Sapience: Living Villagers

## Sapience beta.355

This update is mostly about fixing the problems I found after beta.354 and making villagers behave more consistently during long play sessions.

### Survival and village defence

- Assigned defenders are much better at waking up and protecting the village instead of fighting briefly and then running away.
- Villagers stop panicking once the danger has actually passed and return to their normal needs.
- Villagers hit by arrows or tridents now remember the real shooter.
- Civilians still retreat from fights they realistically cannot win.
- Villagers make better use of homes, cover, safe terrain, and nearby defenders while escaping.
- Fire, deep water, dangerous drops, suffocation, damaging plants, and crowd pressure properly interrupt normal work.

### Conversations and relationships

- Villagers can now hold connected back-and-forth conversations instead of saying unrelated lines.
- They face each other, remember the current subject, and respond to what was actually said.
- Speech changes based on personality, age, mood, relationships, work, grief, danger, recent events, and time of day.
- Villagers should no longer talk about things they never witnessed or learned about.
- Gifts, apologies, attacks, friendship, grudges, family, grief, and village history have more lasting effects.
- Revenge and village justice are more proportional. A small disagreement cannot suddenly turn into murder.
- Villagers understand the difference between temporary separation, loneliness, losing somebody, and being reunited.

### Gathering and building

- Woodcutters finish connected trees instead of leaving floating logs behind.
- Saplings avoid houses, farms, doors, paths, work areas, unsafe ground, and nearby trees.
- Farmers use real seeds, protect farmland, avoid unreachable fields, and return full inventories to storage.
- Miners share structured shafts with usable stairs instead of digging random holes around the village.
- Interrupted mining work can remember unfinished cleanup after saving and reloading.
- Builders now protect existing homes, farms, paths, doors, storage, residents, and other structures.
- Construction projects keep their materials, progress, interruptions, and ownership through reloads.
- Villagers can identify and repair important broken parts such as beds, doors, ladders, lights, chests, furnaces, and crafting tables.

### Movement and equipment

- Removed the artificial wobbling from ordinary movement.
- Villagers keep useful paths for longer and brake around dangerous drops.
- Tools and weapons sit more naturally in their hands and only animate when being used.
- Armor follows the villager’s body more accurately and scales properly for children.
- Speech gestures no longer interfere with held tools or weapons.

### Transformations and graveyards

- Known villagers can retain their identity and history when transformed into zombies or witches.
- Curing the same zombie villager can restore the original person instead of creating a blank replacement.
- Villages can establish their own persisted graveyards with aligned rows and named graves.
- Graveyards avoid farms, paths, buildings, water, unsafe slopes, and occupied spaces.
- Flowers are no longer created from nothing. Somebody must actually bring one.

### Performance and reliability

- Farming, mining, tree, and emergency-food searches now reuse short-lived deterministic results instead of repeatedly scanning the same area.
- Construction no longer records hundreds of fake interruptions during reduced simulation.
- The release test successfully mined all 48 stone targets.
- The packed 80-villager test measured 6.7ms average and 8.6ms at the 99th percentile.
- The separate 250-villager stress test retained all 250 villagers.
- The exact beta.355 build passed determinism, survival, natural-world, movement, conversation, equipment, transformation, persistence, stress, and long-duration simulation testing.

### Important

- Fabric for Minecraft 1.21.1 only
- Fabric API required
- Fabric Loader 0.16.9 or newer
- Java 21 required
- NeoForge, Sinytra Connector, and other Minecraft versions are not supported by this file
- Right-clicking greets a villager instead of opening vanilla trading
- Sneak-interact is used to offer a gift
- This is still a save-writing beta, so please back up important worlds before updating

Sapience runs entirely through deterministic local game logic. It does not use a language model, external API, cloud service, account, or runtime network connection.