CompanionRM

0.3.4: Hearth and command

Life around the base, and a firmer hand on the pack. The companions keep their chatter to their own corner of the screen, the base you set becomes a place they actually tend and draw from, the backpack grows, and a handful of new commands let you point the whole group at a threat or wave it out of your way. The miner also stops saving all its best tricks for the very end. Saves from 0.2.x through 0.3.3 stay compatible.

Their own voice

Companion talk no longer doubles up in the normal chat. Everything a companion says now lives only in its own speech display in the corner, so your chat stays clear. Because those lines fade after a few seconds, a new key opens a scrollable history of the last hundred things your companions said, to read at your leisure. The banter companions trade with one another was widened a great deal, with far more lines per mood, so two of them travelling together repeat themselves much less.

A base that gives back

The base you mark is no longer just a place to call everyone home to. Within 64 blocks of it, companions treat your chests as the household stores. They file their surplus away as before, but without needing a pile already there to recognise a chest, and they now take from those chests what they actually need: food when they are low, arrows when they carry a bow, and the materials they are short on for their own crafting. They will also pull a better weapon, tool or piece of armour out of a base chest and equip it. All of this happens near the base even when you have wandered off, so a companion left on guard keeps the place in order. To keep things from sloshing back and forth, anything a companion stows it will not turn around and pull back.

Two old packrat habits are fixed along the way. Saplings no longer pile up by the stack: a companion keeps a couple of each kind for replanting and files the rest. And charcoal and ordinary coal are now treated as one fuel, so it keeps a single modest reserve between them instead of a full stack of each.

Roomier pockets

The backpack went from 18 slots to 27. On top of that, food and armour a companion picks up now head straight for the backpack, leaving its main pockets free for tools and weapons. It still equips the best armour it owns, now reaching into the backpack to do so. Existing backpacks carry over and simply gain the extra room.

Commanding the pack

Aiming at a foe and giving the command while crouching now sends every nearby companion at that target at once, a full rally, while the plain command still picks the single closest one as before. A new key tells the companions crowding around you to take a few steps back and give you room. Another new key opens a roster of the companions near you, each with its name and level, so you can pick one out of a crowd and open its gear directly instead of hunting for the right body to click.

Eyes on a creeper

A companion now treats a creeper that wanders within a few blocks as the thing to deal with right now. It drops its current target and turns on the creeper to put it down before it can close in and blow, a reflex that holds whether it is set to guard or to follow.

The miner finds its feet

The Miner class was bunching all its rewards past level 70, leaving a long empty stretch early on. Its abilities were spread back out across the climb so the signature ones, the ore chest, the ore detector and the vein miner, arrive in the first stretch rather than deep into the hundreds. The capstone dig to bedrock still waits at the top.

Tweaks and fixes

The companion lines were swept clean of stray dashes for a tidier read in every language. New default keys arrived for pushing companions back, opening the speech history and opening the roster, and all of them, like the existing ones, can be rebound in Controls.