Hazard Pay

The wandering trader might be the most murdered character in Minecraft. Hazard Pay makes him start taking precautions.

Every wandering trader that dies makes the next one show up a little more prepared. There is no warning, no giant message telling you what changed. You just see a trader coming over the hill with nine llamas and an armed escort and think, oh... right.

The Guild keeps a ledger

There is one shared counter for the entire world. Not one per player.

So yes, your friend's lava trap is now your problem too.

Nothing pops up in chat when the tier increases. There is no boss bar, title card or dramatic sound effect. If you want to know how bad things have gotten, you have to look at the next caravan and count the llamas.

What starts showing up

There is no maximum tier.

There is no final boss and no point where the mod decides you have suffered enough. Every trader killed adds another llama. Every third kill adds another guard. The caravan can keep growing for as long as your world keeps finding creative ways to murder traders.

Tier 10 is only where the trader runs out of new outfits.

What actually counts as a kill?

Basically, any trader death that wasn't caused by a mob.

If you hit him yourself, obviously that counts. But so does lava, fire, fall damage, cactus, drowning, suffocation, dispensers, anvils and pretty much anything else that kills him without a monster's name attached to it.

If a hostile mob actually gets the kill, you are off the hook.

And if a trader simply wanders away and despawns, that does not count. The system only listens for actual deaths, so a trader disappearing naturally never touches the ledger.

The burning rule

Starting at tier 2, if the trader catches fire, his llamas turn on the nearest player.

This exists because of how wandering traders usually meet their completely accidental ends.

Vanilla trader llamas normally retaliate when something directly attacks their owner. Lava and flint and steel, however, have always been a convenient little loophole.

Hazard Pay closes it.

You can light the trap and walk twenty blocks away if you want. The trader remembers who was nearby for roughly a minute.

Can this occasionally result in an innocent player walking past your lava trap and getting blamed for the whole thing?

Yes.

That is intentional.

The escort takes it personally

Attack any llama in the caravan and the entire group responds.

Not just the llama you hit. All of them.

And the guards join in too.

They will not attack each other, though. A llama missing a spit, a guard landing a stray hit or the trader getting caught in the crossfire will not turn the caravan into a civil war.

That sounds obvious. It also took two rounds of playtesting to make sure it stayed obvious.

What Hazard Pay will never do

No block destruction. No fire spreading. No raids. No reinforcements. No weird village takeover mechanics.

The guards are passive until the trader or caravan is attacked. They do not join raids, and iron golems leave them alone, which is especially important because wandering traders like spawning around village meeting points.

There are also no new crafting recipes, items or blocks.

Hazard Pay adds exactly one new entity: the Guild Guard.

Playing it

Install the mod and kill a wandering trader.

That's it. You've started.

There are also a few debug commands for testing, modpacks and people trying to record footage without waiting several hours for natural trader spawns:

/hazardpay status
/hazardpay settier
/hazardpay reset
/hazardpay summon

These are available to server operators, as well as the host of a singleplayer world even if cheats are disabled.

If you want to reach the really ridiculous tiers naturally, though, prepare to spend some time waiting for traders to show up.

Compatibility

Hazard Pay works in both singleplayer and multiplayer. On servers, everyone shares the same ledger, so the entire world gets to live with each other's decisions.

One compatibility note: Hazard Pay replaces the renderers for wandering traders and trader llamas so their armour can be displayed.

If another mod also replaces or heavily changes the appearance of those same entities, the two may conflict, and whichever renderer loads last will usually win.

On NeoForge, Hazard Pay does not add mixins to trading, spawning or AI. The Fabric version only uses two small mixins, so it should play nicely with most mods unless they are also trying to repaint the wandering trader caravan.