Mods / Pickup Baby Animals
Author: PureWinter
Side: Both
Created: Dec 8th 2025 at 3:54 PM
Last modified: Jan 17th at 12:52 AM
Downloads: 15873
Follow Unfollow 370
Recommended download (for Vintage Story 1.21.5 - 1.21.6):
pickupbabyanimals_1.2.2.zip
1-click install
Sneak + right click to pick up baby animals and chickens into your inventory. (Since poultry are handled differently, birds from other mods such as "more animals" are also adult-pick-up-able)
Press P (rebindable in game like vanilla controls) to toggle this mod on/off in case it interferes with vanilla petting or other mod's functionalities.
--- πΊ Wolves and Fotsa Wolves πΊ--
If it's a wolf puppy, you can also sprint + right click to pick it up as the item traders will buy! If you are using this mod, please uninstall my Pickup Wolf Puppies mod if you were using it .
This mod also includes the patch for traders to buy female puppies, not just male. Breed Wolves and pick them up for profit!
Totally optional, but works out of the box:
Support has been added to pick up all Fotsa wolves (pups) in a sellable format as well. Use this patch to sell Fotsa wolf puppies. (Replaces vanilla.)
You can use this mod's config to add other species to the 'shift will pick it up as its base spawn item' as well if that applies to you for some reason, or you want traders to buy your young pigs/chicks and patch that in.
---------------------------------------------
This mod is designed to preserve everything by cloning the entire Attributes and WatchedAttributes trees when a baby is picked up, making it ultra compatible with other mods that modify animal apperance or behavior!
It should work with the majority of modded animals added to the game (current and future) but if one doesn't, please link to it. (If someone adds attachables to babies and needs this updated, let me know.)
Tested with Fotsa, draconis, equus, pegasus, more animals, the critters pack, (but all animal mods, including future ones, should automatically work except egg hatching which need to be added manually.)
Configuration support (babysnatcher.json)
You can just write a common english name like in the example config generated. Like just writing elephant or calf (covers ALL calves) will work. You don't need the game's full code for any animals. But you can use a full code, or wildcards. Or just a mod domain name like draconis to cover all contents from a single mod, making configging super easy!
Blacklist: This cannot be picked up. (The mod already doesn't pick up non-avian or non-insect adults and rust creatures/humanoids by default.)
Whitelist: Add something to be picked up. (Can and will pick up adults if you do not specify their baby code. Turn on dev mode in interface and hover the creature in creative inventory to see entity codes, or use my mod.)
BackpackList: The valid entity goes into the backpack slot instead of your regular inventory. (If adding something custom, put it on the whitelist AND backpack list if you want to be able to put it in your backpack!)
BackpackDomainsIfJuvenile: Draconis adds an extra growth stage, juveniles, that are huge. This allows juveniles to go into backpack, but babies to just be picked up.
This mod is pretty well tested by many people, but if you find an issue/oversight/bug/incompatibility please report it in the comments with detail so I can fix it!
This mod shouldn't reset grow timers in Draconis/regular animals if picked up/placed again.
All new language keys are 100% localized to all languages Vintage Story currently supports, in native script.
-It's MIT open source if you want to make your own adjustments or branch off.
| Mod Version | Mod Identifier | For Game version | Downloads | Released | Changelog | Download | 1-click mod install* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.2.2 | pickupbabyanimals | 5087 | Jan 17th at 12:51 AM | pickupbabyanimals_1.2.2.zip | 1-click install | ||
|
-One line bugfix for determining tamed deer (elk) path resolution. Or in plain terms you can't pickup adult tamed elk in default mod settings, only if you whitelist it like any other adult animal that isn't poultry. | |||||||
| 1.2.1 | pickupbabyanimals | 2801 | Jan 3rd at 7:26 AM | pickupbabyanimals_1.2.1.zip | 1-click install | ||
|
-Added out of the box support for Fotsa Wolves and buying/selling of Fotsa wolves. (Which replace vanilla if installed.) <- Completely optional, wont affect you if you don't use them! | |||||||
| 1.2.0 | pickupbabyanimals | 44 | Jan 3rd at 6:42 AM | pickupbabyanimals_1.2.0.zip | 1-click install | ||
|
-Added ability to toggle this mod functionality on/off in game by pressing P. (rebindable.) | Purpose: This mod could interfere with petting animals in vanilla, and some interactions from other mods. This change makes it compatible with everything in one go. | |||||||
| 1.1.4 | pickupbabyanimals | 718 | Jan 1st at 11:07 PM | pickupbabyanimals_1.1.4.zip | 1-click install | ||
|
-Fixed bug that you could pickup dead babies. o_o; (If you want to pick them up, use butchering mod instead! Compatibility for it was in mind here.) | |||||||
| 1.1.3 | pickupbabyanimals | 1197 | Dec 29th 2025 at 12:22 AM | pickupbabyanimals_1.1.3.zip | 1-click install | ||
|
- Added manual custom white list. (If you want your new pick-up-able animal to be in a backpack slot, add it to the whitelist AND backpack list) | |||||||
| 1.1.2 | pickupbabyanimals | 1046 | Dec 25th 2025 at 9:54 PM | pickupbabyanimals_1.1.2.zip | 1-click install | ||
|
-Adds support for critters pack. (Babies, some adults and small critters like snails and isopods.) | |||||||
| 1.1.1 | pickupbabyanimals | 1439 | Dec 20th 2025 at 6:04 AM | pickupbabyanimals_1.1.1.zip | 1-click install | ||
|
-Added caught animal info to the mouse hoverover/tool tip. Auto localizes from available vanilla or mod content- if a mod added something unusual it will still try to resolve a proper name, and then falls back to a simple English word like 'Baby'. If the mod is not localizing into your language for vanilla content let me know. :) | |||||||
| 1.1.0 | pickupbabyanimals | 819 | Dec 17th 2025 at 3:49 AM | pickupbabyanimals_1.1.0.zip | 1-click install | ||
|
-Added configuration support. Use common words (from the entity's english name or its actual item code, accepts wild cards too so "*wolf*" or "elephant" or "game:creature-spider-*" all work. | |||||||
| 1.0.1 | pickupbabyanimals | 1232 | Dec 13th 2025 at 11:30 PM | pickupbabyanimals_1.0.1.zip | 1-click install | ||
|
-Added support for more animals. (Both adults and babies can be picked up, like vanilla chickens.) | |||||||
| 1.0.0 | pickupbabyanimals | 1490 | Dec 8th 2025 at 4:57 PM | Empty | pickupbabyanimals_1.0.0.zip | 1-click install | |
CrabberGrabber Just launched right now and can pick up vanilla baby chicks without any config settings, however they are so tiny you MUST crouch to pick them up or you're not close enough for the crosshair to turn from black to red indicating you are in range to pick.
Edit to add: I cannot 'catch' them in survival because they are too fast, but when they are tame or you're in creative they are catchable. Because you have to be crouching and they bolt it feels kind of impossible so maybe trap them up against landscape first. :DPureWinter ok now that ive experimented some more its way more intuitive lol. but i cant seem to catch baby chicks for some reason? am i just slow or are they bugged?
SanicDeHudgeg Yes (funny username btw) You can add it to singleplayer or servers mid save. If you remove it mid save, if anyone was holding a bagged animail in their inventory it will turn into a droppable (non crashing) 'item not found' blank item. (An that animal effectively dissapears from data.)
This mod is compatible with already existing saves, right? Thanks for making it, regardless.
CrabberGrabber Lol Every mod is confusing the first 10 secdons of using it, trust. But yeah as you already discovered picking up the animal creates an item containing the animal, either in your backpack slot, hotbar, or inventory if the hotbar is full. And when you release the animal there is no more item. Maybe not the most 'balanced' mod- maybe I should create linen capture sacks but eh, no one has complained. xD
AH im just stupid. I assumed they'd be in the bag like trapped chickens are and didn't see them show up as items lol
So it lets me pickup baby animals, as in, they disappear when I rightclick em with an empty sack. But then they disappear? They're not inside the sack??
Leavraell Toggle off the mod by using P 🌸(Rebindable in game!)
So the storage of data for feed counter is probably being handled by the wolf taming mod. It might not be getting saved to attributes, I haven't looked at their mod's functionality. I may need to switch from attribute tree info to binary but I don't want to refactor this mod right now, haha. However you can simply toggle the mod off around your puppers!!
Kyuuragi Thank you for letting me know! Fixed picking up adult elk. Doesn't fix the map issue but that's kind beyond the scope.
I have a found wild baby wolf I was keping safe and have been feeding it to tame it. I sometimes accidentally pick it up (oops!) and each time, when I place it down again it has restarted the number of times it needs to eat to be tame. Many many meat and bones later I finally resisted picking her up so she could become tame and even obedient - she's all grown up and beautiful.
Is anyone else seeing this where picking up a baby wolf while you are feeding it to tame resets the counter? Does this only happen with wolf pups? Thanks.
I haven't touched the default whitelist, but appear to be able to bag and carry around the adult Elk I obtained via trader - while convenient, it seems to have broken the map icon for the elk, which is now permanently stuck beside the trader where it was obtained, regardless of where the elk actually is in world.
Thanks a lot! Now I can get all the poultry I desire!
Thank you for the answer! Yeah, no, rushing is absolutely my plan; they may end on my plate, but that's hardly an excuse to treat them poorly in the meantime! It's a relief that they won't keel over from that move, too!
GreenDragonette No they have no time cap, stuff the cat in your pocket for eteranl life
throw them in a chest and come back a month later
If it makes you feel guilty then do not do that and instead mentally release them in a timely manner xD
Even though I know the animals are safe in the bag, I always rush and can't even fathom not letting them out as soon as possible despite there being no rules or consequences for my digital babies..
Hey, love this mod so much, it's so much easier to manage all the critters at my farm, thank you!
I have a question about the time you can safely keep them in your inventory - is it capped at 24h like vanilla, until they grow, or some other value? I'm starting to transfer to a new base, which, depending on route and how much I sprint, is roughly at or a few hours above vanilla cap. Should I make a transfer pen inbetween to keep my rabbits and chickens from dying, or are they going to be okay if I move them all the way?
PureWinter Hey i looked into adding more wolves to the tradelists for my patch mod but I couldn't feasibly implement more species into the tradelists without the vanilla trades being outnumbered, I left a comment on my patch explaining more. Thank you for linking my work it really means alot and I just have to say you do some amazing work, keep it up!
PureWinter
it solves it! i used sneak, didnt knew i could use sprint (did i missed it somewhere?), thanks!
Chubz Are you holding sprint when trying to pick up a pup? Sneak = bag, sprint = item?
Detailed animals actually uses vanilla animals. (The mod applies their patches directly to vanilla to achieve functionality.)
Hi, i have a problem. Im trying to get wolf pup as an item, but im using genelib and detailed animals. I have set "wolf" in "SpawnItemPickupList", but im still getting bag with a pup. I also tried setting "pup" but still no luck
PureWinter Thank you so much!!
seems to work fine on 1.21.5 and thankyou for adding a toggle key. i was just about to ask about it 😂 thanks for this great mod.
Kida_Mei Okay I added a (rebindable) toggle key. By default P. Pressing it turns off pick up animals functionality, allowing vanilla (or any other mod)'s keys to be useable as normal for maximum comptability.
There is also a new config option ChatNotificationToggle: true, which you can use to turn off text feedback (via setting it false) in chat notifying you that the toggle key was pressed.
If you have an existing config, you can just add "ChatNotificationToggle": true (or backup old config and let it regenerate)
- I also localized the description of the button in controls, and the chat feedback to all languages the game supports. :)
this mod points to whatever you set sneak and sprint to for picking up animals, not specifically shift/control, so this toggle solution should work for everybody!
Katzielle Probably just try it in creatiive mode and if it works it works.
can i still use this on 1.21.5?
Is it possible to make the keybind configurable? I'm really sad that sneak+click interferes with being able to pet the babies and certain animals 😭 I really didn't realize how often I pet my baby chicks until I installed this haha
Porvalov Thanks! Fixed. You can no longer pick up dead animals using this mod. (But can still do so if you have butchering, using that mod's mechanics free of this one.)
I think I found small bug/exploit - you are able to pickup dead baby animals and when you do, loot in their corpses change - I got some additional meat from baby deers.
I would still like to natively support modded animals my native detection missed (birds/egg hatching creatures are the biggest culprit of not making it in automatically) so if anyone comes across a lack of support for a very public mod, that they had to manually add themselves, please let me know. :)
Heck yeah! Thanks for adding it :)
gndrneutralnoun The white list was added.
Critters pack and the emu mod thing were added
PureWinter as to your question and statement below, the dumb ducks from The Critters Pack and I'm sure probably most of the birds in that mod are un-pickupable with this mod.
But thanks anyways for this mod! I'm loving it so far.
gndrneutralnoun Sneak + click (control if you swapped it to a different hotkey like most do.)
So all birds have to be added manually because the game handles them differently.
It's hard to test in survival since they run away so fast and often I'm not sure if I'm just failing to shift-click them properly or if they actually can't be picked up, haha. I could always load into a Creative world and spawn animals in to test, but my modlist is kind of embarassingly long and it would take quite a while to load in and do all that; time I'd honestly just rather spend playing. Mainly, I've found that the kakapos from Dinornithiformes Plus make sense as a bird I should be able to pick up, and aren't. There's a couple reasons I'd like to be able to have a whitelist config, but I don't have the energy to explain why right now; holidays and all, plus some personal stuff. Sorry to bother you! (If I do end up doing the creative mode thing, I might make some issues on the Github, but I make no guarantees.)
gndrneutralnoun No, which animals are not compatible with the mod? -can just add it to the base mod if baby animals are missing from a mod-
Is it possible to add creatures to the mod via the config? Can't figure it out if so.
Kcdragon da
would it possible to add the captured animal name and gender added to the tooltip?
lol babysnatcher XD brilliant!
Varkeniz I made the configuration file this mod now generated called babysnatcher.json
you're welcome 😹
I wanted to keep the title easy to understand at a glance and easy to translate.
Ngl, should had called mod the baby snatcher lol. Still good stuff, I was so tired of chasing goats through mountains only to see em throw themselves to their deaths or escape to the guts of the caves
Wow, that was fast! Thanks for the speedy response :)
gndrneutralnoun Thanks for finding that out for me, added support!
Been using this on my modlist, it's very helpful. So far, it works with the baby wyverns from Mythic Legends, but not the babies (or adult birds) from More Animals. Support for the latter would be awesome :) Thanks for sharing regardless!
I love the "-you can also sprint + m2 to pick it up-" insinuating you're running full speed through a pack of wolves to nab their child and book it tf out of there
Ving Sure, uploaded the source repo for you to tinker or make your own version good luck have fun :)
hmmmm can I still choose what animals I want to be capture by making an addon myself?
Ving I don't plan to make any changes to the mod other than keeping it up to date, I made it because I wanted it myself. :)
hmmm can I config it so I can only pick specific animals? I think it's interesting to pick baby chickens, but not baby elephants, for exemple
rhino1998 I don't plan to make any changes to the mod other than keeping it up to date, I made it because I wanted it myself. :)
Is it possible to make the capturedbaby item take a backpack slot? I made a basic patch to do so (unreleased), but it is still possible to pick up a baby animal into a non-backpack slot even w/ storageflags set on the capturedbaby item. Maybe even require an empty linen sack to create the item? Also, more complicated, but maybe make the captured animals expire after ~24h so that you have to at least let them out periodically when transporting them?