NEROCOMPANION

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NeroCompanion is the pets & helper robots mod of the Neroland ecosystem — the personal, screenshot-able layer where the same energy that powers your factory powers the little bot trailing behind you. Deploy owner-bound companions driven by goal-based AI, customise them through modular upgrade chips, and keep them running on rechargeable charge. Mining, hauling, repairing, guarding — or just a charming pet alien brought home from another world.

Built on Neroland Core, so its upgrade-module framework, FE-compatible energy, progression gates and shared c: tags are the same ones used across the lineup. Because companions are owner-bound, ownership is stored as a UUID and routed through Core's shared data-erasure hook. (Planned — in design; not yet released.)

1. Personal drones — your first companion#

1. Deploy and follow. A small flying drone that follows you, holds a few chips, and teaches the whole mod. It stores owner UUID, active mode, energy and installed chips in NBT, and recalls to a drone capsule item for transport.
2. Chip-driven. Drones carry a small chip inventory backed by Core's upgrade-module framework — the canonical surface for both stat upgrades and cosmetic skins.

• 🛸 Owner-bound — bound on first deploy, mirroring the vanilla tamed-entity ownership pattern.
• 🔋 Charge to run — drones drain energy while active and idle at low power rather than dying.

2. Helper & utility bots#

• ⛏️ Mining bots — autonomous block-breakers that clear an assigned area or vein, gated by owner permission and Core progression; speed, area and ore filters are set by chips. Deliberately slower than a player with good tools.
• 🔧 Repair bots — scan for your damaged gear and nearby machines and restore durability over time, spending energy and optional repair-material chips.
• ⚔️ Combat bots — guard-and-fight companions that engage hostiles, never targeting the owner or team. Fragile and energy-limited by design so they augment, not replace, player skill.
• 👾 Pet aliens — charming, characterful creatures recovered from space exploration, leaning to presence over raw utility.

3. Modes — follow / guard / mine / carry#

Every companion carries an active-mode enum in NBT, and a small state machine swaps its AI goal set when the mode changes. Follow sticks to the owner; guard holds a radius (defensive for most, aggressive for combat bots); mine works an area; carry shuttles items between you, containers and pickups.

• 🎛️ Per-type modes — supported modes are declared per companion and can be unlocked or extended by chips (a basic drone might only follow until a chip grants carry).
• 📦 Carry integration — carry-mode companions expose an item-handler capability — the seam where they connect to NeroLogistics for routing and deposit targets.

4. Upgrade chips & charging#

1. Upgrade chips. Modular items routed through Core's upgrade-module framework, sharing install, validation, tooltip and tier handling with every Nero mod. Chips come in stat, capability and cosmetic-behaviour varieties, with per-type slot counts and tier caps so no single companion stacks every effect.
2. Drone charging pads. Powered blocks that pull FE from an attached network, buffer it internally, and top up docked or nearby companions — doubling as a home and recall point. Place them across a base or at remote, off-world outposts.

• 🔌 Any FE source — pads accept power from NeroPower, Nerotech, or external FE through Core tags.
• ⚖️ Energy is the balance dial — generous enough to feel good, tight enough that companions need infrastructure.

5. Marketable & recoverable#

• 🎨 Cosmetic skins — alternate textures, colours and trim stored as an NBT identifier; purely visual, never touching stats, and optionally gated behind Core's currency/reputation API.
• 🧭 Lost drone recovery — persistent saved data tracks each owner's companions so a despawned or abandoned one can be recalled or reclaimed, chips and skin intact.
• 🪪 Naming & identity — companions keep a name and identity through recall, reinforcing the attachment the mod is built around.

Privacy (POPIA / GDPR)#

NeroCompanion stores only what ownership needs — a companion's owner is kept as a UUID (never a username) in entity NBT and in the lost-companion saved data, alongside last-known position and the companion's own chips and skin. It carries no chat, no analytics profile, and no personal data beyond that owner UUID, and it registers with Core's shared data-erasure hook so a single erase request clears your companion ownership alongside every other Neroland mod. Any crash telemetry follows the ecosystem standard: anonymous, version-strings only, and opt-out.

Telemetry notice: NeroCompanion sends anonymous error reports (stack trace + mod/game versions only — never IPs, usernames, UUIDs, or world data) to the developers via Sentry (EU servers) so crashes can be fixed. On by default — opt out any time by setting telemetryEnabled = false in config/nerocompanion.properties. Full details: PRIVACY.md.

Why it fits the ecosystem#

• 🧩 Built on Neroland Core — one upgrade-module system, one FE-compatible energy surface, one progression arc, shared c: tags. NeroCompanion ships in its own creative tab.
• 🤝 Interoperates, never hard-depends — soft synergies make it better without being required: NeroPower / Nerotech power the pads, NeroLogistics takes carry- and mining-bot output, NeroCreatures supplies alien types that NeroCompanion adds the binding/recall layer to, and Nerospace provides the worlds where pet aliens are found. With them absent, it still plays standalone.
• 🌍 Off-world ready — companions are designed to keep working on Nerospace and Ad Astra-style planet dimensions, so a drone bound on Earth still functions at a colony.
• 🧱 Cross-loader — NeoForge, Forge and Fabric on Minecraft 26.1.2 and 26.2.

Requirements & compatibility#

• Requires Neroland Core — install it alongside NeroCompanion (it loads first).
• Optional but recommended: NeroPower / Nerotech for pad power, NeroLogistics for hauling, NeroCreatures and Nerospace for pet aliens.
• Charging pads accept energy from any FE source — Create, AE2, Mekanism, Ad Astra and Energized Power interoperate through Core's common tags as the 26.x ecosystem fills in, with no hard dependency on any of them.
• Modpacks are allowed and encouraged — any platform, no need to ask. Use the official files and credit NeroCompanion by Neroland with links to the CurseForge page and the GitHub repository. Full terms: LICENSE.

Links#

• 📖 Wiki — every companion, chip, and system documented.
• 💬 Discord — chat, help, and sneak peeks.
• 🐞 Issues — bug reports and feature requests.
• 🗒️ Changelog
• 🔥 Also on CurseForge

Created by Neroland. The project logo was made with the help of AI image tools; in-game art is generated by the project's own tooling and refined by hand.