Sapience: Living Villagers

Beta.354 - Changes since beta.336

This is the first CurseForge build of Sapience and a major polish pass over the villager brain, survival, building, gathering, combat and village life.

• Rebuilt how villagers hold tools and weapons. Work tools, swords and armor now follow the villager’s actual body and movement instead of floating or using mismatched player poses.

• Reworked fear, fleeing and village defence. Villagers commit to real escape routes instead of constantly changing direction, guards rally when the village is attacked, capable friends can help somebody in immediate danger, and civilians still retreat from fights they cannot realistically win.

• Fixed villagers continuing to run after danger was already gone. A completed escape now hands control back to normal needs, work and social life instead of leaving the villager trapped in permanent panic.

• Hardened first-day survival. Villagers respond to damaging plants, fire, water, cliffs, pits, suffocation risks and hostile pressure even when the player is not nearby.

• Improved homes and construction. Builders choose safer and more affordable land, return to the surface before starting surface projects, protect doors and paths, avoid burying villagers, and prove that a finished entrance is actually reachable.

• Improved shared houses and sleeping. Beds are assigned to different residents properly, villagers can operate doors along their sleep route, shared entrances stay open while somebody is passing, and broken beds or doors are treated as real damage.

• Construction projects now remember who started them, what materials were funded and what remains unfinished. Interrupted work can continue after saving and loading instead of silently becoming a different project.

• Reworked mining and stone gathering. Villages share productive mine entrances, prospecting follows stable passages, abandoned shafts are cleaned up, mining avoids protected blocks and unsafe openings, and workers no longer leave scattered one-block holes around the village.

• Improved farming and wood gathering. Crops pay their real seed cost before replanting, trees require real saplings to regrow, woodcutters finish the natural connected trunk they chose, and farms avoid dangerous drops, buildings, paths and mine openings.

• Gathering now follows conservation. Failed world changes do not create free materials, item pickup cannot duplicate or delete leftovers, and villagers cannot collect items through walls.

• Refined conversations so villagers stay with one real listener and respond to what was actually said. Speech remains grounded in real relationships, memories, emotions and events rather than unrelated generated lines.

• Strengthened persistent identity. Relationships, grief, grudges, families, homes and important memories survive saving and loading more reliably.

• Zombie curing can restore a converted villager’s original identity. Villagers transformed into witches by lightning can retain the trust and relationships they earned unless later events give them a reason to betray the village.

• Redesigned graves and graveyards. Each settlement now establishes its own safe cemetery with organized rows, named graves and space protected from later construction. Flowers only appear when a real mourner brings one.

• Improved large-village performance by reusing short-lived deterministic planning results instead of repeatedly scanning the same farms, trees and mines. This does not skip the final safety checks before villagers change the world.

• Expanded deterministic testing across combat, construction, gathering, saving and loading, transformations, long-running survival, rendered conversations, equipment and large villages.

Sapience remains fully local and offline. It does not use an LLM, cloud service, account or external API.

Requires Fabric API and Java 21. Install the same Sapience jar on the server and every connecting client.

This is still a beta, so please back up any important world before installing or updating.

Player trading is still being redesigned and is not available in this build. Right-click greets a villager, while sneaking and offering an item gives it as a gift.