MCA: Conversations

[1.4.2] - August 28th, 2026

A massive conversation overhaul focused on making villagers feel more coherent, individual, persistent, and aware of their lives, relationships, work, and surroundings.

Conversations Now Actually Flow

The conversation system has been extensively rebuilt around one rule:

Every player response should make sense as an answer to what the villager just said.

• Reworked numerous branches that previously shared inappropriate or unrelated replies.
• Responses now account for whether a villager was happy, upset, guarded, grieving, dismissive, affectionate, or otherwise reacting to the conversation.
• Reputation conversations now give appropriate options depending on whether the village likes you, dislikes you, barely knows you, or has an unresolved issue with you.
• Check-ins now respond properly to festivals, injuries, sleeplessness, flirting, bad moods, and other circumstances.
• Deep-topic rebuffs now lead to apologies, clarification, or backing off instead of continuing as though the conversation went well.
• Food, village, neighbour, news, rumours, and several other conversation funnels have been rebuilt around what was actually said.

Automated checks now prevent incoherent reply combinations from being added in future updates.

Much Deeper Profession Conversations

All 37 supported professions now have conversations written specifically for their work.

Instead of every profession sharing generic replies, villagers can discuss:

• What they are working on.
• How their craft is done.
• What makes the work difficult.
• What risks or responsibilities it carries.
• What the village gets from their work.
• What they hope to do with it in the future.

Each profession now has its own questions, responses, follow-ups, plans, and work situations.

Professions added by optional mods remain optional and are cleanly separated from the core content.

Fixed Missing Profession Conversations

Fixed a major issue where half of the generated work conversations could never appear.

Eighteen professions were affected, including librarians, masons, shepherds, toolsmiths, weaponsmiths, miners, priests, scribes, and several modded professions.

All authored work scenes are now reachable.

Villagers Now Build a Personal History

Villagers can now accumulate a more persistent conversational life instead of behaving like freshly generated characters every time you speak to them.

Each villager receives a stable individual profile containing things such as:

• Interests.
• Values.
• Comforts.
• Aversions.
• Work style.
• Social style.
• Willingness to disclose personal information.

Profiles are stable across restarts, renaming, relocation, and different players talking to the same villager.

Situations, Threads & Promises

Villagers can now remember things that are actually happening in their lives.

The new history system supports:

• Ongoing situations.
• Conversations left unfinished.
• Things the villager is waiting on.
• Player promises.
• Completed or failed events.
• Remembered outcomes.
• Social opinions and relationships.

Promises are only judged when the game can actually observe whether they were kept.

If an optional mod disappears and makes a promise impossible to verify, it becomes unobservable, not automatically broken.

Profession Stories That Progress

Every supported profession now has its own living work situations.

Examples include:

• A farmer dealing with a failing crop.
• A guard worried about a weak point in the wall.
• A mason concerned about a rushed foundation.
• A librarian trying to save a specific damaged book.

These situations can progress through different states and return in later conversations.

Villagers can remember whether you:

• Helped.
• Promised something.
• Disagreed.
• Gave advice.
• Followed through.
• Failed to come back.

Conversations Remember What You Did

Expanded callbacks across the conversation system.

Relationship, family, village, neighbour, rumours, news, work, and other topics can now return to decisions made in earlier conversations.

Profession plans also return later instead of being forgotten immediately.

A villager may remember whether:

• You encouraged their ambitions.
• You followed through on an offer.
• You promised to help.
• You gave them space.
• You remembered something important.
• You let a commitment drift.

More Personality in Dialogue

Villager personality now influences substantially more than the opening sentence.

Important moments such as:

• Refusals.
• Hurt reactions.
• Boundaries.
• Deep disclosures.
• Commitments.
• Callbacks.
• Profession conversations.

now receive personality-aware wording.

Different personalities are also more likely to approach different parts of their profession when starting a work conversation, without completely locking other subjects away.

Better Relationship Awareness

Dialogue can now work from meaningful relationship states rather than scattered raw heart values.

Relationships include concepts such as:

• Stranger.
• Acquaintance.
• Friend.
• Confidant.
• Partner.
• Tense.
• Hostile.

Unresolved conflict also takes priority over simple affection, so a villager with high hearts will not behave as though everything is fine when something serious remains unresolved.

Seven New Conversation Topics

Added seven major topics:

• Interests
• Values
• You / what they think of the player
• Routine
• Origin
• Favourite places
• Shared history

These topics include deeper branches and contextual scenes rather than being single-question additions.

Existing topics have also been expanded with dozens of missing subjects and deeper follow-ups.

Teenagers Now Have Their Own Dialogue

Teen villagers no longer share child-oriented news dialogue.

They now have their own gossip and reaction branches written for their age group.

Children, teenagers, and adults are kept distinct when a topic requires age-specific dialogue.

Smarter Conversation Selection

A new conversation director chooses scenes using the villager, player, world state, recent conversations, and ongoing history.

It considers things such as:

• Current situation.
• Profession.
• Personality.
• Relationship.
• Time.
• Weather.
• Season.
• Recent subjects.
• Ongoing promises and threads.

Reopening the conversation does not simply reroll until a preferred response appears.

Repetition is tracked across exact scenes, subjects, topics, and similar conversational structures.

Contextual Conversation Hub

Chat mode can now surface relevant topics based on what is actually happening with the villager.

Examples include:

• Where were we?
• What's on your mind?
• Can I ask about…

Private information is deliberately hidden from these labels.

Set:

dynamicTopicSlots = 0

to retain the traditional fixed topic hub.

Optional Group Conversations

Added an early version of multi-villager conversations.

When enabled, another nearby villager may occasionally:

• Confirm something they genuinely know.
• Add a profession-specific detail.
• Disagree about a harmless preference.
• Remember a shared family event differently.
• Object when something private should not be discussed.

Group conversations are currently:

• Chat-mode only
• Disabled by default

Enable them with:

group.enabled = true

Rumours Can Travel

Information can now spread between nearby villagers.

Stories retain their original event identity while gradually losing confidence as they travel.

Privacy remains enforced:

• Secrets that cannot be shared do not spread.
• Names are removed when only anonymous discussion is permitted.
• Player disclosures remain private unless they were explicitly public.
• Rumours cannot magically become eyewitness accounts.

Stories can also later be corrected without creating an entirely separate event.

Rumours Can Be Private

Sensitive events such as deaths, divorces, and private matters now receive more guarded conversations.

Pressing a villager for information after they establish a boundary does not reward the player with the full story.

Villagers can decline to elaborate and close the subject.

Villages Now Have Their Own Identity

Villages can now develop persistent cultural traits, including:

• Traditions.
• Shared values.
• Work concerns.
• Landmarks.
• Festivals.
• Local disagreements.

Residents can have different opinions about those traits based on who they are.

Townstead installs add additional Townstead-specific village culture possibilities.

Villagers Remember Social Roles

Villagers can now remember relationships beyond MCA's family tree, such as:

• Coworkers.
• Mentors and apprentices.
• Suppliers.
• People they care for.
• Shared experiences.
• People they deliberately avoid.

These relationships require an actual reason and can change or expire over time.

Villagers Know How They Learned Something

Memories now track whether information was:

• Witnessed personally.
• Experienced directly.
• Learned from family.
• Learned from a coworker.
• Told by another person.
• Publicly announced.
• Heard as an unattributed rumour.

This controls how confidently villagers can speak and whether they are allowed to pass the information on.

Better Conversation Initiative

Fixed the configured daily limit on villagers starting conversations not actually being enforced.

Villagers now respect:

• Player mute requests.
• Whether they are sleeping, fighting, panicking, grieving, working, or otherwise occupied.
• A short anti-spam cooldown.
• The configured daily initiative limit.

Villagers should interrupt the player less often and for better reasons.

Full Chat-Mode Support

Every normal reply button can now also be selected through typed chat.

Added missing chat intents for 89 responses that previously only worked when clicked.

Typed responses and GUI responses are now kept in sync automatically.

Dialogue Variety Improvements

• Reduced heavily repeated phrases and verbal habits such as excessive "Aye".
• Added automated checks against repeated sentences and overused openers.
• Improved several repetitive Portuguese lines.
• Expanded conversation breadth across the full topic catalog.

Fixed Conversation Frequency & Fallbacks

• Fixed weekly scene limits above one not working correctly.
• Fixed scene fallback definitions being ignored at runtime.
• Fixed several conversations losing their semantic state after a line was spoken.
• Fixed broken or conflicting datapacks potentially damaging the active conversation catalog.
• Fixed generated scene selection dropping content based on alphabetical ordering.

Fixed Affection Rewards

Fixed 18 authored affection rewards that were silently discarded when worlds loaded.

Affected content included several deeper reflective topics and profession arcs.

Their intended affection rewards now apply correctly.

Fixed MCA 7.6.20 Compatibility

Fixed part of the living-history system being unable to read villager inventories on MCA 7.6.20.

The mod now supports both the older 7.6 inventory layout and the newer 7.7 version correctly.

Configuration & Datapacks

Added extensive new datapack support for:

• Villager identities.
• Conversation scenes.
• Situations.
• Threads.
• Commitments.
• Village cultures.
• Social roles.
• Knowledge and privacy.
• Relationship bands.

Added [dynamic], [history], and [group] configuration sections.

The major new systems can be disabled without removing or rewriting the original conversation content underneath them.

Debugging & Administration

Added new /conversations tools for inspecting:

• Villager profiles.
• Conversation history.
• Current context.
• Scene candidates.
• Why a scene was selected.
• Compatibility capabilities.

These are intended primarily for modpack authors and troubleshooting.

Localization

All new conversation content is available in:

• English (en_us)
• Brazilian Portuguese (pt_br)

Portuguese conversation flow is now also automatically reviewed for missing lines and buttons.

Reliability & Testing

The conversation content now receives extensive automated validation covering:

• Replies that do not make sense after their preceding line.
• Unreachable conversations.
• Missing chat responses.
• Broken callbacks.
• Missing personality variants.
• Datapack conflicts.
• Repetition and dialogue variety.
• Locale parity.
• Generated-content drift.
• Client/server separation.
• Feature-disable fallbacks.

Continuous integration has also been added so the full validation suite runs automatically on every update.

Compatibility

• Existing 1.3.0 saves remain compatible.
• No existing conversation history is discarded.
• New living-history data is stored separately.
• Existing relationships, arcs, milestones, affection budgets, and MCA memories continue to load normally.
• Existing worlds are not given fabricated historical events when upgrading.
• Optional profession integrations remain optional.
• Townstead remains optional.