Caravans

Caravans gives your tamed pack animals a job. Llamas follow you in a spaced line, carry up to 90 slots each, and walk your loot home while you keep playing. Donkeys and mules haul beside them, a camel leads, wolves guard the line. A custom movement engine drives every caravan animal, so formations hold over rough terrain, swim shorelines, and route around obstacles instead of snagging — and an animal you never recruit stays fully vanilla.

Paper or Purpur · Minecraft 1.20 – 26.x · Java 21+ · no dependencies. Spigot is not supported.

Guide, recipes & config: Caravans Wiki

Two tools run everything

There are no player commands to learn. Craft these two and go; ordinary sticks and leads stay ordinary.

Drover's Stick — string knotted onto a stick. Recruit or dismiss pack animals, appoint a lead camel or a wolf protector, right-click the air to whistle stragglers in, sneak-click to halt.

→ Drover's Stick

Khipu — knots tied along a lead. Read a llama's load, flip its saddlebag pages, record depots, and dispatch storage runs.

→ Khipu

Admins get /caravan with matching subcommands (op by default).

The caravan

	In the caravan
Camel	The lead. Appoint one and the herd follows it — ride it for a mobile train, park it as a base camp. As you play it becomes a quartermaster, returning storage runs up to 40% faster.
Llama	The hauler. Follows in line, levels up to 90 slots, and runs your storage errands.
Donkey & mule	Extra haulers, fully vanilla: their native 15 slots, no pages, no leveling.
Wolf	The protector. Screens the moving caravan, engaging hostiles within 16 blocks before they reach you.

Right-click an animal with the stick and your nearby pack forms up. Members hold a spaced line along the trail you walked — 2.5 blocks apart, no conga pile-ups — and speed up to about 1.5× walking pace when they fall behind. Teleporting is the last resort (30 seconds stuck, or 48+ blocks away), and it lands out of your sight, walking back in.

One more role: a red carpet in a llama's decor slot posts it as a sentry. It spits at hostiles within 12 blocks — 3 damage, Slowness, knockback — and holds its ground until you take the carpet out.

Saddlebags

A vanilla llama tops out at 15 slots. A caravan llama keeps the strength it rolled, then earns a level (three more slots) per hour of your play time, applied the moment you next open it — no background task. At strength 5 its saddlebags unlock: up to six 15-slot pages, 90 slots in all. The active page is the llama's real, native screen; the rest travel on the animal. The Khipu reads the load (Saddlebag 2/6 · 34 on this page · 121 total), and a sneak-tap flips the page.

Storage runs

Record depots by clicking containers with the Khipu; couriers fill them in the order you recorded them. Sneak-click the air twice and the farther half of your llamas walks off to unload:

1. A courier vanishes only once you can't see it — beyond 32 blocks, out of your view cone, or hidden behind terrain — or after 15 seconds boxed in.
2. It deposits every page into your depots, merging into partial stacks and skipping full containers.
3. It waits out a return timer scaled by depot distance, 10–90 seconds, on a boss bar countdown. A quartermaster camel trims it.
4. It reappears behind you, walks in, and rejoins.

Leftovers ride back, and anything that can't be re-stowed drops to the ground. A courier away during a restart is persisted whole and resumes on the next start; a dying llama spills its stashed pages where it fell. Nothing is duplicated, nothing is deleted. Past 80% full, a following caravan sends a run by itself — with a cooldown, and a longer back-off when the depots came back full.

Configuration

Every tuning number lives in a commented config.yml, hot-reloaded with /caravan reload, and each system has an off switch: storage.pages: 1, progression.minutes-per-level: 0, storage-run.auto.enabled: false, quartermaster.enabled: false. Feedback stays out of chat — action bar, boss bar, particles.

Strength, pages, tiers, depots, and roles persist across restarts. The formation itself is live state; one tap of the stick re-forms it.

Compatibility

One jar spans Paper and Purpur, 1.20 through the 26.x releases (current through 26.2): built against the 1.21.11 API, renamed constants resolve at runtime, newer mobs gate by capability. Java 21+ — 26.x servers themselves run on Java 25, and the same jar just works there.

The engine is deliberately cheap to run: a parked caravan goes network-silent, sentries relax to a slow scan when nothing has been around, and the per-tick steering probes each block once. Recruit nothing, and the plugin costs nothing.

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Docs & setup: Caravans Wiki · Part of Machina — Machina Docs hub · We Are Machina