Farsighted Mobs Rework (2024)

Farsighted Mobs is one of my Minecraft mods, popular with modpack developers (people compiling a selection of mods and configuration settings to create a unique play experience) for its ability to make the game significantly harder by allowing monsters to see the player from further away. The only functionality in the mod when I created it in 2020 were the option to increase the default "follow range" of monsters, as well as adding individual overrides for certain creatures. I desired more flexibility and control, which is why I decided to rework the mod in October 2024.

The first change was one of convenience. In the past, I maintained two separate versions of the mod for different mod loaders. This added unnecessary overhead to the development process; updating two versions of the same mod takes longer than maintaining a single version. By using the Architectury Framework and moving most of my code to a common framework, I minimized the version-specific code.

Minecraft includes a predicate system used to generate loot when a chest is opened or a creature is killed in the base game, and designed to be extremely flexible. By incorporating this predicate system to determine whether a creature should be affected by my mod, modpack developers are granted the same options, and any future predicates added to the base game will automatically be accessible to the mod. Any predicates added by other mods will also be available to users of my mod, and my mod includes a small number of predicates which can thus be used for loot generation too.

The game also uses an attribute system for creatures: each creature is assigned attributes for things such as follow range, health, size, et cetera. The original mod only affected the follow range to make mobs see the player from further away, but the same approach can be used to affect other attributes — including attributes added by other mods or introduced in future versions of the game.

The combination of these two features creates an extremely flexible and modular system. The default behaviour of the mod is only slightly changed: the distance monsters see players from now depends on the difficulty of the game. But the new configuration options allow for nearly anything, from spawning animals with less health on a player's first day to spawning larger monsters during a full moon.

Feel free to contact me if you want to chat! Send me an email at [email protected].