Villager Wrangler

Villager Wrangler — Project Summary

Villager Wrangler is a small, lightweight Minecraft 1.21.1 NeoForge utility mod designed to make moving villagers easier while preserving normal vanilla villager behavior.

The mod adds two focused mechanics:

• Villager Leading: Shift + right-click an adult or baby villager with a vanilla Lead to leash it. Vanilla Minecraft handles the rope rendering, movement, fence attachment, breaking distance, and leash behavior. Normal right-click trading remains available.

• Emerald Following: Villagers are attracted to a nearby player holding an Emerald and will follow them within a configurable range. Emeralds are not consumed.

Emerald attraction is intentionally not absolute control. Villagers prioritize important vanilla behaviors such as sleeping, panic, raids, combat/safety behavior, breeding, trading, and existing leash behavior. Once the emerald attraction ends, they resume their normal schedules and activities.

Wandering Traders are intentionally unaffected.

Technical / Release Information

Release: 0.1.0-alpha.1
Minecraft: 1.21.1
Loader: NeoForge
NeoForge: [21.1.250,21.2)
Java: 21
Mod ID: villagerwrangler
Author: Brian Brown
License: MIT

The mod is completely standalone and has no relationship or dependency on ButcherCraft.

The implementation deliberately remains lightweight: no custom entities, custom items, custom networking, mixins, access transformers, or replacement villager AI system. It integrates with vanilla leash mechanics and the existing Villager Brain.

Configuration

Server configuration independently controls villager leading and emerald following. Emerald-follow range defaults to 10 blocks and supports 1–16 blocks.

Configuration should currently be changed while the world/server is stopped because changing the leading setting live can leave connected clients with stale configuration until reconnect/restart.

Validation Status

The release candidate has passed 38 GameTests, clean production builds, dedicated-server testing, packaged-JAR client/server smoke testing, villager lifecycle testing, and a 100-villager performance fixture.

Known alpha limitations are primarily that compatibility with major villager-AI overhaul mods has not yet been established and two simultaneous graphical Minecraft clients have not been tested.

Release baseline: d0ca6ff40f16e3b0e3533e1f1ea67c3212d51ed5

The project is feature-complete and approved for its first public alpha release; publication/tagging is the remaining step.