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Spawning Tamed Entities

intermediate

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Spawning Tamed Entities

In this tutorial, you will learn how to spawn a pre-tamed entity by running an event on the player you want the entity tamed to, and by throwing an item that transforms into a tamed entity upon impact.

Overview

Traditionally, if you wanted entity tamed by a player, you had to force the player to interact with that entity through minecraft:tameable. However, you can also take advantage of the fact that vanilla projectiles keep track of the entity responsible for spawning* them to spawn an entity pre-tamed.

To do this, we'll summon a dummy middle-man projectile entity through minecraft:spawn_entity, which will instantly transform into the entity we want to spawn pre-tamed in this tutorial, a vanilla wolf through minecraft:transformation with keep_owner set to true.

*: Spawning should not be confused with summoning. The projectile will keep track of the player if it was spawned by a spawn egg or minecraft:spawn_entity component, but not by a /summon command.

player.json

Here, we'll need a copy of the player's behavior file, which we will modify slightly. we'll add a simple event that adds a component group which will spawn our custom middle-man entity.

You can find the BP player entity file in the vanilla behavior pack provided by Mojang here.

BP/entities/player.jsonCopy
json
{
    "format_version":"1.16.0",
    "minecraft:entity":{
        "description":{
            "identifier":"minecraft:player",
            "is_spawnable":false,
            "is_summonable":false,
            "is_experimental":false
        },
        "component_groups":{
            "wiki:spawn_tamed_wolf":{
                "minecraft:spawn_entity":{
                    "entities":{
                        "min_wait_time":0,
                        "max_wait_time":0,
                        "spawn_entity":"wiki:pretamed_wolf",
                        "single_use":true,
                        "num_to_spawn":1
                    }
                }
            }
		},
        ...
		"events":{
            "wiki:spawn_tamed_wolf":{
                "add":{
                    "component_groups":[
                        "wiki:spawn_tamed_wolf"
                    ]
                }
            }
        }
    }
}
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pretamed_wolf.json

Afterwards, we'll need to create a simple custom entity that will have the minecraft:arrow runtime identifier (other projectile runtime identifiers work as well), an empty projectile component, and a transformation component to turn into a tamed wolf.

BP/entities/pretamed_wolf.jsonCopy
json
{
	"format_version": "1.16.0",
	"minecraft:entity": {
		"description": {
			"identifier": "wiki:pretamed_wolf",
			"runtime_identifier": "minecraft:arrow",
			"is_spawnable": false,
			"is_summonable": true,
			"is_experimental": false
		},
		"components": {
			"minecraft:projectile": {},
			"minecraft:transformation": {
				"into": "minecraft:wolf<minecraft:on_tame>",
				"keep_owner": true
			}
		}
	}
}
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And now, you can spawn a tamed wolf next to the player with /event entity @p wiki:spawn_tamed_wolf. You can also spawn it with a wiki:pretamed_wolf spawn egg by setting is_spawnable to true!

Integrating Item Projectiles (Alternate Method)

Introduced as one of 1.16's experimental item features, the shoot event property can be used to make projectiles that transform into tamed entities upon impact.

BP/items/throwable_pretamed_wolf.jsonCopy
json
{
    "format_version":"1.16.100",
    "minecraft:item":{
        "description":{
            "identifier":"wiki:throwable_pretamed_wolf"
        },
        "components":{
            "minecraft:on_use":{
                "on_use":{
                    "event":"wiki:on_use"
                }
            }
        },
        "events":{
            "wiki:on_use":{
                "shoot":{
                    "projectile":"wiki:pretamed_wolf"
                }
            }
        }
    }
}
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We'll also need to make some adjustment to our custom projectile entity so that it doesn't transform right as it spawns.

BP/entities/pretamed_wolf.jsonCopy
json
{
    "minecraft:entity":{
        "description":{
            "identifier":"wiki:pretamed_wolf",
            "runtime_identifier":"minecraft:arrow",
            "is_spawnable":false,
            "is_summonable":true,
            "is_experimental":false
        },
        "component_groups":{
            "wiki:transform_to_entity":{
                "minecraft:transformation":{
                    "into":"minecraft:wolf<minecraft:on_tame>",
                    "keep_owner":true
                }
            }
        },
        "components":{
            "minecraft:projectile":{
                "on_hit":{
                    "impact_damage":{
                        "damage":0
                    },
                    "stick_in_ground":{},
                    "definition_event":{
                        "event_trigger":{
                            "event":"wiki:on_hit"
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        },
        "events":{
            "wiki:on_hit":{
                "add":{
                    "component_groups":[
                        "wiki:transform_to_entity"
                    ]
                }
            }
        }
    }
}
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Special thanks to Zarkmend ZAN for figuring this out 😃

Edit Spawning Tamed Entities on Github.

Contributors