Carrier Pigeons

Carrier Pigeons

Tame a bird. Put three things in it. Open the world map, click a spot, and press send.

The pigeon takes off, crosses the distance in real time — through every unloaded chunk between
here and there — and leaves a cardboard box on the ground at the far end with your things inside.
Then it comes home.

A real world map, not a coordinate box

Actual terrain in actual map colours, out to three and a half thousand blocks across the panel,
that remembers everywhere anyone has walked. Click to drop the pin, drag to pan, scroll to zoom, or
type the coordinates if you already know them.

Your birds are drawn on it while they fly, along with where each one is headed and how far along it
is. The ring is that bird’s range: outside it, the dispatch button tells you how far you missed by
instead of failing quietly.

Deliveries actually arrive

This is the part most postal mods get wrong. Entities in unloaded chunks do not tick, so a bird
sent past your render distance would normally stop dead and the parcel would never turn up.

Here it stops being an entity. A dispatched pigeon is absorbed into a per-world flight table the
moment the last player walks away from it, flown forward with no chunks loaded at all, and put back
into the world as a real bird the moment anyone gets close enough to see it — at exactly the
position and speed the numbers said. On arrival it loads one chunk, sets the box down, and turns
round.

Send a Homing Pigeon four thousand blocks, log out, come back tomorrow. The box is there.

Eight breeds, and half of them have to be bred

The Common Pigeon, the Rock Dove, the Snow Pigeon and the Ash Pigeon turn up in the world. The
Homing Pigeon, the Racer, the War Pigeon and the Dusk Pigeon do not — you breed your way to them,
and the table is short enough to work through in an evening and long enough to be a project.

Rain costs an ordinary bird a fifth of its cruise and a thunderstorm two fifths. Snow Pigeons ignore
the rain, Ash Pigeons ignore the weather entirely.

Nine modules

Fit a Pigeon Modulator and the bird gains three sockets: one job, and as many upgrades as fit.

Player Delivery Module — deliver to a named player instead of a coordinate. The flight retargets
on them once a second, so the parcel lands where they are, not where they were when you pressed
send. They get told who it came from.

Combat Module — pick a name and the bird hunts that person wherever they go. Pick nothing and it
patrols the coordinate, killing whatever is hostile there. It climbs between passes instead of
hovering inside the swing.

Spy Pigeon Module — post a bird over a place and it stays there as a camera. Hold the Pigeon
Viewer, pick it off the list, and you are looking through its eyes in real time from anywhere in
the world — steering it with your own mouse, W to fly it forward, sneak to come back to yourself.

Plus six upgrades: half again the cruise speed, two more cargo wells, double the range, eight points
of armour plating, total weather immunity, and an autopilot that repeats the last run the moment
there is something aboard.

The loft

Build a Pigeon Loft and it becomes the post office. Right click it for the board: every bird you
own, where it is, what it is carrying, how far along and how long is left — including the ones four
thousand blocks away that are not loaded. Birds dispatched near a loft come home to the loft rather
than to wherever you happened to be standing. Roosting birds heal.

And when you get a coordinate wrong by a digit, the Pigeon Whistle turns everything you have in
the air around at once.

Getting started

1. Find a pigeon and feed it seed until it is tame — Pigeon Feed works twice as well.
2. Right click it, put something in the three cargo wells.
3. Send parcel, click the map, dispatch.
4. Build a loft, breed for a Homing Pigeon, and start running a real network.

Minecraft 1.21.1 — NeoForge — Java 21

No dependencies. Works on a dedicated server; every flight is stored per world, so deliveries
survive restarts.