Your Companion Has a Face Now

Lab journal, part one. New series: every few weeks, what actually got built, with pictures instead of promises. Last time the news was that you no longer need the mod. This time it is about what your companion looks like, who it is, and where the two of you can meet.

It has a face now

For most of this project, every companion in the world looked like Steve. You would name it, give it a character, watch it grow into someone, and it still stood there wearing the same default skin as everybody else.

Now there are thirteen looks: the classic one, and twelve that glow. Teal, ice blue, violet, magenta, ember, gold. You pick it when you create your companion, right next to the name, and it is the first thing you see when it walks out of the dark towards you.

The one on the cover of this post is one of them, standing on the hub platform in the rain. That is a screenshot, not concept art.

And a character you write yourself

Seven buttons, one of which is a dice roll. Loyal Buddy, Jester, Explorer, Builder, Guardian, Quiet Soul, or Surprise Me. Pick one and you get a starting point in the text field below, which you can then rewrite completely. Two hundred and eighty characters, all yours.

That field matters more than it looks. It is the one line your companion never forgets, no matter how long you play or how much else it has been through. Everything else about it is built out of your time together. This is the part you get to decide.

The whole menu is new

Press V, and it does not look like a debug panel anymore. Your companions in a list, energy as a percentage instead of a made-up point currency, one button to bring one into the world.

Speaking of a second one: free accounts now get two companions instead of one, and noticeably more playtime per day. You should not have to delete the character you got attached to just to find out what a different one is like. That was a bad rule and it is gone.

You can see what it is doing

Health in hearts, hunger in drumsticks, energy, what it is busy with right now, and where it is standing. Plus a button to its memories, which is where it keeps what it made of your time together.

It answers in half a second

This is the change you feel the most and see the least.

Until recently, saying something to your companion meant a pause of several seconds before anything came back. Long enough to turn around and keep mining. Long enough that it felt like talking to a server.

Now it is roughly half a second, and the long stalls are gone entirely. Nothing about the words changed. The presence did. Somebody standing next to you answers immediately, and until that was true, no amount of clever writing made up for it.

And it does noticeably fewer stupid things

The unglamorous half of the summer, in plain language:

• It stops fighting when it is about to die. It used to swing until the end. Now it breaks off, heals, and comes back.
• It eats the food you give it, not the spider eye. Someone handed their companion a melon and watched it poison itself instead. That one hurt to read.
• It climbs out of its own holes. Digging down and then being unable to get out was, for a long time, the single most common way for a companion to quietly disappear from your evening.
• It no longer invents a shared past. A twenty second old companion telling you that you survived the morning together is charming exactly once.
• It knows what it just did. It used to finish a job and then talk as if it had not, which made it look like it was lying to you. It was not. It just could not see its own hands.
• It is warmer. Teasing is still allowed, dry humour is still allowed, disagreeing with you is still allowed. Being cold to the person it lives with is not.

And a place to meet: the hub

If you do not want to install anything at all, you do not have to. Put your Minecraft name on your account page and join:

play.voxel-mind.com

Java or Bedrock, any recent version. A world opens that belongs to you and nobody else, your companion is in it, and it is still there when you come back tomorrow.

The lobby is new as of last weekend, and there is someone in it. Vox stands in the showroom all day and builds things. Shout what you want at him and he will put it up on the pad in front of you, then go back to inventing something on his own when nobody asks. He is the same brain as your companion, just with a spectacular budget and no survival instinct.

What is next

The arena is built, the rules are not. Companion duels are coming, and I want them to be an actual event you can enter, not a command you type.

The bigger one, the thing I keep thinking about: your companion getting something meaningful done while you are gone, so that coming back is genuinely interesting. Right now it waits for you. It should be able to surprise you.

Come see the hub, or bring a companion into your own world if you prefer your own place. If you build one that turns into somebody, tell me about it in the Discord. That is my favourite part of the week and it is not close.

See you in the world.