HELM

Following, with a two column picker for mobs and players.

Following

$follow is new. It walks after mobs and players and keeps going until $stop, or until nothing matches for long enough.

$follow zombie
$follow zombie skeleton
$follow Notch
$follow Notch Steve zombie

There is no keyword and no mode to choose. A name is either a mob or a player and HELM works out which, so mobs and players mix freely in one command, and every name written is followed at once.

The picker

Typing $follow opens a two column picker straight away: every mob in the game on the left, players in the world on the right. Typing narrows both at once, ← and → cross between them, ↑ and ↓ move within one, and clicking or pressing Tab writes the highlighted name in without sending anything. The picker stays open, so Space and a second pick adds another name.

$follow [Tab]
$follow zom[Tab] [Space] ske[Tab] [Space] Notch[Tab]

Each mob is shown with its kind beside it, and the search matches on that too, so typing monster narrows to every hostile mob at once.

Only mobs

The picker lists mobs and nothing else. The game files every entity type into a category, and everything that is not a living creature is misc, so the picker takes every category except that one. That leaves the 86 mobs of the game and leaves out the 72 things there is nothing to walk after:

Writing one of those by hand is refused by name, as is any name that is neither a mob nor a player currently in the world. Player names are matched every tick rather than remembered, so someone who logs out and comes back is picked up again.

How close it stands

The spot HELM stands in is worked out from the target every tick, and the walk is dropped and searched again whenever the spot it was heading for stops counting. How close that spot counts as arrived, and where the spot sits relative to the target, are both settings:

$set follow.radius 0
$set follow.verticalRadius 0
$set follow.offsetDistance 5
$set follow.offsetDirection 180

Radius across and radius up or down are separate, so a mob on a ledge can be followed without being on its level. A vertical offset puts the spot above or below the target, which is how you follow something that is flying. Holding an exact five block gap is a radius of 0 with an offset distance of 5.

Which target

By default every match is a target at once and HELM works towards whichever is cheapest to reach. Three settings change that:

keepTarget is the one for a crowd: without it, ten zombies wandering around make the follow switch between all ten.

Timing

Three settings decide how patient it is:

A target that steps behind a wall or across a chunk boundary is not the end of the follow. waitTicks covers that, and after it runs out HELM says Nothing left to follow. and stops itself.

Getting there

What HELM may do on the way is three more settings, which only ever narrow what movement already allows:

Turning the last two off is what makes following non-destructive. It cannot follow a target through a wall or over a gap, but it will never modify the world to do it.

Watching

Following never touches your camera by default. follow.lookAtTarget turns it onto the target whenever HELM is standing still, and follow.maxLookPitch stops the camera flipping when the target is directly above or below.

Other changes

• $stop now ends a follow, and says Following stopped. when one was running
• $goto, $autogoto, $autolookat, $farm, $mine and starting a macro each end a running follow, the same way they end each other
• Leaving the world ends it
• Commands can now take a list of names as one argument, which is what the follow command uses

See USAGE.md for every follow command, and SETTINGS.md for all nineteen follow settings.