Mob Duplicates on Hit

Hit a mob and it comes apart.

Every time you hit a mob, a copy of it appears next to the original. Hit the cow again and you have two. Keep going and the field is full of them. The copies are real mobs, they wander off, they fight back, and they can be hit as well, so a single cow turns into a herd without you killing anything.

The split happens on the hit, not on the kill, so you can farm copies without killing anything at all.

How many copies

One hit makes one copy by default, and the number can go up to eight. Two limits keep the world playable: one mob can only create so many copies, and one player can only have so many copies alive at the same time. Both are adjustable in game.

What a copy gets

A copy starts with the same health as the mob it came from, wears the same gear and keeps its name. Each of those can be switched off.

Settings

Everything is adjustable while you play:

/scriptevent mobdup:clones <n>      copies a hit creates (1-8)
/scriptevent mobdup:permob <n>      copies one mob may create (1-64)
/scriptevent mobdup:perplayer <n>   copies one player may have alive, 0 is no limit
/scriptevent mobdup:spread <n>      how far the copies spread out (0-4)
/scriptevent mobdup:health|equipment|name|effects|notify <on|off>
/scriptevent mobdup:status          the current settings
/scriptevent mobdup:help            every command

The commands need Cheats switched on in the world settings. The splitting itself does not.

Before you try it

A herd of cows gets heavy for a phone or an old computer. Start with one copy per hit, and if the game starts to stutter, lower the number or turn the splitting off.

The pack does not split players, dropped items, projectiles or villagers.

It needs Minecraft 1.21.90 or newer, because that is where the Script API lives. There is no experimental toggle to switch on.

Credits

The icon was made with an AI image generator. It shows the effect in a stylised way, the game itself looks like the screenshots in the gallery.