The Battle Tank Update

Villages can now build armour, crew it, and send it to war.

Not as a number on a screen: as a factory you can walk into, a crew you can talk to, shells you can steal, and a vehicle that drives itself to the fight.

⚠️ Requires TWO mods, not one: Laendli Transportation for the vehicles, and its Laendli Recruits Compat bridge addon (laendli_recruits_compat), which is what lets an NPC crew one.

Without the vehicles, both technologies are hidden and nothing here applies. Without the bridge the tanks exist and cannot be driven — the worse failure of the two, because everything looks correctly installed. The login message names both, and says whether the reflective bridge actually resolved rather than merely whether the mods are present.

No new world needed. Existing villages pick up factories as they grow.

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Two technologies

Battle Tanks — armour plate, tracks and a gun carriage. 800 wood, 700 stone, 160 iron and 45,000 research points: five to ten Minecraft days depending on how big your faction is, because research speed is driven by population. Armour is something a faction grows into.

Armor Piercing — hardened shot, 2,600 points, one step to the right of Musketry. The only thing that lets a faction's muskets hurt a vehicle, and it does nothing else: against an unarmoured target the ball hits exactly as before.

Arrows never hurt a tank. No research changes that. A village that answers armour with more archers is doing the one thing that provably cannot work.

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The tank factory

A village that researches Battle Tanks builds a tank factory — one per village, and tanks are built there or not at all.

• The shells are real. Iron and gunpowder become ammunition in the factory's own chests and barrels — the whole building is the magazine. You can walk in and count them, and so can someone who shouldn't.
• A hull takes half a Minecraft day on the line, and costs iron and gold only — never wood or stone, so a village saving for armour doesn't stop putting up houses.
• Production is passive, so an unvisited village keeps making shells. The crew isn't what makes it happen; the crew is what makes it pay better.
• A load of ammunition is withdrawn when a tank rolls out. Fuel and water are free; the shells are not.

Four machinists, and the difference between them is the point

• Foreman — a gate, not a share. Without him the others work unsupervised at 25%.
• Machinist ×3 — 25% each.
• Senior Machinist — 50%, and earned, not hired.

There is no senior post to fill. A machinist becomes one after two and a half Minecraft days of service, and the longest-serving qualifier is the veteran — so a raid on your factory destroys the experience, not just the bodies. The rebuilt crew runs at 75% until somebody puts the days in.

The Foreman carries a read-only report screen: efficiency, every post and its occupant's service or respawn countdown, shells against the cap, iron and gunpowder against the next batch, research, shed, and the next hull's progress. He also places orders that the village merchant pays for. Ordinary machinists answer in chat.

The guards

Two soldiers post themselves inside — one at the entrance, one over the stores — drawn from the garrison rather than added to it, so a village that posts guards is a village with two fewer men on patrol. A crossbowman carrying a firearm is preferred; failing that, one melee and one ranged. Elites are preferred within their class.

You can place the posts yourself. Put a diamond block on the floor in creative and it is consumed — the post is remembered by the factory, not by the block, so it survives being broken, stolen, pushed by a piston or blown up. Declare one and the other is still worked out from the building; declare a third and a third guard is posted for it.

Who gets past them

Standing with the faction decides it:

• 40+ — you may walk the floor and stock the chests.
• ??? — the faction stops pretending the crates are for fence posts and tells you what they're for.
• 0 to 40 — turned away. Told to leave, and given fifteen seconds to do it before they open fire.
• Below 0 — shot. Below −20 you aren't even told why.

Members of another faction are judged by the treaty, not by their standing. An ally walks in. A neutral faction's member is warned like anyone else, and his faction is declared war on if he ignores it. A faction already at war skips the wait — there's nothing left to declare.

A new Factory Supply contract pays outsiders to keep the line fed.

When somebody unwelcome is on the floor, the crew clears out. They're unarmed couriers and the guards are about to open fire in the room they work in. They walk out, walk back when it's clear, and only a genuinely stuck one is teleported. The machinists also raise the alarm — and if nobody's left on the door, the village itself answers.

Robbing the place

A tank factory is not a safe. Its chests and barrels open for anyone; the guards are the lock, not the latch. Reach into one and they open fire immediately, no grace period, and war is declared on your faction.

That's the point of the shells being real items in real containers: raiding a factory is something you can actually do, at a price. It's also the only way to hurt an armoured faction that has already out-teched you.

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In the field

A tank goes to field battles and sieges, crewed by a Crewmember who can't be hurt in his seat — an intact machine standing still because its driver died is worse than losing it outright.

• It arrives behind its own line, 56 blocks back, not in no-man's-land where it would be in contact before finishing mounting.
• It only fires at what it can see. The gun fires along the hull, so a target picked by distance alone means shelling the hill in front of it. With no shot it keeps advancing rather than waiting behind a rise.
• It outranges infantry — 120 blocks by default, up to 256.
• If it can't kill what it's shooting at, it drives closer. A shell can land short or splash where the enemy no longer is, and none of that reads as failure, so it would otherwise reload at the same target forever.
• It doesn't bulldoze your village. Ramming destroys no blocks, and shells spare containers and village centre markers — a crater in terrain is fine, a crater where the stores were is not.
• A tank that survives goes home. One that's destroyed is gone. That asymmetry is the risk of fielding one.

Armour changes how factions think

Tanks used to be invisible to every strategic decision in the mod: a village could build an armoured column and read as exactly as strong as the day it had none. Now armour counts toward military strength and toward the per-village figure the attack AI compares — including tanks currently out at a fight.

What a tank is worth depends on who's looking. A faction that can answer armour weighs it at face value. One that can't weighs it double, because for them it isn't a strong unit, it's an unanswerable one.

A faction that meets a tank researches an answer to it — either a round bouncing off, or a tank acquiring a target, and it starts pushing toward Armor Piercing or Battle Tanks, whichever it can actually reach.

A tank on the field puts a tank icon on the map in place of the weapon icon, and a gold Armour on the field line in the tooltip — read from the deployment record rather than an entity sweep, so it's right even for a battle nobody has walked to.

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Commands

/vrtanks (operator) reports what the Laendli bridge resolved, the nearest faction's research and parked count, the factory's state, the crew and their service, the guards and their posts, the door's verdict on everyone standing inside, what armour is worth to the strategic AI, and whether the faction is reacting to armour it has met.

• /vrtanks spawn — a tank and crew at your feet, as a real deployment
• /vrtanks build — parks one in the nearest village for free
• /vrtanks factory — makes the next build a tank factory
• /vrtanks posts [clear] — list or clear declared guard posts
• /vrtanks clear — removes every tank on the field and refunds the ones a village paid for

spawn and build skip the material cost but not the research.

Config lives in military.toml → [tanks].

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Fixes along the way

Getting tanks to actually work took most of this arc.

• They couldn't move, turn or shoot. Steering belongs to the rider, not the vehicle, and has to be written every tick; the firing call had the wrong arguments, and the light tank — the one actually fielded — doesn't fire through a procedure at all.
• They immobilised themselves with Slowness VII from a dry boiler, because the vehicle's slots are reached through a Forge capability rather than a method, so every restock was a silent no-op.
• They killed themselves and their own infantry with their own shell's blast.
• They never turned up at sieges — eight separate gates each refused silently and looked identical from outside. /vrtanks now reports which one it was.
• Logging out mid-fight destroyed the tank, leaving an undriveable, invulnerable hulk and a shed permanently one short. An orphaned tank now goes home.
• A tank sent to defend a siege never despawned if the siege ended while nobody was near.
• Tanks path around obstacles, take 90% less fall damage, and are lit by the last-defender glow along with everyone else.

And in the factory:

• A city plan was not a pure function of its seed, which slid already-built plots off their ground and left a 31-wide factory overlapping its neighbours. Existing worlds repair themselves.
• A factory could be planted on a road, turning a street into a dead end.
• The fifteen-second warning was unreachable. A player who has never met a faction reads standing 0, and the boundary was at or below 0 means shoot — so every stranger was warned and shot in the same tick, while the grace applied only to somebody who had already earned standing.
• One post meant both guards stood on it, leaving the stores watched by nobody, and a newly posted guard always went to the door whatever you'd marked.
• The crew couldn't leave — the village-wide worker evacuation was putting them back to work about once a second.
• One man standing in a doorway stopped an entire village working: a hostile player counted as an assault unconditionally, so every worker ran to the centre and held there, worker respawn was suspended and the builder froze.
• The theft the guards exist to punish couldn't be committed — the containers refused the click while the guards shouted about it.

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Compatibility

Battle Tanks reports at login like every other integration — and reports whether the reflective bridge actually resolved, not merely whether Laendli is installed. A change on their side would otherwise surface as a tank that quietly never fires.