Village Recruits Addon 1.0.7.21 — Resource Convoys

Recommended for everyone. Alongside the new feature this release fixes several faults that quietly broke villages in long-running worlds — missing roads, builders and merchants that never came back, and villages that behaved as though permanently under siege. Existing worlds repair themselves; nothing needs to be rebuilt.

Coming from 1.0.7.4 or earlier? Scroll to Everything added since 1.0.7.4 — a great deal has landed since, including contracts, field battles, firearms, fog of war and three new village workers.

---

New in 1.0.7.21: Resource Convoys

Villages now physically carry supplies to each other. A Workers courier and an escort of guards walk a real load of materials, metals, hides and food from one village to another — and it only arrives if it gets there.

• Where they go. A faction supplies its own outposts, and supplies allies that are at war.   Everyday trade is untouched: auto-sell and AI-to-AI barter still happen instantly and invisibly,   because nobody would ride out to protect a routine sale. Convoys carry the loads where the journey   is the point. Player factions send them automatically as their situation demands — a faction whose   leader is offline is exactly the one whose outposts need supplying.
• Ally war shipments. An ally that is fighting gets metal, hides and coal — what armour, weapons   and, where a firearm mod is installed, guns are actually bought with. Planks are not what loses a   war.
• Wealth decides the whole convoy. A poor village sends a courier, a spear and a token load; a   rich one sends a column with a shipment behind it — both the escort and the size of the cargo climb   with the faction's treasury. Guards carry the firearms their faction has actually researched.
• Raids. Enemy factions send raiders after convoys, and factionless bandits hit them   regardless of who is at war — so even a faction at peace has to guard its own supplies. What a   faction seizes goes straight into its own storage; bandits simply destroy it.
• You can rob one. Kill the courier and the whole load spills on the ground as real items — and   the faction you robbed remembers it, at the same weight as assassinating one of its officers.
• You can be paid to protect one. A new Noble contract, Convoy Escort: paid on arrival, with   a bonus for every raider you kill, and nothing at all if the convoy is lost. You get a clickable   teleport to catch up with it, and /vrconvoy reports what it is carrying and how far it has got.
• On the map. A moving chest icon at the head of the convoy. Cyan is the one you are being paid   to escort, green is yours or an ally's, red is an enemy's — a target. Hover for the cargo.

Config lives in economy.toml → [convoy]. convoyEnabled = false turns the whole system off.

Also fixed in 1.0.7.21

These repair damage that had already accumulated in existing saves.

• Roads a village recorded as built but never actually laid are re-laid. The only thing that   ever retried was the building path, so a village that had finished its plots kept its gaps   forever. The repairman now fixes roads as well as terrain, a few stretches at a time, on villages   you are near. On one test world this was 3 villages out of 7 with every plot built and still 9, 10   and 22 missing stretches of road each.
• "The builder never respawns." Two villages of the same faction closer together than 64 blocks   could not tell whose builder was whose — the neighbour adopted it, and discarded the other   village's own as a duplicate. So one village was left permanently without a builder while its   replacement was killed every few seconds. Village workers now carry the village they belong to.   Same fix for the repairman.
• Two villages sharing one garrison fielded two officer corps, commanding the same soldiers and   buying armour twice. One village now commands each garrison.
• A commander whose last known position stayed unloaded waited for it forever, leaving a road   with an empty officer slot for the life of the save.
• Merchants, commanders and production workers could get a respawn timer that never elapsed   after a world was restored from a backup.
• Battles and skirmishes are fought on land, not in lakes. The site used to be judged on a single   block, so a point one step past a shore passed — and then most of two armies was set down in the   water.
• Recruits teleported into blocks and suffocated when joining a defence or an attack. Every hard   teleport in the mod now guarantees the body fits where it lands.
• A convoy vanished while you were escorting it. Whether a convoy travelled for real or on paper   was decided by whether the chunk under it was simulating — which is not the same as whether anyone   can see it. A convoy crosses loaded but non-ticking ground constantly, and on that ground its   guards were despawned and only the map marker was left, in front of the player escorting it. It   now asks whether a player is nearby.
• Raiders and convoy guards fought without hurting each other. Two lines of men swinging with   nothing happening: the base mod refuses damage between recruits that share an owner, and every   village-spawned body carries the same one. Ambushes now resolve properly. Raiders also stopped   being offered for hire to the person they were ambushing.

---

Everything added since 1.0.7.4

If you are upgrading from an older build, this is what has arrived in between.

Being a free agent: contracts and reputation (1.0.7.5, 1.0.7.12)

Belonging to no faction is now a playable role. Sneak-click a village's Noble Villager for a contract board — monster culls, night watches, supply runs, bounties, breaking a siege — with work offered only when the village genuinely needs it, so an empty board is real information about that village. Doing the work builds reputation with that faction; killing its people costs it, officers most of all. Standing unlocks better contracts and a Quartermaster shop where standing itself is the currency, and falling far enough gets you barred, hunted, and attacked on sight. A village with no Noble now spawns one at its recruit table rather than waiting forever.

Knowing where anyone lives: intelligence and fog of war (1.0.7.5)

An AI faction can no longer read a neighbour's garrison from across the map. Noticing a stranger sends out a scouting party that has to walk there before that village can be attacked at all, and what it saw is frozen at the moment it looked — so a village that re-arms after being scouted keeps the surprise. Fog of war now applies to this mod's own map markers: a village you have never seen is not on your map, and one you saw long ago is drawn faded with its age.

War in the open: field battles (1.0.7.5, 1.0.7.5.1, 1.0.7.6, 1.0.7.7, 1.0.7.10, 1.0.7.17)

Armies now meet outside the walls before anyone besieges anything. Skirmishes thin a garrison; battlefields decide whether a siege happens at all, with the winner marching on the village reinforced. Both sides are the villages' real soldiers, so the casualties are men who will not be on the wall. Players get a clickable [JOIN] invite for either side, and /vrbattles reports readiness village by village. Battles now field 20 troops, bring Elites and Commanders, and give a village its own garrison reserve rather than borrowing the siege one.

Guns (1.0.7.5, 1.0.7.11, 1.0.7.13)

AI factions can equip firearms from musketmod, Warium and TACZ, unlocked through the research tree and paid for out of the village's own industry. Guns are priced from their real crafting recipe, so a gun pack's own balance reaches the AI. The join message now reports which firearm mods are installed and whether their Recruits bridge addon is present — with the guns there but the bridge missing, everything looks correct and recruits simply never fire.

Research and the Armory (1.0.7.5, 1.0.7.6, 1.0.7.8, 1.0.7.12)

The technology tree gained parallel research for large factions and a free starter technology for every faction. A player faction's own village leader keeps research going while its leader is offline, and members can request a project. Two new technologies: Elite Training (soldiers rise to Elite through service, not only promotion) and Battle Medics (elites throw healing potions at the wounded once out of contact). The Armory troop customizer lets a leader dress each rank as a paper doll with a live recruit in it, filed per rank × troop kind × tier, with armour authored as matched sets — and it now reaches Commanders and Leaders too.

Trade and the village economy (1.0.7.5, 1.0.7.14)

Every village has a merchant that buys what it needs and pays emeralds, with prices driven by real need. Leaders get stock tools, per-resource reserves, a recruit-hire tax and auto-sell: surplus always converts to emeralds, at a reduced rate when no neighbour wants it, with the proceeds landing on the merchant that held the goods.

Three new village workers (1.0.7.13, 1.0.7.17)

• Fisherman — villages beside deep water build a fishery and row out in a real boat; the   catch feeds the village's meat store.
• Cook — works a new kitchen, turning raw food into more food.
• Smith — mans the forge.

Both the kitchen and the forge keep running while a village is unloaded and simply yield more with a worker present, so an unvisited village still makes ingots.

Critical fixes worth knowing about

• 1.0.7.16 — AI villages could be built on BEDROCK. The tower's ground search descended through   air with no limit but the bottom of the world, and an ungenerated chunk reads as air everywhere —   exactly what happens for villages founded far from any player.
• 1.0.7.20 — no village tower had generated naturally since 1.0.7.16. The bedrock fix measured   its limit from the spawner's own position, but a natural spawner starts high in the sky and the   descent is what brings the tower down. Every natural tower gave up ~200 blocks above the ground,   silently. Worlds carrying a stranded spawner repair themselves.
• 1.0.7.19 — a village founded from a hand-placed recruit table laid its plots inside its own   tower. Existing villages repair themselves; anything already built is kept, not demolished.
• 1.0.7.9 — settlers were buried alive by the tower of the village they had just founded.   Anything standing in a tower's volume is now moved clear first, players included.
• 1.0.7.18 — nine config options generated in the wrong section and so could not be found where   the documentation said they were. Values you had already tuned are carried across for you.
• 1.0.7.15 — the fisherman deposited his catch into a decorative barrel instead of the chest.

Version by version

• 1.0.7.5 — Noble contracts and standing, intelligence and fog of war, field battles, firearms,   parallel research and starter technology, village merchants and auto-sell.
• 1.0.7.5.1 — Field battle fixes: no troops in water, no battlefield in a lake, battle parties no   longer make a village rebuild its officers.
• 1.0.7.6 — A field battle must be won before a siege; ordering an attack starts that battle. The   Armory's paper-doll gear editor.
• 1.0.7.7 — Battles get their own garrison reserve; /vrbattles shows readiness.
• 1.0.7.8 — Research continues while a leader is away; members can request projects; Elite   Training and Battle Medics; the Armory reaches Commanders and Leaders.
• 1.0.7.9 — Settlers no longer buried by their own tower.
• 1.0.7.10 — Clickable [JOIN] invites for field battles.
• 1.0.7.11 — Startup reports TACZ/Warium and whether their bridge addon is installed.
• 1.0.7.12 — Nobles are spawned when a village has none; Armory picks priced from their recipe.
• 1.0.7.13 — The FISHERY and the Workers fisherman; guns priced from their crafting recipe.
• 1.0.7.14 — Auto-sell revamped; per-second jobs spread out to smooth the server tick.
• 1.0.7.15 — Fishery uses the Workers fisherman house; catch goes to the right chest.
• 1.0.7.16 — CRITICAL: no more villages on bedrock; none in ice biomes.
• 1.0.7.17 — The COOK and the SMITH; bigger, better-officered field battles.
• 1.0.7.18 — Nine config options generate in their documented sections.
• 1.0.7.19 — Hand-founded villages no longer build inside their own tower.
• 1.0.7.20 — CRITICAL: natural village towers generate again.
• 1.0.7.21 — Resource Convoys, plus the road, builder, commander and teleport fixes above.

---

Notes for existing worlds

• Convoys are on by default. If you would rather not have them, set convoyEnabled = false in   config/village_recruits/economy.toml.
• ⚠️ If you ran any 1.0.7.21 test build, open economy.toml → [convoy] and raise   convoyKeepAtHome — early test builds shipped it at 32, and Forge will not overwrite a value   your config already has. Too low a floor lets convoys carry off materials your villages are saving   up for. The shipped default is 256.
• Stranded convoy guards and leftover raiders from test builds are cleaned up automatically as their   chunks load.
• Requires the Recruits and Villager Workers mods. Firearms need musketmod, Warium or TACZ   and their Recruits bridge addon — the startup message tells you which of the two you are missing.