MCA: Crime

MCA: Crime 0.8.0 — November 14, 2026

This is a major update focused on expanding crime and justice gameplay, introducing new ways to enforce the law, improving NPC behavior, and making the entire system more reliable. It also brings expanded Townstead compatibility, new equipment, improved prisoner interactions, and plenty of bug fixes.

What's New and Improved

• New Guard Service: Players can now join a village's guard force, go on duty, and take assignments involving patrols, arrests, investigations, prisoner escorts, recovering stolen goods, and rescues. Complete your duties lawfully to earn rewards, but committing crimes yourself can cost you your position.
• NPCs Can Now Commit Serious Crimes: Villagers can become criminals themselves, stealing from others, threatening people, attacking, or even kidnapping. Their actions can lead to witnesses, investigations, arrests, and criminal cases just like player crimes. This feature is optional and disabled by default.
• Permanent Village Jails: Newly created worlds can now establish permanent village jails with dedicated cells for prisoners, replacing the need to rely entirely on temporary holding cells. Existing worlds retain their previous jail settings unless changed by an administrator.
• New Gallows and Cord Snare: Added a functional gallows for authorized executions and a cord snare that temporarily restrains anyone who triggers it. Both expand the available detention equipment and interactions.
• Improved Prisoner Handling: Restrained prisoners can now be physically escorted and placed into pillories, guillotines, and gallows. You can select individual prisoners when leading multiple people, and the system checks whether you're legally allowed to detain them.
• New Field Guide: Added a craftable, 15-chapter guide covering the mod's equipment, mechanics, laws, and features. Each chapter includes step-by-step instructions and information about the rules currently enabled on your server. Access it through /crime guide.
• Case Evidence and Investigations: Criminal cases can now include witness statements, recovered belongings, arrest and rescue details, photographs, and submitted evidence. Investigations better distinguish verified events from player claims.
• Expanded Locks Reforged Compatibility: Unauthorized lockpicking can now be treated as a crime when ownership and property laws establish an offense. Lock owners, authorized key holders, and officers performing lawful duties are protected from false accusations. Improved support for detecting successful lockpicking and preventing duplicate charges.
• Improved Lockpicking: Fixed issues involving interaction distance, restrained players, interrupted attempts, and protected containers. Lockpicking now verifies that the target remains valid throughout the attempt.
• Expanded Townstead 0.8.0 Compatibility: Updated integration with Townstead's newer API while retaining support for older versions. Improved handling of village buildings, equipment, prisoner needs, dietary restrictions, and interactions.
• Optional Townstead Chronicle Integration: Completed restitution, civic service, and prisoner care can now contribute to Townstead's Chronicles when enabled. Additional integration improvements help connect criminal activity with village life and reputation.
• Improved Restraint Animations: Handcuffs, shackles, hoods, and detention equipment now display more accurately on MCA villagers, including their clothing layers. Fixed animation issues that could affect other villagers' models.
• Improved Detention and Sentencing: Fixed prisoners being affected by disappearing holding cells, interrupted sentences, and execution-related errors. Lawful executions are now correctly recognized without incorrectly charging the responsible player with a crime.
• Improved Guillotine and Pillory: Added clearer feedback when interacting with detention equipment, including placement restrictions, prisoner status, execution progress, and reasons an action cannot be performed. Fixed several problems involving execution timing, prisoner selection, and device behavior.
• Improved Commands and Targeting: Commands such as /crime mug, /crime report, and villager job management now identify the villager you're actually looking at instead of selecting the wrong nearby entity. Error messages also explain why an action failed.
• Expanded Help System: Added /crime help with dedicated topics covering commands, targeting, detention equipment, keys, key rings, key molds, and masks. Equipment tooltips now provide clearer explanations and point players toward relevant instructions.
• Improved Keys and Key Rings: Key rings now correctly display the server's capacity limits, preserve custom key names, and provide clearer messages when binding or using keys fails. Blank key molds can also be imprinted using an existing key in the crafting grid.
• Complete Mask Dyeing Support: All 16 mask styles now support all 16 Minecraft dyes, with improved textures that preserve each mask's original details. Masks can be recolored, washed clean in a cauldron, and found in a dedicated creative inventory tab.
• Improved Crafting Discovery: Standard crafting recipes now unlock naturally in Minecraft's recipe book as players discover ingredients. More specialized recipes are explained through the mod's help system.
• Improved Multiplayer Performance: Optimized restraint synchronization so players only receive updates about relevant nearby entities, reducing unnecessary network traffic and preventing outdated visual states.
• More Configuration Options: Added additional controls for NPC crime, jail management, lock tampering, detention equipment, Townstead integration, and other gameplay systems.

Additional Improvements

Numerous fixes and improvements have been made to prisoner handling, equipment interactions, crime detection, permissions, server synchronization, configuration validation, compatibility, and overall stability.

MCA: Crime now offers a much deeper justice system, where players can serve as guards, villagers can commit crimes, evidence matters, and villages have more ways to enforce their laws.

Important Update Information

• Multiplayer: Both clients and servers must update to 0.8.0 due to network protocol changes.
• World compatibility: Existing worlds are supported and automatically migrated, with previous jail policies preserved.
• Backups: Back up your world before updating. This version updates saved-world data, so downgrading should only be done by restoring a compatible backup.
• Optional features: Serious NPC crimes, unlawful detention-device interactions, and new Townstead Chronicle features are disabled by default and can be enabled through configuration.