LavaGolem

Four hard-working Copper Golems that automate the most tedious parts of vanilla - without a resource pack, without client mods, and without breaking the survival spirit. You still build the infrastructure yourself; the golems just save you the endless walking back and forth.

Tired of building a giant super-smelter - stacks of furnaces wired up with hoppers, minecart loops, item sorters and half a chunk of redstone just to melt some ore? Drop a Smelter Golem next to a few furnaces and a couple of labeled chests instead. Sick of standing at a brewing stand swapping bottles one at a time? That's the Alchemist Golem. Want your dripstone-and-cauldron lava farm collected for you? That's what the Lava Golem is for. And the Courier Golem carries goods between them all, so your stations don't have to be one big pile.

Four little golems can replace a whole room of contraptions.

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The golems

Lava Golem - the lava hauler

Vanilla already lets you drip a lava source through pointed dripstone into a cauldron and slowly accumulate lava - but you have to stand there and bucket it out. The Lava Golem does that for you: it grabs an empty bucket, fills it at a full lava cauldron, and drops the lava bucket into your storage. Forever.

Smelter Golem - the furnace keeper

Feeds your furnaces and hauls out the results, so you don't need a hopper-and-rail smelting factory. It's genuinely smart about it:

• Reads your stock - takes the most abundant smeltable from the [Smelt] chest.
• Picks the right fuel - lava buckets for big batches, coal for small ones, wood if that's all you have - sized so nothing is wasted.
• Spreads the load - splits a big pile evenly across all your furnaces so they run in parallel, instead of dumping it all into one.
• Closes the lava loop - a spent lava bucket becomes an empty bucket; the golem pulls it back out and returns it, so it never clogs the furnace.
• Work modes - right-click a Smelter Golem to open its menu and set it to Balanced, Load only, or Collect only. Run one golem that loads and another that collects if you like.

Alchemist Golem - the brewer

Runs your brewing stands, so you never stand there swapping bottles one at a time again. One chest holds everything - glass bottles, nether wart, blaze powder and ingredients all go into a single [Brew] container, and the golem works out what each item is for.

• Fetches its own water - fills bottles at a water source or a water cauldron (the one rain and dripstone refill for free).
• You set the recipe by stocking the chest - it brews in stages (water → nether wart → awkward → your effect ingredient → one modifier) and keeps going for as long as the ingredients are there. Nether wart, blaze powder and redstone in the chest? Long Strength. It only starts a batch it can finish, so it never churns out awkward bases nobody asked for.
• Pick what it's allowed to brew - right-click it for a list of every potion, drawn as the real potion. Click to switch each one on or off (modifiers too), and it'll ignore that ingredient even if it's in the chest.
• Smart about blaze powder - it's both fuel and the Strength ingredient, so the golem keeps only one pinch in the fuel slot (already 20 brews) and leaves the rest for potions.
• Grinds blaze rods into powder at a crafting table if rods are what you have - using the real vanilla recipe.

Courier Golem — the porter

Carries items between your tagged containers so your stations don't have to sit next to each other. Right-click it to open a route editor:

• Custom routes - add as many routes as you like; each moves items From one tag To another. Left-click a slot to cycle through the tags it can see nearby, or right-click to type any tag you want - the tags are just the signs/names on your containers, so nothing is hardcoded.
• Item filter - shift-click items from your inventory into the filter and choose the mode: blacklist ("carry everything except these", the default) or whitelist ("carry only these"). Per route.
• Live status - the menu tells you exactly why a route isn't running: no source container, destination full, filter lets nothing through, both ends resolve to the same chest.
• Waypoints - drop signs saying [Waypoint] along a walkable path and the courier walks marker-to-marker, so it can climb stairs and round corners instead of walking into a wall. Markers are shared road signs: any number of couriers use the same network, and each one picks the marker that gets it closest to its target. No naming, no assignment.
• Teleport fallback - if a target is genuinely unreachable on foot it blinks to it as a last resort (toggle in config).

Classic setup: [Lava] → [Fuel] to feed the smelter from the hauler, and [Output] → your storage to clear finished goods — wiring all four golems into one loop.

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Recipes

All four golems share the same shape - only the center changes:

C R C        C = Copper Ingot
R X R        R = Redstone Dust
C R C

• Lava Golem - X = Lava Bucket
• Smelter Golem - X = Furnace
• Alchemist Golem - X = Brewing Stand
• Courier Golem - X = Hopper

The result is a "Golem Heart" (a labeled Copper Golem Spawn Egg). Right-click it on the ground to place the golem.

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Setting up a station

Storage containers can be chests, trapped chests, barrels or shulker boxes. Tag each one either by:

• placing a sign with the matching text on any of its 6 sides, or
• renaming the container itself in an anvil to the matching text (no sign needed - cleaner build).

Lava Golem station: a [Buckets] container with empty buckets, a lava cauldron nearby, and a [Lava] container for the output.

Smelter Golem station: furnaces within range, plus containers tagged [Smelt] (ore/food to melt), [Fuel] (any vanilla fuel), and [Output] (finished goods - spent buckets come back here too).

Alchemist Golem station: brewing stands within range, a single [Brew] container (bottles + nether wart + blaze powder/rods + ingredients, all mixed), water nearby (a source block or a water cauldron), and an [Output] container for the potions. Add a crafting table if you stock blaze rods instead of powder.

Courier Golem: no fixed station - just tag the containers on both ends (any tag you like) and set the route in its menu. If the two ends aren't in plain sight of each other, line the walkable path with [Waypoint] signs.

Drop the matching Golem Heart nearby and it gets to work.

Works with regular furnaces, blast furnaces and smokers — and routes automatically: ores go to your blast furnaces, food to your smokers, everything else to regular furnaces.

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Everyday use

• Telling them apart - the Lava Golem is on fire and the Alchemist trails magic particles (both purely visual, no resource pack, no damage).
• Stats / settings - right-click a golem with an empty hand: every golem opens a menu with its stats (the Smelter also has its work modes, the Courier its routes, the Alchemist its potion list).
• Switch one off - every menu has a power button: the golem stops where it stands until you switch it back on. Handy while you rebuild a station.
• Disassemble - sneak + right-click with an empty hand. The Golem Heart drops back, along with anything it was carrying.
• Survives restarts - golems (and their current job and mode) are restored automatically when their chunk loads.

Commands

Command	Permission	Description
/golemstats	lavagolem.admin	Server-wide statistics
/removegolems	lavagolem.admin	Remove all custom golems

Configuration

plugins/LavaGolem/config.yml:

search-radius: 8            # how far a golem looks for containers, cauldrons and furnaces
reach-distance: 2.2
search-cooldown-ticks: 40
tick-period: 10
bucket-sign-text: "[Buckets]"
lava-sign-text: "[Lava]"
smelt-sign-text: "[Smelt]"
fuel-sign-text: "[Fuel]"
output-sign-text: "[Output]"
brew-sign-text: "[Brew]"    # alchemist - bottles + fuel + ingredients, all in one container

courier-search-radius: 24   # courier only - same in every direction, must cover both ends of a route (max 32)
courier-carry-limit: 16     # items per trip
waypoint-sign-text: "[Waypoint]"
courier-teleport: true      # last-resort blink when a target can't be walked to
courier-stuck-ticks: 20     # how long it tries to walk before blinking

locale: en                 # en or ru
bstats: true

Every tag text above works either as a sign or as the container's own name.

These are only the defaults. Open any golem's menu and right-click a container slot to give that golem its own tag (left-click resets it). So a brewery and a smeltery can stand side by side without fighting over one shared [Output] — point one at [Potions] and you're done.

The courier scans a cube, so its cost grows as radius³ - keep courier-search-radius only as big as your routes actually need.

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Need more? The full guide covers each golem in detail, exactly how the courier finds its way, and a troubleshooting checklist for when a courier won't move.

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Only golems created from the custom recipes are controlled - vanilla copper golems behave normally.