Recruits: Living Villages

1.1.0

A large release, and the one that finally fixes the duplication. It also carries relations between factions, markers on the world map, faction colours, per-soldier experience and the guide.

If you have ever walked into one of your own villages and found a crowd of hundreds of villagers, your frames in single figures and the server struggling to keep up, the fixes below are the reason to update.

Features Added

Relations. Every faction now holds an opinion of every other, built from things a ruler would actually weigh: how close their border runs, whether their claim presses against yours, whether there is blood between you, how long the peace has held, and whether you happen to fear the same neighbour. Positive on both sides and two factions become allies; Negative enough and they declare each other enemies, which is what lets an AI faction start planning a war. The Diplomacy tab lists every faction you know of with its banner, its standing and both sides' scores, and clicking one shows exactly what is driving it.

Alliances mean something. An ally is bound to your wars. When one of you is attacked, the other marches, and its villages muster and commit exactly as your own do.

Faction markers on the world map. Every village is now marked at the centre of its claim: a crown for a faction's capital, a star for one that has been conquered or is too weak to attack anybody, and crossed swords for one under siege. Beneath each is that village's garrison size, which is the number you actually want when deciding where to march. Siege markers appear the instant a siege begins, wherever you are.

Faction armour colours. Without Epic Knights, a village's soldiers now wear an armour trim of their own: the metal or gem nearest their banner colour, in a pattern no other faction of that colour uses. Two armies meeting in a field are finally told apart at a glance, and a village taken in war is re-coloured into its new owner's arms.

A proper guide. The first-join book has been replaced by a tabbed, scrollable guide covering the whole mod, from how a village lives to how a siege is won. Right-click the guide, or type /rvguide. Creative players get a full command reference as an extra section.

/rvfaction why <name>. Says in plain words why a village is not growing: saving up for a building, full with nothing queued, or out of ground. All three used to look identical from the outside.

The relations atlas. /rvrelations (creative) opens the whole map's diplomacy in one window: every faction in the world, strongest first, and behind each one its army and its opinion of all the others. Click a faction to read it, click one of its relations to see exactly what is driving the number.

/rvcleanup [village] (operators). Clears a village — or every village in the world — of anyone its records do not account for, and tells you what it removed. For worlds that were played on an earlier version and already carry the crowds: run it once and they are gone, without having to walk into the village to do it. If a village is too far away to read completely it says so, and asks to be run again from closer.

Features Polished

Soldiers earn their own experience. Rank was previously a village-wide pool handed out one promotion at a time, which meant veterans never developed. Every soldier now carries what he has learned: a little for time served, much more for a kill, and most of all for coming through a siege. Rank also gets harder to earn as it rises, so climbing from level 10 to 20 takes twice as long as reaching 10 did, and the ceiling has been raised from 10 to 20 to match Recruits' own.

Looted gear is put to use rather than worn as it was found. Ordinarily a captured piece stays exactly what it is and only its trim changes into your colours. With Epic Knights, where a set is the badge of a troop type, it is re-made into the kit that soldier's sort wears and the original goes into his pack. Captured shields are repainted with your banner in both cases.

Cavalry are given room. Horsemen and nomads are now placed in a clearing rather than whatever gap the formation happened to land on, so a mounted contingent in a forest can actually ride out of where it started.

Gunners carry the right ammunition. Where Musket Mod is installed, a village's gunners are issued cartridges instead of arrows, and their firearms no longer wear out in their hands.

Construction tells you what it is waiting for. The tab now distinguishes a build that cannot be afforded from one the ground will not take, and a village that has run out of room says so.

Villages come alive as you approach, from the town hall outward, instead of appearing all at once. A village too far away for the server to keep loaded now stands finished and empty until you are close enough for its people to have somewhere real to stand.

Bugs Fixed

Villagers and recruits no longer duplicate. A village worked out how many of its people already existed by looking around for them. But since Minecraft 1.17 a chunk's blocks and its entities load separately, and the entities arrive a moment later — so a village that had just been loaded looked completely deserted, and built itself a second population on top of the one already standing there. Every approach added another set. They are persistent, so they never went away, and villagers you had never seen would pile up until the area was unplayable. The village now writes down which villager and which soldier each of its people is, so somebody standing in ground the game has not finished loading is simply out of sight, not missing.

The lag and the frame drops go with it. Loading a village used to force over a hundred chunks at once, generating terrain on the spot if it had to, and it did this every single time you came near one. That is gone, and so are the thousands of surplus entities it was creating.

Villagers sleep. Villagers now sleep in their beds, a bug looped them in the "finding bed" stage which forced them to be stuck next to their beds.

Upgrading a house no longer scatters the old one across the floor. Lanterns, flowers, rose bushes, pressure plates and doors were being knocked loose as items when the larger house went up over the smaller one. Nothing the mod builds will drop the blocks it replaces any more — that also covers roads, foundations, tree clearing and mine rebuilds.

Butchers keep three animals. Fixed alongside the duplication bug.

Distant villages actually join their faction's wars. A village too far away to have troops standing in the world contributed nothing, silently — including, sometimes, the one that declared the war, which is why an attack could occasionally arrive with nobody in it. Its men are now raised at the battlefield instead. Survivors whose home is too far away to return to are stood down into the village's records rather than sent somewhere they would vanish.