Alien Villagers
The social aliens of the Nerospace planets — wary wanderers you win over to unlock trades and grow a village.
Overview
The Alien Villager (nerospace:alien_villager) is a peaceful, wary-neutral NPC: it strolls its
home biome, watches you, and edges away if you crowd it, but never attacks. Earn its trust and it
becomes a merchant and the key to the whole village system — trading, the
Village Core, and the alien structures.
The loop: discover a settlement → earn trust → unlock trades → teach the village to build → it grows into an engine → deeper structures (and a boss) open.
Where they live
Each world with villagers has its own culture, with its own look, trades and building style:
| Planet | Culture | Look | Builds in | Mega-City |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Greenxertz (and the mature terraformed_meadow) | Xertz | the classic green/steel alien | alien bricks, tile and crystal | yes |
| Cindara | Ember-kin | stocky and broad, ember-red skin | cindrite, basalt and magma glass | no |
| Glacira | Frostbound | bulky fur wraps, frost-pale skin | glacite, packed ice, packed cryo-ice and blue ice | no |
| Nyxara (Twilight Band only) | Duskborn | tall and slender | nyx stone, void crystal and tinted glass | yes |
The Moon has no villagers at all, and Mars has none either: it has wrecked rovers, a salvage drone and abandoned habitats instead (see Mars). A villager's culture is fixed when it first appears and is kept with it, so villagers from earlier versions keep theirs.
- Creative: the Alien Villager Spawn Egg (Nerospace tab).
How they look
Every villager is visually unique without a new entity per look — a layered, seed-driven appearance:
-
Per-individual tint — a stored colour seed gives each villager a slightly different shade, so no
two are identical. Deterministic: a given villager always looks the same.
-
Per-culture silhouette — Ember-kin are stocky, Frostbound bulked out by fur wraps, Duskborn tall and
slender. (Placeholder skins for now; the final culture art is still to come.)
-
Per-planet skin — Greenxertz green/steel, Cindara ember/red, Glacira frost/pale. Within
Greenxertz, the mature meadow wears a lighter accessory set.
-
Mood warmth — as your reputation with a village rises, its villagers' tint warms, so you can read
trust at a glance.
-
Glowing eyes & shoulder crystals — emissive, visible in the dark.
Earning trust (reputation)
Each villager tracks a per-player reputation score (0–100) mapped to 6 tiers:
| Tier | Name | Unlocks |
|---|---|---|
| T0 | Stranger | nothing — refuses to trade (wary head-shake) |
| T1 | Acquainted | basic trades |
| T2 | Trusted | mid trades · can teach Tier-1 buildings |
| T3 | Allied | rare trades · Tier-2 buildings |
| T4 | Honored | exclusive gear trades |
| T5 | Kin | best trades |
Reputation rises through:
-
Gifts — right-click a villager while holding a valued item (Xertz Quartz, Nerosium Ingot,
Alien Fragment, or Emeralds). It takes one, with happy-villager particles. Each culture also
welcomes its own favourite: Ash Dust (Ember-kin), Frost Shard (Frostbound), Shadow Lichen
(Duskborn).
-
Trade volume — every completed trade nudges trust up.
-
Quests — handing a village task in to a Village Core bumps the trust of every
nearby villager.
Reputation is keyed by Minecraft player UUID only — no names or interaction logs are sent anywhere (POPIA/GDPR-safe).
Trading
Right-click a villager at tier 1+ to open the vanilla trading screen. Offers are tier-gated and cumulative (a higher-trust villager also offers the lower tiers). Emeralds are the currency, so the goods are useful in any modpack.
| Tier | Sample offers |
|---|---|
| T1 | sell 12 Xertz Quartz → 1 emerald · 1 emerald → 3 iron · 2 emeralds → 6 bread |
| T2 | 4 emeralds → Nerosium Ingot · 1 emerald + 8 Raw Nerosteel → 4 Nerosteel Ingots · sell Alien Fragments |
| T3 | 8 emeralds → diamond · 5 emeralds → Rocket Fuel Canister |
| T4 | 12 emeralds + 2 Alien Tech Scrap → Alien Core · 16 emeralds → Xertz Resonator |
| T5 | 18 emeralds → 3 diamonds · Alien Core + 24 emeralds → Grav Striders |
That is the Xertz table, unchanged from earlier versions. The other cultures trade their own goods, with the same tiers and reputation:
| Culture | Buys | Sells (rising with trust) |
|---|---|---|
| Ember-kin | Ash Dust, Alien Fragments | Cindrite, Sulfur, Block of Cindrite, Magma Glass, the heat-protection suit helmet, diamonds, the rest of the heat-protection suit, Alien Tech Scrap |
| Frostbound | Frost Shards, Alien Fragments | Glacite, Methane Ice, Block of Glacite, Packed Cryo Ice, the cold-protection suit helmet, diamonds, the rest of the cold-protection suit, Helium-3 Canisters |
| Duskborn | Shadow Lichen, Alien Fragments | Voidglass, Night Fibre, Void Crystal, Voidglass Lens, the Tier 2 suit helmet, Gravity Shards, the rest of the Tier 2 suit, Void Shards |
A village sells only the helmet of its world's protective suit until you reach its highest trust tier; the full suit is for its most trusted friends.
The top tiers are the only trade source of the exclusive Artificer gear.
Details
- ID:
nerospace:alien_villager· category CREATURE · size 0.6 × 1.95 - Variant (planet / home biome / colour seed) is synced and saved; reputation is saved per villager.
- Voice currently aliases the vanilla villager sounds.
See also: Village Core · Alien Structures · Alien Gear · Creatures.