Working Villagers (Beta)

Hire villagers, pay them a wage and let them do the work.

Working Villagers turns unemployed villagers into paid employees. Hand one a work contract, give it a workstation and a few chests, and it gets to work: felling trees, sawing planks, crafting chests and carrying goods from one place to another. There are no machines. Every job is done by a villager walking around, opening chests and working at its station.

The goal of this mod is to make Villagers more interesting and close the gap in automatic farms. Some resources are very hard to farm automatically in Minecraft like trees and stones and often require manual steps by the player. This changes with this mod as these manual steps can be done by villagers.

It is still important to me, that this mod stays close to vanilla Minecraft in its look and feel.

👷 The workers (Beta)

These are the first workers for the Beta Release. Many more will follow.

The workers fit together. A lumberjack supplies the sawyer, and a carrier takes the planks to the carpenter, so you get a whole wood workshop that runs by itself.

📜 Hiring and wages

1. Craft a work contract (paper, ink sac and 3 emeralds) and right-click an unemployed villager with it. It's hired and gets a name.
2. Place a workstation, open it and assign the villager.
3. Link chests: where the material comes from and where the products go.
4. Pick a personal chest and put emeralds in it. Every worker takes one emerald a day as its wage. No wage, no work.
5. During the day the villager works on its own.

Hired villagers never take vanilla jobs and never quit by themselves. Outside work hours they still live like normal villagers: they sleep in beds, chat at the village bell and run from zombies and raids.

🪓 Lumberjack

• Looks for natural trees near its chopping block, chops them down, replants a sapling and takes the logs to a chest.
• Only touches trees with natural leaves, so your log houses are safe.
• Uses a real axe from its personal chest. The axe wears out like yours, and better axes (and Efficiency) make it faster.
• Can strip the logs while felling if you switch it on.

🪚 Sawyer and stone sawyer

• The new woodcutter is a stonecutter for wood. One log gives 8 slabs or 4 stairs directly, without the crafting table's waste. You can use it yourself too.
• Give the sawyer an order (a product shape and the wood types it may use) and it cuts everything from its input chests.
• A hired villager at a vanilla stonecutter becomes a stone sawyer. Pick a product from any stone family and it does the rest. Ordinary villagers still become masons.

🔨 Carpenter

• The carpenter's bench is a crafting table for wooden things only: chests, barrels, ladders, bookshelves, wooden tools, boats, shields, bows, torches and more. Its menu lists everything and shows what you're missing.
• The carpenter crafts your order from its input chests and keeps a stock you choose, e.g. "always keep 16 chests ready".

🧺 Carrier

• Craft a wicker basket and hand it to a villager: it becomes a carrier, no contract needed.
• Set up to three routes from a source chest to a target chest. The carrier fills its basket, carries the items over and brings back what didn't fit.
• You can plan the routes on the basket before you hand it over.

🔍 Always know what's going on

• Every workstation has a paper note on its front with its worker's name.
• The menus show what each worker is doing right now: Chopping a tree (40 %), Cutting Oak Stairs, Waiting for wages, Done for today, Sleeping, ...
• If a worker isn't working, the status tells you why.

⚙️ Data packs and configuration

• Woodcutter recipes, wood types and the carpenter's products are data driven, so data packs and other mods can add their own wood.
• config/workingvillagers.json sets the wage, the distances, the speeds and the daily limits.

Requirements

• Minecraft 26.3
• Fabric (with Fabric API) or NeoForge

Needed on both client and server. Works in singleplayer and multiplayer.

⚠️ Beta

This is an early beta. Back up your worlds before trying it, and expect that saves may not carry over to later versions. Known limitations:

• All workers are novices for now. Levels are planned.
• Carriers have no filters yet and carry everything.
• Workers only work while their chunks are loaded.
• No JEI/EMI/REI or Jade integration yet.

Please report bugs and ideas on GitHub.

License

Released under the MIT License, so feel free to include it in modpacks.