Recruits: Living Villages

An addon for Recruits by Talhanation.

Recruits gives you soldiers you can command. This addon gives them a home worth fighting for.

Living Villages turns Recruits factions into settlements that live their own lives. They grow, put their people to work, collect taxes, raise armies, and go to war with each other. Best of all, none of it stops when you walk away. A village keeps growing and fighting in chunks that aren't even loaded, so the world you come back to is never the world you left.

What makes it different

Most village mods only do anything while you're standing there watching. Living Villages runs a lightweight simulation for every faction at all times, then rebuilds the settlement and its army out of that simulation the moment you get close. Walk off and it captures everyone back into the model, injuries, inventories, and all. Nothing is faked and nothing is frozen. The village you find is the exact village the simulation has been quietly running for hours.

Key features

Villages that actually grow

Every faction advances on its own clock. Population rises, civilians are trained into soldiers, new houses and workshops go up, workers earn promotions, and the treasury fills from taxes. All of it happens whether or not a player is nearby. Villages naturally generate where vanilla villages belong, (plains, desert, savanna, snowy, and taiga) + forests and birch forests. Each building constructed fits itself to the local ground.

An emerald economy driven by taxes

Emeralds are the one currency, and taxes are how a village earns them. Every villager contributes at each collection, and skilled workers pay more than the jobless, so a prosperous, well employed town funds bigger armies and grander building projects. Recruits and structures are paid for out of that same treasury.

Real jobs, real food

Farms and butchers employ villagers who feed the standing army on a harvest cadence. Workers climb five ranks from Novice to Master as they gain experience, producing more and better food at every tier. When you're watching, the work shows: fields are cut, replanted, and grown, and paddock livestock are raised and slaughtered on the same timer.

Soldiers with a chain of command

Each army answers to a leader. In peacetime a couple of recruits escort the leader on patrol while the rest wander the claim off duty, and everyone still turns to fight the moment the village is threatened. Leaders are marked out by their gear, and if one falls, another is promoted on the spot. Soldiers gain levels over time, which sharpens their combat power.

War, siege, and conquest

Factions go to war, and so can you. Declare war on a rival, rally your side during the join window, then deploy to siege the enemy claim in a Recruits siege. Factions fight as a whole: every village of the attacking side commits troops, and the defenders call in reinforcements from their other settlements.

Winning doesn't wipe a village off the map. Conquest is an occupation. The defeated settlement survives under its new banner, a garrison stays behind to hold it, a share of its wealth flows to the conqueror's capital, and a fresh leader is raised from the survivors. Factions become capitals with a network of villages, and the map's balance of power shifts over time.

Battles that resolve even when nobody is looking

When two AI factions clash far from any player, the fight is settled by a detailed power model that weighs troop type, level, gear, home advantage, and a little luck, then hands out casualties to both sides. Ambitious factions will hunt down weaker neighbours on their own, so the political map keeps moving while you're off doing something else.

Command a village of your own

Stand in a town hall and say "I would like to join your army", or use /rvjoin, and the village is yours to lead. Declare its wars, hire your own troops into named groups with your own emeralds, and earn an emerald bonus for helping win a siege in person.

A proper village terminal

Every settlement has a clean, tabbed screen covering Overview, Resources, Taxes, Construction, Population, Roster, and Employment, with live updating bars and timers and a dropdown to browse across a whole faction. Open it by right clicking the lectern at the heart of any town hall or with /rvvillage. The roster even shows each soldier's real, currently worn equipment, right down to gear looted off the battlefield.

A guide in your first pages

New players are handed a written tutorial book on their first join, tailored to how they play: a settler's guide in survival, or a full command reference in creative.

Optional battlefield looting

With henkelmax's Corpse installed, the aftermath of a battle becomes lootable. Recruits scavenge food and better gear from the fallen without ever abandoning a fight, and the field is cleared once the war is over. The feature stays completely dormant if Corpse isn't present.

Config Tuning

Nearly everything is exposed in the server config, from simulation speed and tax rates to war balance, generation density, and materialization range. Play it as a slow, peaceful settlement builder or a fast war of conquest.

Commands

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.20.1 on Forge
• Recruits by Talhanation (version 1.15.2 or newer). This mod does nothing without it.
• Optional but reccomended: Corpse by henkelmax, for battlefield looting.
• Optional but reccomended: Preformance Mods like: Entity Culling, Let Me Despawn, and Radium.

Upcoming Features

Living Villages is in active development. Feedback and bug reports are genuinely welcome and shape what gets built next. Polishes and Bug Fixes will come out over time.

• AI Chunk Claiming
• Armour Smith, Weapon Smith and Leather Gear
• Gold Mine, and Gold Gear
• Iron Mine, and Iron Gear
• Diamond Mine, and Diamond Gear
• Villager Workers Intergration
• Immersive, and Overhauled Seiges
• New and Varied Structures

Not affiliated with Talhanation. Recruits is required and is the work of its own author.