MineColonies: War 'n Nobility

Source & full guide: github.com/teamdemivfxfish-dev/war-n-nobility-wiki

Climb from Outsider to Emperor, one conquered rival at a time.

War 'n Nobility lays a living ladder of noble rank over your MineColonies server: titles you earn, peers who swear to you, vassals you bind, and a crown you have to take. This is the politics of rank. War 'n Nobility owns who you are and who answers to you; its companion War 'n Taxes runs the wars and the economy, and every victory there feeds your standing here.

Eight titles run from Outsider to Emperor. The lower rungs are granted by admins, NPCs, or quests; the high seats are taken, not given. You do not climb them alone, and you cannot skip them: you rise on the seals of your peers, you bind those peers as vassals, and you paint your growing county, duchy, or realm onto the map. Nothing about the ladder is hard-coded, so a server can rename or reshape the whole hierarchy to fit its own lore.

Early alpha: this mod is still experimental and being tested in multiplayer. Back up your world before you add it.

Came here for the atlas map or the War Frame? The Antique Atlas integration left this mod in 1.1.0, and the War Frame briefing map is on its way out too, into a standalone mod of its own. Both live on in the older releases: install NeoForge 1.21.1, version 1.0.9 for the atlas map and the War Frame together, working as they were intended. Details under The War Table below.

This is a MineColonies add-on that integrates directly with War 'n Taxes and Easy Factions. It never edits another mod's code: every integration is reflection or a fail-soft Mixin that lives entirely in this jar, so the nobility ladder still runs when its optional partners are absent.

The Noble Ladder

The default ladder, lowest first, is Outsider, Artisan, Knight, Baron, Count, Duke, King, Emperor. Every rank wears its own color in chat and on the tab list, and every rank has a feminine form a player can switch to at will.

Each rank declares how you enter it, and the mechanics follow that requirement, not the title text. That means you can rename the titles, add or remove ranks, or move the war bracket without touching a line of code.

Every rank, threshold, and name is editable in config, so your server can rename the whole hierarchy to fit its own lore.

Seals and Vassals

A seal is a pledge of fealty, and it is the currency of every ascension from Count upward. You do not climb the high ranks alone; you climb on the backs of your peers.

• Two nobles of your own rank pledge their seal to you (/nobility seal, revocable with /nobility unseal), and you rise to the next title.
• When you ascend, those sealers become your sworn vassals, and their collected land forms your county, duchy, or kingdom under you.
• A fresh vassal is bound for a real-world sentence (seven days by default) so players cannot vassal-hop to swing different lords' promotions. A bound player may /renounce only after the sentence is served.
• Losing vassals never strips your title. Once a Duke, the rank sticks even if your duchy thins out.

Conquer Your Peers

Rank is won on the battlefield, through War 'n Taxes. When it is installed, a bridge polls its vassal state and mirrors each colony vassalization into a nobility bond, so you never touch a command: win the war, gain the seal.

• Beat a rival of your own rank in a War 'n Taxes vassalization war and their seal is forced to you.
• Only victories against equals count toward your climb; crushing a lesser noble proves nothing.
• A win does not instantly make the loser a vassal. It creates a provisional seal that converts to a sworn bond when you next ascend, and the War 'n Taxes sentence timer carries over. Each still-provisional colony is tagged (Provisional) on War 'n Taxes' own tax-book vassal page.
• A higher noble beating a lower one binds them immediately; a lower noble cannot bind their better.
• With feudal war protection on, a War 'n Taxes war declared against a colony whose owner outranks the declarer is cancelled outright: you may not make war upon your betters. The attacker is told why, and the declaration is suppressed.

Claim the Crown

Becoming King is not a grind; it is a conquest. Three things must all be true at once:

• Two Duke seals, the support of your fellow Dukes, as with every prior step.
• A faction's land. You must lead an Easy Factions faction holding at least the claim threshold (50 chunks by default). Crowns rest on territory, not just titles.
• The Crown itself, crafted and consumed at the coronation.

The Crown is forged from a Shard from the Crown of Unification, which has no recipe on purpose. It is admin-granted or dropped by an out-of-band event (for example a POIs & Raid Bosses boss), so nobody simply buys the throne; the road to a crown runs through a real challenge.

The Emperor Throne

There is one imperial seat. The first King ever to rise takes it unopposed, as though the empire were an empty throne waiting for its first claimant. After that, the crown changes hands only through usurpation: a challenger must seize every Duke the sitting Emperor holds, take the throne claim, and win the decisive war, all three at once. A live checklist shows exactly which conditions a challenger has met and which they still lack.

The Chancery Table

Craft the Chancery Table, a lectern that serves as your seat of power, and right-click to hold court. It opens a rank-filtered console where every action a noble can take (advance, seal, declare, name a domain) is a button that runs the same server-side logic as the matching command, then refreshes. Only the lines that matter at your rank are shown.

• Court: your standing, what you need to advance, and the buttons to act on it. Counts and above name their county, duchy, or realm right here.
• Settings: style your title and choose your gender form, switching your rank between its masculine and feminine names everywhere.
• Special Titles: reserved for a future system of bespoke honors.

The commands still work alongside it; the table is simply the graphical seat of governance.

Recipe (Chancery Table):

 G
G L G
 B

G = Gold Ingot, L = Lectern, B = Writable Book

See Your Domain

A Count and up commands a named domain: a county, then a duchy, then a realm, set with /nobility domain. Its borders are painted as a political chart on the wall-mounted War Table's map.

• Counties, duchies, and kingdoms are painted in their holder's colors, each aggregated up the vassal tree so a kingdom's border is the sum of all the land its barons and counts hold, with a name label at its heart.
• A separate layer draws every Easy Factions claim in its own color, so you can read the whole balance of power at a glance.
• The overlay is client-rendered on the board and its planning screen; the rest of the mod runs regardless.
• The chart is drawn on the War Frame board, so it travels with the War Frame when that moves out into its own mod (see below).

Want to scribble on the Antique Atlas itself? That lives in its own standalone client mod, Here Be Doodles, which works with or without War 'n Nobility.

The War Table

Campaigns are planned on a wall-mounted War Table. Six War Frames craft at once; mounted like item frames, nine like-facing frames form a 3x3 grid, and inserting an atlas activates it as a live, drawable briefing map with a shared view, a marker lock, and a persistent plan. A completed grid resists mining and takes three hits to dismantle, so nobody wipes a briefing mid-sentence. When Hundred Years War is present, the board gains a company-style command layer over HYW's army units and freecam commander mode; it stays dormant otherwise.

Recipe (War Frame, makes six):

S S S
S P S
S S S

S = Stick, P = Paper

The command overlay, and how to turn it off

With Hundred Years War installed, entering its freecam commander mode draws this mod's own command surface over it: a status strip, an Antique Atlas minimap, a card for the force you have selected and a grid of your live control keys. To keep that readable it also hides three pieces of Hundred Years War's own interface, its action list, its mouse control legend, and the action bar text it prints on every order.

If you would rather have Hundred Years War exactly as it ships, one switch undoes all four at once.

• Press Alt+H while in freecam. The overlay goes, HYW's action list, control legend and order messages come straight back, and the choice is remembered. Press it again to bring the overlay back.
• Or set hyw_command_hud to false in config/warnnobility-client.toml, a per-player client config. Set hyw_command_hud_hotkey to false as well if Alt+H should do nothing at all.
• The bottom of the overlay names the key, so it can be found without reading a config file. That hint disappears if you turn the hotkey off.

This is client-side. Servers do not control it, and nothing changes for anyone without Hundred Years War installed.

Where the War Frame is going

The War Frame and the old atlas map are being pulled out of War 'n Nobility into a mod of their own, so this mod can go back to being purely the ladder of rank: titles, seals, vassals, and the crown. The atlas half is already gone, removed in 1.1.0, because layering our own map onto Antique Atlas could leave the book looking blank and it chained every release here to one specific atlas version. The War Frame still ships in 1.1.0, but it will not be part of future releases either.

Nothing is lost, it just lives elsewhere:

On Forge 1.20.1 the War Frame never shipped at all, and that build's atlas overlay was written for Antique Atlas 4 rather than Antique Atlas 8, so on an Antique Atlas 8 pack it draws nothing. Here Be Doodles is what puts the domain borders back on the book there.

Renouncing a Liege

A vassal past their sentence may /renounce. They keep their own title, but the break is open defiance: the rebel is marked hostile in every colony the ex-liege owns, so MineColonies guards turn on them until the quarrel is settled. Loyalty, once sworn, is not walked away from cleanly.

Configuration

Everything lives in config/warnnobility-common.toml.

• [ranks] ladder defines the whole hierarchy, lowest first. Each line is name;REQUIREMENT;param;entryScore;show;advanceText;femaleName (only the first four are required), letting you rename titles, reshape rungs, choose which Chancery lines appear, and write custom "how to advance" text for a questline.
• [vassalage] vassal_sentence_days (default 7): real-world days a vassal stays bound before it may break free. Conquered vassals serve the same term once the conqueror ascends.
• [economy] buyin_item (default minecraft:emerald): the item consumed for a BUYIN promotion.
• [integration] toggles the War 'n Taxes bridge (tribute_enabled, tribute_poll_seconds), feudal war protection (protect_higher_rank_from_war), and the King gate (king_requires_faction, king_faction_claim_threshold default 50, king_consume_crown).

Commands

All /nobility ... subcommands require permission level 2 (ops, command blocks, quest rewards). /renounce is player-facing.

Requirements and Integrations

This is an integration mod that sits on top of a stack of others. Integrations are reflection- or Mixin-based and fail-soft, so the ladder runs even when the optional partners are missing.

Built for Minecraft 1.21.1 on NeoForge, with a Forge 1.20.1 build of the ladder as well. The 1.20.1 build carries the ranks, seals, vassalage, casus belli, the Chancery Table and the domain overlay; it has no War Frame, no besiege rank guard and no Antique Atlas 8 map, because the 1.20.1 versions of the mods those hook into do not have the matching systems.

Supported Versions

Support the Mods

These mods are free and they stay free. If one of them runs on your server, you can back the next version, the next port, and the next mod at patreon.com/epicwarborn. Patrons get their name in the credits, a direct line to me for bugs, early builds, and a vote on what gets built next.

From Outsider to Emperor. Take your seat.

Part of The Warborn Realm, by barunn

MineColonies: War 'n Nobility is a MineColonies add-on. Because MineColonies is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0, War 'n Nobility is distributed under GPL-3.0 as well.