Zombies Eat Animals

Zombies hunt animals for food. When a zombie eats dropped meat, it recovers health and can gain additional maximum health over repeated feeding. A zombie that has eaten stops despawning naturally and stays in the world, and the loot it drops scales with the maximum health it has gained. Eating rotten flesh gives a zombie a temporary Resistance effect. Unprotected livestock in the wilderness therefore becomes part of the zombies' food chain, and the change makes a zombie both more dangerous and more rewarding to meet.

Many modded animals are supported automatically, because the mod checks loot tables, datapack tags and configs. Target selection follows a priority order, and the item tag for eaten foods, the entity tag for always-valid targets and the entity tag for never-hunted targets let modpack authors set the system directly. The maximum health growth can be limited by a configurable cap, and the cap can be set separately for Hard difficulty, while most parts of the system are tunable through the config file. The mod runs on Forge 1.20.1 and is open source under the MIT License.