Better Villagers and villages

# Better Villages

**Vanilla villages that live, grow and fight for themselves.**

Better Villages adds no new village blocks. It works with the villages that are already in your world and finds them by their bell. Villagers gather wood, mine stone, farm, forge, enchant and build. Their village grows from a hamlet to a town, trades with other villages over rails and can even die out.

You can watch it all from a distance, or step in and help.

## What villages do

**They build and grow**
- A village stores its goods in a storage shed and keeps a treasury in emeralds.
- The builder places houses, farms, storehouses, apartments and a library block by block from the storage, whenever beds are missing.
- Villages with plenty of food and a free bed have children. A farm is added for every three villagers.
- When wood or stone runs out, traders bring it at twice the price, paid from the treasury.
- At night the builder lights up the village with lanterns, glowstone pillars and path lamps, so monsters stop spawning inside.

**They work**
- New professions with their own workstations: lumberjack, builder, miner, sawyer, smelter, guard and enchanter. Farmers, fishermen, butchers and smiths work according to the village's needs.
- The miner digs a mine and sells surplus ore for emeralds. Once the village has iron tools and needs diamonds or gold, it digs a deep mine with a spiral staircase, tunnels and passages to ore veins. Miners also search caves for ore.
- Farmers harvest, replant and bake bread. A new enchantment, Bountiful Harvest, gives more yield per harvest.
- Tools wear out and get replaced. Villagers eat from the storage, and can starve if it runs empty.

**They defend**
- Guards carry swords or spears, shields and armor, and shoot bows at far enemies. Smiths craft better gear step by step, up to diamond and netherite. Iron golems are built from iron blocks.
- Villagers hold their tools and weapons in their hands like a player.
- Theft from the storage is noticed.

**They expand**
- A village with 16 villagers sends settlers with building material to found a new village.
- An adventurer finds other villages. The builders then lay a rail route to them, stage by stage. Rails cross rivers and lakes on plank bridges and go over hills with cuts and embankments. Oceans stay a barrier.
- A chest minecart drives between the villages and trades goods.
- Villagers can also set off through a self-built portal to the Nether and found an outpost there.

**They can die**
When the population falls below the minimum, the village is abandoned and covered in cobwebs. New villagers can bring it back to life.

## What you can do

- **Quests:** a notice board next to the bell lists what the village really needs: food, a building site, a golem, lapis, obsidian, monsters, or tools for a profession. Rewards are modest on purpose.
- **Paid orders:** order goods from the village with `/village order`.
- **Deliveries:** put goods into the village's delivery chest. The village buys them at a price list that falls as its stock grows.
- **Speed things up:** every block you deliver is one the village does not have to find on its own.

## Configuration

Everything is configurable, and every limit set to `0` means "no limit". Prices and building blueprints are datapacks you can change or extend. Operators get commands to inspect villages. See the files in the `docs` folder.

## Requirements

- Minecraft **1.21.11**, NeoForge **21.11.45** or newer
- Installed on **both** the server and the client
- Works with Sodium, Iris and shaders

## Good to know

- The mod saves its data inside the world. Without the mod, the villages stay as they are and only the buildings stay behind.
- Villages only work while their chunks are loaded, except for expeditions, adventurers, route building and the minecart, which keep their chunks loaded.
- Tested on a dedicated development server, and in the real game. Multiplayer with several real players has not been tested yet, so please report anything odd.
- Steep cliffs and oceans block rail routes. Villages in deserts have no wood and cannot build unless players sell Wood.