Twelve dragon species ship with the mod, and they are not interchangeable reskins. Each one has its own spawn biome, its own taming requirement, its own breath attack and its own secondary ability. Knowing which tier a species sits in tells you roughly how long you will be working before it lets you near it.
How the roster is structured
The community organises the roster into five tiers. Tier is shorthand for difficulty: how aggressive the dragon is on sight, how specific its taming condition is, and how much preparation you need before the attempt is realistic.
What a tier actually measures
A tier one dragon will usually tolerate you walking up to it with the right food in hand. A tier five dragon needs a specific status effect, an empty gear setup and a lot of patience. The tier is not a power ranking, though the two correlate closely.
Variants within a species
Most species roll a colour variant when they spawn. Variants are cosmetic rather than statistical, but some are considerably rarer than others, and a few appear tied to the biome the dragon generated in. You can force one in creative with a summon command that passes a variant number.
Tier one and two: the starting dragons
These are the species you will meet first, usually within a few in-game days of starting a world with the mod installed.
Terrible Terror
The smallest dragon in the set, and the friendliest. Terrible Terrors travel in loose groups, perch on the player once tamed, and are the natural first catch for anyone learning the taming mechanic. Their breath attack is more of an annoyance than a threat, but a swarm of them adds up.
Gronckle
Slow, heavy and remarkably tough. The Gronckle is the tank of the early roster — poor top speed in the air, excellent survivability, and a lava-style breath attack that melts through mobs at close range. A good choice for a first flying mount because it is forgiving of bad landings.
Deadly Nadder
Fast on the ground, agile in the air, and armed with a spine-launch secondary ability that fires a volley of tail spikes. Nadders spawn across several open biomes and are common enough that you will find one before you have a saddle ready for it.
Hideous Zippleback
The two-headed species, and mechanically the strangest in the mod. One head lays down gas, the other ignites it. Taming it is not harder than a Nadder, but flying it takes adjustment because the model is wide enough to clip terrain that a slimmer dragon would slip past.
Tier three: the mid-game roster
By this point you need a plan rather than luck. These dragons hit hard enough to end an unprepared attempt.
Monstrous Nightmare
Aggressive on sight and capable of setting itself alight, which makes approaching it during a failed taming attempt genuinely dangerous. Once tamed it is one of the strongest all-round combat mounts in the mod.
Speed Stinger
Flightless, pack-based, and brutally fast on the ground. Speed Stingers hunt in groups led by an alpha, and the pack leader cannot be tamed through the normal method — you work with the juveniles instead. They are the closest thing the mod has to a genuine ambush threat.
Stinger
The twelfth species, taken from the How to Train Your Dragon live show rather than the films. It is a large, aggressive flyer that sits at the top of the mid tier, and it is usually the last dragon players tame before attempting the night-flying species.
One thing to watch if you move between builds: the maintained community port swaps this slot for a Stormcutter, so a roster written for the port will not match the original one for one.
Tier four and five: the end-game species
These four are the reason the taming system exists in the shape it does. None of them will tolerate an armed, armoured player.
Skrill
The lightning dragon. It spawns in cold and storm-prone biomes, its breath attack is an electrical discharge rather than fire, and it is hostile immediately. Albino and high-contrast variants of the Skrill are among the most sought-after spawns in the mod.
Triple Stryke
Three tail stingers, a venom-based secondary ability and a temperament to match. It is a duelist rather than a bomber — excellent in one-on-one fights, less useful for clearing crowds.
Night Fury
The headline species, and deliberately the hardest. You need a night vision effect active, no armour on your body and nothing weapon-shaped in your hands before it will let you approach. Its plasma blast is the strongest single-target breath attack available, and its flight speed is unmatched.
Light Fury and Nightlight
The Light Fury shares the Night Fury's speed profile with a different visual identity and its own taming quirks. Nightlights are the hybrid offspring line, obtainable through breeding rather than found in the wild, which makes them the natural long-term goal once you have a stable breeding pair.
Using the roster in practice
Reading the list top to bottom is not the same as playing it that way.
Build a flight mount before a combat mount
A Gronckle or Nadder gets you mobile, and mobility is what makes finding the rare spawns realistic. Chasing a Night Fury on foot wastes days.
Keep a stick on your hotbar
The stick is the universal control item — it reads taming progress on a wild dragon and cycles sit, follow and wander on a tamed one. Every species answers to it.
Check the biome before the species
If a dragon is not appearing, the biome is the usual culprit. World-generation mods that replace vanilla biomes can suppress spawns entirely, which is a known friction point for players running large terrain packs alongside this one.