TouhouLittleMaid: a Minecraft mod where maids farm, fight and take custom models

The problem: a mob that does the chores, and where the idea came from

Minecraft is a game about doing things yourself: you mine, you build, you farm, you fight. The Little Maid Mob mod, by MMM and Verclene, took that premise and added a mob that does the jobs for you, and TouhouLittleMaid is a descendant of it with the Touhou Project characters in place of the original art.

The project describes itself as a Minecraft NeoForge and Forge mod about the maid, and the description in the repository says it adds cute maids to Minecraft who can help with battles, farming and other tasks. That is the whole value proposition, and it is a small one: a companion mob that fights beside you and works your farm, in a game that otherwise expects you to do both yourself.

The lineage matters, because it explains the shape of the project. The credits list MMM and Verclene as the makers of the Little Maid Mob mod, and ZUN as the creator of the Touhou Project, which is the Japanese doujin series whose characters the maids are based on. There is also a longer list of borrowed pieces: a Japanese voice material workshop for the sound resources, a separate sound pack, and three AI implementations for gomoku, Chinese chess and chess, plus a GIF decoder library and a set of icons.

The audience is Minecraft players on Forge or NeoForge who enjoy the Touhou characters and want a helper mob, and the project is unusually open about its inspirations, which is a good sign for a mod that reuses other people's art and code.

The licence is recorded on the repository as a custom one that GitHub cannot classify, and the last push was on 2026-06-29. The project is not archived.

The mechanic: what the maids actually do, and the model format

Two features define the gameplay, and one of them is unusual enough to be worth understanding on its own.

The first is task work. The maids help with battles and with farming, and the wording in the project description is general, other tasks, which suggests a task system rather than a single scripted behaviour. A combat companion changes the shape of a Minecraft session, because the enemy no longer only has to be a problem for you.

The second is model support. The mod supports custom models in the Bedrock Edition Entity format, and the project states you can easily switch the maid model or create your own maid model. That is a much bigger deal than a reskin option usually is. The Bedrock entity format is the geometry and texture format that Bedrock Edition addons use, so supporting it means a player with a Bedrock conversion pipeline, or a pack author, can author a maid in the same tools they already use and drop it into a Java Edition world.

The reason to build on the Bedrock format rather than the Java one is that Java Edition has no equivalent official model format. Mods that want custom player or mob models in Java either ship their own renderer and their own tools, or they adopt the Bedrock format as a de facto standard, which is what a lot of the ecosystem does. Adopting it means an author can reuse existing assets and workflows, at the cost of a format that was designed for a different edition and a conversion step when the mod runs on Java.

So the mod's own model is one of a set, and the interesting part is that the set is open. Whether a maid behaves identically regardless of the model used is a question the repository description does not answer, and it is worth checking in game if you plan to swap models.

Version support: six Minecraft versions and two loaders

The stated version support is broad for a mod: 1.12.2, 1.16.5, 1.18.2, 1.19.2, 1.20.1 and 1.21.1, on Forge and NeoForge. That range spans a large part of the modern Minecraft timeline, and the default branch is named 1.20, which tells you where the main line of development sits.

Forge and NeoForge are the two halves of the modern modding story. Forge is the older loader, and NeoForge is the fork that took over when the original Forge development stalled. A mod that supports both is reaching players on either side of that split, which is a fair amount of testing surface for a project that also has to track Minecraft's own changes.

The build system is Gradle, which is the norm for Minecraft mods of this kind, and the repository carries a gradle.properties file, a gradle directory, the gradlew and gradlew.bat wrappers, and a libs directory for the dependencies that Gradle cannot fetch from a public repository. There is also a .claude/ directory and an AGENTS.md file in the root, which in practice means the project has taken to keeping instructions for automated assistants alongside its human documentation.

The consequence for a user is straightforward but easy to get wrong. A mod built for one Minecraft version will not load on another, and with a list this long the wrong jar is the most likely installation problem. The version you pick has to match the game version exactly, and the loader has to match the mod's build.

Installing: the store builds, and the snapshots you should probably avoid

There are two normal ways to get the mod, and both are the standard Minecraft mod distribution channels.

The CurseForge listing is linked from the repository with a download badge, and there is a Modrinth listing as well. Both are the places to go for a user who just wants to play, and both handle the loader and version metadata that the launcher needs in order to install the right file.

The third route is the GitHub releases page, and this is where the warning belongs. The documentation says you can visit Releases to download the snapshot version mod, but notes that the snapshot version mod will be very unstable. The published release names match that description: they are dated snapshots such as snapshot-2026-05-13-12-44-42 from 2026-05-13, snapshot-2026-05-10-11-38-07 and snapshot-2026-05-09-06-47-58, all from the same week in May 2026. There is no versioned release in the list, only dated snapshots.

That is a deliberate workflow, and the reason is visible in the repository: the default branch is a specific Minecraft version, and the project appears to be shipping continuous builds of that branch rather than curated releases. The commits of 2026-05-09, 2026-05-10 and 2026-05-13 are three days of work, and each one produced a jar. For a mod that people test and report bugs against, that is a sensible way to get fixes into players' hands quickly. For anyone who just wants a stable game, it is the wrong download.

There is also a community around it, with Discord links for feedback and bug reports, a Crowdin project for translations, and a DeepWiki badge for asking questions about the code.

The licence split, and why the asset terms are the part to read

The licence is where this project differs from a typical open source mod, and the difference is not a technicality.

The code is MIT, with a LICENSE-MIT file in the repository root. The assets are CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, with a LICENSE-CC file beside it, and the badge in the project description shows both together. The repository's own licence field is recorded as a custom licence that GitHub cannot classify, which is what happens when a repository carries two licences for different parts of itself.

The non-commercial clause in the asset licence is the part that matters. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 permits reuse and modification with attribution, but forbids commercial use, and it requires that derivatives be shared under the same terms. For a mod, the assets are the models, the textures and the sounds, and they are the part that carries the Touhou characters and the borrowed sound packs. So the code can go into a commercial project while the art cannot, and any pack built on those assets inherits a share alike obligation.

This is not a criticism of the project, which is explicit about the split rather than hiding it, and a personal mod that everyone plays for free is a perfectly reasonable use of non-commercial assets. It does mean the question to ask is about your situation rather than the mod: a server that takes donations, a monetised server, a resource pack sold on a marketplace, or a video monetisation setup are all cases where the non-commercial term is worth understanding before you build on it. And the Touhou characters are a separate matter entirely, because the series is a fan work and commercial use of the characters is something the rights holder has never licensed.

For anyone repackaging the mod, the two-file layout makes the split easy to respect: keep the attribution and the terms, and do not mix the assets into a commercial bundle.

Extending the mod, and the sample repository that shows how

The project takes a position on contributions that is worth copying: instead of a long developer guide, it points at a working example.

The Development section of the repository points at a sample repository, TLMAdditionExample, whose stated purpose is to demonstrate how to add additional functions to the mod. That is a much stronger form of documentation than a description of an extension point, because a developer can read working code and, more usefully, copy a project that already compiles.

The key detail is the word functions. A mob that helps with farming and fighting is one thing, and being able to add new behaviours to it is a different thing, and the second is what turns a mod into a platform for a community. If the mod exposes its task system, its entity registration and its data generation in a way that an external project can hook, then other people can write the interesting content while the maintainers keep the version churn of the base mod to themselves.

That is also why the model format decision matters more than it first appears. A mod that lets you replace the model, and that separates code from assets in its licensing, is built on the assumption that other people will build on it, and the snapshot release cadence is the same assumption applied to the code.

The contributor list is handled in the usual way, through the contributors graph and the contrib.rocks image, and the project also carries a Code of Conduct, a SECURITY file and an AGENTS.md in the repository root, alongside the .github/ directory for its workflows and issue templates.

Maintenance, and where this mod is the wrong choice

The repository is not archived and the last push was on 2026-06-29, so the project is being worked on, with a gap of close to four months before the date of this article. The releases are the May 2026 snapshots, so the most recent published jar is also a few months old, and the versions the mod supports still include 1.12.2, which suggests the maintainers are keeping the older branches alive rather than abandoning them.

The honest summary of this project is that it is a labour of love attached to a fan franchise, with a good amount of engineering in it. Supporting six Minecraft versions on two loaders, a Bedrock entity format for user content, a task system, and a task-based extension API is more work than the feature list suggests, and the presence of a separate example repository, a wiki site at tlmwiki.cfpa.team, a translation project and a Discord community all point to a project with a following rather than a single author.

It is the wrong choice in a few clear situations. If you are on Fabric, the mod is not for you, since it targets Forge and NeoForge. If you need a commercially licensed asset set, the split licence is a problem rather than a detail. If you want a stable release with predictable behaviour, the snapshot workflow and the absence of curated version tags are a poor fit. And if you want a mod whose only job is to automate a farm, a general purpose farming mod is likely to cover that better, because TouhouLittleMaid is deliberately a character mod first.

What it does offer that a general purpose mod does not is a specific, good looking character with a model pipeline you can extend, and for the players it is aimed at, that is the reason to install it.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt TouhouLittleMaid if you play Minecraft on Forge or NeoForge and want the Little Maid style of helper mob with support for your own models, and if you are comfortable with non-commercial asset terms. Do not adopt it for a commercial server or a monetised resource pack without reading the asset licence, because the assets are CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 while only the code is MIT. Before you install a build, check which Minecraft version and loader it targets, and prefer a CurseForge or Modrinth release over a snapshot, since the project states plainly that its snapshot builds are very unstable.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. Project website
3. README
4. Releases
5. TartaricAcid/TouhouLittleMaid on GitHub