Create: Manned Cannons , An Ambush Addon

Villagers shoot your cannons for you!

Create: Manned Cannons turns any ordinary adult villager into a gun crew for Create Big Cannons. Stand one beside a button wired to your cannon mount, load the gun, aim it, and the villager will pull the trigger the moment the shot is actually worth taking — on the ground, or aboard a moving airship at a mob and a AMBUSH airship.

There is no GUI, no linking item, no new profession and no new block. A villager, a button and a cannon is the whole setup.

The shot it predicts is the shot you fire

• Whatever is loaded. The breech-to-muzzle walk reads the real projectile blocks and the real propellant behind them. Solid shot, shells, grapeshot and anything else fire differently because the addon asks the round itself rather than checking a list of names. New munitions work without an update.
• Whatever the cannon is. Barrel length, cannon material, breech strength and safe charge limits all feed in. A long steel cannon and a short cast iron one do not shoot alike.
• Real obstacles. The arc is swept through world collision every tick. Terrain, buildings, your own hull and enemy hulls all stop the shot, and a blocked shot is not taken.

It will not fire an unloaded cannon, a squib load, an overcharged barrel that would burst, a blocked bore, or a cannon whose propellant cannot ignite — the same conditions Create Big Cannons itself fails on.

Ships

Manned Cannons is built for AMBUSH.

• Cannons on your airship work. Your ship's motion, rotation and coordinate frame are handled, so a firing solution computed while under way matches the shell Create Big Cannons actually spawns.
• AMBUSH raiders are valid targets. Enemy vessels are recognised from AMBUSH's own runtime ownership marker, so ordinary player-built airships are never shot at — and a vessel you have captured stops being a target the moment it becomes yours.
• Moving targets are led. A raider crossing your arc is intercepted where it will be, not where it was.
• Ships are hit as hulls, not as boxes. A shell that passes through the hull counts, even nowhere near the centre, and a rotated ship is not treated as a giant cube.
• Your own ship is never a target, and the gunner will not fire through it.

Setup

1. Build and assemble a Create Big Cannons cannon on a cannon mount or fixed cannon mount.
2. Wire a button to the mount's firing side. (The opposite face is the assembly input — a button there assembles the cannon, it does not fire it, and the addon will correctly ignore it.)
3. Load the cannon and aim it however you like.
4. Put an adult villager beside the button.

A villager already sitting in a Create seat next to its button will fire as well. You will see particles when the villager finds the assembled cannon's button.

Default cooldown is 3 seconds between presses at the same station.

Commands

Both require permission level 2.

/mannedcannons scan is the first thing to reach for if a gun is not firing. It will tell you which stage is failing instead of leaving you guessing.

Normal gameplay logs nothing. Debug output is off by default.

Configuration

Server-side, in manned_cannons-server.toml:

• Evaluation interval
• Firing cooldown (default 60 ticks)
• Button search radius
• Minimum hit confidence
• Simulation tick ceiling (a performance guard, not a range setting)

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge
• AMBUSH — required
• Create Big Cannons — required
• Create — required

Enemy Airships are all from AMBUSH, a mod that allows you to create custom encounters including airships.

Bug reports are much more useful with the output of /mannedcannons scan attached. Report bugs to my discord.