Drop Map
The canonical answer to "what does this creature drop, and what is it for". This page is the shared contract between NeroCreatures and the mods that consume its materials — if a recipe elsewhere in the ecosystem wants a creature drop, it references the tag listed here, never the item id.
Status: every item, texture and tag below exists and is registered, and all eleven drops are now obtainable in survival — the four hostile fauna, the Crystal Golem, the Space Pirate, the two Rogue Androids and now the first planet boss have all shipped with the loot tables in Shipped drop rates below. The tameables are the first consumers: see Consumption inside NeroCreatures. See the Bestiary for where each creature lives, and Bosses for the Apex Trophy's two very different payout paths.
The table
| Creature | Drop | Item id | Tags | Intended consumers | Recipe intent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Void Crawler | Void Essence | nerocreatures:void_essence | neroland:materials/void_essence, neroland:highlight/materials | Nerotech, NeroEconomy | Exotic-tier reagent: the "impossible" ingredient in quantum/collider recipes, and a high-value trade good. |
| Lunar Stalker | Stalker Hide | nerocreatures:stalker_hide | neroland:materials/stalker_hide, neroland:highlight/materials | Nerospace, NeroDecor | Insulation and soft armour: suit liners, thermal padding, upholstered decor. |
| Lunar Stalker | Stalker Sinew | nerocreatures:stalker_sinew | neroland:materials/stalker_sinew, neroland:highlight/materials | NeroCreatures (Glacite Wisp taming), NeroLogistics | Taming reagent for the Glacite Wisp; flexible cabling and belt stock. |
| Asteroid Worm | Worm Chitin | nerocreatures:worm_chitin | neroland:materials/worm_chitin, neroland:highlight/materials | Nerotech, Nerospace | Heavy casing plate: machine frames and hull sections that must survive pressure. |
| Asteroid Worm | Ore Slurry | nerocreatures:ore_slurry | c:dusts/ore_slurry, neroland:materials/ore_slurry, neroland:highlight/materials | Nerotech, any ore-processing mod | Half-digested rock: feeds a washer/centrifuge step for a random ore dust. The c:dusts membership is what makes it work in third-party processing chains. |
| Crystal Golem | Refined Crystal | nerocreatures:refined_crystal | c:gems/refined_crystal, neroland:materials/refined_crystal, neroland:highlight/materials | Nerotech, Nerospace, NeroSecurity | Optics: lenses, sensors, laser and scanner cores. c:gems gives external mods a drop-in gem. |
| Plasma Slime | Plasma Cell | nerocreatures:plasma_cell | neroland:materials/plasma_cell, neroland:highlight/materials | Nerotech, NeroCreatures (Xertz Forager taming, Drone Shell) | Portable charge: energy-storage components; also the taming reagent for the Xertz Forager and part of the Terraforming Drone Shell. |
| Space Pirate | Contraband | nerocreatures:contraband | neroland:materials/contraband, neroland:highlight/materials | NeroEconomy, NeroFactions | Not a crafting input: a sell-only trade good, and a reputation lever with the factions that want it back. |
| Rogue Android | Salvaged Circuitry | nerocreatures:salvaged_circuitry | neroland:materials/salvaged_circuitry, neroland:highlight/materials | Nerotech, NeroLogistics, NeroSecurity, NeroCreatures (Drone Shell) | General electronics: control boards, logic units, terminal parts. The workhorse drop. |
| Rogue Android (heavy frame only) | Android Core | nerocreatures:android_core | neroland:materials/android_core, neroland:highlight/materials | Nerotech, NeroColonies, NeroCreatures (Drone Shell) | Rare automation brain: autocrafters, colony managers, anything that needs to "decide". Stacks to 16 — it is meant to feel scarce. |
| Any planet boss | Apex Trophy | nerocreatures:apex_trophy | neroland:materials/apex_trophy, neroland:highlight/materials | Nerotech (exotic recipes), NeroEconomy (high value) | The top of the ladder: proof of a boss kill, and the gating reagent for the ecosystem's most expensive recipes. Stacks to 8, because a trophy is meant to be counted rather than accumulated. |
Consumption inside NeroCreatures
NeroCreatures spends four of its own drops. These are the only in-mod sinks, and they are listed here rather than buried in the code because they are the reason two of the drops have a floor under their value even with no other Nero mod installed.
| Drop | Spent on | How much | Consumed? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stalker Sinew | Taming a Glacite Wisp; feeding a tamed one | 1 per attempt (1-in-3 tames); 1 per heal | Yes |
| Plasma Cell | Taming a Xertz Forager; feeding a tamed one; crafting a Drone Shell | 1 per attempt / heal; 2 per shell | Yes |
| Salvaged Circuitry | Crafting a Terraforming Drone Shell | 3 per shell | Yes |
| Android Core | Crafting a Terraforming Drone Shell | 1 per shell | Yes |
The reagent is consumed on a failed taming attempt as well as a successful one — but never when the attempt is refused for being at the pet cap, which is checked first. See Pets & Drones.
The Drone Shell (nerocreatures:drone_shell) is not a material and is not in
neroland:materials/*; it is a crafted deployable and sits in neroland:highlight/tools with the
spawn eggs. It is fully recoverable — recall or kill a drone and the shell comes back — so it is a
one-off cost, not a running one.
Rules for consumers
- Reference tags, never ids.
neroland:materials/<drop>is the ecosystem-internal "is this that material" tag;c:memberships are the cross-mod interop surface and the right choice for a recipe ingredient. - Every entry is optional. All tag files ship with
"replace": falseand"required": falseentries, so a pack without NeroCreatures resolves them to empty rather than failing to load. - Empty is a valid answer. A recipe gated on a NeroCreatures drop simply cannot be crafted when the mod is absent. Do not write logic that assumes a member exists.
- Balance changes go through this page. Drop rates and consumers are the shared lever between NeroCreatures and every mod that spends these materials; change the table first, then the code.
Shipped drop rates
The loot tables that exist today, hand-authored at
data/nerocreatures/loot_table/entities/<creature>.json. Every count is a uniform roll, and every
table is a plain data file — a pack may override any of them without touching code.
| Creature | Drop | Count per kill |
|---|---|---|
| Void Crawler | Void Essence | 0–2 |
| Lunar Stalker | Stalker Hide | 1–2 |
| Lunar Stalker | Stalker Sinew | 0–1 |
| Asteroid Worm | Worm Chitin | 2–4 |
| Asteroid Worm | Ore Slurry | 1–3 |
| Plasma Slime | Plasma Cell | 0–1 |
| Crystal Golem | Refined Crystal | 1–3 |
| Space Pirate | Contraband | 0–2 |
| Space Pirate | its own worn gear | 6% per equipped slot |
| Rogue Drone | Salvaged Circuitry | 0–2 |
| Rogue Android | Salvaged Circuitry | 1–3 |
| Rogue Android | Android Core | 1, at 35% |
| Glacite Wisp | — | nothing |
| Xertz Forager | — | nothing |
| Terraforming Drone | its own Drone Shell | 1 |
| Cinder Tyrant | Apex Trophy | 1 |
| Cinder Tyrant | Refined Crystal | 6–12 |
| Cinder Tyrant | Plasma Cell | 4–8 |
| Cinder Tyrant | Void Essence | 1–3, at 50% |
The two pets drop nothing, deliberately: a tameable that pays out would turn a companion into a crop. The drone returns its shell whether you recall it or it is killed, so it is never lost.
The Plasma Slime's rate looks low on purpose: a full-size slime splits twice on the way down, so one encounter is up to three kills.
The Space Pirate's gear is not in its loot table at all — it is ordinary mob equipment with a low vanilla drop chance, so what drops is exactly the vanilla item the pirate was wearing (a looted iron chestplate is an iron chestplate).
Bonus rolls
Two creatures pay a bonus on top of their table for how you fought them. Both are additive, both
are code rather than loot conditions, and both are scaled by dropRateMultiplier:
| Creature | Rule | Bonus |
|---|---|---|
| Crystal Golem | Killed by a player holding a #minecraft:pickaxes item | +1–3 Refined Crystal |
| Rogue Android | Killed during its shield-break stagger window by damage that is not in #minecraft:is_fire | +1 Salvaged Circuitry |
| Any planet boss | Killed in a summoned fight, per participant, split by damage share | +1–2 Apex Trophy, +2–14 Refined Crystal, +2–10 Plasma Cell — the exact rule is on Bosses |
Why code and not a loot-table condition. The obvious data-driven form of the pickaxe rule is
minecraft:match_tool, but that condition reads the loot context's tool parameter — and the
entity loot context does not have one (it carries the damage source and the killer, not the
killer's weapon). match_tool therefore works for block loot and silently never matches for a mob.
Reading the killer's weapon in dropCustomDeathLoot is the only honest implementation. The android's
salvage rule is code for the same class of reason: it depends on the mob's own shield state, which no
loot condition can see.
The boss rule is code for a third reason again: it depends on who was in the fight and how much they did, which is per-player state accumulated across a whole encounter — nothing a loot table has ever been able to see. A boss that was simply found in the world pays no bonus at all; only a summoned fight does.
Consequence for pack makers: overriding a loot table does not remove these bonuses. Set
dropRateMultiplier to 0 to switch every bonus roll off while leaving the base tables alone.
Rate scaling
Loot tables are hand-authored per creature and are the base rates. The
dropRateMultiplier config value scales the bonus rolls NeroCreatures adds on top of a table,
never the table itself — so a data pack that overrides a loot table keeps full, predictable control
of the base drop. The two rules above are the bonus rolls that exist today.
Highlights
Every drop is in neroland:highlight/materials, so Neroland Core's client-side item highlighting
gives them all the shared "crafting material" slot border. See Core's item-highlight documentation
for the colour key.