Sapience

This update is a massive jump from beta.336. Most of the work went into making villagers feel like one complete person instead of a bunch of separate systems fighting over the same body.

Conversations and personality

• Villagers can now hold actual back-and-forth conversations instead of throwing unrelated one-liners at each other.
• They face whoever they are talking to, remember the subject, respond to what was actually said, and end conversations naturally.
• Speech now reacts to personality, mood, age, relationships, work, hunger, danger, grief, recent memories, and the time of day.
• Villagers should no longer talk about events, relationships, deaths, supplies, or weather they do not actually know about.
• Children have their own speech, and crowds are less likely to repeat the same line over and over.
• Names, personalities, moods, memories, relationships, and conversation history survive save and reload.

Memory, relationships, and grudges

• Friendship and trust now grow from real interactions such as gifts, help, time spent together, apologies, and protection.
• Harm, betrayal, witnessed violence, and repeated attacks can create lasting grudges.
• Relationships fade slowly after a long absence instead of suddenly disappearing.
• Villagers can distinguish an accident from deliberate or repeated harm.
• Revenge and village justice are more proportional. A small disagreement cannot instantly become murder.
• Gossip spreads witnessed information without magically making the entire village know everything.
• Isolated villagers can tell the difference between being briefly separated, genuinely alone, bereaved, reunited, or surrounded by danger.

Work and gathering

• Woodcutters commit to a real tree and finish cutting its connected trunk instead of leaving random floating logs.
• Tree replanting avoids houses, doors, paths, farms, water, unsafe terrain, and trees that are already too close together.
• Farmers protect farmland, use real seeds, replant harvested crops, return full inventories to storage, and stop targeting unreachable fields.
• Villages can create a small safe farm terrace when ordinary terrain has no usable farm location.
• Miners use a shared structured shaft instead of opening random holes everywhere.
• Mine entrances, stairs, cleanup work, and exhausted searches are remembered through reloads.
• Mining searches no longer permanently stop because one area or dimension had no useful stone.
• Workers only receive materials when a block was genuinely collected. No phantom resources or gathering through walls.
• The exact beta.354 release test successfully mined all 48 out of 48 stone targets.

Building and terrain

• Builders now keep a real project record containing the site, materials, funding, progress, interruptions, and inspection state.
• Half-finished buildings survive save and reload and can be taken over by another builder if the original builder dies or transforms.
• Villages check the complete building footprint before starting.
• Houses avoid farms, paths, storage, doors, water, unsafe drops, existing structures, and underground locations.
• Doorways and entrances are checked so villagers can actually enter the finished house.
• Buildings use real materials and do not begin when the village cannot afford them.
• Beds, doors, ladders, lights, chests, furnaces, and crafting stations are checked before a structure counts as complete.
• Damaged structures can be repaired.
• Villages stop building once they have enough essential homes, food, and storage instead of covering the world in pointless buildings.
• Construction no longer reports a fake pause and resume every couple of ticks.

Movement, tools, and armor

• Villagers keep one intention for longer instead of constantly changing direction.
• Movement speed now comes from real causes such as health, urgency, exhaustion, emotion, and the current job.
• Pathfinding is more careful around water, cliffs, dangerous plants, occupied cells, and exposed drops.
• Villagers should no longer spin, pace in tiny circles, teleport, or endlessly run after a danger has already ended.
• Tools and weapons sit in the villager’s actual hand and move only while the matching action is happening.
• Armor follows the head, body, and legs instead of floating away from the model.
• Helmets keep the villager’s face visible, and children no longer wear adult-sized armor.

Night survival and village defense

• Villagers search across the settlement for usable beds instead of giving up because the nearest meeting point is too far away.
• Villagers caught outside at night look for shelter and wake when real danger gets close.
• Assigned guards now wake, gather, and defend the same village boundary instead of starting a fight and immediately abandoning it.
• Guards can come inward from nearby homes and fields when the settlement is attacked.
• Civilians still run from fights they cannot realistically win. They are not turned into disposable soldiers.
• Villagers committed to a winnable fight no longer become terrified after taking one small hit.
• Critically wounded villagers retreat, while nearby capable defenders may attempt a tightly checked rescue.
• Panic ends when the threat is gone, allowing villagers to return to sleep, food, work, and their normal lives.
• Battle losses are remembered correctly, including when an attack crosses midnight or the world is reloaded.

Graves, grief, and village history

• Villages can now establish their own graveyard at a safe location near the settlement.
• New graves form readable rows instead of appearing as scattered signs wherever somebody died.
• Graves have a named marker and a two-block grave bed, and each marker faces back toward the village.
• Graveyards avoid farms, crops, paths, water, buildings, containers, unsafe slopes, and occupied locations.
• Graveyard locations survive save and reload.
• Existing older graves are left where they are.
• Flowers are no longer created from nothing. A flower only appears when a real mourner carries one from their inventory.
• Villagers remember the dead by name, visit graves, comfort people they care about, and record major events in the village Chronicle.

Transformations

• A known villager converted into a zombie can retain their identity and saved mind.
• Curing that same zombie villager can restore the original person instead of creating a blank replacement.
• Naturally spawned zombie villagers remain new people and cannot steal an existing villager’s identity.
• Villagers transformed into witches keep their name, selected trusted relationships, and settlement history.
• A transformed resident is treated differently from an unrelated hostile witch.
• Permanent death closes the original family and village identity exactly once and safely handles unfinished responsibilities.

Performance and stability

• Expensive farm, tree, mine, and emergency-food searches are now shared and bounded instead of every villager repeatedly scanning the same area.
• Real work still checks the world again before changing a block or consuming materials.
• Two large-crowd problems that could freeze the server watchdog were found and fixed.
• The fixed 80-villager performance test measured 6.7ms average, 8.6ms at the 99th percentile, and a 9.8ms slowest sample.
• The separate 250-villager stress test kept 250 out of 250 villagers and reached a 31ms peak.
• A seven-day automated village test finished with all 24 original villagers alive.
• Save/reload, conversations, movement, equipment, gathering, building, combat, transformations, persistence, natural terrain, stress, and deterministic repeat runs all passed the final beta.354 release test.

Important before installing

• This build is for Fabric on Minecraft 1.21.1 only.
• Fabric API, Fabric Loader 0.16.9 or newer, and Java 21 are required.
• Install Sapience and Fabric API on the server and every connecting client.
• NeoForge, Sinytra Connector, Minecraft 1.20.1, and unlisted Minecraft versions are not supported by this jar.
• Right-click now greets a villager instead of opening the vanilla trade screen.
• Sneak while holding an item to offer it as a gift.
• Player trading is not finished yet, although villagers can barter resources among themselves.
• This is still a save-writing beta. Back up any world you care about before installing or updating.