Caravans & Convoys - Automatic Trade

Caravans & Convoys - Automatic Trade Version 1.0.4 - Minecraft 1.21.1, NeoForge

NEW: Creative Dock (server shops)

• An admin/creative variant of the Caravan Dock that sells from endless stock, so a server can run a permanent shop that never needs restocking and never runs dry.
• Trades with everyone, no mutual whitelist needed.
• Buyers choose their own order size; the shop enforces its RATE rather than a fixed bundle, so you set "8 iron for 1 diamond" once and any multiple of it is accepted. Underpaying is refused, overpaying is allowed.
• Orders are capped to what one wagon can carry and are refused outright rather than part shipped, keeping the "full bundle or nothing" guarantee intact.
• Needs no wagon item and no guard scrolls: it deploys and escorts endlessly.
• Placed by creative mode or op level 2, and is blast proof.

NEW: Caravan Checkpoint

• A block you bury under your road to tell caravans "come this way".
• Checkpoints only apply when they genuinely sit along the route: anything outside the corridor between the two docks, or behind either end, is ignored, so a caravan never detours to one that is nowhere near where it is going.
• A long chain is sampled evenly along the route, so a road paved end to end with checkpoints keeps its shape instead of stopping at every single one.
• Works while buried and in unloaded chunks. Crafted from stone bricks and a compass, yields 2.

NEW: Bandit mode and the Creative Endplate (chase minigame)

• A Creative Dock can be switched to bandit mode: it ships on a timer to a paired Endplate with no partner and no payment, escorted by hostile mobs.
• The wagon is deliberately robbable, so players can intercept the convoy and take the cargo. Getting the shipment through is the escort's job, not a formality.
• Escorts spawn automatically (pillagers and vindicators by default); drop spawn eggs in the dock's chest to override the band per dock.
• Escorts spawn properly armed and each convoy rolls its own gear quality, so you can size up a shipment by how much of the escort is enchanted. Their equipment never drops, so an endless route is not a free gear farm.
• Docks and Endplates are linked by a six character pairing code with a copy button; a mistyped code is reported immediately rather than failing silently.
• A convoy that reaches its Endplate vanishes: the shipment escaped.

NEW: Sea crossings

• Caravans that must cross deep water now do it in style instead of trudging along the seabed. The draft team is swapped for skeleton horses, the driver changes to a drowned skin, and the escort is stowed for the crossing and restored on dry land with health, gear and identity intact.
• Detection uses water above and at the wagon, so fords and puddles never trigger it, and it is smoothed so a rig bobbing at the waterline does not flicker.
• The driver no longer drowns.

Wagon compatibility

• Armoured wagon supported. It is the one wagon type with no cargo bed of its own, so it now carries freight in a sealed hold: the load cannot be viewed or taken in transit, and getting at it means destroying the wagon. Previously an armoured wagon silently destroyed the shipment it was loaded with.
• The royal wagon is barred by default as a passenger coach rather than a freight cart. It is accepted into the slot and refused at Start Operation with a clear message, so the slot never appears broken. Configurable via "bannedWagons".

Pathfinding

• Fixed caravans taking a different route home than the one they drove out on. The cost model charged for climbing but not for descending, so a hill a caravan paid to detour around on the way out was a free drop on the way back and the return leg abandoned the road. Descent is now charged too, symmetrically by default.
• Fixed the wagon jerking off course and snapping back. Obstacle avoidance was recomputed from scratch every tick with no memory, so a single borderline reading flipped the rig back and forth. Avoidance is now a committed manoeuvre: it takes repeated readings to engage, holds its line, and needs repeated clear readings before straightening up.
• Water routing: crossing water now costs more than going around, so a caravan takes a bridge or follows the shore whenever either exists and only wades when there is genuinely no dry route. Water is never made impassable, so an island dock stays reachable.
• Road preference costs rescaled against the game's own path search, and the search given a larger budget so long routes are not abandoned early.
• New "debugRoutes" option (off by default) logs what each caravan planned and how much of it runs on road. Useful if you are reporting a routing problem.

Localisation

• Around 30 new strings, in English and Russian.

Housekeeping

• Fixed the in jar version at its source: the mod version is now generated from the build rather than typed in by hand, which is what caused earlier builds to misreport their version in crash reports and the mod list.

New config keys, all picked up automatically by existing worlds: [pathfinding] descentPenalty, waterPenalty, debugRoutes [checkpoints] checkpointCorridor, checkpointMaxPerRoute, checkpointArriveRadius [guards] banditSlots, banditDefaultMobs, announceShipmentEscaped [wagon] bannedWagons

Note for existing worlds: changing a config DEFAULT does not reach a world that has already written its config file. Brand new keys are added automatically, but if you want a changed default you will need to edit the toml directly.

No protocol or world format changes. Drop in replacement for 1.0.3: swap the jar on the server and have clients update to match.