Not So Boring Bard

Not So Boring Bard

A Tektopia add-on that gives the village bard a real job. He plays six new instruments with their own animations and 3D models, performs ten new original melodies, gives concerts in the tavern every evening, sits down for a beer between songs, and goes to bed on time. As a bonus, the borders of your villages are drawn on Xaero's Minimap and Xaero's World Map.

Features

6 new instruments (3D, held in the bard's hands)

• Ukulele
• Harmonica
• Trumpet
• Kanklės – the traditional Lithuanian zither
• Hand drum – with drumsticks
• Fiddle – with a bow

Tektopia's original flute stays and is part of the rotation. The bard picks instruments evenly and avoids repeating the same instrument or song twice in a row.

10 new original melodies – 20 audio tracks

Every melody exists in two versions: a short street version (about 11–17 seconds) that he plays for villagers while walking around the village, and a long tavern version (about 43–67 seconds) for the evening concert. The melodies were synthesized specially for this mod.

Subtitles show the song that is playing (“Bard plays: Sunny Strum”) in English and Lithuanian.

10 new animations

Every melody has its own playing animation: two for the ukulele, two for the harmonica, one for the trumpet, two for the kanklės, one for the drum and two for the fiddle. They are added next to Tektopia's own bard animations, so nothing of the original is replaced.

A proper daily routine

• Work time: the bard walks to a villager who could use some cheering up and plays a short piece, just like in Tektopia – but now with the whole set of instruments.
• Evening: he goes to the tavern and plays a long piece for the guests. Then he sits down at a chair, drinks a beer for a while (40–65 seconds), and plays again – for as long as the evening lasts. If nobody is in the tavern yet, he waits there with a drink instead of wandering off.
• Bedtime: he never starts a song that would not be finished before bedtime, so he is never cut off in the middle of a tune. Then he goes to sleep at the normal time like every other villager, instead of staying in the tavern all night.
• The tavern break respects Tektopia's villager AI filter for visiting the tavern.

Village borders on Xaero's maps

Do you ever lose track of where one village ends and the next one begins? This mod draws the area of every valid village (a village with a Town Hall and a village token) as a golden outline on both:

• Xaero's Minimap – the border shows up right in the minimap while you walk around.
• Xaero's World Map – the same outline on the full map.

The border is a square around the village's centre, sized to the village's radius as Tektopia sees it. Villages within 4096 blocks are tracked, the outline updates by itself when a village appears, grows or disappears, and it is shown per dimension. Everything is free of configuration – install the mod and look at your map.

The server sends the village data, so on a multiplayer server the mod has to be installed on the server as well as on the clients.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.12.2 with Forge 14.23.5.2860
• Tektopia 1.1.0 (and its dependency CraftStudio API)
• Xaero's Lib, Xaero's Minimap and Xaero's World Map – recent 1.12.2 builds

Install the same jar on the server and on every client. The mod adds new sounds, animation channels and a network channel, so both sides have to match. It adds no blocks, items or entities, so it can be added to an existing world (back up first, as always).

Compatibility

None of these mods touch the bard, the tavern AI or the bard's rendering. Tektopia Addons changes how held items are positioned for villagers; the instruments of this mod are drawn by their own render layer, so the two do not get in each other's way. This was checked by reading the code of these add-ons; if you find a combination that misbehaves, please report it.

Known limits: the mod uses one tiny coremod transformer on EntityBard.wantsTavern() so that the bard goes to bed on time. Another mod that rewrites the same method or replaces the bard's AI tasks entirely may conflict with it.

FAQ

Do I need a config file? No, there is nothing to configure.

Does it change other villagers? No, only the bard.

Credits

Tektopia is made by Tango Tek, Xaero's Minimap and World Map by xaero96, CraftStudio API by Leviathan Studio. This add-on is a fan project and is not affiliated with them.