chips 40% off everything else. See Chisels.

Shaped ➜ Stone Chisel

2. Find a fossil. Look for Fossil Ore in stone between Y -64 and 50, or for rock piles on the surface with bones or an egg sticking out, and mine them with the chisel. Better still, find a dig site: an expedition camp with excavation pits full of suspicious sand and gravel to brush. Fossils also hide in amber, in old ice, on cliff faces and in vanilla ruins, and a Sifter slowly turns gravel into fragments. See Finding fossils.

3. Clean it in a Fossil Cleaning Table with a brush.

4. Identify it in a Fossil Identification Chamber. The first fossil of each species can fail and lose some quality. After that, that species always succeeds.

5. Extract its DNA in a DNA Extractor with Extraction Fluid and a Sample Vial.

6. Sequence the DNA onto a Genome Cartridge in the Genome Sequencer. Keep adding DNA of the same species until the cartridge reaches 100%.

7. Grow an embryo. Put the completed cartridge, an Artificial Egg and Nutrient Solution into the Embryogenesis Chamber.

8. Incubate the egg in the Incubator, then use the Baby Creature Capsule on the ground to release your baby. It's yours: it grows up, and once it's an adult you can saddle and ride it. Give it orders with a Horn Whistle and keep it comfortable so it stays put and breeds.

Plan ahead

Better fossils make better DNA, and better DNA fills a genome in fewer samples and gives healthier animals. Teeth, skulls and egg fossils are the best finds. A Diamond or Netherite Chisel keeps most or all of their quality.

Field Guide

Paleontologist's Field Guide

The Paleontologist's Field Guide is this guide in book form. Every player gets one the first time they join a world (turn this off with FieldGuide.giveOnFirstJoin in the config), and you can craft another from a Book and a Bone. Right-click it to read it: pick a chapter on the left and scroll the page. Recipes, machine steps and items are shown with real item icons, so you can hover over them for their names.

Species Journal

Press J to open the Species Journal. It lists every species that has been identified on the server, with its habitat, diet, size, speed, health, attack, incubation time and how long it takes to grow up. Species nobody has identified yet show as locked.