Lantern Beetle — shape, paint and animate your own garden creature

Give a greenhouse or sheltered garden a little movement with Lantern Beetle, an original Modonix creature with six legs, antennae and amber markings. Its complete source makes a manageable first creature project: repaint the shell, adjust the antennae, then change the wing rhythm without rebuilding the whole add-on.

The amber markings are color, not a light source. Add ordinary lanterns to illuminate its enclosure. This example adds no natural spawning or breeding system.

Leave room above the plants for the beetle to hover, and use ordinary lanterns to light the garden.

Put a beetle in your garden

Download create-bedrock-lantern-beetle-0.1.2.mcaddon from Files and open it with Minecraft for Windows. Use file-open for this add-on; Play → Import world is for .mcworld files. If opening does nothing, save and close Minecraft normally, then open the file again.

In a spare world's settings, activate Modonix Lantern Beetle — Behavior and Resources. Return with Back to Worlds before entering. The pack declares Bedrock 26.30 minimum; the creature runs in 26.52, without an experiments requirement.

Build an enclosure with solid walls, a roof and room above the plants. In Creative with cheats enabled, summon one:

/summon modonix:lantern_beetle ~ ~1 ~

Leave an open viewing side behind glass. A simple background makes the wing covers and antennae easier to see than dense foliage.

A side view of the beetle, with its short legs tucked below the wing covers.

Change the shape in Blockbench

Download and extract create-bedrock-lantern-beetle-sources-0.1.2.zip. Work in a copy. In Blockbench, open packs/RP/models/entity/lantern_beetle.geo.json as a Bedrock model, then import its texture, packs/RP/textures/entity/modonix_lantern_beetle.png.

Expand the model's groups. Keep root, left_wing and right_wing named exactly as supplied: the animation addresses those bones. For a first shape edit, lengthen each antenna rod by one model unit and move its small amber tip to the new end. Inspect front and side views as you work. Keep the wing pivots at their existing hinges.

Save a .bbmodel working file separately, then export Bedrock geometry back to lantern_beetle.geo.json. Keep the geometry identifier geometry.modonix.lantern_beetle; changing only that name breaks its connection to the creature.

Lengthening both antennae in Blockbench 5.2.1, with the 64 × 32 texture and selected model parts visible.

Paint a different shell

Keep the PNG at 64 × 32 pixels and preserve its existing UV mapping—the connection between pixels and model faces. Use Blockbench's Paint tab or a pixel editor with a one-pixel pencil and smoothing off. Start by replacing the amber colors #EEBE4A, #CB912C and #FFDB7C with three shades of another color. Leave the dark outlines so small details remain readable.

Save the actual PNG. art-source.json records the original palette and pixels, but editing that JSON alone does not repaint the packaged texture. Rotate the model and check the undersides of the wing covers too.

Slow the wings

Open packs/RP/animations/lantern_beetle.animation.json in a text editor. The left wing's rotation includes:

"-8 - math.sin(query.anim_time * 720) * 8"

Change 720 to 360 in both wing expressions for half the oscillation speed. Keep their opposite signs. Change one thing at a time: the final 8 controls the movement's size, while the first sets its resting angle. The root's bobbing animation changes appearance; travel through the garden comes from the behavior pack.

Package your variation

For another import of your edited copy, keep the UUIDs. Increase both manifests' header and module versions to [0,1,3], and the behavior pack's resource dependency to match. Set project.json's version likewise and change package.py's output labels from 0.1.2 to 0.1.3. Minecraft ignores an already imported pack with the same or lower version.

With Python 3 available, run python package.py from the extracted folder. Open the resulting .mcaddon in artifacts, activate its pair in a fresh spare world and summon again. Keep the included MIT notice when sharing your variation; the model, pixels and source are original Modonix work.

Give a separately published creature its own identifiers and pack UUIDs so it can coexist with this one.