Roles and defence

Who may do what in a colony, how to change that, what marking somebody as an Enemy does, and what the colony's Guards, wolves and golems will and will not attack.

The four roles#

Everybody else is a stranger. Owner, Chief and Ally are the colony's members; an Enemy is never a member.

Players who had access to a colony before roles existed are Allies now, with exactly the rights they had.

Operators (permission level 2 or better) are treated as the owner of every colony, as they always were.

Who may do what#

A member who tries something above their rank is told Your rank in this colony does not allow that. A stranger is told You are not a member of this colony. Either way nothing happens.

Every one of these is decided on the server, from the colony's own record. The same table applies whether the request comes from a block, the beacon's interface, a command or a companion app.

Changing roles#

Two front ends, one set of rules.

The rules#

• Nobody can change the owner's role, and nobody can change their own.
• Allies are added and removed by the owner or a Chief.
• Chiefs are made and unmade by the owner alone. Making somebody a Chief gives them access first if they had none; unmaking one leaves them an Ally. A Chief cannot remove another Chief.
• Enemies are marked and cleared by the owner or a Chief.
• Adding somebody as an Ally or a Chief clears any Enemy mark on them.
• A list that is full refuses the change.

By command#

/nerocolonies colony role ally   add|remove <colony> <player>
/nerocolonies colony role chief  add|remove <colony> <player>
/nerocolonies colony role enemy  add <colony> <player> [confirm]
/nerocolonies colony role enemy  remove <colony> <player>
/nerocolonies colony role ally|chief|enemy list <colony>

<player> is an online player's name or a raw UUID, so the commands work for somebody who is offline. list answers with a count, the list's limit and your own role; it never prints who. The older /nerocolonies colony access add|remove|list still works and means role ally. Full details are on Commands.

At the beacon: the Roles tab#

What the tab shows depends on who is looking.

An Ally is never sent anybody's name. Names are shown only to somebody who may manage the list, because nobody can be asked to decide who belongs without seeing who already does.

To change a role, type a player's name in the field (or click one in the list), press the role button until it reads Ally, Chief or Enemy, and press Add or Remove. The beacon's editor matches the name against online players only; for somebody offline, use the command with their UUID. The answer says what happened and does not repeat the name.

How the names get there: the colony stores player ids, never names. When the server builds the view for somebody who may manage members it looks up each stored id — the online player list first, then the server's own profile cache — and sends the names to that one viewer. A player the server cannot name appears as ?. The names are not saved or logged by the mod, and no player id is ever sent to a client. See Data storage.

Enemies#

Who can be marked#

Anybody except the colony's owner, yourself, and a server operator. An operator is recognised only while online; marking one who is offline is accepted, and makes no difference to them, because guards never attack an operator and an operator can always act on the colony.

What marking does#

• Guards and guardian animals attack them inside the claim and a margin around it, as long as guardsAttackEnemyPlayers is on. See the next section.
• They lose any membership. An Enemy cannot be an Ally or a Chief. Marking a member takes them off the access list and out of the Chiefs first.
• The colony notices them. When a player the guards would attack walks into the claim, the colony's companion sessions get an alert that enemies are inside. It carries a count, never a name.

An Enemy who was not a member loses nothing else: a stranger could not open the colony's blocks to begin with.

Marking a member needs confirming#

Marking somebody who is currently a member is a demotion, so it has to be asked for twice. The first attempt changes nothing and answers:

That player is a member of this colony, and marking them as an enemy removes their access. To go ahead, add "confirm" to the command, or hold Shift and press Add at the beacon.

So either run /nerocolonies colony role enemy add <colony> <player> confirm, or hold Shift while pressing Add. Marking a Chief additionally takes the owner; a Chief cannot do it.

Lifting it#

An Enemy mark ends in one of four ways:

1. the owner or a Chief clears it (role enemy remove, or Remove at the beacon);
2. the owner or a Chief adds the player as an Ally, or the owner makes them a Chief;
3. the Enemy claims retribution (below);
4. the player asks for their data to be erased, which removes them from every list of every colony.

Guards and guardians#

A colony defends itself with three things, and all three obey one rule.

A Beastkeeper raises at most one animal per colony cycle and replaces any that are lost, as long as the materials are in storage. Without a Beastkeeper the animals a colony already has stay, but missing ones are not replaced. Beastkeepers also heal them.

What they attack#

Inside the claim, plus guardPursuitMargin blocks beyond its edge (default 16):

A Guard picks the nearest valid target within 16 blocks of itself. Guards are the only Nerans that fight; every other trade never attacks anything.

Guardian wolves are tame but have no owner, so they do not hunt sheep, and the colony points them at targets itself, once per colony cycle. A guardian that is chasing something it may not attack is called off, and one that has strayed past the margin is walked home. Hurting a guardian golem by accident does not turn it on you.

Because a chase ends at the margin, an Enemy who leaves the claim and keeps going is not followed across the map.

Switching it off for players#

Set guardsAttackEnemyPlayers to false and Guards and guardians fight hostile mobs only. The Enemy list still exists and marking still removes a member's access, but the colony never raises a hand to a player, and the enemies-inside alert stays silent as well.

Retribution#

An Enemy has one way to clear their own name.

When a player on a colony's Enemy list kills that colony's owner, they are taken off that colony's Enemy list. It counts whether the killing blow was dealt directly, by a projectile they fired, or by an animal they own. If the victim owns several colonies that list the killer, each of them clears the mark.

The colony's members who are online are told:

The feud with <colony> is settled: an enemy has had their revenge and is an enemy no longer.

The message names the colony and nobody else. The colony adds one to a count of retributions. Who the killer was is used for that one comparison and is not stored or logged.

Only the owner's death counts — not a Chief's, not an Ally's — and only that colony's list changes.

Servers with PvP switched off#

NeroColonies does not read the server's PvP setting. What follows from the code:

• Guards and guardians are mobs, not players. Whether they attack a listed Enemy is decided by guardsAttackEnemyPlayers alone. On a server that does not want players harmed over a colony dispute, set it to false.
• Retribution needs an Enemy to kill the owner. Where the server stops one player from killing another, that cannot happen, so an Enemy mark is lifted only by the owner or a Chief, or by an erasure request.
• Everything else about roles — access, planning rights, the cache — has nothing to do with combat and works the same.

Privacy#

A colony's role lists are player ids, and that is all they are: no names, no timestamps, no reasons. They exist for as long as the colony does, go with it when it is dissolved, and an erasure request removes the player from every one of them, the Enemy lists included. Commands answer with counts. Guardian animals carry a tag naming their colony and nothing about any player. The full account is on Data storage.

Configuration#

See also#

• Commands — the colony role commands in full
• Nerans and professions — the Guard and Beastkeeper trades
• Buildings — the watch post, kennel, barracks, watchtower and golem forge
• Gratitude cache — the one thing only an owner may open
• Data storage — what the role lists hold, and erasure