MineColonies Fabric — unofficial Fabric port of MineColonies for Minecraft 26.x

MineColonies on Fabric at last. Play the MineColonies colony simulator and town-building mod on the Fabric loader: found a colony, hire NPC workers, and grow a camp into a city — builders, farmers, miners, guards, couriers and cooks, blueprint-based construction, raids, a 200+ node research tree and quests. It runs on Minecraft 26.x with Fabric, in a single jar.

This is a community Fabric port of LDTTeam's colony simulator, plus a set of features and bug fixes made here — citizens that sail boats, three land-claim scepters with block-precise colony borders, working outposts, a farmer that prepares its own ground, and fixes for several bugs that have been in the mod for years.

Requirements, installation and other technical details are at the bottom of this page.

⚠️ Unofficial MineColonies port — read this first

This is an unofficial, community-made Fabric port of MineColonies. MineColonies itself is the work of LDTTeam (Let's Dev Together); this port is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by them.

• Do not send bug reports from this build to LDTTeam. Use this project's issue tracker.
• If the same bug also happens on the official NeoForge build, it belongs upstream instead.
• The jar contains none of MineColonies' textures, models or sounds. On the first start the mod downloads the original assets from the original authors' own server and verifies them — see "How to install" below.

Original mod: CurseForge · minecolonies.com

🧱 What is MineColonies? A colony simulator and town-building mod

MineColonies is a colony simulator / town building mod for Minecraft. You place a town hall, and everything after that is done by NPC citizens who live in your town:

• Dozens of NPC jobs — builder, farmer, miner, lumberjack, fisherman, guard, archer, courier, cook, baker, blacksmith, healer, teacher, beekeeper, florist and many more, each with skills that level up.
• Blueprint building — huts are placed as previews and built block by block by your builders, from several complete architectural styles.
• A colony economy — requests, deliveries, warehouses, minimum stock, crafting chains.
• Research — a 200+ node tree across four branches, unlocking huts, worker abilities and colony-wide bonuses.
• Raids and defence — barbarians, pirates, Egyptians and Norsemen come for your town; guards, towers and walls keep it.
• Quests, happiness, disease, schooling and a full simulation underneath it all.

Single player or multiplayer. The mod is required on both the client and the dedicated server.

✨ New features added in this Fabric port

Everything below is new relative to upstream MineColonies and exists only in this build.

🛶 Citizens sail boats

Your citizens can now cross water by boat instead of walking around the lake — or refusing to go at all.

• A new colony boat entity, integrated into the mod's pathfinder: open water is priced as a route the citizen can actually take, and the path is planned through it.
• The citizen boards from the bank, steers, and lands on the far shore by itself. Interrupt the path, send it somewhere else, or take the boat away mid-crossing and it gets out cleanly instead of drifting off across the lake.
• Gated behind its own research — Boats, sitting beside Rails, costing boats and requiring a level 3 Fisherman, which is the building that has any business owning them. Guards drop it while in combat, so nobody sails into a fight.
• Empty boats are discarded, and only the citizen a boat was placed for can board it — no fleets of abandoned boats on your coastline.

Measured on a live server: an 800-block water route builds a complete path in 7–11 ms; the same route on foot, swimming, does not build at all. Boats turn coastal and island colonies from "the worker stands there" into a working commute.

🗺️ Three land-claim scepters, and colony borders you can actually draw

• Land Claim Scepter — right-click to claim a chunk and the eight around it. No distance rule, so your territory can spread wherever you want it, in as many pieces as you like.
• Land Release Scepter — the direction the mod never had: give land back. One chunk per click, or nine while sneaking, exactly undoing one claim click.
• Border Scepter — draw the border inside a chunk, block by block. Click to add a column, sneak-click to cut one out, hold to paint. Follow a river, a wall or a cliff instead of the chunk grid.

The drawn border is real, not cosmetic: protection, whether a citizen calls a place home, the raid spawner and the build tool's preview all follow the line you painted. All three scepters draw the colony borders while held, redrawing live as you edit them, so claiming and releasing land is no longer guesswork.

🏘️ Outposts and enclaves that work

Upstream quietly refuses to let a colony live far from its town hall — building claims, chunk loading and bed assignment all measured distance to the centre. All three now ask who owns the ground instead:

• A hut placed on your land claims its own footprint at any distance (new maxoutlyingchunks config).
• An outpost stays chunk-loaded on its own (new maxforcedchunks config).
• Citizens get a bed near their work, not near the town hall — plus /mc colony rehouse to move citizens who are already living in the wrong place.

Mining outposts, coastal docks and satellite farms are a viable way to play now instead of a bug report.

🌾 A farmer that prepares its own ground

• The farmer terraforms. A field square it can't hoe because of what's lying there — stone, gravel, sand, a path, someone's floor — is no longer skipped in silence. The farmer clears it, lays down dirt and tills it in the same pass. Water is the one hard exception.
• It tells you in chat what it cleared, with a count and a per-block breakdown, so a rectangle drawn over the corner of your base is something you read about rather than discover later.
• Field marker stick — click the scarecrow, then drag out a rectangle with two clicks and bind it to a specific farm right there. No hut GUI, no guessing which farm grabbed which field.
• Fields of any shape in free mode: the rule is total area (default 4096 blocks, server-configurable) instead of upstream's "sum of four radii ≤ 20", which capped every field at 11×11. Long 4×1000 strips along a river are now expressible.

🐴 The Stable, and cavalry guards that actually ride

Upstream ships a Stable hut and mounted guards that no style could build and no player could unlock. Both work here.

• The Stable exists in all 23 architectural styles, derived from each style's own barn so it belongs to the set rather than being a grey box dropped into it. It has a recipe, and it sits under Military where a barracks-adjacent hut belongs.
• Cavalry guards ride to their patrols instead of sitting on a horse that wanders. A citizen-ridden horse never reached vanilla's player-riding code — it moved by the mob formula, where speed scales as the attribute squared, so a mounted guard did 1.4–2.8 blocks/s against 3.96 for a guard walking. Cavalry now rides at 4.8–6.6, by the same linear rule vanilla uses for a player's horse, capped so it cannot outrun its own pathfinding. A 70-block leg went from 32–48 s to 12–16 s.
• The rider looks where he is going, and dismounts before a ladder — both were reading the horse's own navigation, which is empty for every tick of every ride.

How it plays: the Stable takes a stablemaster, who herds and breeds the horses, and cavalry guards, who are guards like any other — you assign them in the hut, they take a mount from the Stable, patrol from it, ride down raiders and return to their stall. Their patrol radius is one and a half times a guard tower's, so a Stable covers ground no tower can. Free mode hands out mounts ready-made, trained and armoured, so you can try the whole thing without breeding a herd first.

The Stable's own settings tab carries the patrol interval — how many minutes between sorties. It defaults to six, which is deliberate for a unit that ranges that far, but it is also why cavalry spends most of its time near the Stable; set it to one if you want them out constantly.

Two crashes-in-slow-motion fixed along the way: a cavalry horse no longer loses its stable when the world saves under it, and the cavalry stopped writing a stack trace to the log for every hit it took.

🎣 A fisherman who sails to his water

• He takes a boat to the fishing spot rather than refusing water he cannot walk to.
• Up to five fishermen per hut, by hut level.
• They sit apart on the same pond — spread by seat rather than by pond, so a small pool holds all five instead of leaving three of them permanently idle.

⛏️ A mine that admits it is stuck, and a miner that respects lava

• A watchdog on the shaft: when the mine cannot make progress the miner says so in chat, instead of the shaft silently never finishing.
• The miner never swings a pickaxe at lava and stands on the ladder while digging, which is what used to end a mine and the miner in it.

🧱 Racks break like blocks

Upstream gives racks infinite blast resistance — bedrock's — so a creeper craters your warehouse floor and leaves every rack hanging in the air. They are 6 here, which is stone's, and their contents drop.

🔧 Long-standing MineColonies bugs fixed here

These are upstream's bugs — they reproduce on the official NeoForge build, and each was read line by line in upstream's own 1.21.1 source before being called upstream's rather than this port's doing. They are fixed here:

• "The builder refuses to build." The "is this order inside the colony" check stepped through the building's footprint in a way that, for a 17×17 hut, checked exactly one chunk — and the wrong one, then reported the coordinates of the hut, which was fine. Now every chunk under the building is checked and the message names the chunk that is actually unclaimed.
• A farm 1000 blocks away stealing a field from the farm next to it. Field auto-claim never looked at distance at all. It does now — and a citizen no longer keeps walking to a field that changed owner.
• A worker standing still forever. The navigator's stuck handler only rescues a worker that is walking and getting nowhere; it can do nothing for one whose destination has no path at all — nothing moves, nothing is logged, no request is outstanding, and the usual fix is breaking the hut. stuckrescueseconds watches the destination instead of the path and puts the worker there.

Separately, and not upstream's fault: the farmer never hoeing the ground, which was the new Minecraft's doing — vanilla split the #minecraft:dirt tag, moving grass, podzol and mud out of it, so the hoeable-surface test stopped covering the ground every real field is laid on and the farmer walked its whole spiral doing nothing. Measured on an identical grass scene: 0 of 121 cells tilled before the fix, 80 within three minutes after.

This is not a build that was compiled and uploaded. Every feature above has been played on a live client and a dedicated server — colonies founded and grown, huts placed and built, hut interfaces driven by hand, workers followed around, permissions tested from the wrong side of the border, raids called in. Many of the fixes exist because a player hit the bug and reported it, and the measurements quoted throughout were taken on running servers rather than estimated.

🖥️ Tools for server owners, builders and testers

Also new relative to upstream MineColonies and only in this build.

🧰 Free mode — build and test without the grind

/mc colony freemode <colony> on makes a colony work with no items at all. One switch, saved with the colony, off by default. It replaces the four scattered hut checkboxes with something that covers everything they never reached: build materials, tools, weapons, seeds, breeding items, cures, food — and the request system, so crafting recipe inputs, furnace fuel, smeltery ore, school paper and guard equipment are conjured too. Guards get a real weapon rather than merely being told to stop asking for one. Workers already stuck waiting for a request resume without a relog.

Ideal for creative builds, screenshots, server showcases and testing a layout before committing to it.

⚔️ Raids on demand

The raid command, made usable for testing and for server events:

• /mc raid <colony> now starts immediately instead of waiting up to three minutes for a slow tick and a campfire timer.
• size and strength — ask for 40 raiders at 2.5× health, damage and armour, in one line, without naming a raid type first.
• where tells you where the raiders actually are and how many of them exist as entities right now — the answer to "the raid bar is full but the town is empty".
• tp puts you next to them, stop calls every raid off and sweeps up raiders that outlived their event.
• A raid you asked for by name no longer fails with NO_SPAWN_POINT just because your surroundings aren't loaded far enough out. Natural raids are untouched.

📦 Know what your warehouse is actually doing

/mc colony warehousestock <colony> reports, per item type, how long since anything was taken and how often it is taken. Both numbers, deliberately: idle age alone calls a rarely-but-regularly used consumable junk. "Idle 20 days, taken 0 times" is what you clear out; "idle 1 day, 400 taken this week" is what you must not sell.

• The chat gets a summary; the full list goes to a CSV in the world save, with the path printed in chat — sort it in a spreadsheet by whatever column you like.
• Fill is reported as two numbers that are never averaged: slot occupancy first, because that is what actually stops a courier storing anything, and item capacity second. A slot holding three cobblestone is a full slot and nearly empty capacity.
• Costs a median 875 µs per sample, once every 25 seconds, on a warehouse of 51 racks and 589 item types.

🛡️ Colony protection, and a switch to turn it off

Permissions that the Fabric port had lost are enforced again: placing blocks, placing huts, filling a bucket, drawing a bow, and OPEN_CONTAINER now sees modded inventories. Hostile mobs no longer spawn inside a built building, and the damage half of turnoffexplosionsincolonies spares your citizens and livestock from every explosion in the game.

/mc colony protection <colony> off stops one colony refusing you anything while you work in it — the middle setting between the server-wide config and editing rank tables one action at a time. It is read in a single place, the one method every permission check goes through, so "off" cannot miss a gate. Two things stay on because they protect the colony rather than deny you: mob spawning inside buildings, and the explosion damage filter.

🩺 Diagnostics and admin commands

• /mc colony diagnose — what is stuck and why: every worker's job, AI state and how long it's been held, citizens with no AI, requests nobody took, work orders with no builder, inconsistent buildings.
• /mc citizens fill — populate the colony and hire everyone into an empty job slot.
• /mc citizens maxstats / heal — max every skill, or cure and heal everyone at once.
• /mc colony research completeall — finish the research tree, parents first, no cost, no university.
• /mc colony teachRecipes — teach every crafter everything it's allowed to learn.
• /mc colony growChildren — grow up every child in a colony at once, for worlds left with children stuck from an older save.
• /mc colony protection / /mc colony warehousestock — see above.

⚙️ Configuration

• maxcitizenpercolony now accepts up to 1000 (default unchanged at 250), with the research ladder's top rung raised to match — otherwise a config of 1000 was clamped straight back to 500.
• stuckrescueseconds (new, default 60) teleports a worker to where its job sent it once it has spent that long without getting any closer. See the bug fixes above for why that matters.

📋 Requirements

Base: upstream's 1.21.1 branch (NeoForge 21.1, Java 21), moved to the Fabric loader and to Minecraft 26.x at the same time.

📥 How to install MineColonies on Fabric

1. Install Fabric Loader for your Minecraft 26.x version. Java 25 is required by Minecraft itself.
2. Put exactly two files in mods/: Fabric API (the build for your Minecraft version) and this mod's jar.
3. Launch. On the title screen the mod asks for permission to download the MineColonies assets (about 78 MB). Click Download once; the files stay on your computer and the prompt does not come back. A dedicated server skips this step entirely.

The jar carries the three required LDTTeam libraries inside it via Fabric's Jar-in-Jar: blockui, structurize and domum_ornamentum, each ported to Fabric for Minecraft 26.x as well.

⚠️ Do not install Structurize, BlockUI or Domum Ornamentum separately

A jar in mods/ shadows a nested one regardless of version, silently. The resulting crash points at source lines that do not exist in the loaded code, and nothing about the substitution appears in the log.

In your mod list, blockui, domum_ornamentum and structurize must appear indented under minecolonies. If any of them is at the top level, there is a stray jar in mods/ — remove it.

⚡ Performance — profiled on a 1000-citizen colony

The port was profiled on a real 1000-citizen colony on a dedicated server, with the pathfinding pool instrumented live. A round of measured hot-path fixes shipped from it — the server tick no longer walks every colony for empty callbacks, defensive copies of the citizen list are off the tick paths, GUI lists stopped refreshing twice, A* stopped reading the world clock per node, courier lookups are hashed, and request-system logging no longer builds strings behind a disabled flag.

The full measurement — including what is still expensive and why — is published in the repository rather than summarised into a marketing number.

⚠️ Known limitations vs. the official NeoForge build

Some NeoForge-only hooks have no equivalent in Fabric or in vanilla Minecraft 26.x. Nothing was deleted — it is commented and logged.

Colony protection: TOSS_ITEM and PICKUP_ITEM are not enforced — a stranger inside your borders can still drop items and pick them up. Every other permission works, including PLACE_BLOCKS / PLACE_HUTS, FILL_BUCKET, SHOOT_ARROW, BREAK_BLOCKS, ACCESS_HUTS and ATTACK_CITIZEN.

Explosions: colony blocks are not shielded from vanilla explosions — a creeper, TNT or a bed in the Nether will take a blueprint apart. Reaching those generically would mean patching the game's own explosion code, which this port does not do. What does work: blasts from aircraft mods are shielded, and the damage half of turnoffexplosionsincolonies spares your citizens and livestock from every explosion in the game.

Fire and mob griefing: neither can be limited to a colony. Current Minecraft routes both through world-wide gamerules with no per-region hook, so fire_spread_radius_around_player and mob_griefing are the only levers and they change the whole world. This is not something the port lost — the original does not hook them either. Worth knowing: with the vanilla defaults, a colony with no player near it cannot burn at all.

Rendering: the spear renders as a flat item; the fallback citizen model shows player overlays (the mod's own job models are unaffected); items from other mods do not set a citizen's arm pose.

Other: one TravellingManager field reads back as BlockPos.ZERO in worlds made before the port; restaurant menus parse ingredients only from MineColonies' own recipes; the colony creation particle differs.

Core gameplay — building, jobs, worker AI, pathfinding, raids, research, quests and the request system — works fully. The complete list, with what each looks like in game and how it could be repaired, is published in the repository as PORT-STATUS.md.

❓ FAQ — MineColonies on Fabric

Does MineColonies work on Fabric? Officially, no — upstream ships for NeoForge only. This is a community Fabric port of MineColonies for Minecraft 26.x.

Is there a MineColonies version for the newest Minecraft (26.x)? This one. It is built from upstream's 1.21.1 branch and carried up to Minecraft 26.x.

Do I need Structurize, BlockUI and Domum Ornamentum? No — Fabric ports of all three are bundled inside the jar. Installing them separately breaks the game; see the warning above.

Does MineColonies Fabric work on a dedicated server? Yes, and the mod is required on both sides. It has been booted and played on a real Fabric server with Fabric API alongside it.

Can I move a 26.2 world to 26.3? Yes — back it up, then open it with the 26.3 build. The colony comes across whole: buildings, citizens and their jobs, work orders, research, rack contents, fields, permissions, even a raid in progress. Going back — a 26.3 world on 26.2 — is not supported.

Can I use my old MineColonies world? A world from the NeoForge 1.21.1 build is not directly portable — Minecraft 26.x changes the save format itself. Start fresh.

Is it compatible with other Fabric mods? The mod does not patch the game's logic. It contains a single client-side mixin, which registers the downloaded assets as a resource pack; the server side has none. It is still a large mod, and conflicts are always possible — report them here, with your mod list.

Where do I report bugs? This project's issue tracker on GitHub. Include your Minecraft / Fabric Loader / Fabric API versions, the full logs/latest.log or crash report, your other mods, and the steps to reproduce. If the same bug happens on the official NeoForge build, report it upstream instead.

🙏 Credits

MineColonies is the work of LDTTeam (Let's Dev Together) and its many contributors — more than a decade of work. Every worker, hut, research branch, blueprint and line of colony logic originates with them. The official mod, for NeoForge, is on CurseForge — if you play on NeoForge, use that build and support its authors.

📄 License

Licensed under GPL-3.0-only, the same license as every upstream project above, and distributed under its terms. Complete corresponding source for each released jar is in one public repository, github.com/unknown-wq/minecolonies: the mod's own source, the source of the three libraries bundled inside the jar under libs/ (blockui, domum-ornamentum, structurize), and the released jars themselves under dist/. Each version's jar and the source it was built from are in the repository at the same commit.