SupportedMods

##2. Supported mods/interaction with other mods

One of the goals in development of this mod was to allow for a lot of flexibility, while also allowing for detailled, intresting villages. In order to achieve that, mg_villages interacts with several other mods.

###2.1 Required mods

The actual placement of the houses is done by the handle_schematics mod. That mod even used to be part of mg_villages before it became a seperate mod. You need it.

The default mod from either minetest_game or RealTest is required.

Other mods included in minetest_game, namely doors, farming, wool and stairs, ought to be present in one form or another as well. This is simply due to the fact that most saved buildings make use of these nodes. It's a bit difficult to place houses if the nodes they are made of do not exist.

In general, if you have Minetest Game, RealTest or another subgame, you ought to be fine.

###2.2 Go farming

In combination with farming_plus, farming_plusplus or farming_redo, cotton plants grown on fields belonging to a building get replaced by a random fruit (i.e. potatoes, strawberries). This fruit may of course also be cotton. Farms get more intresting if they grow diffrent types of plants, so please install one of these farming mods for more fun!

###2.3 Cottages, snow, traders and bells

What do they have in common? Well, most of them where written specificly for the villages.

Cottages was written in order to be able to build more decorative houses on a small scale, with benches, beds, furniture, window shutters and the like. Many houses and village types make use of it and rely on it. You can run mg_villages without cottages, but you will miss a lot.

All torches in the villages are replaced by a special variant that is similar to the normal torch except that it does not melt snow. If your set of mods comes with a function to let snow melt in the presence of torches, the snow in the villages will remain there.

If mg_villages.artificial_snow_probability = <n> is set to a value of <n> larger than 0 (by default: 10), about each nth village will get an artificial snow cover regardless of the biome.

If moresnow is installed, normal and jungletrees will get a winter look in snowy regions. Roofs, fences and other nodes will get a snow coat. Moresnow was written due to roofs looking bad in winter without a (partial) snow cover. Stairs and slabs also cannot be covered by normal snow slabs. If you like winter, install moresnow.

Most people want mobs that populate the world. And it feels pretty empty without anyone "living" inside the villages. mobf_trader adds traders to the villages. They will stand around all day, waiting for someone to right-click them for trading. There's an extra set of traders that fits particulary well into a medieval village, complete with fitting trades.

Some players have also adjusted mobs_redo by letting the NPC mobs spawn on the mg_villages:plotmarker node. That's a very clever idea and ought to give you a suitable number of npc. See here. If you have mobf_trader and mobs_redo installed, the NPC from mobs_redo will gain the ability to trade when you right-click them.

Worlds feel empty without mobs running around. Use a mobs mod to let animals roam around!

The bell mod adds a bell that chimes the hour. A must-have for medieval villages. Regardless of what you think about religion - european medieval villages had churches and not exactly many personal clocks. Hourly chimes are also tourist attractions when used by town halls. Note: You need to add your own sound for the mod to actually play anything.

There are also several mods which add new village types to the game. They act mostly as a demonstration as to how this can be done. Of course they can also increase the variety of villages found in your world.

###2.4 Trees are important

With ethereal, you'll get new tree types and villages built out of them. Ethereal comes with a wide variety of trees and has a very nice biome system.

With RealTest, you'll also get new tree types and diffrently looking villages. There is also support for the other differences between RealTest and normal Minetest Game. Note: RealTest is a game on its own.

Forest is another great mod that gives you new tree types.

Tiny Trees are further sources of nice wood.

And, of course, the classic: MoreTrees is supported and adds many decorative wood types and trees. The very first lumberjacks even came to life in order to sell wood from these tree giants :-)

Wood is a popular building material for medieval houses. Don't underestimate the impact of decorative wooden textures on the appearance of villages! The reason why so many mods which add trees to the game are supported by mg_villages is that the villages profit a lot from nice, diffrent trees.

While not directly used, there are many mods found in the DreamBuilder Game that add rich plantlife to the world and make everything look very beautiful. If you can spare the CPU cycles for its far more expensive mapgen and love nature, then go for this subgame.

Dreambuilder also contains cavestuff, which is also part of the undergrowth modpack, and dryplants, which can be found in the grasses modpack. Both mods are used by the grasshut village type.

The trees from Nores experimental mapgen mod are of course also supported. Nores mapgen is where the basic code for the village generation comes from. However, using experimental mapgen mod and mg_villages in combination may result in errors due to both trying to place villages at the same location.

###2.5 More variants of stony nodes

With Moreblocks, many decorative blocks for buildings are added to the game. The villages make use of these nodes and replace their cobble and stone nodes by moreblock ones when it is installed. Apart from that, moreblocks also comes with the circular saw and allows you to use microblocks and the like.

Darkage, which has some newer forks that may be better by now than the original, comes with a lot of medieval nodes, but also with a lot of stony nodes (basalt, gneiss, chalk etc). The villages will make use of them. Plus you can build nice medieval villages on your own.