After years of being destroyed by your infection mods, the villagers decided to build their own.

The Village Fights Back turns ordinary villages into self-organizing strongholds. At the heart of every village sits the Village Brain Node, an AI that spends the village's emeralds to arm its people, raise walls, and evolve its defenders across 4 stages, until the village can strike back at whatever threatens it, players included.

Built to stand against the harshest infection mods, the village answers with its own: a contagious counter-infection, 12 weapons, 17 new creatures (two of them bosses), 3 potions, 17 structures it raises by itself, and a whole new dimension to chase the fight into.

The Village Brain Node

Every village gets a Village Brain Node, a block that appears in place of the village bell at the heart of the settlement and runs the whole defense. It keeps a per-village economy: the emeralds the village earns, and the ones you donate, fund everything it does.

It evolves through 4 stages. Each stage it reaches arms and upgrades the village's villagers, guards, and iron golems with stronger gear and new abilities. Let it grow on its own over time, or feed it emeralds to push it through the stages faster.

It thinks for itself. The Brain reads the state of the village and reacts: it sends out settlers, raises walls, and builds specific structures such as golem factories, barracks, and lure towers when the situation calls for them, spending emeralds as it goes. Right-click it to open its screen anytime, showing the current stage, stored emeralds, and live villager, guard, and golem counts. A Logs tab lists the last actions the Brain took, with the day each one happened.

Where you stand with the village. The Brain keeps a reputation score for you, and everything it decides about you comes from that number. Trade, fight its enemies, and feed it emeralds to raise it; hit its people, rob its chests, or mine its metal to lower it. Reach 100 and you are a Hero of the Village; fall to -100 and every defender attacks you on sight. The score is shown in the node's screen, on the same row as its organic mass, and a Reputation tab lists the last changes and their causes. See the reputation section below for the full picture.

It protects its own. At sunset the village calls in reinforcements scaled to the Brain's current stage, and an immunity aura radiates from the node over the village's villagers, guards, and golems.

Choose your difficulty mode

When you enter the world, you can choose between 4 difficulty modes. Each one decides where your reputation starts and how far it is allowed to move:

1. Peaceful: you start at 200 reputation, so you are already a Hero of the Village, and your score can never fall below 0. The village will never turn on you, even if you hit a villager by accident.
2. Neutral: you start at 0, with no limit in either direction. The default behavior described above: be nice with the village and it will be nice to you.
3. Hostile: you start at -300 and your score can never rise above -100, so you are permanently an Enemy of the Village, whatever you do.
4. Nightmare: you start at -1000000 and can never rise above -500, so the village sends raiders to hunt you down every night, for good. They know exactly where you are, and can dig through blocks to reach you.

Armed defenders and the arsenal

The village does not run. Every villager fights, the guards carry heavier weapons, and the iron golems wield rocket launchers. They hold their ground against any hostile mob, and because targeting keys off Minecraft's own "hostile" tag, monsters from other mods are handled automatically, with no special support needed.

They fight as a unit. Defenders are immune to friendly fire and never hurt one another, and the golems only loose a rocket when no ally stands near the target, so the blast never catches their own. Golems brawl up close, launch themselves skyward on a wind charge, and fire from the top of the arc. Strike a defender yourself and it turns on you briefly before calming down, and you can read the mood on its face: a defender in combat wears an angry expression.

As the Brain evolves, so does their gear. Higher stages hand defenders steadily stronger equipment and abilities. From stage 3 their blades begin to infect whatever they hit with the Emerald Virus, escalating to a stronger strain at stage 4, while ordinary iron golems become golden Gigachad Golems with far more health and rockets of their own.

The arsenal the village forges includes:

• Alien Slasher and Alien Eradicator, blades that spread the Emerald Virus (I and II) on hit
• a native Mace with its three enchantments (Density, Breach, Wind Burst), and its Limbo-forged upgrade the Alien Smasher
• the Rocket Launcher, Wind Charge, and Fire Grenade
• Emerald Virus Arrows (I and II)
• full Emerald and Limbo gear lines, tools and armor alike, including the Emerald Hammer and a Limbo chestplate that doubles as an elytra

Most of it is craftable, the Weaponsmith sells the Mace, wind charges, and the mace-enchant books, and defenders have a chance to drop their weapon when they fall.

Walls and defensive structures

As the village grows, the Brain fortifies it. A built-in planner traces the village's actual footprint, however irregular, and villagers raise a wall around it course by course, complete with gates, loopholes to shoot through, and scaffolding to reach the high spots. The wall scales to the size of the settlement.

From stage 2, Wall Defenders are mounted above the gates: turret creatures that fire real bullets and rockets at anything that comes near.

The Brain builds with materials of its own:

• Reinforced glass, as tough as ancient debris yet still lets light through, used for protective domes
• Protecting glass, which stops projectiles coming from outside while the village keeps firing out
• Fake cobblestone and fake obsidian smart gates, which allies pass straight through but enemies cannot

And it raises purpose-built structures as the situation demands: golem factories that forge new golems, barracks, and lure towers that funnel hostile mobs onto powder snow and drop them into a pool of lava. To put all this up quickly, the village uses special charges: Blue TNT that builds a house block by block, and Green TNT that builds tower variants.

The counter-infection: Fertile and Rich blocks

To answer the infection mods that rot the world, the village grows a green one of its own. Spreading out from the Brain Node, it slowly converts the world around it into Fertile blocks (with richer Rich variants), a full family of green-veined dirt, stone, sand, wood, deepslate, netherrack, end stone, sculk, leaves, and more. The spread is deliberately slow and capped, and it leaves your ores untouched. Those blocks are not just decoration: the Rich ones hold emeralds, and the village's own miners dig them out to feed the economy the Brain runs on. You cannot do the same by hand. Mine a Rich block yourself and you get the block, not the emerald, because only villagers know how to extract it. To get the emerald you need the village's methods: right-click an Obliteration Furnace with the block while it is burning, or break the block with an Obliterator. The growth even has its own fertile chorus plants, whose fruit you can eat (it teleports you like ordinary chorus fruit, with a rare and unfortunate side effect). Out among the fertile fields you may meet the Rich Sheep, a green-touched sheep that drops lime wool and an emerald.

Easier Mining

Because that green growth glows, mining beneath your village becomes far safer. As it creeps downward it turns the stone, deepslate, and even the Deep Dark under the village into a self-lit, lush cavern, with no darkness left for hostile mobs to spawn in and no need to place a single torch. It pays better, too: your natural ores are all preserved, so against the glowing backdrop every vein stands out at a glance, and the Rich blocks are worth carrying home to an Obliteration Furnace, so the deeper the green reaches, the more there is to gather.

The Emerald Virus

The village also fights with a contagion, entirely separate from the green that spreads through the ground. The Emerald Virus is creature-borne: it passes from creature to creature, carried by the village's own fighters on their infecting blades and caught from a single bite of an Emerald Apple. Once a creature has it, it stays infected and spreads it on contact, and only the mod's Immunity (as an effect or a potion) can clear it. You can wield it yourself too, brewed into a Potion of Emerald Virus (with splash, lingering, and tipped-arrow forms) or fired as Emerald Virus Arrows (I and II).

At its peak the virus produces the Emeraldger, a stage-4 virus warrior whose strength scales with its host's health and who is immune to fire and to every status effect (the virus included), staring out through glowing green eyes.

The Emerald faction

A third power now walks the map: the Emerald faction, a creeping mob infection. Any hit from an emerald unit infects its victim, and a creature that dies while infected feeds the closest Brain Node with organic points. The Brain node can then use these points to summon emerald units, based on an AI system that identifies whether it is better to explore, hunt, swarm the enemy, summon a boss, etc.

The emerald faction and the village leave each other alone: emerald units never attack villagers, guards, or golems, and the village never strikes back at them, not even with air strikes. Everything else is prey, the wild animals, the monsters, and, if you become Enemy of the Village, you, though by default they stay neutral toward the player. Because I'm nice, I made them spare the cats, dogs and horses so that you don't lose your pets to them.

Where an emerald creature is born the ground below turns to an infested path that slowly grows the fertile zone on its own, and when an emerald unit dies those paths erupt with emerald mites while the survivors nearby grow stronger. Emerald units drop their normal loot plus an emerald. The whole faction can be tuned, capped, or turned off in the configs.

The Limbo dimension

Beyond the war for the village lies the Limbo, a dark void dimension with a bedrock holding cell at its spawn. There are several ways in and out: drink a Limbo Potion to be banished, throw a Volatile Limbo Potion to banish others, or build a Green Limbo Portal by lighting a fake-obsidian frame. The portal runs at twice the Nether's compression, so a short walk in the Limbo covers a long way back home. When you are sent there, a Limbo Gravel marker is left where you stood, and destroying that marker pulls you back; you can also use a bed in the Limbo, the dedicated Limbo Bed or any bed at all, to return. Even falling out of the world leads here: the void drops you into the Limbo, then from the Limbo into the End, and only the End's void is fatal.

What waits in the dark. The Limbo is dotted with floating bedrock cubes of every size, their outer shells crusted with Forgotten Glowstone, a vivid green growth that lights the void. The larger cubes hide nests of ancient debris cradling Limbo Eggs, and those eggs hatch into Limbo Phantoms: tripled in size, glowing, and able to phase straight through bedrock to snatch creatures and haul them off. Hunt them for Limbo Membrane. The Limbo is not even fully sealed from your world: a small fraction of its chunks mirror their Overworld and Nether twins, copying that terrain in, after which blocks you change on either side are mirrored across, though living creatures never make the crossing.

Limbo gear. Craft Limbo Membrane into Limbo Ingots, then use a rare smithing template to forge netherite into the Limbo set:

• Limbo armor with full knockback immunity, including a chestplate that doubles as an elytra
• a Limbo tool set that out-mines netherite, with a pickaxe that breaks bedrock and reinforced deepslate
• wearing the full set makes you immune to fire and falling, clears harmful effects, turns the Limbo Phantoms neutral, smashes soft blocks as you move, lets you walk through bedrock, and arms a keybound green banish beam on a 30 second cooldown

The Limbo Sage. A new villager profession that deals in rare and costly Limbo goods, from oddment blocks up to enchanted Limbo tools, though never Limbo armor. Threaten one and it hurls a Volatile Limbo Potion to banish you outright.

The Limbo raid. Linger too long in the Limbo and you carry a curse home: come back to a village and a Limbo raid descends, a ghostly, oversized version of the vanilla raid roster, far tougher than the mobs it imitates. The whole journey is charted by its own advancements.

Reputation: where you stand with the village

The village keeps a reputation score for you. It goes up when you are useful to the village and down when you are not, and everything the village decides about you follows from that one number. It is not a timer. Milk will not remove it, and neither will dying. Your difficulty decides where it starts and how far it can move, and on Neutral it starts at zero with no limit either way.

Going up:

• +2 for every trade with a villager
• +5 for killing anything the village would fight
• +1 for every emerald you feed the Brain Node

Going down:

• -20 for hitting a villager, guard, or golem
• -60 more for killing a villager
• -10 for each stack you take from a village chest
• -50 for mining the village's iron, gold, diamond, or emerald blocks
• -500 for swinging at the Brain Node

Every sunset the score moves one tenth back toward zero, in both directions. The village forgets slowly, so standing has to be kept up and a grudge does not last forever.

Hero of the Village starts at 100 and gains a level every 100 points, up to Hero V at 500. Each level buys you better prices from every villager. At Hero I the village trusts you with its chests; at Hero V, with its metal. Fireworks go up each time you reach a new level.

Enemy of the Village starts at -100. Every defender attacks you on sight. Below that is Nightmare of the Village at -500, and then the village sends a raid after you at every sunset until you climb back above it.

One hit no longer makes you an enemy. It costs you 20 points, and nothing else happens until the number itself crosses -100. If you die while your score is negative, it returns to zero.

The sunset bounty. On Peaceful and Neutral, if your score is above -100, the Brain Node picks the strongest hostile creature within 100 blocks each evening and offers you its full health in reputation points. You have ten minutes, and it has to be your kill. This is the fastest way to earn standing, and it is meant to get you out of the village and into the fight, so a monster from any other mod counts just as well as a vanilla one.

The Reputation Book. You start with one, and you can craft another from a book and an emerald. It explains the whole system, and what it says depends on your difficulty. You can also see your current score and the last changes to it in the Brain Node's screen.

Escaping Death

You can craft the powerful Limbo Scythe from a Limbo hoe to bring your most worthy villagers back to life. First, kill worthy opponents (at least 20 HP) with the Scythe to collect their souls, then right-click on a tombstone to resurrect that villager. A villager gets a tombstone when they die after killing at least one opponent (or when they have at least 10 hearst in the MCA Reborn mod). The Scythe can also save you from death by consuming a soul if it is in your inventory when you die.

Minecraft Comes Alive (MCA Reborn) compatibility

You can play "The Village Fights Back" why keeping your MCA Reborn experience intact. Every village and guard will spawn as an MCA villager, the Brain Node will spawn right next to the MCA village center. The MCA compatibility was playtested by us, if you still have issues, please report them in the mod's comments section.

Configs

Tune the village to taste. Every setting lives in a single commented file (config/thevillagefightsback-common.toml) and can also be changed live in-game with /thevillagefightsback config <name> [value] (read it with no value, set it as an operator). Multipliers default to 1.0; most switches default on.

Multipliers (1.0 = vanilla pace):

• multiplier_level_up_emerald_threshold: emerald cost for the Brain Node to reach each stage
• multiplier_unit_spawn_frequency: how many times a day every node and the Brain Node spawn their units (2.0 = twice a day, evenly spaced)
• multiplier_number_of_settlers: how many settlers each wave sends out
• multiplier_brain_initiatives_cooldown: how often the Brain Node's reflexes fire
• multiplier_air_strikes_cooldown: how often air strikes fire (kept separate from the reflexes)
• multiplier_block_infection_speed / multiplier_block_infection_reach: how fast and how far the fertile zone spreads
• multiplier_brain_influence_radius: the reach of every "within the Brain's radius" rule
• multiplier_limbo_raiders: how many raiders a Limbo raid throws at you
• multiplier_emerald_mobs_spawned_by_brain: how many emerald scouts the Brain summons (base 2 cats per settlement + 1 bat per sunset, times this)
• organic_army_multiplier: scales the standing organic army the Brain can field (cap = emerald_mobs_max_number times this)
• organic_spawn_budget_multiplier: scales how much banked organic mass the Brain spends per decision (bigger bursts)

Switches and values:

• difficulty: where your reputation starts and how far it can move, picked on the difficulty screen when the world is created and changeable afterwards. 0 Peaceful (starts at 200, so you begin as a Hero, and it can never fall below 0), 1 Neutral (starts at 0, with no limit either way, and the recommended setting), 2 Hostile (starts at -300 and can never rise above -100, so you are an Enemy of the Village for good), 3 Nightmare (starts at -1000000 and can never rise above -500, so the sunset raid never stops). On the two hostile settings your score can still fall, and dying does not reset it.
• enable_block_infection: master switch for the village's own fertile-zone takeover (the Brain Node's natural spread)
• enable_mob_infection: master switch for the Emerald faction; off means no emerald unit can ever appear (no conversion, no brain summon, not even a spawn egg)
• enable_emerald_infestation: whether emerald conversions lay infested paths that slowly spread the fertile growth on their own (separate from enable_block_infection)
• infested_paths_need_brain_node: infested paths and fertile grass only keep spreading while within reach of a stage-2 or higher Brain Node, so a converted zone stays roughly inside the village's own radius instead of creeping across the map. Turn it off for the old free-for-all spread (default on)
• monochrome_green_fertile_blocks: everything the infection converts from now on comes out green, the way it did before the five colour sets arrived. The other colours stay registered and stay in the creative tab, and blocks already placed keep the colour they were placed with (default off)
• emerald_mobs_are_hostile_to_player: if on, emerald units hunt Enemy-of-the-Village players; off by default, leaving them neutral toward you (they only fight back when struck)
• emerald_mobs_max_number: soft cap on emerald units near a player (to limit lag); emeralds far away don't count. Over the cap a new unit's health is poured into the nearest emerald instead of spawning, and an egg/summon tells you
• enable_organic_mass_system: emerald kills bank "organic points" in the nearest Brain Node, which spends them to field its own emerald army instead of converting each kill directly (off = classic convert-on-kill)
• creature_rocket_ / air_strike_rocket_ / emerald_virus_explosion_destroy_blocks and _set_blocks_on_fire: whether each kind of explosion breaks blocks or starts fires (it always still hits units)
• enable_emerald_virus_explosion: master switch for the emerald-virus death explosion; off means no blast at all (no damage, no fire), while the emeraldger and emerald loot still appear
• guards_drop_fire_grenade_upon_death: whether a slain stage-3 guard goes out in a fiery blast
• brain_node_extinguishes_fire: the Brain Node douses fire in its radius for an emerald
• defeated_brain_node_spawn_spirit: whether destroying a Brain Node (any non-silk-touch break) raises anything at all. On Mega Brutal or Nightmare that is the Vindictive Village Spirit boss; on any other difficulty the node instead leaves a Dead Brain Node behind, which any player can feed a golden apple to send a Village Spirit off to found the village again elsewhere. Off means a node can be broken with no consequence at all (default on)
• reversed_gravity_flips_screen: when General Darius' Special Sauce turns the world upside down, whether every player's view rolls over with it. The physics are identical either way, this is only the camera (default on)
• air_strikes_appear_at_stage (1-4): the stage air strikes unlock at
• unstable_limbo_gravel_HP_threshold: the HP above which a banished creature is "unstable" in Limbo
• enable_chunk_portals: work in progress; when on, once a brain reaches stage 3 about 1% of nearby chunks turn into 4-wall portals that show and lead into the Limbo (default off; turning it off stops new portals but leaves existing ones)
• guards_spawning_with_general_darius: guards that spawn already under General Darius's command
• general_darius_remains: Darius holds the field instead of returning home
• emeraldgers_size_variation: emeraldgers sized by the HP of the host they sprang from
• mca_compat: with Minecraft Comes Alive (MCA Reborn) installed, every villager and guard this mod spawns is an MCA human rather than a vanilla villager, so the village stays uniformly MCA instead of turning into a mix. Harmless when MCA is absent (default on)
• player_spawn_in_village / player_is_given_bell_at_spawn: where you start and whether you start with a Bell. In the Survival experience the bell is replaced by a buried cache: you get a live distance readout on the action bar instead, and the chest at the end of the walk holds a Dead Brain Node between the two books, ringed with eight gold ingots
• player_is_hostile: bounds your reputation the way Hostile does, so you are an Enemy of the Village for good
• darius_inflicts_obliteration: every blow from General Darius marks its victim with Obliteration, and a stage-4 Brain Node builds an Obliteration Furnace beside itself and pays 1 emerald a minute to keep it lit. Anything Darius kills near the village is then struck off the spawn tables for as long as the fuel lasts. Players are never affected. Turn it off and Darius is simply a hard fighter
• mega_expansion_mode: the Brain Node founds a new building every minute
• mega_brutal_mode: every village unit gains permanent Strength/Regen/Resistance/Speed III, guards swing Alien Smashers, and golems teleport to their prey
• unstick_test_mode: a testing aid. A villager trapped in a pit is normally rescued after 30 seconds, or 60 seconds when it is stuck for any other reason; this drops both clocks to a few seconds so the rescue can actually be watched. Leave it off in a real world (default off)

Handy commands: /thevillagefightsback brain_stage_get and brain_stage_set <1-4>, village_status_report (the nearest Brain Node's report), tp_to_nearest_node (warp above the nearest Brain Node), unstick (free any villager trapped nearby), clear_forced_chunks (release chunk tickets left behind by old 1.4.0 saves), reset_default_configs (restore every setting above to its default), and firework [count] (set off the village's own celebration fireworks overhead).

Requirements and credits

• Minecraft: 1.20.1 (original), 1.19.2, or 1.21.1
• Mod loader: Forge
• Required dependency: Guard Villagers (the village's guards are built on it). Playtested with guardvillagers-1.20.1-1.6.17.
• Author: LexNoWolf
• License: All Rights Reserved