Clay Soldiers: Remoulded [Fabric]

If you were playing Minecraft around 2012 you probably remember Clay Soldiers. You would craft a stack of tiny dolls, drop a few on the ground, throw some sticks between them, and a battle would happen around you. The mod stopped being updated years ago. This is that idea rebuilt from scratch for Minecraft 26.2, 26.3, 1.21.1 and 1.20.1 on Fabric.

- What they do

Put a soldier down and it goes looking for a fight with any other team. There are twenty different colors/teams. Fifteen come from dyeing a plain clay soldier, four more from a melon slice, a pumpkin, a lump of coal or redstone, and plain undyed clay is a side of its own.

The gear is the cool part. Soldiers pick up what you drop near them and behave differently afterwards. Some of it you can guess: a stick makes them hit harder, leather halves the damage they take until it wears through, a bowl works as a shield. Others are a bit less obvious:

* A gold nugget crowns a soldier as king, and idle teammates fall in behind him. One king per team per area, the same limit the original mod enforced.
* Clay turns a soldier into a field medic that walks to fallen teammates and stands them back up. Four reinforcements, then the clay is spent.
* An ender pearl makes a traitor. It turns on its own side, and other pearl carriers leave it be.
* Wheat seeds are poison to a traitor, so scattering seeds is how you deal with pearls in your own ranks.
* Burn an enemy and it leaves a brick doll behind. A soldier holding a ghast tear will walk over and raise it in your colors, twice per tear.
* Nether wart sends one berserk and it attacks everything it can see, its own side included.
* A fermented spider eye does the opposite. It starts no fights, and anything that strikes it loses interest and wanders off, which can defuse a brawl on its own.

There are fifty of these, and most of them stack. A soldier can be sugared, flinted, armored and diamonded all at once.

- Mounts

Soldiers find a riderless mount within a dozen blocks and climb on by themselves, unless they are already in a scrap. Four kinds to craft, all of them animals that already live in Minecraft:

- Horses, in ten materials. A clay ball and the material. These are not just recolors. A gravel horse is slow and tough, a cake horse is quick and fragile, a grass horse is the fastest thing on the field and dies to a stiff breeze.
- Bunnies, in all sixteen dye colors. A clay ball and a dye. Quick and easily killed.
- Turtles, in nine materials. Two clay balls and the material. Slow, and very hard to shift.
- Clay spiders, in stone, cobblestone, coal and redstone. A clay ball, a piece of string and the material. These climb walls (but not a keep's wall), and they carry their rider up with them.

Drop paper next to a horse and it grows paper wings. It stops taking fall damage and drifts down instead of dropping, which is the pegasus from the original without putting a winged horse in your world.

Two mounts have no recipe at all and turn up by luck alone, at roughly one placement in eight thousand. You will know them when you see them.

- The Keep

A small stone fort that raises an army for one team. Craft it from clay balls, a diamond, soul sand and stone bricks, and place it on a clear, level space 3 blocks by 3. It builds a spruce palisade round itself, with a tower at each corner and a gatehouse facing you.

Load it with a soldier doll and switch on troop spawning, and it keeps up to ten of that team's soldiers in the field. Each one rides out through the gate on the mount you loaded and carries one of each kind of gear you gave it. The keep throws its ammo (gravel, snowballs, fire charges, eggs or emeralds) at enemies nearby, lobbing it over its own walls, and the flag on its pole shows whether it is sending out troops.

Enemy soldiers come for it. They break through the gate or the wall, then hack at the keep, and the team that lands the last blow takes it over. Clay balls and sticks repair it, and once the fighting stops, its own soldiers rebuild the wall.

A keep is home to its team. Its soldiers stay within a dozen blocks of it when they have nothing to do. Soldiers you place yourself stand guard where they are until a keep of their team is nearby, and then stay near that keep.

- Getting started

Soul sand plus a block of clay gives you four clay soldiers. Dye them to pick sides. If a battle gets out of hand, craft a disruptor from clay, a stick and redstone and it clears the field. Hitting a soldier with your bare hand also kills it outright. Every recipe shows in the recipe book once you hold one of its ingredients.

Everything is in the Clay Soldiers creative tab.

- Works on servers

Client and server code are kept separate, so this runs on a dedicated server as well as in single player.

- Credit and license

The original Clay Soldiers Mod was created by Kodaichizero and maintained by SanAndreasP, SilverChiren and CliffracerX. It is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0.

This project is an independent rebuild. It is not the official continuation and it is not endorsed by any of them. No code and no artwork from the original is included here. The mod's own textures are drawn by code, and the keep uses Minecraft's own stone brick, spruce and item textures, so a resource pack restyles it too.

Original mod: https://github.com/SanAndreaP/ClaySoldiersMod
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Released under that same license, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.