Bartering Station

The Bartering Station is a block added by Bartering Station mod. It automates piglin bartering: a player loads gold ingots into the station, and the station hands them to nearby adult piglins at a fixed interval. The piglins' vanilla barter loot is placed into the station's output slots instead of being thrown onto the ground. It is a utility block rather than a threat.

The mod adds one block, one item and one container interface. It adds no mobs, structures, biomes, enchantments or effects. Its only change to the base game is the piglin barter path, so most of its value comes from working with piglins that already exist in the world, such as those in The Nether and in Piglin Outposts.

Overview

Bartering in vanilla Minecraft requires a player to throw gold ingots to piglins one at a time and collect the results from the ground. The Bartering Station replaces that loop with a container. Once it is built and filled with gold, it keeps working without the player present, as long as adult piglins stay within its search box. The station is the only block the mod adds, and it is placed as a normal block with a model rather than a custom shape.

Content

The mod's content is one block and its item form:

• The Bartering Station block, a functional block with a container GUI and a small animated book-like renderer. It is listed in the Functional Blocks creative tab.
• Its BlockItem, the item form of the same block.

The mod has one advancement, which unlocks the station's recipe once a player has gold ingots. It adds no other items, blocks, loot tables, trades, recipes or tags. The existing vanilla recipes and loot tables are unchanged.

Mechanics

The station works in four stages, which repeat while it has gold and piglins in range:

• Piglin scan. The station searches a box around itself for adult piglins. The default range is 12 blocks horizontally and 4 blocks vertically. The GUI shows the number of piglins found in a tooltip over the station's piglin indicator. Baby piglins and zombified piglins are not counted.
• Hand-out cycle. Every barter delay the station tries to give one gold ingot to the next piglin that does not already have an item to admire. The default barter delay is 300 ticks (15 seconds). The station takes exactly one ingot from its input slots per hand-out, and it checks the six input slots in order.
• Admiring. The piglin admires the ingot for half of the barter delay, which is 150 ticks at the default setting. Vanilla piglins admire a player-thrown ingot for a fixed 120 ticks, so station-fed piglins take a little longer. The piglin's walking and holding behaviour is otherwise unchanged.
• Delivery. When the piglin finishes admiring, the station takes the barter result that vanilla would have thrown to the ground. It places the result into its 15 output slots, merging stacks where possible. If the output slots are full, the leftover is thrown by vanilla logic and can land on the ground near the piglin.

Timing depends on the result of each cycle. After a successful hand-out, the next attempt comes after one full barter delay, which is 300 ticks by default. When a cycle has nothing to give, for example because there are no piglins or no free output slot, the station waits twice the barter delay, which is 600 ticks by default, before it tries again.

Gold in the input slots is the only input. The station accepts any item that vanilla treats as piglin currency. The mod does not define a separate tag for currency, so modded gold-like items that the game recognises as piglin currency are accepted too.

Changes to vanilla

The mod changes one part of the piglin behaviour, and the change applies only to piglins that a station has fed:

• Barter results from a station-fed piglin go into the station's output slots and are not thrown to the ground, unless the output is full or the station has been removed.
• Station-fed piglins admire the gold for half of the barter delay instead of the vanilla 120 ticks.
• Each piglin gets a small persistent data entry that records the position of the station that fed it. This is written to every piglin, not only to piglins near a station.

Manual bartering with a player-thrown ingot is not affected. The barter delay setting does not change vanilla's 120-tick manual timing. No other vanilla behaviour, including recipes, loot tables, spawns, combat and worldgen, is changed.

In Fear Nightfall

The pack keeps the mod's default settings. The server configuration sets the horizontal search range to 12 blocks, the vertical range to 4 blocks, and the barter delay to 300 ticks. The Fear Nightfall changes listed for the pack do not include this mod, so the station behaves as the mod ships it.

In the pack's horror setting, the station is most useful in the places where piglins already live. Piglins gather in The Nether and in Piglin Outposts, and a station built inside a Nether base can supply gold from the outpost's piglins without the player standing nearby. The station does not add any danger of its own, and it does not change how the pack's horror biomes or structures generate.

Obtaining

The Bartering Station cannot be found in the world. It does not generate in any structure, does not appear in any chest in the pack, is not sold by any trader, and is not dropped by any mob. A player obtains it by crafting it, following the recipe shown below.

The station's recipe needs two gold ingots and four planks. The ingots go in the top row, and the planks fill the two rows below. The recipe is unlocked as soon as the player has gold ingots in the inventory.

Crafting

Bartering Station · Crafting

Usage

To use the station, place it, then open its GUI and load gold ingots into the six input slots. Adult piglins within the search box will then receive the gold automatically. The station's output slots hold the barter results, which the player can take out by hand. The output accepts no inserted items, so the player cannot put anything into the output slots.

The station has 15 output slots in a 5 by 3 grid, which is enough for several barter cycles before the output fills. Items that fit only partly into an existing stack are merged, and any remainder is placed in an empty slot. If the output fills completely, the station stops generating new results until the player empties it.

The station's cooldown is shown in the GUI. The client setting for the cooldown display can be set to none, overlay, arrows, or both. The display is visual only and does not change timing.

The station works with item pipes and hoppers. Items can be inserted into the input slots from a side, and results can be pulled from the output slots from the bottom. Breaking the station drops its contents and keeps any custom name.

The station requires piglins to be close to it. Piglins within 12 blocks horizontally and 4 blocks vertically count as available. If the station is placed in an empty area, it cannot barter at all, so it should be built inside or next to a piglin base.