CompanionRM

## 0.5.0: Major changes

Two big things at once. CompanionRM now runs on NeoForge as well as Fabric, so the mod has two doors in and the same companion waits behind both. And your companion can now leave on his own: you hand him provisions, he sets out, and he comes back hours later with what he found.

### Excursions

Give your companion a set of provisions and he goes away. Really away: he leaves the world, and while he is gone you play without him. When the time is up he walks back with what he gathered, tells you how it went, and writes it in his diary.

There are five grades of excursion. The first two are handed to him directly, and they only need a craft. **Walk** opens at level 10 and always brings back the same load of raw material, with no risk at all: it is the one where you learn how the whole thing works, and nothing can go wrong. **Journey** opens at level 25 and starts rolling real loot, and real risk.

The three big ones need the **Excursion Table**, a block you craft and place at your base. It posts three missions a day, and you can ask for a fresh board once per day if you do not like what came up. **Expedition** at level 50, **Incursion** at level 80, and **Odyssey** at level 100, which takes an hour and a half and comes back loaded.

Longer excursions bring more, and a companion who has been around shortens the trip: the higher his peak level, the faster he travels, down to half the time at the very top.

Every grade except the Walk can hurt him. He may come back scuffed, or come back in a bad way with only half of what he found. **He never dies out there.** Losing a companion to something you could not see or influence is not a thing this mod will do to you.

### He can also go looking for a place

The other kind of mission does not bring back a single item. He goes out to find something, and comes home knowing where it is: a village, a mineshaft, a shipwreck, a trial chamber, an ocean monument, a stronghold, a woodland mansion, buried treasure. He tells you the coordinates out loud and writes them in the chat so you can find them again later, and he remembers the place, so **companionguide** will walk you there.

### A NeoForge build

Everything is here: the companion and its six classes, the whole skill tree, the Portable Station and its six services, runes, the diary and the bond, the upgrade tree, recycling, patrols, dimension travel, and every screen, key and command. The two builds are the same mod, so a world made on one behaves the same on the other. Both were tested on a dedicated server as well as in single player.

### He stops getting stuck

If you sent him somewhere and he spent ten seconds getting no closer, he finds his own way there. Same if a mob is hitting him and he cannot reach you, or if you told him to attack something he simply cannot walk to. He only does this when he has genuinely stopped making progress, so a long walk is still a long walk, and he says something when it happens.

It turned out to be useful in a way we did not plan: you can now send him up to places that have no path at all, and he will get there.

### The interface, redone

Every screen in the mod now uses the game's own panel instead of one drawn by hand. Two things come with that. The screens finally look like they belong to Minecraft, and if you play with a texture pack, **the mod follows it**, because it is the game's panel and not a copy of it.

While doing that, a handful of old annoyances went with it: text that was almost invisible on the dark panels, half the screens blurring the world behind them and the other half not, and the rune screen that used to have a background of its own that matched nothing.

### Small things you asked for

**companionwhere** lists every companion you have, with name and coordinates, and it finds them even when they are far away and nobody is around them. In the ore filter, searching for something and then clearing the list now only clears what you searched for, instead of everything. And the scroll bar in that list can be dragged with the mouse.

### Three old bugs, found along the way

Rebuilding the mod on two loaders meant reading every corner of it, and three faults came out of hiding. A handful of spells were leaning on a piece of the game that is not meant to be reachable, and now stand on their own. The Spell Lancer's lightning was setting fire to whatever stood near where it struck, pens and livestock included, because the strike itself belonged to the game rather than to the companion; it now hits only what it aimed at, and your base stops catching fire. And a companion's home, once set, was quietly failing to save on the NeoForge build.

### Settings from the mod list

If you have Mod Menu installed, the settings screen now has a button on the mod list entry, next to the mod itself. The companionconfig command still works exactly as before, so nothing is lost if you do not use it. Mod Menu is optional and is not bundled: without it the mod behaves the same as always.

### THE FILE HAS A NEW NAME

The download is now called companionrm, followed by the loader and the version, so you can spot it in your mods folder at a glance. Nothing inside the mod changed: the worlds you already have open exactly as before.

One thing to watch when you update. Because the file name changed, the old companionai file is not replaced automatically. Delete it, or the game finds the mod twice and refuses to start.

### Under the floor

The mod was rebuilt as a shared core with a thin layer for each loader, so a feature written once arrives on both. Nothing about how the game plays changed, and saves from 0.2.x onward still carry over untouched.

For modpack makers: excursion loot comes from the game's own chest tables, so anything your pack adds to them can turn up. If something in your pack should never come home in a companion's bag, put it in the **companionai:excursion_blocked** item tag and it never will.