Colonist Errands - Voice Commands for MineColonies

Your voice runs the colony. Talking Colonists gives MineColonies citizens AI voices - Colonist Errands makes those conversations do things, and makes what a colonist tells you true.

Discord: discord.gg/BVztrTtXFu - questions, dev builds and bug reports.

2.2.0 - the astronomer and the photographer from Voyager 0.3.0 join the conversation (see The Voyagers join the conversation below), and /errands reloadtalking lets a server operator change the Gemini API key without a restart. Using the modpack? 1.0.6 carries it.

2.1.2 is 2.1.1 packaged properly - the 2.1.1 jar was broken and could not start the game ("invalid entry size" on the loading screen); if you have it, update. Using the modpack Lovkar's MineColonies Ultimate? Update it to 1.0.2 - 1.0.1 was missing this mod.

2.1.1 fixes the colonist who stood under "Listening" all night and never went to bed - a Talking Colonists session that kept reconnecting after Gemini had dropped it (see the changelog). 2.1.0 added the optional integration with Voyager - End Expeditions for MineColonies - see The Voyagers join the conversation below. 2.0.0 was the first full release - 42 voice tools, play-tested daily on a heavily played world (single-player + LAN co-op). Resurrection and births exist but are rarely seen, so they have had the least testing. Please report bugs with your latest.log.

Talk, and it happens

• Errands: "Go eat at the restaurant" (they really eat), "go to the hospital" (sick citizens become patients and rest), "come here", "wait here", "everyone home", "follow me".
• Logistics: ask couriers for warehouse stock, have them fetch items to you or deliver between buildings - multi-warehouse rounds, honest answers when stock runs short.
• Crafting and orders: ask any colonist to have something made. Several items in one sentence, delivered to a building or carried to you personally - and you are told when it is really ready, or when it failed. A shared courier board passes orders on to the first courier who is free.
• Messengers: a citizen walks to any building and sends its worker back to you for a chat.
• Find people: "where is Amelia?" -> a guide walks you to her. "Tell me when you mine diamonds" -> they do.
• Jobs: "become a farmer" - and employed citizens can switch jobs ("work at the bakery instead"), with profession words resolving to the right building (carpenter -> sawmill).
• Military: bodyguards (one tower or all), defensive lines at any border, voice-set patrols, red alert. Raids are announced per colony, pinpointed before raiders spawn, and the defense line forms - and stands down - automatically. Ask who is missing armour, a weapon or a shield, then arm the lot of them in one order.
• Building: reorder the build queue by voice, and ask what every builder is really doing right now.

Colonists who tell you the truth

The theme of this release. Before a colonist opens their mouth, their prompt is grounded in the colony's real state: the compass direction and distance of every building, which guard towers cover which side, their own real health, their own real equipment, what the builders are actually doing and why, whose beds are broken, what research is running. Invented aches, invented gaps in the defence and complaints about gear they are already wearing are gone.

A guard leaderboard with weekly seasons

Kills, raider kills, assists and damage taken, scored into a weekly season that closes on its own with a podium announcement - and the top three are paid in real skill XP. Careers, wins, podiums and personal bests carry across seasons.

Promises they remember

Promise a citizen a house, food, a guard tower… They write it down, remind you when it's due, patiently stop nagging while they trust you - and the colony notices on its own when you deliver (the promised building gets built, the homeless citizen gets a home). Kept promises give a real happiness boost; broken ones hurt.

Citizens who know who you are

Multiplayer-aware: citizens know who is speaking (name, nickname, colony rank), keep per-player memories and rapport (kindness, rudeness, kept/broken promises), gossip about players' manners, and follow configurable rank permissions - guests may chat, but by default only Officers command jobs, alarms and defence.

Colony life

Citizens chat standing together or strolling (per-profession policy), families talk as families, marketplace staff talk shop when no customer is around, births are celebrated, the fallen are remembered by name - and helping builders with the Assistant Hammer earns real gratitude. When a building goes up or gains a level, the people who live, work or built there react to it.

Watchdogs that quietly fix things

A builder who has genuinely stopped laying blocks is reported with the real reason (asleep, eating, on an errand, missing a tool, waiting for materials) instead of a false alarm. Broken bed registrations are re-filed onto the right block and phantom entries dropped, hospital beds blocked from above are named, and a worker whose restart has been pending too long is nudged through it.

Under the hood

A pile of audio fixes for Talking Colonists: no doubled goodbyes, interruptible pre-generated clips with true barge-in semantics, citizen-to-citizen audio that follows the speakers and keeps following to the end of the last sentence, a self-learning blocklist for TTS voices the Gemini API rejects (no more permanently mute citizens), a fix for citizen memories lost to markdown-wrapped JSON, and (2.1.1) a session watchdog that ends sessions Gemini has dropped instead of letting them reconnect forever - the colonist frozen under "Listening" who never went to bed. Player conversations are never touched.

The Voyagers join the conversation (optional, with the Voyager mod)

With Voyager - End Expeditions for MineColonies installed, the End-explorer profession gets its own voice. A Voyager knows which look their Departure Point has (a rocket that really lifts off, or an End Gate that beams them up), what they are doing right now (packing rations, waiting for supplies, tools, the launch window or the rocket, boarding, out in the End, just back), who their crewmate is, and what the last expedition brought home - or how it ended - straight from the hut's Expedition Log. They embellish the feelings, never the facts. Two Voyagers who share a Departure Point talk shop like astronauts while they wait, and the one who stayed behind welcomes the other back from the End and hears the story. Everyone else in the colony knows who flies, who is out there right now and who just came home.

With Voyager 0.3.0 the astronomer and the photographer join in too (Colonist Errands 2.2.0+). The astronomer knows they work nights at the Observatory's telescope - or up at a lookout with the colony's camera and a guard escort - develop plates in the darkroom and fill the colony's sky book: which look and level their Observatory has, what lens it reaches, what is in the book and what came in last, tonight's sky, and what they are doing at this very moment, down to "caught the Crab Nebula tonight - a first for the colony". The photographer knows their studio, the bench work, the portraits of colonists and of paying visitors, the prices and the sales so far, and the colony chronicle they keep of every building going up. Both are told by Voyager itself, so they never invent a discovery or a sale, and everyone else hears a sentence of news about each. Without Voyager nothing changes.

Requirements

Minecraft 1.21.1 - NeoForge 21.1.x - Talking Colonists 1.7.x (with a working Gemini API key) - MineColonies 1.1.1300+ - Simple Voice Chat + a microphone. MC Trade Post is optional; the marketplace and economy features simply stay quiet without it. Voyager 0.2.0+ is optional; it adds the Voyager lore and crew talk, and with Voyager 0.3.0+ the astronomer and the photographer get theirs. In multiplayer only the host needs the API key - and on a dedicated server an operator can change it on the fly with /errands reloadtalking.

Credits

Made by Lovkar & Claude - designed through hundreds of in-game test reports, coded by Anthropic's Claude. Thanks to sshcrack (Talking Colonists) and the MineColonies team. GPL-3.0.

Source and issue tracker: https://github.com/Lovkar-Squid/colonist-errands