The wandering trader has noticed how many of him you have killed
The wandering trader is the most murdered character in Minecraft. This mod makes him notice. Every trader who dies at anyone's hands brings the next one back better protected: more llamas, then armour, then a mounted crossbowman riding at the head of the caravan. Nothing is explained to you, because nothing needs to be: you see six llamas and an armed escort and you already know exactly what you did.
The first one dies the way they always die, and you do not think about it. Two worlds' worth of habit later you are standing at the edge of a hill watching a train of nine llamas come over the ridge behind a man in plate armour with a scar on his face, and one of the llamas has a crossbowman sitting on it. He still wants to sell you a bucket of tropical fish. When you eventually set one on fire, the whole caravan breaks formation at once and turns around, and you find out that llamas can spit further than you can run.
One counter for the whole world, so your friend's trader kills escalate the traders you meet.
New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.
The whole escalation is one formula: llamas equal the tier plus one. Tier 1 is untouched vanilla with its usual two llamas. Every trader death moves the world up one tier, to a maximum of ten. Tier 3 brings armour, tier 4 brings a guard, tier 7 brings heavier armour and a second guard, and tier 9 arrives with ten llamas.
Any death of a wandering trader that was not inflicted by a mob. Your sword counts. So do lava, fire, flint and steel, falling, drowning, suffocation, cactus and a trap set an hour earlier by anyone at all. A trader killed by a zombie, a husk or a pillager patrol is free and moves nothing. Without that exclusion the tiers would climb overnight while you were asleep and the escalation would stop reading as a consequence of anything you did. A trader who simply despawns is not a death.
Exactly two llamas are ever leashed to the trader. The rest chain themselves onto those two using ordinary vanilla llama caravan behaviour, so a tier-9 escort assembles itself into a train snaking over a hill rather than a blob orbiting a man. Vanilla's caravan chain tops out at eight links, and tier 9 sits exactly on that limit. Strays that wander more than ten blocks off are quietly pathed back toward the trader once a second, because a llama that drifts past nine blocks can never rejoin on its own.
From tier 2 onward, the moment the trader catches fire his llamas turn on the nearest player within sixteen blocks, and if nobody is that close, on the last player seen within thirty-two blocks in the previous minute, which is the trap-and-step-back case. Vanilla llamas only ever retaliate against something that hit the trader directly, so lava and flint and steel had no attacker to blame. That gap is exactly the one players actually use.
From tier 3 the trader wears a different texture and gains real statistics to match: extra health, armour and armour toughness that grow with each tier, plus knockback resistance so he cannot be shoved into his own death. He is explicitly not given fire resistance, because burning is the interesting failure case and the whole burning rule exists to answer it. A test asserts that a trader can never look armoured without actually being armoured.
From tier 4 a crossbow guard rides one of the two leashed llamas at the head of the train; tier 7 adds a second on another llama. He is passive until provoked (he shoots if the trader is attacked, if the trader catches fire, or if he is shot at himself), because a caravan that opened fire on sight would make every trader encounter a fight. He refuses to target llamas, traders or other guards, joins no raids, and iron golems are prevented from attacking him.
The tier is a single per-world count, not a per-player one. In multiplayer that means one person's three trader kills put everybody on tier 4, which is the intended social outcome; it makes dead traders a group problem and generates the argument. The world also keeps a record of each dead trader: the day, the cause, and who was nearest.
Nine kills puts the world at tier 10, where the trader wears the ceremonial gold sheet and brings eleven llamas and two guards. The boss fight itself and the promised shutdown of all future trader spawns are designed but not built, so at present tier 10 is the top of the ordinary ladder wearing the best armour in the mod.
Light mail over the green robe and a steel band across the blue turban. Still recognisably a merchant, just one who has started taking precautions.
Where: Appears once two traders have died in your world.
Plate over the chest, a real helmet shape where the turban was, scuffs and a healed scar on the face. Patched, veteran, worn, and the same man.
Where: Appears once six traders have died in your world.
Full gold-heavy ceremonial armour, drawn as the third step of the same chained edit so all three tiers read as one character. The boss behaviour behind it is not built yet. This is the top of the ordinary ladder.
Where: Appears once nine traders have died in your world.
A crossbow escort riding at the head of the caravan. Mechanically a pillager with every raider behaviour stripped out, repainted from illager maroon into the trader's blue and gold so the guard and the trader read as one organisation.
Where: One from tier 4, two from tier 7.
The trader llama's blue carpet redrawn as an armoured caravan blanket. It was designed as a cheap extra escalation cue at tier 7 and ships inside the mod, but nothing in the code points at it yet.
Where: Not currently used in game.
Every texture this mod ships, at its real in-game size, scaled up so you can see each pixel. Most are 16×16, the same size as a vanilla dirt block.
Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.
Nothing in the mod ever says the word guild out loud, but everything is built as though there is one: a shared per-world ledger of the dead, an escort in matching livery, and a chain of command that gets more expensive to cross. The guard's texture is deliberately re-liveried out of illager colours into the trader's blue and gold for exactly this reason, so that when the crossbowman appears, he reads as a colleague rather than as a monster.
The design's argument for the whole mod is that it is built on something every player already does a hundred times a world, so it never needs explaining in a video. There is no advancement telling you where you are on the ladder and no announcement when it moves. You find out by counting llamas.
No. Install it and play. Nothing changes until a wandering trader dies, and then it changes a little bit at a time.
No. A trader killed by a zombie, drowned or pillager is free. Only deaths that were not inflicted by a mob move the ladder.
Because the counter belongs to the world, not to you. That is deliberate: it makes dead traders a group problem.
Not in normal play; the ledger only counts up. Operators and singleplayer hosts have /hazardpay reset.
No. He is passive until the trader is attacked or set on fire, or until you shoot at him.
At the moment, the best-armoured ordinary trader in the mod with eleven llamas and two guards. The boss fight and the permanent end of trader spawns are designed and not yet built.
Status: The jar compiles and the author has tested it himself, but it has not had a real playtest yet.
.jar file into your mods folder.This wiki documents the mods; it does
not host them. Builds live in the project's own repository under
mc-hazard-pay/build/libs/.
Built by Bulletpies. Textures made with the Flow pipeline from real 1.21.1 sheets.