Caravans & Convoys - Automatic Trade

Caravans & Convoys - Automatic Trade

Source & full guide: github.com/teamdemivfxfish-dev/caravans-and-convoys-wiki

Place a dock, post an offer, and let horse-drawn wagons run your trade routes for you.

Caravans & Convoys turns two chests in different places into a living trade route. You set what a Caravan Dock sends and what it wants back; from then on a real horse-drawn wagon, driven by its own coach and guarded by soldiers, hauls the goods overland on its own. Nothing teleports. Every trade rides a real wagon down a real, road-aware route, so a caravan can be raided, stranded, or wrecked before it ever arrives. No hoppers strung across the map, no manual shuttling, just wagons on the road.

Everything is standalone. It works in any world, reads your existing chests without ever owning them, and leans on other mods only when you actually have them installed.

Dependencies

Read this first so your caravans have something to drive.

Every integration is reflective, so there are no external Maven coordinates and the mod compiles and boots against pure NeoForge.

The Caravan Dock

• The mod's only placed block, found in the Functional Blocks creative tab.
• Crafts in a standard grid: three Planks across the top, a Chest flanked by two Planks in the middle, three Iron Ingots along the bottom. Yields one Caravan Dock.
• Clamps onto the first adjacent inventory (chest, barrel, MineColonies rack) and reads it through the standard item capability only, so hoppers, storage mods, and MineColonies couriers keep working exactly as before.
• A shop-style terminal where you set an Export (what you send) and an Import (what you want back), each an exact item and amount. Clicking a held item onto a ghost slot copies the item type only and never consumes the stack.
• Owner-claimed. Only the player who placed it can right-click to open the terminal; the settings tab holds the whitelist and a self-trade toggle.

Barter with a safety guarantee

Trade is mirrored barter with escrow, built around one promise: you can only ever lose goods to your own wagon being raided. A partner's bad luck never costs you.

• Routes need mirrored offers: your "send 64 iron, want 10 diamonds" pairs with a partner's "send 10 diamonds, want 64 iron."
• Both halves are pulled into escrow before any wagon rolls; a failed run refunds the undelivered half.
• No partial shipments, ever. It ships the full agreed bundle or nothing.
• A surplus floor (64 of the exported item by default) always stays in the chest, so a trade only fires from genuine overflow and never drains your working stock to zero.
• Cross-player routes require a mutual whitelist, and links stay strictly pairwise. A player who owns both ends of a route enables "Trade with your own docks" instead.

Live two-convoy exchange

When both docks have a wagon ready, this is the main event:

• Both wagons roll out and meet at the midpoint of the route.
• They pull up side by side, the way real caravans park to hand off loot, pause for a visible cargo swap, then each carries its half home and deposits it in the partner's chest.
• If only one dock has a wagon, it falls back to a single round trip that fetches and delivers both halves itself.
• A hard anti-stuck failsafe watches every rig; if one ever wedges against terrain or the other wagon, it frees itself instead of freezing.

A real wagon, driven and guarded

• An actual Trotting Wagons cart with two hitched draft horses and a seated Wagon Coach driver cracking a whip, cycling through five coach looks. The draft horses are invulnerable, so stray damage cannot strand a haul.
• With Hundred Years War installed, post soldiers as escorts just by dropping their unit scrolls in the linked chest, up to ten.
• Guards ride in formation around the wagon, break to fight threats, then reform. They cannot be marched off by a passing player, and friendly fire between your own caravan members is cancelled.
• A non-owner who cracks open the wagon or its coach turns every posted guard hostile against them.
• Fallen escorts return as scrolls to your dock, and a returning wagon refills its detail from any scrolls waiting there.

Roads it actually respects

The wagon routes with a weighted search that thinks like a teamster:

• It hates hills, taking the flatter way around rather than scrambling straight over a rise.
• It prefers player-made roads: dirt paths and laid paving such as cobblestone, bricks, and planks read as safe road and pull the route onto them.
• On a wide road it hugs the crown down the middle instead of skating an edge.
• It never treats a lone stray block as a road, and the road preference can never lure it toward a hazard.

Long hauls stay smooth: a travelling caravan carries a small chunk ticket so it keeps moving and pathing even with no player nearby, then lets those chunks unload once it parks.

Losing a wagon, and the dock grace period

• If a caravan is destroyed, the dock stands down and asks you to re-supply a wagon and press Start Operation again.
• If the dock block itself is broken while a caravan is out, a grace timer of about thirty seconds starts. Rebuild a dock in time and it re-homes the orphaned caravan, inheriting the old dock's offer, whitelist, and settings.
• Let the timer run out and the caravan goes derelict, its cargo left free for anyone to loot.
• Breaking a dock that still holds an un-launched wagon returns that wagon to you as an item.

Tuning

Every number lives in config/caravansconvoys-common.toml:

Supported versions

• Minecraft: 1.21.1
• Loader: NeoForge
• Mod ID: caravansconvoys

This mod ships no player-facing commands. Everything is driven from the dock terminal.

Set the offer, start the operation, and watch the road do the work.

Part of The Warborn Realm, by barunn