MCA: Quests

[0.4.0] - 2026-06-19

Built for Minecraft 1.20.1 / Forge, requiring MCA Reborn 7.6.x and Architectury API. Save-data compatible with 0.1.0–0.3.0 worlds; the new village projects are additive and pre-0.4.0 worlds load cleanly. Datapack breaking change: chain.time_limit_ticks has been replaced by the new failure block (see Changed/Removed). Network protocol bumped to v2 — client and server must run matching versions (the project packets are rejected at handshake otherwise).

Added

• Quest failure states & deadlines — a new optional failure block makes a quest expire while it's active, with author-controlled triggers and outcomes. Failure is server-authoritative, persisted (the deadline is anchored to acceptance time, so it survives logout/restart), grants no rewards, and records a FAILED outcome that follow-up quests branch on via the existing mcaquests:quest_failed condition.
  • Triggers (combine freely; first to fire wins): deadline_ticks (relative deadline), deadline_time (fail at a Minecraft time-of-day, e.g. "before sunrise"), require_weather (fail when the weather stops matching, e.g. "while it's raining"), and fail_on_giver_death (per-quest, independent of the global failQuestIfGiverDies config).
  • Outcomes: failure_hearts (relationship penalty, or 0 for non-punitive), retry_after (cooldown before the quest can be offered again), and block_retry (permanent lock). The giver's dialogue.failed line is shown on failure; recovery quests are expressed with quest_failed.
  • A quest already complete ("ready to turn in") is not failed by a time/weather trigger — a grace window to hand it in. All failure paths route through one idempotent handler, so no quest ever double-fails or duplicates a completion.
• HUD deadline countdown — the quest tracker shows a live m:ss countdown for quests with a time deadline, turning red in the final minute. Weather/giver-death failures show no countdown.
• 3 built-in failure examples — guard/dawn_defense (kill zombies before sunrise), cleric/urgent_medicine (+ cleric/urgent_medicine_recovery, a recovery quest gated on quest_failed), and fisherman/rain_catch (fish while it's raining).
• Failure validation — /mcaquests validate reports a failure block with no trigger, a failure_hearts magnitude past the hearts clamp, and block_retry combined with retry_after.
• Village projects — a new, separate system of shared, multi-stage community goals loaded from data/<namespace>/mcaquests/projects/**.json. A project's progress is shared (stored in the world save, not per-player), so multiple players contribute toward one common objective. Fully additive and backward compatible — existing quests are unchanged and pre-0.4.0 worlds load cleanly.
  • 5 scopes decide who shares the progress: player, villager, family, profession, and village. The MCA-backed scopes (family/profession/village) resolve via MCA's village/ relationship data and fail safe (the project never appears) when that data is missing.
  • Phases run in order — a phase is entered only after every earlier phase completes — each with its own dialogue, objectives, rewards, and an optional unlock gate.
  • 4 project objective types that track shared progress: donate_item (items consumed and banked into the pool, with an optional per_player_cap), project_kill_entity, project_place_block, and project_talk_to_profession.
  • Shared rewards wrap any existing quest reward with a target (contributors, all_participants, sponsor_village, top_contributor) and add new reward types (hearts_with_sponsor, hearts_with_participants, village_reputation, unlock). Projects also carry independent mod-side village reputation deltas (on_phase_complete / on_project_complete / on_fail), and a new mcaquests:village_reputation condition tests a giver's reputation in any quest or project condition tree.
  • Sponsors (by profession) surface a project via a View Project button in the MCA villager menu; with oneSponsorPerProjectPerDay only one deterministically chosen villager per village offers a given project per day. Contributions are atomic and server-authoritative (items validated and consumed server-side, then banked, then synced); per-phase rewards distribute exactly once, with offline players' non-hearts rewards queued for next login and villager hearts queued via MCA.
  • 6 built-in example projects: guardhouse_stockpile, library_restoration, festival_preparation, well_repair, after_raid_recovery, and missing_villager_search.
  • Project commands — /mcaquests project list, info <id>, validate, reset <id>, advance <id> (test-only force-advance), and debug <id> (explains availability from the nearest villager); list/info/debug at op level 2, validate/reset/advance at op level 3.
  • Project validation flags unknown scope/objective/reward type ids, missing phases, and unknown/disabled or circular follow_up chains as errors, with warnings for empty non-final phases, MCA-dependent scopes while MCA is absent, disabled command rewards, and mismatched reward targets. Hard errors abort the load under strictJsonValidation.
  • A project menu, quest-log section, and HUD tracker (showProjectTrackerHud / projectTrackerMaxEntries) surface active projects and their shared progress.
  • Network protocol bumped to v2. Project sync/contribution packets require a matching client and server; mismatched versions are rejected at handshake.

Changed

• The chain.time_limit_ticks deadline is now failure.deadline_ticks — it works on any quest, not just chains, and gains the richer triggers/outcomes above. The two built-in chain quests that used it (farmer_family/3_apprentice, guard_safety/2_patrol) were migrated.

Removed

• chain.time_limit_ticks (replaced by the failure block). Datapacks still using it will fail validation; move the value to failure.deadline_ticks.