Naturalist 2.0.6 went out on 28 September for Fabric and NeoForge, and it is the kind of release that makes a mob mod feel finished rather than just bigger: rideable zebras, capture nets that work on small creatures, and a pile of fixes to things that were quietly wrong.
Zebras become mounts
The headline change. Zebras can now be equipped with saddles, and untamed zebras run when mounted, the way horses do.
That second detail is what makes it a proper implementation rather than a reskin. Horses have a taming loop – you mount, you get thrown, you try again – and giving zebras the same behaviour means they slot into a system players already understand instead of being a horse with stripes.
It also gives the savanna a reason to exist for a mounted player. Horses generate in plains and savanna already, but a zebra you tamed in the biome where you found it carries more of the mod’s point, which is that the world should have distinct animals in distinct places. The horse and mount stats rules for speed and jump apply the same way here.
Capture nets get much wider
Bees, dragonflies, endermites, fireflies and silverfish can now be caught with capture nets. Previously the net worked on a narrower set, which made it feel like a feature that applied to some mobs for no discernible reason.
The related fix matters as much as the addition: caught mobs with variants no longer flicker to a different variant before the correct one is applied. That was the sort of bug that made the net feel unreliable even when it worked – you catch a specific butterfly and release something that looks briefly wrong.
Bees being catchable is the practically useful one. Moving bees currently means a silk touch pick and a nest, or a lead and a lot of patience. A net is considerably faster for anyone building an apiary.
The rest of the fix list
- Spawn eggs all have custom textures now, rather than the generic two-tone default.
- Butterfly UV mapping fixed – the texture was wrapping incorrectly on the model.
- Wolf mixins should no longer conflict with other mods.
That wolf entry is the one modpack builders will care about. Wolves are heavily modified by several popular mods, and mixin conflicts on a vanilla mob are a recurring source of crashes that are painful to trace because the stack trace names the mob, not the culprit.
Spawn egg textures sound cosmetic and are not, quite. A creative inventory with forty identical-looking spawn eggs is genuinely harder to use, and a mod adding that many mobs has to solve it.
What Naturalist is for
For anyone who has not run it: Naturalist fills the Overworld’s empty biomes with animals that behave. Bears, deer, snakes, boars, birds, fireflies, butterflies, elephants, zebras and more, each with spawn rules tied to biome and their own behaviour rather than a shared template.
The design goal is ambience rather than content. There is no progression attached, no boss, no new ore. A forest just has things living in it, and a savanna has different things.
That makes it a good companion to worldgen mods rather than a competitor – a biome overhaul makes the terrain worth looking at and Naturalist makes it feel occupied.
Version coverage
2.0.6 shipped for 26.2 on both Fabric and NeoForge. That is one version behind current, which matters if you have already moved to 26.3.
Content mods lagging the release by a version is the normal pattern and not a sign of trouble – it takes longer to port a mod with forty entities than one that adds a keybind. The wider picture of which mods have moved is in the 26.3 support overview.
Worth updating?
If you are on 26.2 and running Naturalist, yes without reservation. The wolf mixin fix alone justifies it on a modpack, and the capture net changes are a genuine quality-of-life improvement.
If you are on 26.3, this is a reason to keep an eye on the project rather than to act. Nothing here changes world data, so updating whenever the port lands will be straightforward.
Where it fits in a pack
Naturalist is an ambience mod, which means it competes for the same slot as the other mob-adding mods rather than complementing them. Two mods both filling forests with animals produces a forest that is crowded rather than alive.
Pick one and let it own that role. Naturalist’s argument for the slot is that its animals behave differently from each other rather than sharing a template, which holds up over a long world in a way that a larger but flatter mob list does not.
Performance
Worth a thought on a server. More entity types means more entities ticking, and mob mods are a common contributor to tick time on worlds with many loaded chunks.
Naturalist is reasonable about this – spawn weights are conservative and the behaviours are not expensive – but it is not free either. If your server is already near its tick budget, add it and measure rather than assuming, using the usual profiling approach.
Images: Naturalist project gallery.