NeroColonies

Settle the planets you reached — drop a beacon, ship in supplies, and let colonist NPCs grow a self-sustaining off-world settlement that runs while you're away.

NeroColonies is the sci-fi colony & settlement mod of the Neroland ecosystem — a lightweight colony layer on top of the Neroland space arc, deliberately not a deep village-management sim. Claim a site on a discovered planet, anchor it with a colony beacon, ship in supplies, and watch automated colonists grow a settlement that produces rare off-world exports. Colonies are an automation and progression sink, not a micromanagement game — establish and upgrade them, then leave them ticking on the server.

Built on Neroland Core, so its power/upgrade-module framework, currency and reputation APIs, claim/permission layer, progression gates, c: compat tags, and shared data-erasure hook are shared with the rest of the lineup. (Planned — in design; not yet released.)

What you build

1. Colony command block. The beacon that anchors and governs a colony. Placing it claims a configurable radius and registers a new colony record — its block entity holds core state (claim bounds, roster, morale, research) backed by level-attached saved data, so the colony survives chunk unload and server restart. A GUI reports status and config, and it integrates with Core's claim/permission layer for placement and teardown rights.
2. Colonist NPCs. Automated worker entities that spawn against housing capacity, register on the job board, and pathfind between home, workplace, and storage. They're interchangeable labour units — not persistent personalities — carrying a job, a home, and a contribution to morale and output. AI tick rate and population are config-bounded and idle down when no owner is nearby.
3. Life support. On planets Nerospace flags as non-breathable, a colony must run an oxygen generator — a Core-powered machine burning fuel/power to keep a "life support OK" state on the colony. Drop it and morale falls, then colonists stop working, then the colony idles: a graceful failure curve, never instant death.
4. Food production chains. Colonists consume food from colony storage each cycle at a config-driven, per-colonist rate. Food is farmed by colonist jobs or shipped in — off-world food is harder, making it a real logistics decision. Any food-tagged item counts (Core compat tags).
5. Housing levels. Upgradeable dwellings — each research-unlocked tier raises colonist capacity and comfort, feeding morale. The colony scans housing within its claim and sums it into a capacity stat.
6. Colony morale. A per-colony 0–100 stat that modulates output. Good housing, steady food, and intact life support raise it; shortages, overcrowding, or life-support loss lower it. Low morale throttles work but never deletes colonists.
7. Automated jobs. The production engine — a job board of work slots, colonists filling them, each running a datapack-defined recipe on the server tick: inputs from storage in, outputs to storage or the export buffer out. Throughput scales with assigned colonists and morale.
8. Research trees. Colony-local progression. Spend accumulated colony resources at a research station to unlock higher housing tiers, more job slots, better oxygen efficiency, and new export recipes. The tree lives in datapacks so packs can retune it.
9. Colony exports. High-value surplus flagged for export accumulates in an export-buffer interface. NeroLogistics shipping drains and routes it home or to market; NeroEconomy prices and sells it via Core's currency API. Export tables are datapack-defined and research-gated.
10. Planetary outposts. Small forward bases that extend a colony's reach — resource nodes, relays, or staging points — tied to a parent colony, sharing its claim context with reduced colonist and job capacity, letting you spread across a planet incrementally.

Built to run while you're away

• 🛰️ Persistence is a feature — colonies tick on the server and produce passively within fuel, food, and morale limits, rewarding returning players.
• ⚙️ Performance-first — colony ticks are batched and throttled per-colony, colonist AI is capped and reduces when no owner is near, and server config bounds colony count, colonist count, claim radius, and tick budget.
• 🎛️ Tune or disable anything — production rates, oxygen fuel burn, food consumption, morale decay, research costs, and export buffer size are all server-config driven; job recipes, research nodes, housing tiers, and export tables are datapack-overridable.
• 🤝 Shared-world fairness — config governs minimum spacing between colonies and per-player/per-faction caps so a few players can't blanket a planet.

Privacy (POPIA / GDPR)

NeroColonies records player-linked data for gameplay and anti-grief: colony ownership and access logs (who entered, who changed jobs, who pulled from storage). This is kept to the minimum — UUID + action + timestamp only, never names, chat, IP, or location beyond the colony. Access logs auto-expire on a configurable, short default retention window and purge automatically. Admin/player commands export a player's colony records and erase them on request, routed through Core's shared data-erasure hook so one request purges you across every Neroland mod. Non-essential logging is opt-out, and anything optional defaults to off. Any crash telemetry stays anonymous and opt-out — version strings only, never personal data or world state.

Why it fits the ecosystem

• 🧩 Built on Neroland Core — one power/upgrade framework, one currency and reputation layer, one claim/permission system, one progression arc, and shared c: material tags. NeroColonies ships in its own creative tab.
• 🚀 The payoff for the space arc — it turns Nerospace's planets into places worth living, reading breathability and dimension data from Nerospace to gate life support. It closes the Earth → industrialise → space → colonies journey (Build #8) and seeds later mods with persistent, contestable off-world assets.
• 🔌 Interoperates, never hard-depends — synergy mods are detected at runtime: NeroAgriculture feeds colonists, NeroLogistics ships supplies and drains export buffers, and NeroEconomy prices and sells exports. External mods (Create, AE2, Mekanism, Ad Astra, Energized Power) interoperate through Core's common tags for power, items, and oxygen — no hard dependency on any of them.
• 🧱 Cross-loader — NeoForge, Forge, and Fabric on Minecraft 26.1.2 and 26.2.

Requirements & compatibility

• Requires Neroland Core — install it alongside NeroColonies (it loads first).
• Nerospace is a strong companion — it provides the planets to colonise and the breathability data that drives life support. Without it, colonies degrade gracefully to Earth-only and lose the off-world experience the mod is built around.
• Conventional c: tags and loader-native capabilities let Create, AE2, Mekanism, Ad Astra, and Energized Power interoperate for power, storage, and oxygen as the 26.x ecosystem fills in — no hard dependency on any of them.
• Modpacks are allowed and encouraged — any platform, no need to ask. Use the official files and credit NeroColonies by Neroland with links to this page and the GitHub repository. Full terms: LICENSE.

Links

• 📖 Wiki — every block, colony system, and setting documented.
• 💬 Discord — chat, help, and sneak peeks.
• 🐞 Issues — bug reports and feature requests.
• 🗒️ Changelog
• 🟢 Also on Modrinth

Created by Neroland. The project logo was made with the help of AI image tools; in-game art is generated by the project's own tooling and refined by hand.