Frens

A lot has changed since April. Here is the short version.

⚠️ The AI chat and voice features are very much in beta. Talking companions, memory, banter and voices run on local models and can be slow, odd or wrong, and setups other than Apple Silicon Macs have had little testing. Everything else in Frens works without them. Questions, bugs and feedback: join the Frens Discord.

Frens works fully without any AI model. The companions follow, gather, build, fight, farm and fish on their own. The talking AI companions below are an optional extra.

Companions with personality (optional, local AI)

• Talk to your bots. Address a bot by name in chat or /msg. It answers in character and remembers your conversations, what it saw, and how it feels about you and the other bots. Everything runs on your own machine through Ollama. It is off by default. To turn it on, open the Guide (]) → AI setup, or Bot Controls → Soul Chat → Setup…. The checklist walks you through it: install Ollama, pick a model (with RAM guidance), turn on Soul Chat, enable each companion, send a test line, and optionally add a voice. No commands or cheats needed.
• Distinct personalities. Jake, Bob (a curious naturalist and tinkerer) and Silas (a superstitious miner) each get a persona.
• Group conversations. Say "bots, …" or several names to talk to up to four companions at once. Bots can also banter with each other while idle or working, and chime in on things they notice. Scenes now stay on one subject.
• Voices. Choose Piper, Pocket TTS, or (Apple Silicon only) Dreamsleeve, and assign a voice per bot with /bot soul voice list|install|assign. Speech is positional, so nearby players hear it.
• Memory tools. /bot soul memory <bot> and /bot soul beliefs <bot> show what a bot remembers. /bot soul reset <bot> archives it.
• Privacy. What you tell a bot in a DM stays out of conversations other players can hear.
• Dialogue settings. Scripted text and voice are controlled separately from AI chat and voice. There are four pacing sliders and per-category mutes. Settings save automatically.
• Emotes. Optional Emotecraft support: bots wave, point, celebrate and dance.

Survival and skills

• Type zzz to send your companions to bed. Bed choice and placement are better, and nights skip reliably.
• Food. Bots accept hand-fed food, ask before eating precious food, prefer cooked food, and pause work when starving: feed them, then /bot resume.
• Safety.
  • Better rescue from powder snow, burial and walls.
  • Bots avoid digging into lava, fire or magma.
  • Safer combat around charged creepers and when cornered.
  • Named mobs are spared.
• Woodcutting. Bots can make their own wooden axe, and hold torches in the dark.
• Crafting.
  • The Crafting window has search and sorting (A–Z, Z–A, category, material, learned order).
  • /bot craft stone_axe style names work.
  • A bot tells you exactly which ingredients it's missing.
• Fishing. Bots find better treasure water, come back to shore, remember spots, and store catches in nearby barrels or home storage. /bot fish forget clears saved spots.
• Travel. /bot come waits out travel cooldowns automatically. Fast travel explains which equipment it needs.

Movement

• Doors, gates and floors. Much better passage through doors, gates, stairs, slabs, carpets and pressure plates. Bots no longer fight gates that a pressure plate or button controls, and still close ordinary doors behind them.
• Following. Bots handle diagonal doors, low ceilings and getting stuck far behind you. Builders walk out through doorways.
• Mounts. Boats keep pace, and mounts, leads and rejoining are more reliable.

Storage, bases and multiplayer

• Chests ask first. Companions ask before taking from your chests (Allow once / Always / No). They leave 16 of each material and a spare of each tool type. Revoke with /frens supply revoke <pos> or all.
• Bases. Bases get protection zones, owner/operator editing, private listings, allies (/bot ally invite|revoke|list) and a server Spawn base.
• Access control. Only a bot's owner, an operator, or the single-player host can open its inventory, cast travel spells on it, change its hunts, or edit walls. Hidden bases stay hidden from other players.
• Stand down. /bot standdown (or hold \ then 1) pauses following for 60 s.
• Hobbies. Per-hobby on/off with /bot hobby <name> on|off.

Performance and stability

• Singleplayer "server is full" fixed. With several saved companions, a world could refuse to let you back in: the bots auto-joined before you did and took all 8 singleplayer slots. Companions now join after you, and one slot always stays free. If a world has more saved companions than fit, you'll get a chat note and can bring the rest in with /bot spawn.
• Several sources of server stutter are gone: crafting-table searches, making room in a full inventory, and doorway recovery.
• Fewer repeated retries and scans.
• Quieter logs. Detailed follow diagnostics are opt-in: /bot config diagnostics on.
• No more native downloads at startup. The memory database uses plain SQLite.

Before you update

• Both sides need the mod. Frens is required on both client and server. It conflicts with the original AI-Player mod, so don't install both.
• The AI features are optional and off by default.
  • Ollama: install it separately. The in-game "LLM…" manager can download models: llama3.1:8b is 4.6 GB, llama3.2:3b is 1.9 GB. If you point Frens at an Ollama server that isn't on your machine, your chats with bots are sent to that server.
  • Piper: the installer downloads Piper from GitHub and voices from Hugging Face, and verifies their checksums.
  • Pocket TTS: the installer uses uv/Python to install about 850 MB, plus a 228 MB model.
  • Downloads only on request. Nothing is downloaded until you ask.
• Operators and servers. Global settings, the AI model and the voice engine need operator (or single-player host) rights. Other players are told when a change wasn't saved. On a server, Ollama and voices run on the server machine: the setup screens show the server's status, and the host pulls models there (ollama pull <model>). A bot's owner can enable AI chat for their own bot.
• Upgrading existing worlds.
  • Bases from older versions become admin-only, and each existing base gets a protection zone automatically.
  • Memories bots made before this version are treated as private.

Known issues

• A bot can't yet craft using materials from a chest in the middle of a task. /bot craft may ask for chest permission first: allow, then retry.
• Some rare paths can still cause a brief server stutter:
  • defending an ally
  • crafting with a completely full inventory
  • returning home through a door
• The Pocket TTS installer is untested on Windows.

Questions or bug reports? Join the Frens Discord.