Clay Soldiers: Remoulded [Fabric]

If you were playing Minecraft around 2012 you probably remember Clay Soldiers. You would craft a stack of tiny dolls, drop a few on the ground, throw some sticks between them, and a battle would happen around you. The mod stopped being updated years ago. This is that idea rebuilt from scratch for Minecraft 26.2, 26.3, 1.21.10, 1.21.1 and 1.20.1 on Fabric.

- What they do

Put a soldier down and it goes looking for a fight with any other team. There are twenty different colors/teams. Fifteen come from dyeing a plain clay soldier, four more from a melon slice, a pumpkin, a lump of coal or redstone, and plain undyed clay is a side of its own.

The gear is the cool part. Soldiers pick up what you drop near them and behave differently afterwards. Some of it you can guess: a stick makes them hit harder, leather halves the damage they take until it wears through, a bowl works as a shield. Others are a bit less obvious:

* A gold nugget crowns a soldier as king, and idle teammates fall in behind him. One king per team per area, the same limit the original mod enforced. Near a keep of his team, the king goes up and stands on its roof.
* Clay turns a soldier into a field medic that stands teammates back up when they fall near it. Four reinforcements, then the clay is spent.
* An ender pearl makes a traitor. It turns on its own side, and other pearl carriers leave it be.
* Wheat seeds are poison to a traitor, so scattering seeds is how you deal with pearls in your own ranks.
* A brick doll, crafted from a soldier doll and a brick, can't be placed by hand. A soldier holding a ghast tear will walk over to one and raise it in your colors, twice per tear.
* Nether wart sends one berserk and it attacks everything it can see, its own side included.
* A fermented spider eye does the opposite. It starts no fights, and anything that strikes it loses interest and wanders off, which can defuse a brawl on its own.
* A mob head, or a player's head with its face, is worn just for show. A king keeps its crown on top.
* An iron nugget makes a guard. It wears a kettle helmet and iron, takes a quarter less damage, and stays in its keep's courtyard to fight any enemy that gets in.
* A ladder makes a ladderman. It carries the ladder to an enemy keep within 24 blocks, sets it against the wall and climbs first, and its team follows it up.
* Leaves of any kind are camouflage. Enemies notice the soldier only within 4 blocks, until it strikes or is struck and the leaves fall off.

There are fifty-four of these, and most of them stack. A soldier can be sugared, flinted, armored and diamonded all at once.

- Mounts

Soldiers find a riderless mount within a dozen blocks and climb on by themselves, unless they are already in a scrap. Four kinds to craft, all of them animals that already live in Minecraft, and every recipe makes two:

- Horses, in ten materials. A clay ball and the material. These are not just recolors. A gravel horse is slow and tough, a cake horse is the quickest, and a grass horse is nearly as quick and dies to a stiff breeze.
- Bunnies, in all sixteen dye colors. A clay ball and a dye, or eight clay balls around a dye for sixteen bunnies. Quick and easily killed.
- Turtles, in nine materials. Two clay balls and the material. Slow, and very hard to shift.
- Clay spiders, in stone, cobblestone, coal and redstone. A clay ball, a piece of string and the material. These climb walls (but not a keep's wall), and they carry their rider up with them.

Drop paper next to a horse and it grows paper wings. It stops taking fall damage and drifts down instead of dropping, which is the pegasus from the original without putting a winged horse in your world.

Two mounts have no recipe at all and turn up by luck alone, at roughly one placement in eight thousand. You will know them when you see them.

- The Keep

A small stone castle that raises an army for one team. Craft it from clay balls, a diamond, soul sand and stone bricks, and place it on a clear, level space 3 blocks by 3. It builds a spruce palisade around itself, with a lookout tower at each corner, a gatehouse facing you and a small door in the back wall.

Load it with soldier dolls of one team, up to four stacks: that is its garrison. Switch on troop spawning and it sends them out, each soldier using up one doll, riding out on a mount doll you loaded while they last and carrying one of each kind of gear you gave it. First it fills its posts. Soldiers carrying something to throw go up to the lookouts on the corner towers, one to each, and throw down from there without ever running out. The next four keep watch on the walls and the next two guard the keep's door. Then eight go out and wander near the keep. After that it sends out twelve at a time, the next wave when only two of those outside are left. When enemies strike the keep's door, everyone left inside comes out into the courtyard to defend it. The Recall button on its screen calls its soldiers back in as dolls and switches troop spawning off. The keep throws its ammo (gravel, snowballs, fire charges, eggs or emeralds) at enemies nearby, lobbing it over its own walls, and the flag on its pole shows whether it is sending out troops.

Place a soldier wearing a gold nugget near the keep and he becomes its king, standing on the keep's roof.

Enemy soldiers come for it. They break through the gate or the wall, or set ladders against the wall and fight the watch, then break down the keep's door and climb to the king. When attackers crowd the gate, the keep's soldiers go out by the small door in the back wall instead. Once the king, every soldier of the keep and every doll it holds are gone, a ten second count runs above it, and then the attackers take it over. Their soldiers at the keep go inside as its new garrison. Clay balls and sticks repair it, and once the fighting stops, its own soldiers rebuild the wall before the next wave goes out.

A keep is home to its team. Its soldiers wander within 8 blocks of it when they have nothing to do, and there they take half damage, so an attacker needs about twice their number to win. Soldiers you place yourself stand guard where they are until a keep of their team is nearby, and then stay near that keep.

- Getting started

Soul sand plus a block of clay gives you eight clay soldiers. A soldier or mount that falls is gone for good, doll and all. Dye them to pick sides: one soldier with one dye, or eight placed around a dye in a crafting table. Sneak while placing a doll to put down a squad of eight. Hold a team's dye, and the soldiers of that team that can see you follow you. You can walk through them, and outrun them at a sprint. If a battle gets out of hand, craft a disruptor from clay, a stick and redstone. It clears the field and gives you back the dolls and gear of the soldiers it cleared. A setting in config/claysoldiers.json, or in Mod Menu, makes it remove them outright instead. A dispenser places dolls and fires disruptors too. Hitting a soldier with your bare hand also kills it outright. Every recipe shows in the recipe book once you hold one of its ingredients.

Hold the stat display to count every team's soldiers and every kind of mount within 64 blocks, and to see each keep's team and health. If you have Roughly Enough Items installed, each item's Information page says what it does.

Everything is in the Clay Soldiers creative tab.

- Works on servers

Client and server code are kept separate, so this runs on a dedicated server as well as in single player.

- Credit and license

The original Clay Soldiers Mod was created by Kodaichizero and maintained by SanAndreasP, SilverChiren and CliffracerX. It is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0.

This project is an independent rebuild. It is not the official continuation and it is not endorsed by any of them. No code and no artwork from the original is included here. The mod's own textures are drawn by code, and the keep uses Minecraft's own stone brick, spruce and item textures, so a resource pack restyles it too.

Original mod: https://github.com/SanAndreaP/ClaySoldiersMod
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Released under that same license, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.