Villager Guard Gunners 1.4

Naturally generated armed Village Watchtowers for Minecraft 1.20.1 Forge.

Added in 1.4

• Naturally generated Village Watchtowers
  Rare standalone 9 x 14 x 9 stone-and-oak Watchtowers can now generate on suitable dry terrain in vanilla village-compatible Overworld biomes. The structure supports four persisted rotations, a lower guardroom, internal ladder, observation deck, railings, and roof. Watchtowers are independent structures and are not injected into vanilla village roads or building pools.
  
  
• Difficulty-scaled tower squads
  New towers can create up to four persistent Guard Villagers. Easy favors small rifleman posts, Normal adds Marksman and Support combinations, and Hard can add Support, Breacher, and Demolitions positions. Peaceful creates no guards, and the configurable per-post ceiling can restrict the result from zero through four.
  
  
• Role-appropriate generated loadouts
  Tower members use the existing native TaCZ issuance transaction with dedicated Rifleman, Marksman, Support, Breacher, and Demolitions pools. A configurable 1.5x tower-only multiplier raises their normal difficulty-based gun chance to 52.5% on Easy, 75% on Normal, and 97.5% on Hard by default. Nearby caps, inventory capacity, source controls, pool conditions, TaCZ compatibility, and global explosive restrictions remain authoritative.
  
  
• Generated squad Armories
  Each enabled tower places a squad-locked Village Armory with deterministic datapack-defined ammunition for the built-in weapon classes. Generated Armories retain the existing storage, comparator, automation, locking, and automatic guard-resupply behavior.
  
  
• Watchtower configuration
  Fzzy Config now provides server-authoritative controls for new Watchtower starts, guard spawning, the 0–4 guard ceiling, Armory placement, and initial Armory stock, plus a 0–3 tower gun-chance multiplier. These are one-way restrictions for newly processed structures and never retrofit completed towers.
  
  
• Watchtower diagnostics
  Added permission-level-2 /vgg watchtowers status, groups, inspect, and errors commands. They expose bounded read-only configuration, group, generated guard, and rejected-datapack information without locating structures or loading chunks.
  
  

Modpack Support

• Watchtower biome selection, spacing, structure settings, physical template, guard groups, role-specific weapon pools, and initial Armory stock use standard namespaced datapack resources.
  
  
• Datapack definitions remain authoritative. Server configuration can suppress new generation or marker actions but cannot silently add a structure back after a datapack removes it.
  
  
• The add-on does not modify vanilla or third-party village jigsaw pools and performs no nearby-village, road, outpost, or structure search.
  
  

Improved in 1.4

• Placement uses a fixed nine-point terrain check and rejects water, frozen unsupported terrain, slopes greater than two blocks, and locations where the complete tower would exceed build height.
  
  
• Generated guard and Armory integration is deferred to persisted one-shot server tasks. World-generation workers do not perform live entity scans, TaCZ definition work, or arbitrary inventory transactions.
  
  
• Nearby natural-gunner counting now stops as soon as the configured cap is reached across loaded guards and the unloaded persistent index.
  
  
• Completed towers add no manager, recurring scan, block-entity ticker, forced chunk, repair pass, or retro-generation system.
  
  

Fixed in 1.4

• The generated Armory now sits against the interior wall instead of blocking the Watchtower's central doorway aisle. The corrected placement is preserved under all four tower rotations.
  
  
• Generated guard handoffs now retain their pending assignment and source until the queued server task confirms the same guard is still live.
  
  
• Peaceful, guard-disabled, zero-occupant, and failed-spawn towers no longer leave an Armory locked to an unavailable squad. The Armory registers its deterministic squad once or safely becomes public if registry capacity is unavailable.
  
  
• Removed guards are not respawned, manual squad reassignment is not reverted, broken Armories are not rebuilt, and generated loot is not rerolled when a completed structure piece is revisited.
  
  
• Malformed and future-version Watchtower records remain preserved and inactive instead of being executed, normalized, or erased.
  
  
• Structure pieces with missing or corrupt persisted rotations now remain disabled instead of placing in an incorrect default orientation.
  
  

Required Dependencies

• Minecraft 1.20.1
• Forge 47.4.23
• Guard Villagers 1.20.1-1.6.19
• Timeless and Classics Zero 1.1.8-hotfix
• Fzzy Config 0.7.6 for Minecraft 1.20.1
• Kotlin for Forge 4.12.0

Install the mod and every dependency on both the client and server. Existing worlds remain supported; Watchtowers generate only in newly generated chunks.