Frens 1.1.297: better navigation, death retrieval and safer nights

Everything since 1.1.230. For Minecraft 1.21.11. Bots find their way better, fetch your lost items, keep their tools and spend the night more safely.

⚠️ The AI chat and voice features are still in beta. Everything below works without them. Questions, bugs and feedback: join the Frens Discord.

Navigation and following

• A new pathfinder is the default. The Unified Pathfinder plans routes that bots can really walk.
• Bots handle blocked paths like a player. When stuck, a bot walks around, wades shallow water, breaks soft blocks or places one dirt step. It only digs or builds during its own task.
• Following under trees. A bot clears the leaves in its way, steps down and up under a canopy, and gets up a leafy step.
• Doorways and walls. A following bot lines up with an open doorway before stepping through, and small steps no longer clip it into a wall.
• Out of trouble. A bot in a flooded pocket carves a ledge and climbs out, and a guarding bot wedged in a hole gets itself out.
• The End exit. A bot that walks into the End exit portal comes back on its own.
• Fewer stuck loops. A bot stuck in a hole stops repeating the same move and tells you once.
• Back home at sunset. The sunset return uses shorter routes it can actually walk.

Woodcutting

• Bots share a forest. Each bot claims its own tree, so several bots no longer queue on one trunk.
• Faster and steadier in dense forests. Bots pick their next tree in about a second, finish the tree they started and stay in the forest.
• Bots keep their axe, and look in nearby chests for one before punching trees by hand.
• Tidier cleanup. Bots leave the soil under a felled tree, never dig another tree's soil or another bot's pillar, and never swing a weapon at leaves.
• Unreachable trees are skipped quickly, and no shears are used on leaves, so saplings and sticks still drop.
• Spawn trees, if you allow them. With "Cut trees in the Spawn base" on, a bot climbs on its own scaffold to fell a whole tree there and removes every block it placed. It still never digs or builds anything else near spawn.

Night shelters

• New wall-off shelter. A bot can seal itself under a natural overhang and open it at dawn.
• Dirt before cobblestone. Without a pickaxe, bots seal with dirt or sand, which they can remove by hand.
• Shelters survive a reload, and dig-down shelters are always capped and climbed out of at dawn, with the pit filled in.
• Your house stays intact. A bot that logs back in inside your house no longer digs out through the roof or a wall, even in a hillside house, as long as its door opens to the outside.

Death retrieval

• /bot retrieve <bot> [me|<dead bot>] or the Retrieve Drops button sends a bot to where you or another bot died. It picks up only the items from that death, then comes back to you.
• A bot's task stops when it dies. It asks whether to carry on, and no longer reports a finished job after it died.

Combat, leads and companions

• Bots with a bow help defend each other, step aside for a clear shot and hold fire when a friend is in the way.
• A bot shot from range pauses its task to fight or flee, then carries on. A miner fights what it can handle and works past the rest.
• Bots call out big fights and apologise if they hit you.
• /bot leash release [bot] and a Release Leads button make a bot drop every lead it holds and forget the animal.
• Food. Hungry bots can eat from a chest as long as 8 of that food stays in it, food packed in bundles counts, and a bot never throws a valuable stack away to make room.
• Spells work with Questing off. The Spells key, the spellbook and resurrection work in any world.
• Souls for new companions. The AI setup asks once whether new companions should get a soul when the AI is ready, and remembers your answer.

Bases, saves and multiplayer

• Non-op owners can use the Frens buttons and screens for their own bots on a server or LAN. The world host can use admin tools like zones, lock mode and base resizing without being op.
• Unowned bots are no longer open to anyone. Only ops and the host can control them, and a button that doesn't reach the bot it shows is refused instead of acting on another bot.
• Private chats stay private. What you say to your bots in a private group chat is not shared with other players' bots when someone joins.
• /bot base owner <base> <player|server|none> lets ops and the host set who owns a base. Zone owners can rename and delete their own zones.
• Each save keeps its own data: zones, locked blocks, bases, World Mode, roster, furnaces, beehives, crafting and hunt history, hunt settings, fortifications and villages. An existing save picks up its old data on its first start, and admins can recover data after moving or renaming an instance with /bot legacy-state.

Fixes

• Saving settings no longer disconnects you when the settings file is large.
• /bot place onto snow works in one command, and snow or carpet in a bot's way is mined like a player would, dropping its item.
• Lodestone fast travel works when nobody is near the lodestone, and the sunset return finds you at any distance.
• /bot craft <item> [amount] <bot> crafts with the bot you name, and a failed craft says one line.
• Honey collecting works, and fishing bots cook their cod and salmon.
• A bot fast travelling when you quit the world still arrives.
• Bots chat in turn instead of over each other, and describe damage and tasks in words.
• Shorter, clearer messages. A few lines that never had a recorded voice now show as text instead of a silent pause.
• Screens fit at large GUI scales and small windows, and a new player now meets their first companion instead of a Restore screen.
• The download is smaller, about 32 MB instead of 53 MB.

Before you update

• The Unified Pathfinder becomes the default when you update. To go back, use /bot config pathfinder baritone, or turn off "Unified Pathfinder" in Admin settings.
• The old pre-Soul AI chat is gone. Soul Chat is the chat. The "LLM World (legacy)" and "LLM Chat (this bot)" toggles, /bot llm and /bot send_message_to are removed, and /configMan now opens Bot Controls.
• Trees around the world spawn are protected again by default. An admin can allow it under Admin, World Settings, "Cut trees in the Spawn base".
• New worlds start in Admin mode. Questing is off unless an admin runs /bot config questingMode on. Existing Questing worlds are unchanged.
• The Training spawn mode is now Admin. Saved training bots still spawn.
• Removed: /bot nav_mode and the "allow everyone to change skins" toggle. Owners can always pick preset skins for their own bots.
• Recipe viewers: with REI, EMI or JEI installed, their side panel can sit in the wrong place on the bot inventory screen when the window is small or the GUI scale is large.
• Carpet: if you use Carpet, use 1.4.193 or newer.
• Servers: per-bot settings from a client need 1.1.254 or newer on the server.
• Both client and server need the mod. Don't install it together with the original AI-Player mod.
• The AI features are optional and off by default. Open the Guide (]), then AI setup to turn them on. If you answer yes to giving new companions a soul, bots that never had one get one when they next join. /bot soul disable <bot> turns it off for that bot.
• Testing so far: every change was tested in a test world and by automated tests. Long sessions and multiplayer with other real players have had less testing, so please report anything odd on the Discord.

Voice lines are synthetic speech generated with licensed text-to-speech.