TradeHall

Villager lag, gone — without breaking trading. For Paper 1.21+ and 26.x.

A villager runs a full brain twenty times a second: pathfinding, points of interest, gossip, restock schedules. In a trading hall with a hundred of them, that is the single largest source of tick lag on an ordinary survival server. TradeHall switches that brain off and takes over the one job the villager still owes you — restocking.

• Automatic: once several villagers stand close together (default 4 within 8 blocks) they are put to sleep by themselves. Nobody has to mark anything.
• Manual too: a marker block underneath, or a name tag — both configurable, both optional.
• Trading keeps working. Right-click still opens the trade window.
• Manual restocking, because a sleeping villager will not do it: configurable interval with vanilla's two-per-day limit.
• Damage protection: a sleeping villager cannot run from a zombie, so it is woken for a few seconds when hurt.
• /tradehall restore-all wakes everyone — a clean way out before uninstalling.
• Babies and villagers without a profession are left alone; they need their AI.

Commands: /tradehall [status|restore-all|reload] (alias /th) · Permissions: tradehall.admin (command, op), tradehall.use (sneak-right-click a villager, everyone)

Tested on

Paper 1.21.11, 26.2 and 26.3 — runtime-tested, not just "it loads". 33 assertions run against the shipped dev.tradehall.Optimizer, loaded through the plugin's own classloader so the test cannot drift from a copy, plus real spawned villagers on the live server: AI shutdown, the persistent sleep marker, neighbour counting, and the full restock round-trip. 33/33 green on both.

Niche

The established plugin for this job (~23,900 downloads) shipped its last version in July 2024 and its GitHub repository is archived — the author formally ended it. More to the point: that jar crashes on startup on Paper 26.2, because it cannot parse Minecraft's new version scheme. On the current Minecraft version there is currently no working plugin for this problem. The strongest active alternative has about 1,000 downloads. Details and evidence: LISTING.md.

Install

Drop the jar in plugins/, start, done. Defaults are conservative: automatic sleep at 4 villagers within 8 blocks, restock every 10 minutes, twice per day, 8 seconds of wake-up on damage.

AI disclosure

Human-led development: Arvid Grün directs the work, sets the requirements, tests and approves every release. Code and documentation are written with AI assistance (Claude). No AI-generated images are used; the icon is drawn geometrically in code.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

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Human-led development: a human maintainer directs, tests and takes responsibility for every release; AI is used as a development tool (disclosed per Modrinth policy). The icon is hand-made geometric artwork, not AI-generated.