How to play Copperstead

The idea in one minute

You place a Town Hall and get a small town square. Then you build: a closed room with beds and a Home Marker is a Home, a closed room with a copper chest and a Storage Marker is your Storage Room, and every building and every road you lay grows the village outward. Settlers are your villagers. Give one a token and, once it has trained at the job's school, it takes that job: farmers farm within reach of a Farm Marker, lumberjacks cut within reach of a Lumber Marker, guards fight and sleep in the Barracks, the Trader sorts your Storage Room and sells at the Trading Post bell, the Explorer goes out and brings back maps, visitors and links to other villages, and Builders raise houses, towers and the village wall from a Build Marker. Settlers get hungry, want a bed, and cheer up when they are fed, rested and busy. A happy town with a spare bed grows on its own. Once it is big enough, some nights a Necromancer comes for it with an undead army.

The village at spawn new in 0.10.1

The world was reset on 8 September 2026, and you now spawn beside the Town Hall of a finished village. It is a working example of everything on this page, built by hand by the server owner, so walk round it before you build your own. Every building has a sign on it saying what it is and how to make one yourself.

What is where

• The Town Hall stands on a copper square with the lectern (the Engineer's podium) beside it. You spawn right next to it. Right-click the hall for the report.
• Around the square: four Homes with two beds each (one is kept empty so the village can grow), the Storage Room (the copper chest is the way in; it is stocked with bread, seeds, cobblestone, planks, doors, torches, ladders and glass), the Barracks with its armoury chest (two iron suits, a spare iron sword, a bow and 64 arrows), the Trading Post (a bell and a Trade Marker) and the Well.
• Further out: the Farm (a Farm Marker and wheat), the wood (a Lumber Marker and oak trees), an Outpost hut with a bed, and a Build Site where the builders are raising a Watchtower from what is in the store.
• Roads run to every door and out to the edge, and there are lamp posts and torches everywhere, so nothing spawns on its ground.
• One settler of every job lives there: a farmer, a lumberjack, two guards, a trader, an explorer, two builders and a nitwit. The Engineer walks in on his own 5 minutes after a village is founded; right-click him for the next plan.

It is the shared demo. Read it, right-click everything, watch the settlers work, but build your own village a good distance away so the two do not overlap.

Blocks and items

Creative inventory: search town, marker, token or settler, or open the Copperstead tab. Right-click any marker with an empty hand: it tells you what it does, re-checks its room, or lists what the Storage Room holds.

Your first village, step by step

1. Place the Town Hall where you want the centre. Chat confirms the village is founded and names it after you.
2. Storage: build a small room (walls, floor, roof, a door), put a copper chest and a couple of ordinary chests inside, and a Storage Marker. Put bread or other food in the copper chest. Settlers with no food starve, so do this first. In a hurry? A Storage Marker next to a chest in the open works too.
3. Farm: hoe some dirt near water, plant wheat, wait (or bone-meal it), and put a Farm Marker at the edge of the field.
4. Trees: put a Lumber Marker beside a few trees.
5. Home: another closed room with a door, two beds and a Home Marker. One settler per bed.
6. Settlers: spawn two with the egg (creative) near the hall. Right-click one with a Farmer Token, the other with a Lumberjack Token.
7. Right-click the Town Hall. It should list the size of your village, 2 buildings, 2 settlers, both jobs and 2 beds.

How big is my village new in 0.5

The village is the shape of what you build, not a circle around a block.

• The Town Hall gives a 33x33 town square.
• Every whole building (Home, Storage Room) adds 8 blocks of yard around its walls.
• Fields and woods around Farm and Lumber Markers count as village ground, so a farmer at the far edge of the field is never called home.
• Roads carry the village outward: dirt path, cobblestone, mossy cobblestone, stone bricks or cut copper (plus their slabs and stairs) that touch the village edge become village ground, two blocks to each side. Three blocks in a row make a road; one stray block does not; a gap ends it; diagonals connect; roads may climb one block at a time.
• A new marker must be placed inside the village or within 8 blocks of its edge. Fields do not count for this, so lay a road if you want to build far out.
• See the edge: hold any Copperstead marker, the Town Hall or a job token and copper dust shows the boundary around you (green where a road makes the edge). Walking in or out shows "Entering" or "Leaving" your village above the hotbar.

Villages built before 0.5 keep their old 60-block square until the founder runs /copperstead shrink. The command first previews which markers would fall outside; /copperstead shrink confirm does it.

Rename your village with /copperstead name My Town (founder or operator).

Homes

A Home is a closed room with at least one bed, a door, and a Home Marker inside it. When you place the marker the game checks the room and tells you in chat what it found, or in red what is wrong and where.

What counts as a closed room

• Walls, a floor and a roof with no gaps to the sky. Anything solid is a wall: stone, planks, glass, fences, stairs, leaves, even beds and chests.
• At least one door. Doors, trapdoors and gates count as walls whether open or closed, so one marker per room: a bedroom behind an inside door is a separate room.
• Inside at least 3x3 and 2 high; at most 32x32 and 12 high. Beds, chests and the marker standing on the floor count as floor.
• If the room leaks, chat names the block where it leaks. Fix it, then right-click the marker with an empty hand to check again.

Why build Homes

• Beds inside Homes set how many settlers can live in your village. Until you have your first Home, any bed in town counts. From your first Home on, only Home beds count, and the Town Hall report says so.
• Settlers walk through doors on their own to reach their beds.
• A Home with a hole in it stops counting until you fix it. Settlers already living there keep their beds. The Town Hall re-checks buildings every few seconds and tells nearby players when one breaks or is mended.

The Storage Room new in 0.5

A Storage Room is a closed room with a copper chest and a Storage Marker inside.

• The copper chest is the input: settlers with a full backpack walk there and drop everything in. If it is full they say so in red and try again later.
• The other chests, trapped chests, barrels and shulker boxes in the room are the sorted storage. A furnace, hopper, dropper or brewing stand inside the room is left alone: it is neither sorted into nor counted as stock. A copper golem in the room will sort the copper chest into them (vanilla behaviour; it also reaches chests in nearby houses, and the marker warns you when one is inside). Better: give a settler a Trader Token and it sorts by item-frame labels (see The Trader below).
• Hungry settlers take food from the copper chest first, then from the other chests in the room.
• Farmers with no seeds and lumberjacks with no saplings fetch up to 8 from the Storage Room before going to work.
• Right-click the Storage Marker to see the ten biggest stacks and what is waiting in the copper chest. /copperstead storage shows the same.
• A Storage Marker that is not in a closed room keeps working the old way: chests within 6 blocks of it are storage.

The Trader and the Trading Post new in 0.6

A Trading Post is a bell with a Trade Marker within 4 blocks of it. No walls, no roof, no door: it is the one open-air building, a market stall. One per village. A Trader is a settler you gave a Trader Token (emerald + gold ingot); it holds an emerald so you can tell it apart.

What to build

• Place a bell anywhere in your village, then a Trade Marker (bell + copper ingot) within 4 blocks of it. The chat says Trading Post recognised at the bell at .... If the bell is too far you get No bell within 4 blocks of the Trade Marker. Hang one within 4 blocks, then right-click the marker to check again.: move one of them and right-click the marker to check again.
• You also need a Storage Room (see above): the Trader sells what is in it and puts the emeralds it earns in it.
• Break the bell and the Trading Post is BROKEN until you put it back, like any other building. The Town Hall report and /copperstead buildings show it.

What the Trader does

• Sorting first. Whenever the copper chest of the Storage Room has something in it, the Trader walks there and moves it, one stack at a time, into the other chests and barrels of the room. Higher-level Traders sort faster.
• Labels. Hang an item frame on a chest and put an item in the frame: that chest is now for that item. A stack goes to the chest labelled with it first; otherwise to a chest already holding the same item with room left; otherwise to any unlabelled chest with room. Labelled chests never get anything else.
• If nothing fits, the stack stays in the copper chest and the Trader says waiting: storage full, add a chest or barrel to the Storage Room. Add a chest or a barrel to the room and it carries on.
• Then the bell. With the copper chest empty, the Trader stands by the bell all day and looks at whoever comes near. At night it goes to bed like everyone else.
• A Trader with neither a Storage Room nor a Trading Post says so in its status line: idle: no Storage Room to sort and no Trading Post to stand at.

How to trade

• Right-click the Trader with an empty hand: the normal villager trade screen opens. Sneak-right-click for its status line instead.
• The offers are built from the Storage Room every time the screen opens, so they follow what your village has. /copperstead trade lists them without walking to the Trader.
• The screen stays open while you are within 8 blocks of the Trader. If the Trader is off sorting, standing at the bell shows The Trader is in the Storage Room; back when the copper chest is empty above your hotbar.
• Without a Storage Room the screen is empty and the chat says Nothing to trade: build a Storage Room.

What is sold and bought

• The village sells produce: wheat, carrots, potatoes, beetroot, wheat seeds, beetroot seeds, any logs and any saplings. 1 emerald buys 16. Nothing else is ever sold: your diamonds in the Storage Room are safe.
• The reserve. The village always keeps 32 of everything. Only what is above 32 is for sale, 16 at a time: 64 wheat means two trades, 48 wheat means one, 40 wheat means none.
• The village buys while it has at least one emerald in the Storage Room (its treasury) and holds fewer than 64 of the item: 8 bread, 4 saplings (oak, spruce or birch) or 8 wheat seeds for 1 emerald each. It never buys something it is selling at the same time, and it never promises more emeralds than the treasury holds. What you sell it goes into the copper chest and the Trader sorts it.
• Emeralds you pay go into a chest labelled with an emerald if you have one, otherwise into the copper chest. Emeralds anywhere in the Storage Room count as the treasury.
• If two players trade for the same stock at once, the second one still gets the goods; the Storage Room comes up short and the Town Hall report says traded short by 16 wheat today. Every trade is written to the beta log.
• The Trader gains a level point for every stack it sorts and two for every trade.

The Town Hall report shows Trading Post: at the bell at ...; treasury 12 emeralds; sold today 32 wheat, or No Trading Post: put a Trade Marker next to a bell when you have none yet.

Stock: the five things your village runs on new in 0.11

Your village runs on five things, and all five are real items in real chests: Food (anything a settler can eat: bread, carrots, potatoes, apples, cooked meat), Wood (logs of any tree), Stone (cobblestone, cobbled deepslate and stone), Iron (iron ingots) and Emeralds. Nothing is minted and nothing is abstract: if the copper chest holds 40 bread and a barrel holds 56 carrots, the village has Food 96, and when it pays 8 Food for something, 8 of those items leave a chest.

Where the stock is

• Everything in a whole Storage Room (the copper chest and every sorted chest and barrel in it), plus any chest, barrel or shulker box within 6 blocks of a registered Storage Marker.
• A chest that stands inside your neighbour's village is your neighbour's, however close it is to your own marker. A chest in no-man's land counts for whichever village's marker reaches it.
• So the Storage Room is the heart of the village: Farmers, Lumberjacks and Miners fill it, and everything you order is paid out of it.

Seeing it

• /copperstead stock prints the five counts, the items behind each one (Food 96: Bread 40, Carrot 56), what came in and went out today and why (Food +16 (command), -8 (tuition: Farmer)), and how full the room is. A resource at 0 is printed in red with a hint about where it comes from.
• The Town Hall report and /copperstead status carry one line: Stock: Food 96 | Wood 128 | Stone 256 | Iron 24 | Emeralds 12 | Storage Room 41% full, red the moment any of the five is 0.
• /copperstead stock history lists each of the last 7 days besides today, newest first, with the net change and every reason. After 8 day changes the oldest day is gone.
• Every movement is also written to the events log, so you can see exactly what was paid, when, and what was left.

Paying from it

• Everything the game charges (a child's birth, an apprentice's tuition, a settler posted at a banner, kit forged for the guards) is taken from this stock all or nothing: if any one resource is short, nothing at all is taken and the message says Cannot afford: needs 8 Food, 8 Wood; the village has Food 16, Wood 0.
• Payment comes out of the sorted chests first, then the copper chest, then the chests beside the marker. Things you drop in the copper chest by hand count at once.
• The game always tells you the price before it takes it: every sign, report line and refusal names the cost.

The Trading Post is the valve

• When you are short, the Trader (see The Trader and the Trading Post) buys and sells against the same stock. It now sells cobblestone like any other produce: 16 for an emerald once the village holds more than the reserve of 32 (48 cobblestone means one trade; 40 means none).
• It buys 16 arrows or 2 iron ingots for an emerald each, beside bread, saplings and seeds, while it has an emerald to pay with and holds fewer than 64 of the item.
• If a purchase finds the treasury short (two customers at once), you still get your emerald and the report's traded short by 1 Emerald today line names it.

For operators

• /copperstead stock give food 16 puts 16 bread in the copper chest; /copperstead stock take food 16 takes 16 Food out, sorted chests first. Both show in the stock as command. The other words are wood (oak logs), stone (cobblestone), iron (ingots) and emeralds.

Nothing is ever made from nothing. If a number in the stock and a hand count of the chests disagree, type /copperstead bug and say so.

Settlers

Right-click a settler with an empty hand. The first thing it says is what it is doing right now, green when it is working and red when it is stuck, and the red line tells you exactly what is missing. After that comes happiness, hunger, what it carries, its village and its home.

Staying in the village new in 0.9.3

Settlers wander only inside the village. It matters more than it sounds: the Town Hall counts the settlers standing in the village, and a settler outside its bounds belongs to no village, so it is not in the population, takes no job and does not sleep in your beds. One that does end up outside (dropped there, pushed, or the bounds shrank under it) walks back to the Town Hall on its own. A settler at work is left alone, so a builder walling the edge or raising a house on the boundary is not marched home mid-job.

Hunger

Hunger drops one point a minute, so a fed settler is fine for about five Minecraft days. Below 40% it goes looking for food. At 0% it slowly loses health and eventually dies, and you get a red chat message when that happens.

Happiness

Mood drifts toward a target: fed (+), rested (+), working (+), hungry (−), idle (−), hurt (−), outside any village (−), raid in progress (−). Village happiness is the average. It matters for growth.

Levels

Every harvest or felled log gives experience. Level 1 to 100. Higher level settlers work faster.

Beds and sleep

• At night each settler claims a free bed it may use and sleeps in it. Two settlers never head for the same tree or crop either: work is claimed the same way.
• Your own bed is safe: beds you have slept in, your spawn bed, and any bed you click while a settler is in it become yours, and settlers leave them alone.
• Guards sleep lightly. Any monster within 12 blocks gets them up, and during a raid they stay up all night.
• A village no longer grows a free adult. A happy village (average happiness 60 or more) with a spare Home bed, at least 2 grown settlers and 16 Food in stock has a child instead, every 3 minutes, for 8 Food. The spare bed has to be one a new settler could actually use: Barracks beds are for guards only, so they never bring anyone new. See Children and founders.
• A settler away on an expedition still counts as one of yours, so the settler count and the cap can read "full" while your explorer is out.

Children and founders new in 0.11

A village grows by having children, and a child costs something. Every 3 minutes a happy village (average happiness 60) with a free Home bed, no raid on, at least 2 grown settlers and 16 Food in stock has a child, and the birth takes 8 Food out of the Storage Room (/copperstead stock shows it as a child was born). When the timer fires and something is missing, chat says so once: The village wanted to grow but needs 16 Food (have 4), and the Town Hall report says the same every time you read it: Next birth in 120 s: needs 16 Food (have 4), 2 grown settlers (have 2), a free Home bed (yes), happiness 60 (have 63).

What a child is

• Half size, with a Child name tag. It takes a bed like everyone else, but only a bed inside a Home: never a Barracks bed.
• It eats like everyone else, from the Storage Room, and it gets hungry at the same speed.
• By day it follows a grown-up: whenever the nearest grown settler is more than 8 blocks away it walks after it and stops 3 blocks off. At night it goes to bed.
• It cannot be given a token (Too young: grows up in 14 min.) and cannot be ordered to a banner.
• It grows up after 20 minutes of being fed. Only fed minutes count: a child whose hunger is under 40% stops growing until it eats, and the clock never resets. Right-click it with an empty hand: Child (lvl 1): grows up in 14 min if it is fed (hunger 82%); following Farmer 3f9a12c0.
• When it grows up it is full size, the tag is gone, chat says A child has grown up in Ben's village. Hand it a token., and it is a Nitwit you can enrol like any other.

Founders

When you place a Town Hall on empty ground at least 64 blocks from any other Town Hall, two grown settlers arrive within 5 seconds (Two settlers have arrived to found Ben's village.) so you can start at once. The rules, each with its own message when it stops you:

• Once per spot: break and replace the same Town Hall and nobody else comes.
• One founding pair per player per day: No founders: you founded a village less than a day ago.
• Spacing: No founders: another Town Hall stands 40 blocks away; place yours at least 64 blocks from any other.
• A village that already exists gets none: if the first census finds people, a building or a raid won, the report says Founders: already given (village existed before 0.11). Villages from before this release never gain a settler from this rule.
• A Town Hall placed by a command or a dispenser has no founder and gets no founders.

Commands

The Town Hall report and /copperstead status carry a Children: 1 (grows up in 14 min) line. Every birth, refusal, founding and growing-up is in the beta log.

Jobs

Farmer

Looks for ripe crops within 8 blocks of any Farm Marker, walks over, harvests, replants a seed, and pockets the rest. Fetches seeds from the Storage Room when it has none. Unloads at the Storage Room when the backpack is full.

Lumberjack

Looks for a natural tree (a log with leaves above it) within 10 blocks of any Lumber Marker, chops it from the bottom up, and replants a sapling if it has one. Fetches saplings from the Storage Room when it has none.

Guard

Gets a plain iron sword and extra health, attacks any monster it sees, and fights first, sleeps second. Anything better than that sword it fetches itself from the armoury (any chest in the Barracks; see below), and with a bow and arrows it becomes an archer.

Trader

Sorts the Storage Room's copper chest into the other chests (item frames on chests are labels), then stands at the Trading Post bell by day. Right-click it to trade: 16 produce for an emerald above a reserve of 32; it buys bread, saplings (oak, spruce, birch) and wheat seeds while it has emeralds and is not selling them.

Explorer

Leaves from the village edge on timed trips and comes back with a link to another village, a map to a nearby structure, or a visitor you can hire with any job token. Outposts extend its range.

Builder

Raises what a Build Site asks for (Small Home, Watchtower, Wall segment) and the village wall, fetching materials from the Storage Room and placing one block at a time. Mends leaking Homes and Storage Rooms with a cobblestone. When there is nothing else to build, keeps the village lit with torches from the Storage Room.

Nitwit

A settler with no token. Wanders about the village, eats, sleeps. Slightly unhappy about it.

Apprentice new in 0.11

What a token makes first, not the job itself. Carries a stick, wears the tag Apprentice <Job>, and trains at the job's school (3 minutes, 5 for a Guard) before graduating into the job. See Apprentices and schools.

Child new in 0.11

A half-size settler born to the village rather than hired with a token. Follows a grown-up by day, sleeps in a Home, and grows up into a Nitwit after 20 minutes of being fed. See Children and founders.

Miner new in 0.11

Digs in a whole Mine (a shaft 3 deep with a Mine Marker at the mouth). Once its Mine is worked out, once the village has no Mine at all, or whenever the armoury wants more Iron than the stock holds, a Miner works the Forge instead: smelting raw ore into ingots and forging what the Guards are short of. See The Forge, and the four Ages.

Apprentices and schools new in 0.11

Jobs are learned, not handed out. A token no longer turns a settler into a worker; it enrols one. Right-click a grown settler with a token and, if the job's school exists in the village and the village can pay, the token is spent, the tuition leaves the stock, and the settler becomes an Apprentice: it wears the name tag Apprentice Farmer, carries a stick, walks to the school and trains there. When it is done, everyone within 64 blocks reads Settler 1a2b3c4d is now a Farmer (trained 3 min at the Farm Marker) and it gets to work.

Where each job is learned, and what it costs

• The price is all or nothing. If the village cannot pay, chat says so in red (Cannot afford: tuition is 8 Food; the village has 7.), the token stays in your hand and nothing is taken. The tuition shows in /copperstead stock as tuition: Farmer.
• No school, no lesson. Without the school the token is refused in red and says what to build: No school: a Farmer learns at a Farm Marker; place one in the village.
• Your first token is the Builder's, and a new village has no Lumberjack or Miner: cut the first 8 logs and mine the first 8 cobblestone yourself and drop them in the copper chest, or the Builder Token is refused with Cannot afford: tuition is 8 Food, 8 Wood, 8 Stone; the village has Food 16, Wood 0, Stone 0.
• Guards are capped by beds. A Barracks with 2 beds trains at most 2 Guards, working or learning; a third Guard Token says The Barracks has 2 beds, so at most 2 Guards; add beds.

How training works

• The minutes count only while the apprentice stands within 4 blocks of its school, by day. It sleeps at night and goes to eat like anyone, and its progress never resets: it carries on where it left off.
• A settler of a higher level learns faster (the same work-speed rule every job uses: a level-100 settler needs 40% of the time).
• Right-click an apprentice with an empty hand to see the minutes: Apprentice (lvl 1): learning Farmer, 1 of 3 minutes at the Farm Marker.
• Graduating gives the settler one level and the job's kit through the job's own rules: a new Guard gets its iron sword and 30 max health the moment it graduates, not when you click.
• If the school disappears (you broke the marker, the Barracks lost its roof) the apprentice waits and says so; put it back and the minutes carry on.

Retraining, and who is unchanged

• A settler with a job can be retrained the same way: hand it another token and it hands its kit back to the armoury first (bow, arrows and armour go into the Barracks chest; a Guard's standard sword is simply put down), then becomes an apprentice of the new trade and pays the new tuition. Its veteran armour, if any, is gone with the job.
• Handing an apprentice a token again restarts it and pays again.
• Visitors an Explorer brings home already know a trade and join the moment they get a token, as before. The Engineer still refuses tokens. Settlers that already had a job when 0.11 arrived keep it.

Commands

The Explorer new in 0.7

The Explorer is the one settler that leaves the village. Craft an Explorer Token (emerald + compass) and right-click a settler with it; it picks up a compass and, when the time is right, goes looking for people and places.

What a trip looks like

• It sets off when it is daytime, it is fed (hunger 40% or more), the village is not under attack, and its last trip was at least 5 minutes ago.
• It walks to the edge of the village in the direction it chose, vanishes in a puff of copper dust, and chat tells everyone nearby: "Your explorer set off north-east. Back in about 3 minutes." That is not a despawn: the Town Hall report says "Explorer away north-east, back in 2 min" and still counts it as one of your settlers.
• A trip takes about 3 minutes, up to 6 when it is heading for a far village. It comes back at the same edge and walks in to the bell (or the Town Hall), gains experience, eats, and goes again 5 minutes later.
• It will find any way out there is: the eight directions from where it stands, the gates your roads leave in the wall, and failing those it walks the boundary for a gap. If there is genuinely no way out (walled in, or every edge unreachable) it says so when you right-click it and tries again in 5 minutes. If the Town Hall is broken while it is away, it comes straight back.

What it brings back

In this order, the first that applies:

1. A linked village. Every Town Hall the game has ever counted is known, even far away. If one is within range and not linked yet, the explorer heads for it: "Your explorer found Alice's village 380 blocks north-east. The villages are linked." Both villages hear it; from then on /copperstead status lists "Linked: Alice's village (380 blocks NE, 7 settlers)" on both sides, and each side hears the other's news ("News from Alice's village: a Necromancer attacks!", a traveller settling). Caravans and migration come later.
2. A map. If a village, pillager outpost, ruined portal, ancient city, trial chambers or woodland mansion lies within range and your village has no map to it yet, the explorer comes back with a filled map marked at the spot and named after it. The map goes into a chest labelled for maps if you have one, otherwise the first sorted chest or barrel with room, never the copper chest (that is the Trader.s input); without a Storage Room the explorer holds it: right-click the explorer with an empty hand to take it. Each place is mapped once per village.
3. A visitor. If a Home has a free bed and the village's happiness is 50% or more, there is a 50% chance (plus 1% per explorer level, up to 90%) that someone follows the explorer home. "Your explorer is back with a visitor. Give them any job token within a day and they'll stay."
4. Nothing. "Your explorer is back. Nothing out there this time", with the reason when there is one: "no free bed in a Home, so nobody came along".

Visitors

• A visitor wears a Visitor name tag, follows the explorer to the bell (or the Town Hall when there is no bell) and waits there. It has no job and no bed and is not counted as a settler.
• Right-click it with an empty hand: "Visitor: I'll join if you give me a job (any token). Leaving in 14 min."
• Hand it any job token and it joins the village with that job and claims a Home bed that night. If no Home bed is free at that moment you hear "No free bed in a Home. Build one and try again." and keep the token.
• After one day without a token: "The visitor left." and it walks out of the village.

Outposts and range

• An explorer looks up to 300 blocks from the Town Hall.
• Build an Outpost (a hut with a bed and an Outpost Marker) out in the wild and your explorer can go farther. An Outpost is an Outpost Marker (compass + copper ingot) inside a small closed shelter, at most 5x5 inside, with a bed and a door, anywhere within 512 blocks of your Town Hall. Each whole Outpost adds its own 300-block circle, so a chain of Outposts reaches villages and structures far out.
• An Outpost is not part of the village: it does not stretch the edge and its bed does not count toward the population. The explorer rests there instead: a trip toward something closer to an Outpost than to the hall returns a quarter sooner.
• The report says "Outposts: 2 (range 900 blocks north-east)".

Where to look

• /copperstead explorer: explorers away and back, visitors waiting, Outposts and range, linked villages, every village your explorers know and what the last trip found.
• Right-click the Town Hall or run /copperstead status: the same lines are part of the report.
• Right-click the explorer with an empty hand: what it is doing, or why it is waiting (night, hungry, raid, no way out).

Raids

Each night there is a chance that a Necromancer appears at the village edge and marches on the Town Hall, but only once your village is a Hamlet (a whole Home, a whole Storage Room, a Farm Marker and 4 grown settlers) and only with a player within 96 blocks of the Town Hall changed in 0.11: nobody has to fight a raid nobody sees, and a village that is still a Camp is never touched. It has a purple boss bar and keeps raising undead that hunt your settlers, in unit types and numbers set by the village's rank — see Raids have unit types for the full roster and the arithmetic. Kill the Necromancer and the village celebrates: every settler gets happier, the dead pay in emeralds and iron, and the Town Hall counts the win. If it wanders off and you kill it later, that still counts.

Guards without a bed fight all night anyway; guards with a bed get up when there is trouble. If you have no guards, expect losses.

Barracks and the bell new in 0.8

A Barracks is a closed room with at least one bed, a door, and a Guard Marker inside it: the same kind of room as a Home (see above), with a different marker. Chat says Barracks #1 recognised: 3x3 room, 2 beds, door at ... when it works, or in red what is missing. The Guard Marker is crafted from an iron sword and a copper ingot. Any chest inside the Barracks is the village armoury: what you put there, guards come and take (see The Armoury and archers, below).

Who sleeps there

• Only guards. A nitwit, farmer, lumberjack, trader, explorer or builder never takes a Barracks bed, even when it is the only free bed in town. They say night: no free bed in the village instead, so build a Home for them.
• Guards prefer the Barracks. A guard looking for a bed takes a Barracks bed first, even if a Home bed is closer. When the Barracks is full, guards sleep in any bed the village counts, like everyone else.
• Barracks beds count toward how many settlers can live in your village, just like Home beds. The Town Hall report lists them: Barracks: 1 (2 beds for guards). A Barracks with a hole in it stops counting until you fix it.
• One marker per room: a Guard Marker and a Home Marker cannot share a room.

When the bell rings

Hang a bell anywhere inside your village within 32 blocks of the Town Hall (a Trading Post bell counts too). The moment a raid begins the bell rings on its own and everyone in the village reads The bell rings: the dead are coming!

• For the next 60 seconds every guard musters: it drops what it is doing, gets out of bed if it was asleep, and hurries to within 6 blocks of the Town Hall. A guard that spots a monster on the way fights it instead; once at the hall, guards fight whatever comes.
• Guards muster even without a bell (the Town Hall tells them); the bell is what warns you. Without one, chat says in grey where to hang it.
• After the muster, guards go back to their rounds, and back to bed once the Necromancer is dead.

A village with guards but no Barracks works: guards just sleep in Homes and take beds your other settlers could use. The Town Hall report reminds you.

Checking on your guards

/copperstead guards lists every guard of the village you stand in: what it is doing (fighting what, sleeping, mustering, or on watch), where it stands and in which building, its health, and which bed it owns. During a muster the first line says how many seconds are left.

Raids have unit types new in 0.11

The dead come as an army, and the army has jobs like your guards do. Every unit renders with a vanilla model; what makes it a unit is what it does and what it pays.

The rank

Every raid has a rank from 1 to 5, fixed the moment it starts: 1 + (raids won ÷ 2) + (settlers ÷ 8), whole numbers, children included, capped at 5. A village of 14 with 2 raids won is rank 3 (1 + 1 + 1); a village of 40 with 6 raids won would be 9 and is capped to 5. The rank sets three things:

• The Necromancer's health: 60 at rank 1, then 20 more per rank (80, 100, 120, 140).
• The escort it arrives with: rank 1 brings 2 Risen Zombies; rank 2 adds a Risen Skeleton; rank 3 a Risen Brute; rank 4 a Bone Knight and 2 Grave Hounds; rank 5 another Brute and another Knight (2 zombies, 1 skeleton, 2 brutes, 2 knights, 2 hounds).
• What it raises while it lives: at rank 1 grunts and archers (70/30); brutes appear from rank 2, knights from rank 3, hounds from rank 4; at rank 5 the mix is 25/20/20/20/15 grunt/archer/brute/knight/hound. It keeps at most 8 raised units near itself at a time.

When a raid starts, chat says the arithmetic: Rank 3: the Necromancer has 100 health and comes with 2 Risen Zombies, 1 Risen Skeleton and 1 Risen Brute. The raid still ends the moment the Necromancer dies; a minute later whatever is left of its army crumbles within 48 blocks of the Town Hall. A raid that is called off (the Necromancer wandered out of the loaded world for 3 minutes) leaves its army walking. A door a Brute broke is yours to replace.

When the dead do not come

• The dead ignore a Camp. No raid rolls until your village is a Hamlet: a whole Home, a whole Storage Room, a Farm Marker and 4 grown settlers. The report says so while it is true.
• Nobody there, no raid. With no player within 96 blocks of the Town Hall the night's roll is skipped. Nobody has to fight a raid nobody sees, and a village is not eaten while its owner sleeps.
• /copperstead raid off stops raids on a village you are still building; /copperstead raid on starts them again. Founder, trusted player (/copperstead trust) or op. The report reads Raids are OFF for this village.

Guards harden

Every raid a Guard lives through, alive and within 48 blocks of the Town Hall when the Necromancer dies, gives it +1 armour, up to +5. It shows at once (Your guards hardened: ... now veteran +1) and it survives a restart. It comes from fighting, never from the settler's level: a level-30 farmer handed a Guard Token starts at veteran +0. Retrain a Guard as anything else and the armour and the count are gone within a minute; enrol it as a Guard again and it starts over at +0.

Kit: eight arrows make an archer

A bow in the Barracks chest only makes an archer when the chest also holds at least 8 arrows (it used to take one). With 7 arrows a guard keeps its sword, and on the same visit it still takes a better sword if there is one. With 8 it takes the bow and up to 32 arrows, gathered from every arrow stack in the chest.

Commands

• /copperstead raid: the rank with its sum, what the next Necromancer brings, tonight's odds, whether raids are off or the village is a Camp, and one line per guard with its id, veteran count and armour. During a raid it adds the Necromancer's health and position.
• /copperstead raid start [1-5] (founder, trusted or op): calls a raid now at the village's own rank, or the rank you name (the number wins). It works by day too, but the zombies and skeletons burn in the sun; the Brute and the hounds do not.
• /copperstead raid off / on (founder, trusted or op): the per-village switch above.
• /copperstead raid veteran <guard id> <raids> (op): sets a guard's raids survived, 0 to 5 (9 is capped to 5).

Every raid, refusal, crumble and hardening is in the beta log: RAID Rank 3: ..., raids are off for this village, the dead ignore a Camp, nobody within 96 blocks of the Town Hall, the dead crumble, survived the raid: veteran +1.

The Armoury and archers new in 0.10.1

Guards are not handed gear out of thin air. A new guard gets a plain iron sword and that is all; anything better has to be something the village actually owns and has put in a chest. Any chest inside the Barracks is the armoury. A village with no Barracks uses its Storage Room instead, so putting armour in the store is enough to see guards wearing it.

How a guard kits up

• A guard with nothing to fight walks to the armoury and takes whatever is better than what it carries: armour for each slot (helmet, chestplate, leggings, boots) and a better weapon. If the chest holds nothing better, it looks again in 30 seconds.
• "Better" is the game's own numbers: attack damage in the hand, armour value in the slot. So any armour or weapon works, leather to netherite, enchanted or not, including things from other mods.
• Whatever the guard takes off goes back in the chest, never destroyed. Kitting up never interrupts a fight or a muster: a guard that spots a target drops the errand.
• Give a guard another job and its kit goes back to the armoury, except the standard iron sword, which is simply put down, so cycling a settler through jobs cannot mint swords. Kit survives a server restart.

Archers

• A bow is only taken when the armoury also holds arrows. A guard that takes both becomes an archer: bow in hand, up to 32 arrows in the off hand.
• An archer keeps 5 to 15 blocks from its target, sidesteps, and looses an arrow every 2 seconds. Every shot costs an arrow.
• When the quiver is empty it fights on with the bow in hand, and once it has nothing to fight it goes back to the armoury: for more arrows if there are any, otherwise for a sword until arrows are stocked again.
• So you decide how many archers you have by how many bows you stock, and how long they keep shooting by how many arrows.

Right-click a guard with an empty hand: an archer says shooting at .... The demonstration village at spawn has one, kitted from the Barracks chest.

Banners, bells and orders new in 0.11

Settlers are pieces you place. Three gestures, all with an empty hand, move them: sneak-click a settler to make it follow you, click a banner to post your followers there, click a bell to call the guards. Only the founder, a trusted player (/copperstead trust <player>) or an op gives orders; anyone else reads Only the founder, a trusted player or an op gives orders here and nothing happens.

Follow me

• Sneak and right-click a grown settler with an empty hand: Guard a1b2c3d4 follows you. It keeps within 3 blocks of you, out of the village and back, for up to 5 minutes; then it stops on its own and goes back to work.
• Sneak and right-click it again to release it: Guard a1b2c3d4 released.
• A follower that spots a monster fights it, and one that is nearly starving (hunger under 15) goes to eat; both come back to your heels afterwards.

Post at a banner

• Place any banner (standing or on a wall) and right-click it with an empty hand: everyone following you is posted there. They stand within 3 blocks of the banner for one Minecraft day (24000 ticks), at 1 Food each, paid from the stock at once and all or nothing: Posted 1 settler at the banner (radius 3, until tomorrow). Paid 1 Food. With no Food in the Storage Room: Not enough Food to post 1 settler (needs 1).
• A banner must stand inside the village or within 16 blocks of its edge (a road or a building's yard counts as the village; a field around a Farm Marker does not). Further out: Too far from the village.
• A posted Guard fights anything it sees and walks back to the banner; an archer shoots, steps back and returns. A posted farmer, miner or anyone else does nothing but stand there: a piece on the board is not at work.
• Posted settlers do not go to bed and leave the post only to eat when they are nearly starving (hunger under 15), then come back. A settler kept on watch for days misses its sleep and its happiness drops by about 10.
• Sneak and right-click the banner to release everyone posted there. Break the banner and the post is over within 5 seconds: the settler's status says post gone; back to work.
• Children, the Engineer, Visitors and apprentices cannot be ordered: Child ... cannot be ordered.

Bells: muster and rally

• Right-click a bell with an empty hand: it rings, and every free Guard musters at the Town Hall for 60 seconds: The guards muster at the Town Hall for 60 s. Guards that are posted or following stay where they are.
• Sneak and right-click a bell: the guards rally to that bell instead, within 6 blocks of it, for 60 seconds. The rally survives a restart. /copperstead status and /copperstead guards say where they are gathering.
• A raid always wins: when the dead come, the bell rings by itself and every free Guard musters at the Town Hall, rally or no rally, until the Necromancer is dead.

From the console

Every gesture has a command, so a server console can do it with execute positioned <x y z> run copperstead ...: /copperstead order follow <player> [nearest|guards|all] (the nearest free settler, every free Guard, or everyone free follows that player), /copperstead order post x y z [radius] [guards|all|nearest|followers] (posts them at that point; followers means whoever follows the player who typed it, so a console says guards), /copperstead order release [all], /copperstead orders (every order in the village and the muster), and /copperstead rally [x y z|hall] (a muster with no bell). The Town Hall report shows Orders: 2 posted, 1 following, and right-clicking a settler with an empty hand shows what it was told to do.

Numbers in one place: follow 5 minutes within 3 blocks, post one day within 3 blocks for 1 Food, banners within 16 blocks of the edge, a meal under hunger 15, musters 60 seconds. If the game and this page disagree, type /copperstead bug and say so.

Builders new in 0.9

A Builder (Builder Token: emerald + brick) raises what you mark out. You choose what and where; the builder fetches the materials from the Storage Room and puts the blocks in one by one, lowest layer first. Builders sleep, eat and stay inside the village like everyone else, and build the rest of the time.

A Build Site, step by step

1. Place a Build Marker (brick + copper ingot) on flat ground, inside the village or within 8 blocks of its edge. The marker is the centre of the footprint at floor level; the blueprint stands on the marker's level, so build on flat ground.
2. Right-click it with an empty hand to walk through the nine blueprints, one per click: Small Home, Storage Room, Barracks, Farm, Trading Post, Well, Watchtower, Road segment, Wall segment, then nothing again. Each choice shows the outline in copper dust for ten seconds and tells you where you are and what it costs: Build Site #1: Storage Room (2 of 9, needs 46 Cobblestone, 25 Oak Planks, 1 Oak Door, 1 Copper Chest, 1 Chest, 1 Barrel, 1 Torch, 1 Storage Marker). Sneak-right-click to start, right-click again for the next one.
3. Sneak-right-click to start. The ground must be clear: air, grass, snow, water and flowers give way, anything else stops the start with Clear the site first: there is Stone at .... A started site counts as village ground and appears in /copperstead buildings and in the Town Hall report with its progress.
4. Put the materials in the Storage Room (or any chest by a Storage Marker). The builder takes up to a backpack of what the site still needs, walks over, swings, and places a block every 1.5 seconds (faster as it levels up; one XP per block).
5. When the last block goes in: Build Site #1 finished: Small Home. in green for everyone nearby, and the Build Marker is gone. Right-click a started marker to see how far along it is; break the marker to cancel (what stands stays). A finished Small Home hands its spot to a Home Marker; a finished Watchtower or Wall segment keeps its Build Marker standing, stays listed as a building and keeps counting as village ground (break the marker to be rid of it).

The nine blueprints

The village wall

/copperstead wall (founder or operator, standing in the village) orders a 3-high cobblestone wall on every edge column of the village. It keeps up on its own: as the village grows, new edge columns are added to the job, and when everything stands the report says so and keeps watching. Two builders on the same job never build the same block or spend the materials twice. Where a road crosses the edge the wall leaves a gap: that is your gate. Columns with something already in the way are skipped and counted. The report line reads Wall: 212 of 640 blocks placed; /copperstead wall stop cancels the rest.

Repairs

When a Home or Storage Room is BROKEN because it leaks (the report says the room leaks near ...), a builder fetches the same block the wall or roof is made of (cobblestone if the Storage Room has none of it), closes the gap, and the Town Hall re-checks the room: Home #1 repaired: cobblestone at ..., whole again. A room broken for another reason (no bed, no door, too small) is yours to fix.

What the builder says when it is stuck

• waiting for 20 Cobblestone in the Storage Room for Build Site #1 (red): nothing in storage has the next block. Put it in any chest of the Storage Room or beside a Storage Marker.
• waiting: Build Site #1 is blocked by Stone at ...: something sits where a block should go. Clear it.
• cannot reach ... trying another block: the builder could not walk near that spot. Give it a way round.
• idle: no Build Site is active: nothing is marked out and started. Leftover materials go back to storage.

/copperstead build lists every Build Site here with its blueprint, its marker position and its progress. Every choice, start, tenth block and finish is in the beta log.

The Forge, and the four Ages new in 0.11

Iron is the last stock to close. Miners dig raw iron out of the Mine, and once you have a Forge a Miner with nothing left to dig smelts that iron and forges what your Guards are short of. Ages are your score: four steps read off what stands in the village, announced when you reach one, and dropped again while a building is broken. Nothing here is minted: every arrow, sword and helmet is paid out of the stock, and the game tells you the price first.

The Forge

A Forge is a closed room with a furnace (or a blast furnace), an anvil and a Forge Marker (anvil + copper ingot) inside it. Right-click the marker: Forge #1: OK, or in red A Forge needs a furnace and an anvil in this room. The anvil may stand on the floor of a 3x3 room; it counts as furniture, like a bed. The Engineer hands over the Forge plan after you have a whole Mine (46 cobblestone, 25 oak planks, 1 oak door, 1 furnace, 1 anvil, 1 torch, 1 Forge Marker), and the anvil in that bill is the real price of a Forge. A village has one working Forge at a time; a broken one is listed as Forge #1 BROKEN in the report until you fix the room.

Smelting

A Miner works the Forge when its Mine is worked out (waiting: this Mine is worked out), when the village has no Mine at all, or when the armoury wants more Iron than the stock holds. It takes up to 8 raw ore of one kind (raw iron, raw copper or raw gold) out of storage, or the ore it dug itself and still carries, together with the logs to burn them, 1 log for every 1.5 ore, so 8 ore take 6 logs (/copperstead stock shows Wood -6 under smelting 8 Raw Iron at the Forge), puts them in the furnace, waits beside it while it burns (10 seconds per ore in a furnace, 5 in a blast furnace) and carries the ingots back to storage, where they count as Iron (+8 under smelted at the Forge). Its status line says every step: smelting 8 Raw Iron at the Forge (took 6 Oak Log), brought 8 Iron Ingot from the Forge to storage. Night, hunger or a fresh rock face interrupt it and it picks the batch up where it left it; nothing in the furnace is lost. Without logs it waits and says so: waiting: 8 raw ore to smelt but no Wood for the furnace.

Forged kit

With the smelting done, or whenever the armoury (every chest inside the Barracks; the Storage Room when there is no Barracks) is short, the Miner forges at the anvil: 5 seconds a piece at level 1, faster as it levels up, paid out of the stock the moment the hammering starts, all or nothing. It only makes what is short, and the Guards fetch it from the chest themselves.

A village with no Guard is short of nothing: the armoury is nobody's until there is one. What the stock cannot pay for is said once in the Miner's status line, in the report and in /copperstead forge, in red: cannot forge an Iron Helmet: needs 5 Iron, has 1; the Miner then makes the next piece it can afford, and goes back to smelting when the shortfall is Iron. Status lines to expect: forging 8 arrows for the armoury (took 1 Iron, 1 Oak Log), then put 8 arrows in the armoury chest at .... If the armoury chest is full the piece goes to storage instead of being lost.

The four Ages

An Age is never stored; it is read off the village every 5 seconds, and every settler count means grown settlers: children do not count until they grow up (apprentices do). Each Age needs everything the one before it needs, so a broken roof drops a Town to whatever still stands, and nobody loses a job over it. When your village reaches a new Age everyone nearby reads Your village has reached Age II: Hamlet. with the level-up sound and every settler gains 10 happiness, once: fixing a roof brings the Age back quietly.

/copperstead age prints exactly where you stand: Age I: Camp. Age II needs: a whole Home (no), a whole Storage Room (no), a Farm Marker (no), 4 grown settlers (have 2)., one row per line, green when met and red when not; a child shows as 4 grown settlers (have 3, plus 1 child). The same line sits in the Town Hall report. A Well or a Watchtower counts once its Build Site says finished and its Build Marker still stands.

Commands

• /copperstead age: the Age and every row the next Age still needs.
• /copperstead forge: the Forge (with its furnace and anvil), each Miner and what it is doing, the raw ore and logs in stock, and what the armoury is short of with the price and the number of forgings each piece takes.

Lamps new in 0.10.1

Builders keep the village lit. A dark village is a village monsters spawn inside, so when no Build Site, wall or repair has any work, a builder walks the village on an 8-block grid and puts a torch wherever the ground is dark (block light 1 or less), open and firm. A torch lights 14 blocks, so with one every 8 there is no black ground left between them.

• Torches come from the Storage Room. With none in store nothing happens; put a stack in any chest of the room and the lamps go up.
• Lamps never take a builder off a building: a Build Site, the wall and repairs all come first. Lighting is what a builder does when everything else is done, so it costs nothing in a village that is already lit.
• Nothing already standing is touched, and the job goes quiet the moment the last dark spot is lit. A big new village is lit up to 64 lamps at a time.
• The Town Hall report (/copperstead status, or right-click the hall) has a new line: Lamps: the village is lit; nothing spawns on its ground. or Lamps: 7 dark spot(s) left; builders are lighting them (torches come from the Storage Room).

The Engineer: the whole tech tree new in 0.11

The Engineer walks into your village 5 minutes after you found it, as long as somebody lives there: no Home needed any more, because the Home is the first thing he teaches. Right-click him with an empty hand and he gives the next plan and, with it, the first token of the job that plan needs. Later tokens you craft yourself: an emerald plus the job's item. Only the founder, a trusted player (/copperstead trust <player>) or an op gets plans and tokens; everyone else is told whose village it is and how to start their own.

The order, and what each step waits for

The first four come one at a time, in order, because that order teaches the game. Once the fourth is handed over he opens up: every later step comes the moment the village has earned it, several in one click.

Ask him when nothing new is earned and he says what he is waiting for: I will hand over the Barracks plan and a Guard Token when this village has 1 trained Farmer. If the last plan he gave you is still in your pack, he reminds you: You have the plan for a Small Home already. Put it on the podium. A village upgraded from 0.10 keeps everything its Engineer already handed over; the 0.10 chain that waited for "a whole Farm" (which could never be) now waits for a Farm Marker, so the Well comes on your next click.

The podium

• Put a plain lectern anywhere in the village. The Engineer claims the one nearest the Town Hall and works there; with none he says so and waits.
• Put a plan book on the lectern. From then on a Build Marker offers that plan when you right-click it, instead of cycling every blueprint in the game. Swap the book to change what the village is set up to build.
• A village with no lectern keeps the old behaviour: right-clicking a Build Marker walks through all nine blueprints.
• A written book you make yourself with the right title is not a plan. The blueprint is inside the book, not in its name.

Strangers and the Founder's Charter

• A player who is not founder, trusted or op gets directions: whose village this is, and to start your own: place a Town Hall at least 64 blocks from any other; two settlers come with it; I find you 5 minutes later.
• Where an op has run /copperstead engineer charter on (the village at spawn), that village's Engineer also hands every player one Founder's Charter, once per player name: 1 Town Hall, 1 Lectern, 1 Storage Marker, 1 Build Marker, 1 Home Marker, 1 Copper Chest, 16 Bread. Everything a village needs on day one. A second click says You already have your charter.

If he dies

An Engineer that has been missing from his village for a minute is written off: The Engineer of <village> is gone. Another will find the village in about 5 minutes. The new one walks in 5 minutes later and remembers every plan and token the old one handed over.

Founding a village

Placing a Town Hall now tells you the new flow: two settlers come with a Town Hall placed at least 64 blocks from any other, the Engineer walks in 5 minutes later, and the first things to place are a lectern (his podium), a Storage Marker beside a copper chest with bread in it, and a Build Marker where the first Home should stand.

/copperstead engineer says how many of the 13 steps he has handed over, what he is waiting for, what the podium holds, and what is earned and waiting for a right-click. /copperstead engineer charter on|off (op) switches the charter for the village you stand in. Every plan, token, charter and refusal is in the beta log.

Laying out a village from the console (a starter village, a demonstration)? /copperstead build <blueprint> [x y z] chooses a plan at a Build Marker and starts the builders without anyone clicking it. Founder or operator.

Commands

Recipes (survival)