Village Defenders 1.1.0 Beta Update

This build is a focused stability and testing update following the beta released earlier today. It improves civilian emergency behavior, raid diagnostics, defensive equipment presentation, and several systems identified during live testing.

Changes Since the Previous Beta

Civilian and Shelter Behavior

• Removed the settlement-center fallback that caused civilians to run toward seemingly random locations when no real shelter existed.
• Villagers without an available bed, home, or Shelter Marker now hold their position instead of repeatedly attempting an invalid route.
• Children separated from their guardian will first attempt to reunite with them.
• Guardian-child pairs without a valid shelter now remain together instead of continually running around.
• Villagers who successfully reach a real shelter stop restarting their shelter route.
• Withdrawing defenders no longer run toward the settlement center when neither shelter nor reachable golem support is available.

Raid and Threat Diagnostics

• Improved /defensivemod aggressors to display tracked threats across loaded settlements.
• The command now reports threat coordinates, distance, settlement ownership, settlement state, and assigned defender count.
• Raid diagnostics now include the positions and abbreviated IDs of claimed raiders.
• Improved settlement-state logging so repeated threat confirmation is no longer incorrectly described as a new escalation.

Shield Diagnostics

• Corrected shield logging so an active cooldown is reported only after a genuine shield-disabling attack.
• Ordinary blocked attacks now correctly report that the shield remains available.
• Axe attacks can still temporarily disable a Protector’s shield as intended.

Armor Presentation

• Villager helmets are now visually hidden.
• Helmets remain fully equipped and continue providing armor protection, enchantments, durability, and equipment-loan behavior.
• This prevents the distorted and heavily clipped humanoid helmet model from appearing on villager heads.
• Chest armor, leggings, boots, weapons and shields remain visible.

Confirmed During Live Testing

The latest testing confirmed that:

• Villagers respond to hostile player attacks.
• Defenders pursue and repeatedly attack confirmed aggressors.
• Creative-mode players are pursued, although attacks correctly deal no damage.
• Villagers temporarily refuse trading while actively defending.
• Raid threats are detected and defenders respond to them.
• Defenders can handle multiple nearby threats after the initial alarm response.
• Iron golems retain their normal behavior without chasing irrelevant distant mobs.
• Civilians use valid shelters without repeatedly running toward invalid fallback positions.
• Guardian-child emergency behavior works in the tested situations.
• Settlements can withdraw, re-engage, enter recovery, and return to normal.
• Borrowed equipment can be returned to its originating Armory Rack.
• Helmets remain mechanically active despite being visually hidden.

Intended Equipment Rules

• Villagers do not automatically collect loose weapons or armor from the ground.
• Player-donated equipment must be placed inside an Armory Rack.
• This prevents villagers from randomly taking player items and helps maintain reliable equipment ownership and return tracking.
• Borrowed equipment returns to the rack that originally supplied it, which may not be the nearest rack.

Beta Testing Phase

This release begins an information-gathering phase for Village Defenders.

The main defensive systems are now implemented and working in the situations tested so far. Community testing will help identify navigation edge cases, balancing problems, unusual settlement layouts, multiplayer synchronization issues, compatibility gaps and behavior that may need refinement before the first full release.

Feedback from this beta will be used to determine how the code should be improved, simplified, balanced and hardened. This build should not be treated as confirmation that every possible village, raid, server, resource pack or mod combination has been fully validated.

Still Being Tested

The following areas require broader testing:

• Dedicated servers and multiplayer synchronization
• Players joining during an active emergency
• Large or crowded villages
• Multiple nearby settlements
• Complex or heavily obstructed terrain
• Donated Diamond, Netherite, enchanted, and compatible modded equipment
• Armor presentation across every profession, biome outfit, and resource pack
• Generated Armory Racks through Villager Types or Homelands integration
• Operation with companion projects installed separately or together
• Heavily modified raids and hostile entities from other projects

Complex terrain may still occasionally cause a combat or golem-regrouping route to fail. The system should retry or continue operating, but additional reports will help improve these cases.

Reporting Problems

Please include the following when reporting an issue:

• Village Defenders version
• Minecraft version
• Fabric Loader and Fabric API versions
• Relevant logs
• Installed mods and resource packs
• Relevant configuration
• World seed and coordinates
• Current settlement state
• A clear description of what happened
• Reproduction steps, if possible

This beta is intended to gather the information needed to complete the final hardening and polish for the first full release.