Recall: Villager Overhaul

Villagers that notice you.

Vanilla villagers are furniture. They shuffle between a bed and a workstation, ignore a creeper until it is practically touching them, and treat the player who just murdered their neighbour exactly like the one who has been trading emeralds all week.

Recall rebuilds villager behaviour around a simple idea: villagers should be aware of what is happening around them, and they should remember it.

Awareness

Villagers get a real line of sight: a 50 block forward facing cone, blocked by walls and terrain, but not by glass. They watch for hostile mobs, drawn weapons, and violence.

They react far earlier than vanilla. A villager who spots something dangerous panics, runs, and tries to get indoors, pathing to a bed rather than flailing about in the open. If there is no shelter to reach, they scatter away from the threat instead.

Reputation, per village

Every village keeps its own opinion of you.

Defend a village by killing hostile mobs inside its borders and you earn standing there: cheaper trades, and villagers who level toward master faster.

Attack its residents, break its buildings, or kill its animals, and that village turns on you. Its villagers refuse to trade, and flee when they see you coming.

Crucially, grudges are local. Raid one town and the next valley over neither knows nor cares. Your reputation is a relationship with a place, not a global score.

Reprisals

Push a village too far and it comes after you.

Hostile players are hunted by patrols: five villagers armed with iron swords, escorted by an iron golem. They spawn at a distance and walk in. Outrun them, wait out your sentence, or wipe the village out entirely. A village with no residents left has nobody to send.

Even without a patrol, villagers are not guaranteed to run. There is a chance one stands its ground with a stone sword instead of fleeing, defending its home against whatever frightened it, mob or player alike, then putting the sword away once the danger has passed.

A village that feels lived in

 
• Unemployed villagers gather at the bell to socialise, standing together, turning to face each other, and exchanging pleasantries.
 
• Villagers occasionally approach you, once or twice a day at most. They stop a respectful distance away, look at you, and then leave you alone. They will not follow you around.
 
• Villages grow toward 20 or more residents, with iron golems scaling to match the population.
 
• Village property is protected. Breaking generated cobblestone, planks, doors or the bell frightens and angers the locals. Blocks that you placed are never protected, so dismantling your own house costs you nothing.
 
• Villagers watch player fights. Two players duelling draws a crowd of spectators rather than a stampede, right up until someone swings at a bystander. At that point the crowd becomes a panic.

Configuration

89 settings, all editable in game through Mod Menu, or by hand in a heavily commented config.yml.

Every setting is documented in the file itself, including how each default compares to vanilla behaviour. Editing in game preserves those comments, and the file updates itself when new settings are added.

Vision range and cone angle · fear thresholds and speeds · social frequency and particles · village population and golem scaling · trade discounts and progression · protected block lists · hostility penalties and sentence length · patrol composition and behaviour · defender chance and stats · performance tuning.

Requirements

Cloth Config is bundled, so you do not need to download it separately.

Compatibility

Recall is server side. All behaviour runs on the server, so vanilla clients can join a server running it without installing anything themselves.

It does not replace the villager entity and it does not add custom mobs. It extends vanilla villagers directly, so villages, trading, breeding and existing worlds all continue to work normally. Drop it into a world you are already playing and your villages come to life where they stand.

Note for multiplayer: the config that matters is the server's. The in game screen edits your local copy, which has no effect on a remote server. The screen will tell you so when you open it.