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 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.

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.

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 with average happiness of 60% or more and a spare bed gets a new settler about every 3 minutes. 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.
• 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.

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 an iron sword and extra health, attacks any monster it sees, and fights first, sleeps second.

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.

Nitwit

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

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

Once a village has 3 or more settlers, each night there is a chance (10% plus 5% per settler, up to 50%) that a Necromancer appears at the village edge and marches on the Town Hall. It has a purple boss bar and keeps raising zombies and skeletons that hunt your settlers. Kill it and the village celebrates: every settler gets happier, it drops emeralds, 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.

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.

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.

Commands

Recipes (survival)