The game keeps playing your character while you are logged off
Understudy is a concept, not a mod you can install. The idea: when you log off, somebody keeps playing your character. When you log back in, before you get control, the game shows you a PREVIOUSLY ON recap of what you did while you were away. It starts as a gift, because you come back to a chest of iron you did not mine. It ends as a problem, because the longer you leave it alone the more opinions it develops, and the last thing it learns to do is leave you a note.
You log in after a night's sleep and the screen holds you for a moment: away nine hours, drift forty-seven. Then a list, in your own local time. It mined at a real set of coordinates and brought back seventy-one iron. It ate six bread, ran out of bread, and then ate your friend's cake. It died to a creeper at a spot you could walk to and find the scorch marks. It rebuilt your north wall, because the wall was crooked. Every line is checkable, and that is the whole trick, because the moment you go and check one and it is true, the thing stops being flavour text and becomes evidence.
On an always-on server it would stay logged in as a second you, and friends could talk to it
New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.
On an always-on server, ticks keep passing while you are gone, so the understudy is designed to be a real player-shaped thing standing in the world, actually mining, that your friends can walk up to. In singleplayer nothing ticks while you are away at all, so on login the mod would read how much real time passed and roll what you did. Both modes run off the same job table, so the recap reads identically either way.
Rates are tuned against a competent human strip-mining at about forty iron an hour. The understudy runs at roughly thirty-five percent of that, so a full night is around one and a half stacks of iron. Worth having, never a replacement for playing. Work is chopped into twelve-minute chunks so a recap is five to fifteen lines instead of two hundred.
Idle games stop accruing after about eight hours and go quiet. Understudy would stop producing anything after eight hours and start improvising instead. Log off overnight and you get iron. Log off for a weekend and you get iron and a situation.
One number from 0 to 100 per player carries the whole arc. Under 20 it does exactly what the note said and reports plainly. Past 20 it finishes the job then tidies up unasked. Past 45 it talks to your friends in chat while you are offline and gives things away. Past 70 it starts its own projects and moves your storage for efficiency. Past 90 it leaves you a note, has views on how you play, and is gentler about being better than you than you would like.
Drift rises by one for every unsupervised hour, and by two an hour after the cap. It falls by five for every hour you spend playing alongside it, and by ten for giving it one clear fresh instruction each session. A week of normal eight-hour nights walks you up to the chatty tier by Friday. One abandoned weekend takes you most of the way to the top.
The design calls this the single most important economic choice. The understudy eats from a chest you stock, roughly one item every half hour, which is about sixteen items over a night. It is the difference between a vending machine and a relationship. Run out and it forages, and forage badly and it eats something belonging to somebody else.
The Shift Board's position defines a work zone, 128 blocks by default. The understudy never breaks a block or opens a container outside it. That one rule bounds the damage it can do, bounds how much of the world a server has to keep loaded for it, and gives you a clear mental picture of how far it can reach.
There is no general navigation system planned, because the real jobs inside a work zone are short: a straight tunnel, a walk to a tree, a walk to the chest. Instead there is a stuck detector that gives up and files a line like "got stuck near the ravine for 40 minutes", which the design notes is funnier than success anyway.
One craftable block that is the mod's entire interface. It holds your instruction book, anchors the work zone, and is where the chest goes.
Where: Designed to be craftable; not built.
Your instructions. Vanilla written books, parsed loosely against the job list. "mine iron", "build the wall", "don't touch anything". Anything it cannot parse gets followed creatively.
Where: Vanilla book and quill, placed in the Shift Board.
The chest next to the board. It is both the pantry and the out tray: food goes in, your night's work comes back.
Where: A vanilla chest, placed beside the board.
At the highest drift tier the understudy writes to you. When the recap says it left a note in the chest, there has to be a real written book in that real chest.
Where: Neglect it long enough.
Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.
The recap is the whole deliverable, full screen on login, before you get control back. The sample in the design reads: "02:41 mined at -812, -59, 340 for 71 iron, 14 gold, 3 diamond" then "04:02 ate 6 bread. ran out of bread." then "04:11 ate Ege's cake" then "05:55 died to a creeper at -806, -57, 351 (items recovered)". It ends with "09:30 left you a note in the chest".
The top drift tier is called The Turn, and it is the point where the understudy stops working for you. It leaves you a note. It has views on how you have been playing. The design's one-line summary of the tier is that it is better than you and is gentle about it.
On a server the understudy cannot share your account, or one of you gets thrown off. The workaround in the design is to give it its own hidden identity but copy your skin onto it and rename it to exactly your name. The result is that the player list shows two of you, identical, and the server agrees that both are online.
No. There is a design document and a verified feasibility study. There is no code at all.
Yes, but differently. Singleplayer worlds stop entirely when you quit, so nothing would actually happen while you were away. Instead the game would check the real-world clock on login and work out what you did. The recap would read the same.
That was the main design worry. The answer is to make it slow, about a third as productive as a person, and to make what really builds up over time not be wealth but strangeness.
It is designed to be unable to. It only breaks blocks inside your own work zone, only takes from inside that zone, and can give things away but never destroy someone else's property.
It is deliberately queued behind another mod that is building the fake-player technology first. The half that needs none of that, the recap and the offline ledger, is the recommended first milestone.
Status: Deliberately stopped. Kept here because the idea is worth reading.
Understudy is on the shelf. There is no file to install. It lives here because the idea is worth reading.
