NeroColonies

Part of the Neroland sci-fi Minecraft mod ecosystem, built on Neroland Core.

Status: 0.1.0 feature-complete and compile-verified across all six cells; runtime verification is the remaining stage. Version 0.0.1-alpha.1.

NeroColonies turns a place into a colony. You plant a colony beacon, it claims the ground around it, and everything after that belongs to the colony rather than to any one block: one shared store of goods, one population of interchangeable colonists, one morale figure, one research tree, one export buffer.

Features

• Colony beacon and claims — a per-player and a server-wide colony cap, minimum spacing, an overlap check, and an owner plus an access list. The public query surface is boolean-only: an owner UUID never leaves the server.
• Colonists — interchangeable labour units with four fields and no schedule. They path between home and workstation, and they are never deleted as a punishment.
• Housing and population — three habitat tiers, a chunk-budgeted housing sweep that sums capacity and comfort, and growth gated on food and life support. Two founder colonists arrive with the beacon so the loop can start.
• Autonomous construction — the colony builds itself from datapack blueprints: it picks a structure, finds a flat spot inside its own claim, and lays a couple of blocks per cycle. Bring the materials and it builds at full speed; leave it alone and it fabricates from scrap at a quarter rate. It never overwrites an existing block, never builds outside the claim, and never demolishes anything.
• Life support — an oxygen generator burning Core gas and grid power, with an OK → DEGRADED → FAILED state machine. Failure decays morale; it never kills a colonist. Airless dimensions come from a planet mod through one adapter, and every dimension is breathable without one.
• Food and morale — food recognised by tag family, never by hard-coded item id, and a morale figure computed from weighted housing, food, life-support, crowding and hazard terms. Every weight is a config key.
• Automated jobs — four job stations driven by datapack job definitions, running on the colony tick inside one millisecond budget. Unpowered is slow, not stopped.
• Colony storage and exports — one shared stock and a bounded export buffer, both exposed as standard item capabilities, so pipes, hoppers, AE2 and Create work with no mod-specific API. Exports sell for credits through Core's currency API when an economy mod is installed.
• Research — a colony-local node graph loaded from datapacks, spent from colony storage.
• Planetary outposts — small remote claims parented to a colony, feeding its storage.
• Offline catch-up — colonies tick only while loaded; on return, elapsed time is applied at a reduced rate and capped, so there is no reason to chunk-load a planet for free yield.
• Commands — a player tree, an operator tree, a datapack reload-check, and the two data-protection commands.
• Companion app support — five read sections and two actions through Core's link API, scoped to the requesting player's own colonies.
• Everything is datapack-driven — jobs, research, housing tiers, export tables and structure blueprints are all JSON.

Neroland Core is the only hard dependency. Nerospace, NeroAgriculture, NeroLogistics, NeroEconomy and Energized Power are optional and detected at runtime; remove them all and the mod still runs.

Documentation

• Wiki — player and operator documentation
• PRIVACY.md — what is stored, retention, export and erasure, telemetry opt-out
• USING-CORE.md — every Neroland Core API this mod consumes
• CHANGELOG.md — what has shipped so far

Build targets

• Minecraft: 26.1.2 and 26.2
• Loaders: NeoForge, MinecraftForge/Forge, Fabric (the "6 cells")
• Java: 25
• Mod id: nerocolonies · package za.co.neroland.nerocolonies

Layout

The build is the repo root, with a flattened cross-loader structure driven by Stonecutter:

• common/ — shared, loader-agnostic source spliced into every loader node
• fabric/ — Fabric Loom
• forge/ — ForgeGradle
• neoforge/ — ModDevGradle
• stonecutter.gradle — the real root build script; build.gradle is intentionally inert

Building

./gradlew :fabric:26.2:build          # one cell
./gradlew :neoforge:26.1.2:build :neoforge:26.2:build \
          :forge:26.1.2:build :forge:26.2:build \
          :fabric:26.1.2:build :fabric:26.2:build   # all six

See AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md for agent and contributor context.