Townsfolk

A village overhaul for Minecraft 1.21.1 (NeoForge), inspired by TekTopia.

Townsfolk replaces vanilla villagers with townspeople who have names, families, jobs, money, moods and a daily routine. You build the village. They live in it.

Put an emblem in an item frame above a door and the building becomes part of your village: a house, farm, mine, church, tavern, school and many more. Townspeople sleep in the houses, work the farms and workshops, eat, gossip, marry, have children, grow old and are buried in the graveyard. Everything they make goes into a shared storehouse and is bought and sold with real emeralds. That money pays for wages, taxes, exports and your missions.

Highlights

• 17 trades plus a Mayor and Trader. Farmers, lumberjacks, miners, fishermen, blacksmiths, chefs, priests, guards, teachers, artists, tamers and more, each doing real work in the world.
• Build your own village. 25 building types, each marked with an emblem. No structures are forced on you.
• A living economy. Workers sell what they make to the storehouse and buy what they need. The village taxes, pays wages and exports its surplus.
• Families and lives. Surnames, friendships, marriages, children, birthdays, old age, wills and gravestones.
• A village calendar. Sunday services, seven festivals a year, weddings, birthdays and burials. Each day's events are announced at dawn, and the people expected at them take time off work to go.
• Guards and law. Guards patrol posts on foot or horseback and fight off monsters. They also catch pickpockets and thieves and lock them up in the jail.
• Missions for the player. A Notice Board posts jobs from the village, and completing them pays newly minted emeralds.
• The Village Ledger. A book showing your village's calendar, people, accounts and policy at a glance.
• Works with existing worlds. Vanilla villagers and villages can be converted automatically, and this can be turned off in the config.

Getting Started

1. Found a village. Place a Town Hall Emblem in an item frame above a door. A Mayor and a Trader arrive to run it.
2. Build houses and mark them with House emblems (Small holds 1 resident, Medium up to 3, Large up to 6). A house needs beds.
3. Build a Storage and mark it. Chests and barrels there become the village's shared stores, and its treasury.
4. Add workplaces, such as a farm, lumberyard or mine, and mark each with its emblem.
5. Assign jobs. Right-click a resident with a Contract to give them that profession.
6. Grow the village. Visitors arrive by caravan at dawn. Offer one 8 emeralds to settle in your village, if there's a free bed.

An emblem glows (enchantment glint) when it has successfully marked a building. Right-click any townsperson to see their details: job, stats, mood, money, family, inventory and what they're thinking.

Buildings

Every building is marked by an emblem in an item frame above its door. Enclosed buildings are measured by their walls. Open-air zones, like farms and mines, just need the emblem hung on a fence post or wall.

Professions

Most trades need a tool, such as a hoe, axe, pickaxe, fishing rod, shears, lead, flute or wooden cross. Townspeople craft or buy their own, and work much more slowly without one.

Daily Life

Townspeople follow a shared routine: wake in the morning, work a morning shift, take a midday break, work the afternoon, relax in the evening (tavern, music, hobbies, time at home), then sleep.

• Stats: Strength, Agility, Intelligence, Charisma, Vitality and Luck. They affect how fast people work and how much they produce. Townspeople gain experience and level up as they work.
• Personalities: Cheerful, Grumpy, Shy, Bold, Generous, Thrifty, Curious, Diligent, Idle or Devout.
• Hobbies: Angling, Gardening, Reading, Music, Cooking, Animals, Woodwork, Walking or Gossip.
• Needs: Hunger, happiness and health. Hungry, unhappy or homeless townspeople say so with thought bubbles above their heads.
• Friendships grow through chatting and time together. Everyone has a favourite person and a favourite place.
• Furniture: Townspeople sit on Chairs and Pews, and children study at School Desks.
• Decorating: Townspeople buy banners, paintings and flower pots from the Artist to decorate their homes. A nicer home makes them happier.
• Pets: Townspeople can buy a wolf, cat or parrot from the Tamer. Pets follow their owner by day and settle down at night.
• Roads: Townspeople prefer to walk on paths and paved ground, and move faster on them.

Families, Life and Death

• Every townsperson has a first name and family name. Name pools include traditional English and biblical names.
• Unmarried couples who are fond of each other have their banns read, then marry a few days later. The wife takes her husband's name, and the couple move in together.
• Couples have children. Children go to school, play tag, and grow up after about a day.
• Birthdays are celebrated each year.
• Townspeople grow old and eventually die, earlier if they are hungry or miserable. Their money is left to their spouse, their children, other relatives or the parish, in that order. A Gravestone carved with their name, age and epitaph goes up in the graveyard. Right-click a gravestone to read it.

The Calendar and Events

A village year is 96 days, and every 7th day is a Sunday. Each morning at dawn, the village posts that day's events in chat, with times. The people expected at an event take time off work to attend, and they stay until it ends.

At church services, the congregation sits in the pews facing the front while the priest or nun leads from the altar. At a wedding, the couple stand before the altar in their wedding clothes: a suit and a dress.

Festivals each year: New Year, Easter, Spring Fair, Midsummer, Harvest Festival, All Souls and Christmas.

Festival Days

On a festival morning the whole village downs tools and turns out to celebrate:

• Decorations: a ring of banners goes up around the bell, and banners hang beside every front door, all in that festival's colours. They come down again when the festival ends.
• Costumes: townspeople change into bright festival clothes, some with flower crowns and ribbons.
• Activities: people dance, cheer and throw confetti, and wander between the stalls. Friends pair up to chat, and their friendships grow. Children run about.
• Music and drinks: the bard plays a tune that gets the crowd dancing, and the tavern keeper goes round handing out beer.
• Fireworks: as the festival ends, fireworks in the festival's colours go up over the village square.

Easter and Christmas are kept in the church, and All Souls is a quiet walk to the graveyard, with no fireworks.

Visitors and Caravans

Travellers come and go all day. How often they turn up depends on the village: a happy, well-built village with a tavern and a bard draws far more of them. Each wears their own travelling clothes, such as a pilgrim's cloak, a peddler's coat, a wanderer's hood or a drover's tunic. They spend the day around the village and rent a bed at the tavern for the night. Offer one 8 emeralds and they'll settle for good, changing out of their travelling clothes.

Every so often a caravan arrives in the morning. A merchant leads a string of donkeys, llamas or camels, with a few travellers walking alongside. The caravan sets up in the square by the bell, where you can trade with the merchant and try to talk the travellers into staying. At night the caravan rents beds at the tavern. After a day or so it packs up and moves on.

The Economy

The economy runs on real emeralds (100 "pennies" = 1 emerald).

• The storehouse is a market. Workers are paid when they deposit what they make, and they pay when they take out what they need, such as seeds, wool, dye or flour. Prices rise when stock is low and fall when it's plentiful.
• Townspeople carry a purse and can go up to 10 emeralds into debt to buy the materials for their trade. Anyone stuck at the bottom of their debt for half a day gets a visit from the priest with 3 emeralds of charity.
• Wages are paid daily to trades that don't sell goods (guards, teachers, tamers and the trader).
• Tax is collected from workers each day. The Mayor sets the rate.
• Exports: Several times a day, the Mayor sells the storehouse's surplus to the outside world. That is where the village's money comes from.
• The church collection box: Townspeople donate to the church, and the clergy live on the collection.
• Seed cap: Surplus seeds beyond 128 of each kind are composted automatically, so they don't fill the storehouse.

Village policy: sneak and right-click the Mayor to set the tax rate, working hours and how much surplus to export.

Guards, Crime and the Law

• Guards take weapons and armour from the Armoury, claim a Guard Post each, and patrol day and night. They use bows and spears.
• With a Stable and a saddle, guards ride horses, and they fight monsters from the saddle. The horse runs at full speed when needed.
• If a guard dies, their kit is returned to the village and their horse is unsaddled and returned to the stable.
• Desperate townspeople may turn to crime: pickpocketing, theft and brawling. Guards arrest them, and they serve their time in the Jail behind a Jail Gate. Crime can be turned off in the config.

Missions (the Notice Board)

Craft a Notice Board and the village posts jobs for you:

• Supply: deliver goods the village needs.
• Errand: bring something a particular townsperson has asked for.
• Build: add a building the village is missing.
• Defend: kill hostile mobs inside the village.

Rewards are newly minted emeralds, not drawn from the village's savings. Completing missions is how you boost the local economy.

Helping Your Townspeople

• Give items: sneak and right-click a townsperson while holding something. The right tool for their job goes straight into their hand, and anything else goes into their pack.
• Forester's Ribbon: right-click a tree to stop lumberjacks cutting it down, and right-click again to untie it. While you hold the ribbon, marked trees nearby show a glow.
• Contracts: reassign anyone to a new profession at any time. The Mayor and Trader can't be reassigned.

Items and Blocks