Caravans

<img src="https://cdn.modrinth.com/data/fA5OmaDl/images/9b53c290fcbe7c0b936c1bccb6e81cc32023fa4e.png" alt="Caravans — a llama caravan crossing the altiplano at dusk"> Caravans gives your tamed pack animals a job. Llamas follow you in a spaced line, carry up to 90 slots each, and walk your loot home while you keep playing. Donkeys and mules haul beside them, a camel leads, wolves guard the line. A custom movement engine drives every caravan animal, so formations hold over rough terrain, swim shorelines, and route around obstacles instead of snagging — and an animal you never recruit stays fully vanilla. **Paper or Purpur · Minecraft 1.20 – 26.x · Java 21+ · no dependencies.** Spigot is not supported. > **Guide, recipes & config:** (https://machina-1.gitbook.io/machina-docs/llamas) ## Two tools run everything There are no player commands to learn. Craft these two and go; ordinary sticks and leads stay ordinary. **Drover's Stick** — string knotted onto a stick. Recruit or dismiss pack animals, appoint a lead camel or a wolf protector, right-click the air to whistle stragglers in, sneak-click to halt. | | | | |:-:|:-:|:-:| | | <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/misode/mcmeta@assets/assets/minecraft/textures/item/string.png" alt="String" width="36"> | | | | <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/misode/mcmeta@assets/assets/minecraft/textures/item/stick.png" alt="Stick" width="36"> | | | | | | → **Drover's Stick** **Khipu** — knots tied along a lead. Read a llama's load, flip its saddlebag pages, record depots, and dispatch storage runs. | | | | |:-:|:-:|:-:| | | <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/misode/mcmeta@assets/assets/minecraft/textures/item/string.png" alt="String" width="36"> | | | | <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/misode/mcmeta@assets/assets/minecraft/textures/item/lead.png" alt="Lead" width="36"> | | | | <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/misode/mcmeta@assets/assets/minecraft/textures/item/string.png" alt="String" width="36"> | | → **Khipu** Admins get `/caravan` with matching subcommands (op by default). ## The caravan <img src="https://cdn.modrinth.com/data/fA5OmaDl/images/24a2c0b552a9669ee862b9df2c366e98a4172c62.png" alt="Camel, llama, donkey, mule, and wolf"> | | In the caravan | |---|---| | **Camel** | The lead. Appoint one and the herd follows it — ride it for a mobile train, park it as a base camp. As you play it becomes a quartermaster, returning storage runs up to 40% faster. | | **Llama** | The hauler. Follows in line, levels up to 90 slots, and runs your storage errands. | | **Donkey & mule** | Extra haulers, fully vanilla: their native 15 slots, no pages, no leveling. | | **Wolf** | The protector. Screens the moving caravan, engaging hostiles within 16 blocks before they reach you. | Right-click an animal with the stick and your nearby pack forms up. Members hold a spaced line along the trail you walked — 2.5 blocks apart, no conga pile-ups — and speed up to about 1.5× walking pace when they fall behind. Teleporting is the last resort (30 seconds stuck, or 48+ blocks away), and it lands out of your sight, walking back in. One more role: a **red carpet** in a llama's decor slot posts it as a sentry. It spits at hostiles within 12 blocks — 3 damage, Slowness, knockback — and holds its ground until you take the carpet out. ## Saddlebags A vanilla llama tops out at 15 slots. A caravan llama keeps the strength it rolled, then earns a level (three more slots) per hour of your play time, applied the moment you next open it — no background task. At strength 5 its saddlebags unlock: up to six 15-slot pages, 90 slots in all. The active page is the llama's real, native screen; the rest travel on the animal. The Khipu reads the load (`Saddlebag 2/6 · 34 on this page · 121 total`), and a sneak-tap flips the page. ## Storage runs Record depots by clicking containers with the Khipu; couriers fill them in the order you recorded them. Sneak-click the air twice and the farther half of your llamas walks off to unload: 1. A courier vanishes only once you can't see it — beyond 32 blocks, out of your view cone, or hidden behind terrain — or after 15 seconds boxed in. 2. It deposits every page into your depots, merging into partial stacks and skipping full containers. 3. It waits out a return timer scaled by depot distance, 10–90 seconds, on a boss bar countdown. A quartermaster camel trims it. 4. It reappears behind you, walks in, and rejoins. Leftovers ride back, and anything that can't be re-stowed drops to the ground. A courier away during a restart is persisted whole and resumes on the next start; a dying llama spills its stashed pages where it fell. Nothing is duplicated, nothing is deleted. Past 80% full, a following caravan sends a run by itself — with a cooldown, and a longer back-off when the depots came back full. ## Configuration Every tuning number lives in a commented `config.yml`, hot-reloaded with `/caravan reload`, and each system has an off s