I've been working on a mod to assign a name to a village.

 

So far, following GotoLink's BetterVillages example, I can successfully generate a sign on a Village well and place text onto it.

 

I would now like to do two things:

Display stats about the newly-generated village (specifically radius) on the sign. It does not matter if these change at a later time; I just want that information on the sign as of when it gets placed on the well.

I have a way to generate a name for the village, but I would like to save that string into the village's NBT so I can access it in other ways later. How do that? If I can't, how can I otherwise save the string and have it be associated with the village?

To clarify, my MC version is unimportant. I can adapt whatever version to what I need. But I'd still like answers to the questions.

Modifying Vanilla. I'm not interested in making any custom village components (aside from the sign by the well), and the rest of the mod ideas I have involve interacting with the (vanilla and other mods') villagers.

I don't know the answers you're looking for but i would be interested in the code to put text on the signs. That sounds awesome.

I don't know the answers you're looking for but i would be interested in the code to put text on the signs. That sounds awesome.

 

It's just TileEntity data.

Yep, I figured out how to place the sign at the well and put text on it. Now I'm just looking how to obtain the radius of the village the sign has generated in. I just can't figure out how to read a value from the village's NBT so that it can be assigned to a variable.

 

Here you go, bogotezz:

 

    	placeBlockAtCurrentPosition(world, Blocks.standing_sign, standingSignOrientation, 0, 2, 0, boundingbox);  //Sign on top
    	
    	// Put label on sign
	TileEntitySign signContents = new TileEntitySign();
	signContents.signText[0] = "Top line";
	signContents.signText[1] = "Second line";
	signContents.signText[2] = "Third line";
	//signContents.signText[2] = "Maybe I'll add a fourth line someday";
	world.setTileEntity(this.boundingBox.minX, this.boundingBox.minY+signHeightOffGround, this.boundingBox.minZ, signContents);

 

And here is GotoLink's Better Villages mod if you want to pore through it.

Minor update.

 

I first tried the following:

 

Whenever I placed a sign on the village well, I then iterated through the villages within the villages.dat file Minecraft creates, trying to figure out which one the sign belonged to by simply calculating distance, and assuming the sign was in a village if that distance < radius. This failed, and I think the reason it failed is that village structures are being generated before any information is saved to the villages.dat file.

 

I resigned myself to the fact that printing the radius on the sign was either impossible, or possible only post hoc once I've figured out the custom NBT data problem.

 

Then, I tried to figure out how to save and load world-specific custom NBT data following this thread I found. After a couple hours of experimentation, I was successful in making a .dat file that can store things like the sign's coordinates and contents, and do so in a tag compound that can keep all the villages as separate entries (by way of the unique sign coordinates).

 

From here I think I can store the village's name so that it can be retrieved somehow if the sign is lost in-game (i.e. the sign is broken). I've got some ideas on how best to do that.

 

It's been a real gauntlet learning Java/Eclipse from nothing, with all the incomplete tutorials available. As of this post, the "radius" question is still up in the air but I'll post back if I hit another complete snag.