🏘️ What it is
You found a camp, and then you leave it alone. Five people arrive with a campfire, a chest and some bedrolls, and start working: lumberjacks chop real trees and carry real logs to the chest, a builder spends those logs on houses, a farmer digs a well and plants wheat, a miner sinks a staircase into the ground. Nothing is conjured. Every plank in every house was a tree somebody walked to. You do not manage them; they are your neighbours, and they get on with it whether you help or not.
It is a slow watch, and that is the point. You check in after a few in-game days and there is a well where there was not one, and a fence going up, and a chat line telling you the place has grown into a township. People pair off and move into a house together. A child is born and is named. At dusk everyone walks home to their own bed. Then a zombie kills the farmer, and the village retrains a guard into a farmer two days later, and you realise the whole thing has been quietly load-bearing on one person the entire time.
👥 Playing with friends
Everyone on the server shares the settlement and sees its chat announcements
⚠️ Before you install
- A settlement terraforms, chops, digs and fences inside its claim. Found one well away from anything you care about.
- Killing a citizen is permanent; the record is deleted, not respawned.
- Several rounds of work are still marked 'needs testing' in the project's own notes, so expect rough edges in the later systems.
- The world is a save-format commitment: settlements live in the world's saved data. Back up before founding one in a long-running world.
⏱️ Your first 5 minutes
New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.
- Turn on cheats and run /neighbors found where you want the camp, well away from your own builds.
- Watch the campfire, storehouse chest, torches, bedrolls and five citizens appear.
- Follow a lumberjack: they claim a tree, chop it with an actual axe, and haul the logs to the chest.
- Wait for dusk. Everyone walks to their own bed and sleeps.
- Leave for a few days and come back to houses, a well, a fence and a mine entrance.
- Run /neighbors debug for each citizen's job, position and state.
🔁 How it works
A real economy, with real hands
Nothing comes from nowhere. Logs are chopped and stored; tools are crafted out of that stockpile and wear out; torches come from a genuine chain of cobble to furnace to charcoal; terraforming fills are paid for with the spoil that was cut. Axes make chopping take 16 ticks a log instead of 40, and they break. The accepted hand-waves are bed wool and the water for wells and farms.
Tip: Citizens visibly hold the tool they are using, and the held copy is cosmetic so death cannot duplicate it.
Citizens are records, bodies are avatars
Each citizen is a saved record: job, bed, position, an eight-slot pack, partner, whether they are a child. The walking entity is never saved to the chunk; it is respawned from the record when the village's chunks load, and writes its state back every second. That makes duplication structurally impossible, and it makes death permanent: kill someone and the record is gone.
One smart planner, dumb workers
Once a second the settlement itself scans and decides everything: which trees are available, what to build next, where the farm goes, who migrates in, who pairs off, who is born. Workers never scan the world. They are handed coordinates and they execute them.
Growth stages
A camp becomes a township at three houses plus a well plus a fence, which raises the house cap, opens a second ring of plots and unlocks the storehouse, the trading post, two-storey house upgrades and a second farm level built five blocks up with its own staircase. A township becomes a city at a storehouse, a furnace and six houses, and a city breaks ground on its first megaproject.
Tip: Every promotion is announced in chat, including the one about the era of great works beginning.
The town hall, built by a swarm
The megaproject is an 11x11 two-storey town hall of roughly 870 blocks: cobble ground floor, log frame, plank gallery, gable roof, double doors and a meeting table. The village must have saved the entire cost in both logs and cobble before the first spade goes in, then it is emitted as a foundation plus three parallel sections that builders and idle adults claim at the same time.
The grid, and roads that make themselves
Villages plan on 8x8 cells with a one-block road gap between them, campfire at the centre cell, allocated by a seeded spiral with a terrain veto per cell. Roads are not planned at all: every finished building lays L-shaped dirt-path legs along the gap lines toward the centre, and because neighbouring cells share those lines the legs chain into a network on their own.
The mine
The miner is a stage-1 profession with a reserved plot. The mine is a fixed program: a 20-step staircase shaft, a hall at the bottom, six alternating branch corridors, torches every four blocks. Loot is honest (bare hands get nothing out of stone), pickaxes have speed tiers and wear out, and lava is detected and sealed with cobble. Once the program is done the miner picks up a hammer and joins the build crew.
Nights, guards and dying
Zombies and skeletons hunt citizens. Guards fight back with crafted swords that wear down per kill, patrol the buildings and the mine entrance at night instead of sleeping, and hunt animals by day when the larder runs low. Civilians and children flee. A killed citizen drops their pack and is mourned in chat, and if a critical trade stays vacant for about a minute somebody expendable, a guard before anyone else, puts down their old tools and retrains.
🎒 Items & blocks
Citizen
One villager-sized person with a name, a job, a bed and an eight-slot pack. Children are rendered smaller and grow up into a trade.
Where: Five arrive at founding; more migrate in when there are spare beds and food, and some are born.
🏘️
The storehouse
A 7x7 warehouse with four chests. Once it is finished its chests become the village's deposit point, and the stockpile everything else is paid out of.
Where: Planned automatically at township stage.
🏘️
The town hall
The first megaproject: two storeys, a gallery level, a gable roof, grand double doors and a meeting table, on a reserved 2x2 block of grid cells at a road junction.
Where: Break ground once the village is a city and has banked the whole cost.
🏘️
The trading post
Unlocks trading with any citizen near the centre: emeralds for surplus logs and wheat, and emeralds paid out for cobblestone and dirt the village is short of.
Where: Built at township stage, after the storehouse. Right-click a citizen within 40 blocks of the centre.
🏘️
The mine
A lit staircase shaft down to a hall with branch corridors. It is the village's own cobblestone supply, and the reason its torches are honest.
Where: Dug by the miner from the reserved mine plot; announced as breaking ground.
🏘️
The farm and the well
A tilled 5x5 field of wheat with a well at its centre, and later a second raised field on a dirt platform with stairs and corner torches so the shaded level below stays lit.
Where: Sited by the planner; dug and worked by the farmer.
📜 Lore
Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.
A settlement, not a colony
The design rule is that the settlement decides and the player is a neighbour. Nothing asks you for orders, there is no management screen, and no build is waiting on your approval. The most you can do from the outside is trade with them, or take something and find out that nothing yet remembers you did.
The chat log is the village's diary
You mostly learn about them the way you learn about a street you live on: announcements. Somebody has settled in. Somebody is all grown up and has taken a trade. Two people moved into their new house together. A child was born; welcome, whoever they are. And, eventually, that someone of theirs has died.
🎁 Jokes & trivia
Bits you might miss
- The last-resort teleport that rescued stuck citizens used to drop them inside the lit campfire. The rescue was the lethal part.
- Lumberjacks used to eat houses: log frames standing on terraformed dirt looked exactly like trees to the tree scanner.
- Guards hauled every rotten flesh and bone they looted into the storehouse until the chests read as full, which made the crafter build more chests, which made the lumberjacks dump logs on the ground.
- Miners moonlight as builders until their mine exists, and pick the hammer back up the day it is finished.
- Your own bedroom inside the claim used to register as spare village housing, so migrants claimed your bed and the village stopped building houses.
- When a trade goes vacant the village retrains someone and announces it: "put down the old tools, now a farmer."
- The perimeter fence is ground-snapped and skips water, which means a village on a lake fences the shore and calls the job done.
From the workshop
- One budget check froze every new village: it demanded eight cobblestone before planning any structure, including log-only houses, and a fresh village has no cobblestone at all. Nothing could ever be built until round nine found it.
- The root cause of both 'the miner paces his own lawn' and 'the builder stares at a wall' was the same: Minecraft hands back a partial path to an unreachable target, sometimes zero-length, and a zero-length path completes instantly and reads as idle.
- The fix was a watchdog that watches the citizen's position rather than the pathfinder, because the pathfinder's own report cannot be trusted.
- A Castle Keep and a Grand Monument are fully written and sit behind a stage 4 that nothing in the code ever sets, so no village can currently reach them. A fortified perimeter wall upgrade is written and never called either.
- Neighbors' failure modes were later written up as an autopsy, and became the four permanent regression tests of a different mod, The Other Survivor.
❓ FAQ
Do villages appear on their own?
No. You found them with /neighbors found, which needs cheats or operator permissions. Natural founding parties are a design-doc idea, not code.
Will they build over my house?
They only work inside their claim, they respect solid player-placed blocks, and beds you placed outside their buildings no longer count as village housing. Founding refuses to overlap another settlement within 96 blocks.
Do they remember what I do to them?
Not yet. The reputation ledger, witnessed theft and the escalation ladder are designed in detail and unbuilt. That is the milestone the project stopped short of.
Is this MineColonies?
No. There is nothing to manage and no orders to give. The closest relative is Millenaire: it develops in parallel with you rather than for you.
Can I trade with them?
Once the trading post is built, right-click any citizen within 40 blocks of the camp centre. What they offer depends on what the storehouse actually has too much or too little of.
⬇️ Get it
Status: Partly built. Some of it works, some of it is missing.
- Install Forge for Minecraft 1.21.1. The
install guide walks through this assuming no prior knowledge.
- Drop the mod's
.jar file into your mods folder.
- Everyone on the server needs it.
- Launch the game with that loader's profile selected.
📦 Where is the file?
This wiki documents the mods; it does
not host them. Builds live in the project's own repository under
mc-neighbors/build/libs/.
Bulletpies. Forge 1.21.1 (52.x), Java 21. Design history in CHANGELOG.md.
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