Screen Friend

A Desktop Goose-style pest for Minecraft. A tiny 3D mob lives on your screen — not in the world — walking over your HUD and open menus, and causing configurable mischief:

• HUD element theft — it grabs your hearts, hunger or armor bar and drags it somewhere else on the screen. The bar keeps working; it slides back home after a cooldown, or you can drag it back with the mouse while any screen (e.g. your inventory) is open.
• Item stealing — while your inventory (or any container screen showing your inventory) is open, it pulls a random stack out of a slot, carries it to the screen edge and really throws it out — an item entity drops in the world, exactly as if you pressed Ctrl+Q. Click the friend (or the carried item) before it reaches the edge to get the item back and send it fleeing.
• Hotbar dragging — it shoves your whole hotbar (icons, selection highlight, numbers) left or right along the bottom edge. It drifts back to center after a cooldown.

The friend's look is configurable: pick any registered living mob — vanilla or modded — and its real model renders in miniature with walking and idle animations, facing its movement direction. The screen is a scene: up to five mobs can live on it at once, each with its own model, texture and size (add/remove them with the numbered slot bar in the customization panel). A scene can be saved as a named preset and loaded back any time; presets persist in the config file. Pranks stay one-at-a-time scene-wide, so a crowd of friends doesn't gang-rob your inventory. The dummy mob is genuinely ticked (pinned safely in the air, silent, no physics), so keyframed idle and ambient animations play too — axolotls wiggle, breezes swirl, bats flap, squids pulse, the dragon flaps. Walk-cycle speed is normalized to the mob's on-screen size, so sniffers lumber while chickens scurry. Rabbits, slimes, magma cubes and frogs don't walk — they hop across the screen in parabolic arcs (slimes really squash and stretch, rabbits kick their legs), scattering little colored specks on landing; snow golems leave a snow trail (showParticles toggles the specks).

Some mobs have extra idle habits: cats, wolves and parrots randomly sit down using their real sitting poses, bipeds (zombies, skeletons, endermen, piglins — anything with a humanoid model, modded included) fold down into a seat, and bats occasionally fly up and latch upside down to the top edge of your window, dozing there before fluttering off. Cats also come in all their vanilla coat variants — pick the texture with the Cat texture button in the customization panel (or catVariant in the config).

The Cloth Config screen (More Settings…) has an Events category: sliders for how often the random sit/roost happens (sitChancePercent, roostChancePercent), plus Trigger buttons that fire a specific event on demand — sit, bat roost, HUD-bar grab, hotbar drag, or an item steal (that one waits until a container screen with a stealable item is open, and expires after two minutes).

Requirements

Minecraft	1.21.11
Fabric Loader	≥ 0.19.3
Fabric API	0.141.x for 1.21.11
Java	21+
Optional	ModMenu (config button) + Cloth Config (full settings screen) — the built-in customization panel (H) needs neither

Client-side only. You can join vanilla servers; the only server-visible action is the item throw, which goes through the vanilla container-click path (ClickType.THROW) — no custom packets, indistinguishable from Ctrl+Q.

Usage

• The friend appears automatically when you join a world (if enabled).
• G (rebindable, under Miscellaneous) summons/dismisses it.
• H opens the customization panel: the scene bar (numbered slots, +/− to add or remove mobs, click a slot to edit that mob), a searchable list of every living mob (vanilla and modded), a live animated preview that follows your mouse, a per-mob size slider, the cat texture picker, preset save/load (name + Save, cycle + Load/✕), the aggressiveness preset and the per-ability toggles. The same panel opens from ModMenu's config button; a More Settings… button leads to the full Cloth Config screen when Cloth Config is installed.
• It never blocks input: clicks pass through it, except clicks directly on it or on the item it is carrying.
• To rescue a stolen item: click the friend or the floating item before it reaches the screen edge. Nothing actually leaves your inventory until the moment it throws.
• To take a displaced bar back early: open any screen (inventory works) and drag the bar home with the mouse; it snaps in place when close.

Configuration

In-game screen via ModMenu (requires Cloth Config), or edit config/screen_friend.json directly (the mod fully works without the optional dependencies):

{
  "enabled": true,                 // master toggle (keybind flips at runtime)
  "mobModel": "minecraft:allay",   // any living entity id, incl. modded
  "scale": 28.0,                   // on-screen height in GUI pixels (8–120)
  "aggressiveness": "ANNOYING",    // PEACEFUL | ANNOYING | MENACE
  "mischiefMinSeconds": 20,        // min delay between pranks
  "mischiefMaxSeconds": 90,        // max delay between pranks
  "canMoveHudBars": true,          // per-ability permissions
  "canStealItems": true,
  "canDragHotbar": true,
  "hudReturnSeconds": 15,          // displaced bar cooldown before sliding home
  "hotbarReturnSeconds": 10,       // hotbar cooldown before drifting to center
  "protectedSlots": [],            // player inventory slot indices it must not touch
  "itemBlacklist": [],             // item ids it must never steal, e.g. "minecraft:elytra"
  "protectNamedItems": true        // never steal anvil-renamed items
}

Aggressiveness presets scale prank frequency: Peaceful never interferes (it just walks around), Annoying is the default, Menace pranks roughly 3× as often. The per-ability booleans always win.

Demo checklist

1. Join a world → the friend appears and wanders the HUD.
2. Wait (or set Menace) → watch it walk to your hearts and drag them across the screen; they slide back after hudReturnSeconds.
3. Open your inventory with a few items → it walks to a slot, pulls the stack out and carries it toward the screen edge:
   • let it reach the edge → the item actually drops into the world;
   • or click it mid-carry → item returns to the slot, friend flees.
4. Close the inventory → watch it grab the hotbar and haul it sideways.
5. Set aggressiveness to PEACEFUL → it keeps strolling but never pranks.

Automated version

gradlew runClientGameTest runs the whole checklist unattended in a real client (world creation, input simulation, screenshots into run/clientGameTest/screenshots, assertions incl. "item entity really appeared in the world").

Building

gradlew build          # → build/libs/screen-friend-<version>.jar
gradlew runClient      # dev client

Technical notes

• Mappings: Mojang official mappings (via Loom's fabric-loom-remap plugin id — 1.21.11 is the last obfuscated Minecraft version and the last one Yarn/intermediary cover, so mojmap is the forward-compatible choice).
• The friend is rendered through the vanilla deferred GUI pipeline (GuiGraphics.submitEntityRenderState, the same picture-in-picture path as the inventory player preview) from a client-only dummy LivingEntity that is never added to the world.
• HUD bars are repositioned by wrapping the vanilla HUD elements (HudElementRegistry.replaceElement on HEALTH_BAR/FOOD_BAR/ARMOR_BAR/ HOTBAR) with a pose translation — zero offset takes the untouched vanilla path, and no mixins into Gui are needed.
• Exactly three small mixins exist: two on AbstractContainerScreen (hide the stolen stack's slot rendering while the theft is purely visual; expose leftPos/topPos for slot→screen coordinates) and one on Gui that hides the same stack on the HUD hotbar peeking out under the container screen (identity check, no-op unless a theft is in progress).

License

Copyright © 2026 SarusM. All rights reserved. The source is published for reference only — see LICENSE. No permission is granted to use, copy, modify or redistribute it without prior written consent.