Minecraft Minions

By now, many great extensions of the Minecraft gameplay exist (such as Industrialcraft, Buildcraft….) but they have one common weakness. They usually require you to amass X resources before you can make use of the advanced stuff. The process of mining down and then stripmining for raw materials has become very repetitive and boring after a while, so i decided Minions to do it for you were needed!!!

Minions can [currently]:

• follow you around
• be sent to places
• chop down entire forests
• carry you, animals and other players
• dig mineshafts complete with stairwell
• dig custom spaces you defined, above and below ground
• mine ore veins you point out to them
• intelligently strip mine where you tell them to
• return their goods and loot to you
• or to a Block with inventory (> 23 slots) you pointed out

Minions use an A-star algorithm custom pathing system. It's threaded and multicore-capable.
Hitches and problems/teleporting you see all stem from Minecraft pathfollowing, which is … lets call it suboptimal.

The tree finding algorithm is threadbased aswell, and stops when it has found 16 trees or has scanned a 64×64 area. It supports mod Tree's so long their custom Tree blocks have "wood" in their name.

Animal abduction works on all entities that extend EntityAnimal.

Strip mining scans the walls and roofs of the dug shaft continuously for precious blocks. Anything that is not worthless (eg dirt, stone, gravel…) is considered precious, so it fully supports mod ores.

Giving the order to mine an ore vein or having found such a vein while strip mining, the Minion will follow the vein and mine all connected Blocks of the same kind until there are no more. Then it will return to the player, or, if it was stripmining, return to that.