Ignis: AI NPC Engine

After months of pioneering generative AI integration in gaming, crafting unique features like quest generation and villager personalities since October last year, I'm changing the marketing strategy. While I’m proud of the result, I haven’t earned anything from it, so I’m shifting gears: meet Ignis, the evolved, stylish successor with premium updates exclusive to Polymart. Want to fuel my passion and support my work? Grab a copy of Ignis!

Have you ever wondered just how broken the villagers in Minecraft are? Players build actual prisons for them and use them as "vending machines," taking it all for granted. They breed them like animals, keep them in cages, abuse their trades, and proudly call it a "trading hall." Just google that phrase, and you'll immediately understand the scale of the problem. "And this is the endless sandbox we love so much?" – that's what I said five months ago. So I decided something had to change. That's why I created Ignis, which changes everything about villagers.

Villager models have been replaced with player models. Now, villagers are called Humanoids, and they are divided into races: Dwarves (dwarves are cool!), Orcs, Elves, Humans, and Goblins. Each race has unique attributes (e.g., model scale or health), a trading currency (Orcs trade with gold, while Dwarves prefer diamonds), unique names and voices for their race.

Besides names, Humanoids have personalities. The personality affects how the NPC will interact with the player. For example, a depressive Human will be sad and will share their sadness at every possible opportunity. A grumpy Dwarf will constantly be dissatisfied with something. This mechanic is designed to make villagers feel like a living part of the game, rather than static vending machines. Villagers experience hunger and eat food. If you try to wake an NPC in the middle of the night, they will ask you not to disturb their sleep. If you hit them, they will be outraged and tell you not to do that. If you try to trade with an unemployed villager, they will say that they want to find a job first. Villagers can even establish settlements, coming up with unique names. Get it? Villagers are no longer static; they are alive, they have a soul!

Ah, the countless sleepless nights I spent on this. Depending on their profession, a villager will offer the player a quest. If we're talking about a blacksmith, the player will be asked to find, for example, iron ingots or diamonds. If it's a librarian, they will ask you to get them some enchanted book. A farmer will request farming stuff like bone meal or some seeds. An alchemist will want ingredients for brewing potions. Sometimes, they will even ask the player to get them some potion so they can drink it like booze!

Have you ever wondered where villagers get items for trade? The correct answer is from the air. From nowhere. From the abyss! Ignis fixes this as well. Now, villagers have real inventories and only produce items of their profession if they have the necessary materials for it. An armorsmith will not sell diamond armor if they do not have diamonds. A farmer will not sell food if they do not have it. This is precisely the mechanism on which questing is based. If a villager runs out of materials for crafting, they will ask the player to bring them more. Trading is fully customizable, and it's also influenced by reputation. As already mentioned, each race uses its own currency.

With a low chance, villagers will sometimes produce unique items. For example, armor or tools! Such items differ from others by increased base attributes, rarity, name, and description. And, of course, an increased cost. The higher the villager's level, the higher the chance of producing such an item. This armor has increased defense stats or even grants the player additional health. Unique weapons will deal more damage, and tools will become more efficient.

I said I would start with the most interesting and cool thing. Of course, everything described above sounds cool, but you might feel like you've seen it somewhere before. I hasten to please you — while developing the plugin, I used the latest technologies in the field of artificial intelligence. Everything described above is not pre-created. It is all generated on the fly using AI. Character names, quests, lines, names of unique items and their descriptions. If you try to describe it in two words — multiplication by infinity. When generating content, AI is informed of details such as the biome in which the villager is located, their name, profession, race, personality... And the output is something unique, never seen before.

Thanks to AI, the plugin works in any language. English, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, any! Forget about tedious configuration translations. All you need to do is open config.yml and change only one line, specifying your language. All plugin messages, all generated content will be in the specified language. Proof of this is that a multilingual community has already gathered in our Discord server.

You might assume that the mechanics described above would surely affect the speed of your server. But no! Ignis was programmed with performance in mind. Expensive operations are minimized, and where possible, an asynchronous approach is used. Whether you have 5 players on the server or 50, you will not notice any TPS drops, lags, or anything else.

1. Install the PacketEvents plugin. Ignis will not work without it.
2. Follow the installation instructions.
3. (Optional) It is recommended to install the VillagesRevamped datapack.