Middle-earth Kinship

v1.4.0 - Something to lose

Your company stopped being a service you buy. A fighter you have marched with for weeks will tell you his own name, ask to stay for nothing, and remember it if you say no. And the world around him answers better: everyone speaks to you, your men fight for you, and one word calls them off.

• He asks to stay for good - after some five or six weeks together, with the paid term running out, a fighter says in chat that he would rather not go. Talk to him and he asks it properly. Say yes and there is no term and no wage any more: he stays until you let him go, hands back what you paid for the days he will not be a hireling for, and greets you from then on as one of your own rather than as a man on your payroll. Every fighter has his own day for asking, drawn when he was born, so no two ask at once.
• You cannot refuse him coldly - the only answer besides keeping him is that you should part for now, and it changes nothing today: he serves out what was paid and leaves at the end of it. What it changes is what he remembers.
• And he remembers it - most take a parting well and sign on again as before. About a third are hurt by it and want asking more than once, with their own excuses each time: usually one more asking, and in the rarest case seven, which is a story rather than a mechanic. A very few have quietly found another road by the time you come back, and tell you so kindly, and mean it. None of it costs a copper more: the hurt is not in the money. Your own line changes too - you no longer offer work to a man you once let go, you ask him to come again.
• He tells you his name himself - if you never thought to ask, somewhere around the tenth day of service he says it anyway, because walking beside somebody that long and staying nameless is not how people are.
• Nobody is mute any more - an NPC with nothing to sell used to give you a red line and no conversation at all, which was half the world. Now everyone talks, and the ones with an empty stall refuse in their own words: a dwarf is a smith and not a shopkeeper, a hobbit has not a spare spoon and the spare spoon is promised. Around a hundred new lines per language, by people and by kind.
• A temper of their own - one in eight is busy, one in ten thinks well of himself, one in twelve has no warmth for strangers, and the rest simply talk to you. It is a trait and not a mood: the farmhand who was short with you last winter is short with you today. It colours the greeting and the refusal and forbids nothing.
• Your company fights for you - whoever raises a hand against you becomes their enemy, and whatever you strike, they strike, with no judgement about what it is. They also go for wargs, trolls and the walking dead on sight, out to sixteen blocks, without waiting for you to bleed first. Creepers and endermen are left alone on purpose, and the list is yours to edit.
• They will not touch your own - not you, not each other, not what you are riding, not your tamed beasts, not the mount you whistle for. Even a stray swing of your own at your horse will not turn three armed men on it. Middle-earth's own goal for hunting horses is taken off a hireling entirely, since it could not tell a warg from your mare.
• One word calls them off - type стоп or stop in chat, or /mekinship stop. Everyone within thirty-two blocks lowers their weapons: for a minute if they were fighting a player or a farmer's cow, for two seconds if it was a troll, because a companion standing still in front of a troll is a companion you are about to bury.
• Terms up to sixty days - it was thirty, which no longer made sense once an oath waits at the far end of five or six weeks.
• Weapons on a counter make sense now - the number of blades was left to the shuffle, so one soldier laid out eight and the next sold a single dagger. A warrior now shows four on average and never fewer than two, with the whole rack appearing now and then; Dale, which lives by resale, keeps four at the least and a good deal more on average. An ordinary townsman carries none four times in five, and the odd blade in a farmhouse is worth noticing again. Thin catalogues were filled out to match.
• Arrows land (experimental) - an arrow that struck somebody who had been hit a moment earlier by somebody else was thrown away entirely, and bounced off. That is vanilla's ten ticks of grace after every blow, inside which a weaker hit counts for nothing, and in a Middle-earth melee a sword hits harder than an arrow, so most arrows loosed into a fight vanished. It read as though the folk of Middle-earth were dodging. An arrow is now a wound of its own; melee is untouched, and you keep your own grace unless you turn it off. Both switches are in the config and marked experimental there.
• Two fixes worth naming - a hireling of yours could refuse to discuss his own service, because the answer to "would he take work" is drawn from his strength and service makes him stronger. And "sit and rest" did nothing at all if he had ever been in a fight: nothing cleared a dead enemy from his mind, and every standing order asks whether he is fighting first.
• Claim and whistle without the keys - /mekinship bond and /mekinship call do exactly what K and R do, for a crowded keyboard. Both open to anyone, like /mekinship stop: your own horse and your own company are not the server's business.

v1.3.0 - Whistle for your horse

• Whistle for your mount - claim the beast you are riding with one key, and call it with another from wherever you left it. It comes out of a sleeping chunk, across a world if need be, and is set down on ground that will hold it rather than in your own body. Everything you ride answers: horses, donkeys, mules, skeleton horses, and Middle-earth's own Great Horn, warg and broadhoof goat. Somebody else's tamed animal is not yours to call. Both keys are rebindable in Controls; the whistle is silent for now.
• A mount that falls can be raised - its saddle, its armour, its chest and everything in it come back with it, because the beast is written out whole while it is beside you and not on the day you claimed it. One switch in the config makes death final instead.
• A Great Horn will take an apple - the beast is tamed by berries, a dandelion and three of Middle-earth's own plants, none of which you carry by accident. An apple now works too, added to their own list rather than replacing it.
• Drink costs what it does to you - every tankard grants an effect, and the weakest of them used to cost less than a single steak. The whole ladder moved from three-to-thirty-five silver up to fifteen-to-sixty, spaced so that strength reads off the price.
• The stall scrolls - the trade window grew a row taller for every ware with no ceiling, so a trader with ten lines pushed the bottom of the list off a small screen entirely, and there was nothing to scroll with. Five rows now, fewer on a short window, the rest on the wheel, with a bar down the right side.

v1.2.0 - Seasoned by the road

Written from a long play session and everything it turned up. Your company no longer gets lost behind you, the screen no longer lies to you, and a fighter who has seen fighting is the better for it.

• Built for Middle-earth 1.0.1 - that release renamed the NPC data underneath, which crashed the game the moment you spoke to anyone. Fixed, and the mod now needs 1.0.1 or newer: a build for it cannot run on 1.0.0.
• Strike your own coin - heat an ingot, lay it on a shaping anvil and hammer it out: nine copper from a copper ingot, five silver from silver, one gold from gold, since gold is soft and grudging under the hammer. Bronze is not minted - no coin was ever struck from it. It is deliberately worth less than selling the metal, so it makes change on the road rather than money. The coin comes off the anvil as plain coin, with none of the maker's marks the anvil leaves on everything else, so it stacks with what a trader hands you.
• They stop getting left behind - walk a thousand blocks, ride, take a boat, step through a portal: your company catches up. The old follow only ever ran while the fighter's own chunk was awake, so anyone you outran simply froze on the spot until you came back for them. Now the server goes and fetches them.
• They land on their feet - a fighter brought to your side is set down on ground that will hold them: never in your own body, never in lava or a wall, never over a drop, and never all three of them on one block. If there is nowhere safe beside you, nobody is moved rather than dropped into the dark.
• You cannot cut down your own - a stray swing in a melee no longer kills the fighter you paid for, nor turns them on you through the mod's own revenge. Two switches in the config give the sharper world back. A fallen fighter frees their place in your company at once.
• A fighter grows with the fighting - every kill nudges one of four things a little: how much they can take, how hard they hit, how true they shoot, how much their armour turns. Each is born leaning towards one of them, so two hirelings of the same rank are different men after a season - and about one in seven grows against his own grain, which is a person and not a fault. A full line is worth some five health or a fifth on the bow: growth you notice, not a hero.
• "Show me what you can do" - a new line in the conversation. They answer in their own voice, and under it you read what service has made of them: the fallen behind them, their health, their blow, their armour and what their hand adds to an arrow.
• The trade screen tells the truth - your own coins now move as you spend them, buy buttons go dark when the purse empties, the exchange slider follows what you actually hold, and hiring someone turns the hire form into an order form without reopening the window.
• Fuller stalls - an ordinary trader now shows seven or eight lines where they showed four, and a rich one is plainly rich. A rare find adds to the shelf rather than pushing a loaf off it.
• Elves trade like elves - out go the loaf, carrot and egg they used to share with every other people; in come lembas, mallorn, lanterns and candles, elven boots and coats, a diadem, and the tools and blades of edhel steel that nobody in the world used to sell. Their bows differ from stall to stall now, and a foreign blade at an elf's counter is the rare curiosity it should be.
• Boots, arrows and the rest - not one of the thirty-one stalls sold a single pair of boots, and five peoples out of seven sold no arrows at all. Both fixed, along with leg armour, helms of other kits, cram at the dwarven counters and the odd torch.
• Knights and lords will speak to you - every knight, captain, marshal and lord in the world had no wares to their rank, and an NPC with nothing to sell would not open a conversation at all. They have their own stalls now.
• A cloak costs what cloth costs - the six capes and hoods on sale were priced at eight to twelve gold, dearer than a steel sword, for four lengths of fabric and a nugget. Now they run from ninety silver to a gold and a half.
• Every people asks its own price - the merchant town of Dale lives on reselling and undercuts everyone by nearly half, Erebor is easy on metal, Rohan and Lorien charge over the odds for what they make. Worth the walk, and never worth buying in one valley to sell in the next: a trader pays a fifth of their own asking price, so the road to a cheap market is a reward and not a money press.
• Waystones can be built here - Middle-earth has no ender pearls, which quietly made every waystone recipe impossible. They are re-cut from the stones this world does have: adamant, ruby, sapphire and mithril for a warp stone, a sapphire and an amethyst shard for dust, a ruby and gold nuggets for scrolls. Optional - only added if you have the mod.
• Farmer's Delight knows Middle-earth's harvest - its cabbages, onions and tomatoes now sit in the common crop and food tags, so they work in Farmer's Delight recipes rather than lying in a chest beside their own twin. Optional in the same way.
• Names stand alone - a fighter who gives you their name is called by it, with no game title trailing in brackets. The title is still the heading of every conversation with them, which is where a rank belongs.

Built for Minecraft 1.21.8 · Fabric · requires Fabric API and the Middle-earth mod.