Structure Roads

Grow a branching stone road network from discovered structures, with bridges, circular tunnels, gradual underground approaches and lanterns. Since 0.5.0, villages are no longer required to start the network.

This is an experimental alpha for Minecraft Java 1.20.1 with Forge. Use a separate test world or a backup. It changes terrain and is not a finished, universally compatible world-generation system.

Road Starter — 0.6.1

Craft 1 lantern + 1 stick + 1 stone or cobblestone, in any arrangement. Place the Road Starter on solid ground: it becomes a normal lantern and queues a connection toward a nearby completed road. If no suitable road is nearby, it starts a 96-block segment. Mining it returns a normal lantern; ordinary lanterns do not activate the network.

Placement re-enables automatic planning, retries eligible failed connections and unresolved entrances, and requests entrances for up to 16 nearby discovered structures without built connections, within 1,536 blocks. Planning is temporarily accelerated for 16 rounds; construction remains bounded and protected. This does not guarantee a safe connection to every structure or discover an entire world instantly.

The recipe, placement, lantern conversion, reactivation and temporary boost passed native Forge tests. The connection to an existing road passed horse checks at 227 positions across the baseline, branch and reactivated job. A starter without a nearby road passed another 97 positions.

Version 0.5.1 also fixed junction obstructions and allows structures with rejected attachments to start independent exits. Junctions may reuse nearby lanterns to keep the passage clear.

Features

• Roads can originate at confirmed structures with a safe entrance, including villages.
• Structures attach to nearby built roads; road ends grow toward other components and try bounded alternative routes.
• Clears logs and leaves inside the construction corridor, including Quark hollow logs, and can tunnel through natural mountain rock.
• Stone paving, short terrain fills, bridges with supports and lined circular tunnels.
• Half-block slopes and flat landings for underground approaches and junctions.
• Tunnel interior radius of 6 blocks, with an 11-block-wide flat floor. Final entrances inside buildings use a smaller 3-by-3 passage.
• One lantern per 16-block group along a road, alternating sides. Junctions may shift a lantern within its group to keep the route clear. Entrance passages also receive recessed lanterns.
• Protection checks for registered structures, chests and other block entities, portal frames, spawners, TNT and other protected blocks.
• Preflight validation before construction, checks against existing roads and a second approach when the first route is rejected before building.
• Saved discovery and construction progress, plus lighting updates for roads from earlier versions.
• A local browser map exported from the world. It can calculate routes over completed road segments.

Requirements and installation

• Minecraft Java Edition 1.20.1.
• Forge; tested with 47.4.10. Other Forge 47 builds have not been fully validated.
• Java 17 for this Minecraft version.

Put the JAR in the mods folder of a Forge installation. Keep only one version of Structure Roads installed. No additional library mod is required. The alpha was tested in single-player and on a local dedicated Forge server; no promise is made that clients can omit the mod.

Automatic planning starts enabled and is stored per dimension. Structure discovery follows loaded chunks; opening a world does not register every structure in Minecraft's infinite terrain. In 0.5.0 a structure with a verified entrance can start a road without a village or a manually constructed road.

Commands

Commands require operator permissions or cheats:

/structureroads status
/structureroads roads
/structureroads entrances
/structureroads locate villages
/structureroads locate minecraft:stronghold
/structureroads locate namespace:structure
/structureroads auto on
/structureroads auto off
/structureroads retry
/structureroads export
/structureroads build <fromX> <fromY> <fromZ> <toX> <toY> <toZ>

For build, Y is the walking-surface height. auto off prevents new automatic jobs; already queued work continues. retry can retry rejected approaches, unresolved entrances and failed lighting updates; it does not automatically repair every interrupted, partially built corridor.

export writes structureroads/index.html and structureroads/network.json inside the world folder. Open the HTML in a browser and load the JSON. Route finding uses the geometry of completed roads. This is an offline graph viewer, not a live player tracker or terrain map, and it does not use Google Maps services.

Tested behavior

Version 0.5.0 connected two pillager outposts and an igloo without villages: seven completed corridors, with horse movement checks at 1,063 positions. A tree and mixed-rock mountain test cleared oak, birch and moss, built 43 tunnel sections and passed 97 horse checks. An isolated copy of a heavily modded profile built two corridors; the first passed 97 horse checks. Some other approaches were rejected by protection or geometry checks. Existing structure mods supply bosses; Structure Roads does not add monsters.

Earlier versions:

Automated Minecraft movement and collision checks passed for approaches to a desert pyramid, an igloo, a stronghold, an ancient city and an illager campsite from When Dungeons Arise. These were controlled test placements; the ancient-city fixture used a prepared underground cavity.

The five branch routes and their final entrances passed horse-and-rider movement checks. All five baseline roads were checked again after the branches were built. Separate visible-client tests also checked a bridge, a tunnel and an underground descent with lanterns at night.

When Dungeons Arise is not required. Testing one of its structures does not guarantee compatibility with every structure from that mod or any other mod.

Current limitations

• Routes are bounded and orthogonal, not an unrestricted terrain-aware pathfinder.
• A corridor is limited to 1,024 horizontal steps, 250,000 planned block operations and 160 retained chunks. The stored road limit is 256 per dimension.
• The planner considers up to 256 nearby confirmed structures, within 1,536 blocks of players. Widely separated regions may remain disconnected.
• Entrances may remain UNRESOLVED when no safe passage is found. Fully submerged entrances are not comprehensively supported.
• Unknown mod blocks can cause an approach to be rejected. Only the listed cases have been functionally checked; the complete set of mods in any modpack has not been certified.
• Tree clearing is limited to the construction corridor, not the entire canopy. Natural-block and log player builds outside protected bounds cannot always be distinguished from natural terrain. Protection checks are not a complete claim-system integration or a guarantee against all damage.
• Construction and discovery use cooperative per-tick budgets. Individual chunk or block operations can still take longer; no FPS or tick-rate guarantee is made.

The gallery contains real Minecraft screenshots from controlled test worlds. Some entrance screenshots use night vision to show the geometry; the lantern-road night screenshot does not. The project icon is original AI-assisted promotional artwork, not a gameplay screenshot.

License: All Rights Reserved, as declared in the mod metadata. This is an independent project, not an official Minecraft, Mojang, Microsoft or CurseForge product.