MCM: Air Support

Part of MCM (Minecraft Comes Military), a set of separate military mods: Aircraft, Devices, Hordes and Air Support. Each one works without the others.

Minecraft 1.21.1 (Fabric and NeoForge), 1.20.1 (Fabric and Forge) and 1.19.2 (Fabric and Forge) · mod id mcm_airsupport · version 0.2.0 · MIT License

Air raids and air support for Immersive Aircraft, flown by MCA villagers. Pillagers come in aircraft; your guards climb into the helicopters you park and fly rescues, escorts, reinforcements and strikes that you call on a field radio. Works on its own with Immersive Aircraft and MCA Reborn: no city, base file or other mod of this series is needed.

The 1.20.1 and 1.19.2 builds are new ports of the 1.21.1 mod and have not been played through in game yet; please report anything odd on the Discord. Everything below is present in the 1.21.1 and 1.20.1 builds. The visible differences on 1.20.1 are the satellite strike’s particle effect (vanilla poof particles) and the way mission explosions spare friendly entities, which works differently under the hood and has not been compared in game. The 1.19.2 builds leave out a few things; they are listed under “Minecraft 1.19.2 builds” below.

Requirements

Minecraft 1.21.1

Minecraft 1.20.1

Minecraft 1.19.2

Install on the client and the server (it adds an item, a screen and network packets).

Air raids

• During a village raid, from wave 3 on, raiders may arrive in aircraft (raidConfig).
• Raider squads in aircraft sometimes ambush players in the wild, and more often near pillager outposts, where parked raider aircraft can also appear (factions).
• Raider aircraft weave on approach, drop flares against missiles, fire missiles of their own (enemyMissile) and shout (raiderTalk).
• Admins can call a formation with /airattack spawn [count] [vehicle] [weapon] and reload the config with /airattack reload.

Your aircrew

Crew are adult MCA villagers who either

• have a crew profession from the config (crew): MCA archers serve as riflemen and MCA guards as sentries by default, or
• were appointed on the radio (Appoint tab: pilot, rifleman, sentry or frontliner; stored as the tag mcm_role:<role>).

Any crew member can fly; appointed pilots are picked first. Give a villager the tag mcm_no_draft to keep it out of all of this.

Aircraft

Crews use helicopters that you placed and never flew yourself and that have no name tag. The types are listed in missionCraft.types (by default this mod’s series, the Civilian Aviation Bell 206 / Bell 47G / Comanche, and the Immersive Aircraft gyrodyne). Which aircraft does what is set in aircraft (roles such as transport, rescue, attack, heavy_transport). Park them near the crew, inside your base if you have set one.

Home base (optional)

/airsupport base set [radius] (operators) makes a circle around you in the Overworld your base; base clear removes it, base show reports it. With a base:

• raider aircraft approach it from outside, and crew near parked helicopters scramble to intercept them;
• patrols of two helicopters fly around it from time to time (interceptors);
• only aircraft parked inside it are used for missions, and rescues are only taken outside it.

Without a base, aircraft and crew are found around you, and raids come at you as in the original air raid mod.

An east-west runway for fixed-wing aircraft can be set in runway; without one, planes take off and land on their own.

The field radio

Craft it (iron, copper, redstone) or use /airsupport radio, then right-click to open the radio. Tabs:

• Operations: call or cancel a rescue helicopter, request a rifle unit as reinforcement, dismiss your escort.
• Air: form up escorts for your own helicopter, launch a patrol, board escorts onto your aircraft, recall all aircraft.
• Squad: recruit four escorts on foot, report status, rally on you, see the roster around you.
• Appoint: appoint the nearest adult villager as pilot, rifleman, sentry or frontliner.
• Aircraft: the aircraft you ride or stand next to, and a spare radio.
• Radio: the last radio traffic.
• Strike: an attack helicopter flies to the block under your crosshair and drops a stick of bombs or chlorine gas; or sends attack helicopters to the aim point or the current incident.
• Satellite: an orbital strike (high explosive or chlorine gas) on the aim point after a countdown.

Every order is also a command: /airsupport (dispatch, dispatch cancel, reinforce, formation [n], status, patrol, recall, strike gas|he, cas [scene | x z], satellite [x z | confirm | cancel | gas | he], escort [follow | board [n] | rally | status | dismiss], radio, base ...).

When raiders attack a village near a player, attack helicopters from your base fly to it on their own.

Radio

Crews, towers and HQ talk on the radio in chat. Lines are in English or Japanese: language is auto (the game language in single player, English on a dedicated server), en_us or ja_jp.

Also included

• A third-person camera that pulls back far enough for large aircraft.
• Helicopters no longer pitch steeply forward on screen (the view only; flight is unchanged).
• Civilian Aviation helicopters flown by AI no longer replay their start-up sound each time you come near (1.21.1 and 1.20.1 builds).
• Crew-flown aircraft that are shot down call a mayday, go down burning and explode after landing; survivors form a perimeter and wait for pickup.
• Door gunners in large transport helicopters fire at raider aircraft, leading their shots (doorGuns).
• Red chest lights on crews out on night missions, and searchlights under helicopters at night.

Minecraft 1.19.2 builds

They are built for Immersive Aircraft 0.7.11 and MCA Reborn 7.5.20, which offer less than the versions used on 1.20.1. Compared with the 1.20.1 builds:

• No Civilian Aviation support: there is no Civilian Aviation for 1.19.2, so its helicopters and the engine-sound fixes are not part of these builds (its ids stay in missionCraft.types and do nothing). Minecraft Comes Military: Aircraft has no 1.19.2 build either.
• Searchlights light the ground, but the visible beam shaft under the helicopter is missing (1.19.2 has no block display entity).
• Warships are not handled: Immersive Aircraft 0.7.11 has none.
• The radio’s sound carries the default distance instead of 48 blocks, and the field radio sits in the vanilla Tools tab; there is no separate Air Support creative tab.
• A destroyed aircraft always drops its item (Immersive Aircraft 0.7.11 cannot tell borrowed aircraft apart), and the limit on the damage shake animation is not applied.
• These builds were compiled and inspected, but the game has not been started with them. Whether every mixin applies to Immersive Aircraft 0.7.11 and MCA Reborn 7.5.20, how mission pilots are controlled on a server, and the saving and networking on both loaders are untested. The Immersive Aircraft version range of the Forge build comes from the published version numbers only.

Config config/mcm_airsupport.json

Written with defaults on first start; missing sections are added later. Main sections: language, base, runway, crew, factions, raidConfig, approach, interceptors, strike, doorGuns, airTasking, enemyMissile, satellite, chlorine, raiderTalk, missionCraft, aircraft. Satellite strikes damage terrain by default (satellite.terrainDamage); turn it off on shared servers if you prefer.

Known limitations

• Radio lines are built from short phrases, so the English reads like radio shorthand.
• The base is a single circle in the Overworld; the runway runs east-west only.
• Rescues and reinforcements need a helicopter with a free seat and a crew member within 64 blocks of it.

Credits & licenses

• AirRaid 1.0.0 by Ace: MIT. The pillager air raids, the raid spawner, the aircraft AI mixin and the layout of the raid config come from it and were extended here; its MIT permission notice is reproduced in LICENSE. This mod already contains that behaviour, so do not install it together with AirRaid.
• Immersive Aircraft by Luke100000: GPL-3.0. Required, not included.
• MCA Reborn by Luke100000, S0llace, CDAGaming, ffrannny, jahx_senpoopie, WildBamaBoy and SheWolfDeadly: GPL-3.0. Required, not included; its villagers are the aircrew.
• Fabric API by FabricMC: Apache-2.0. Required by the Fabric builds, not included.
• Forgified Fabric API by Sinytra and FabricMC: Apache-2.0. Required by the NeoForge 1.21.1 and Forge 1.20.1 builds in place of Fabric API, not included. The Forge 1.19.2 build does not use it.
• Minecraft Comes Military: Aircraft: GPL-3.0. Optional; its UH-60, AH-64 and V-22 get transport, attack and heavy-lift roles.
• Civilian Aviation: assets by Mr.Mulle, content pack by VellEagle. All Rights Reserved. Optional; its helicopters can fly missions and get the engine sound fixes. Its classes are only named in mixins that are skipped when it is absent. No file from Civilian Aviation is included in this mod.
• Vic’s Point Blank by vic4games: All Rights Reserved. Optional, not included; escort soldiers are handed its M4A1.
• This mod: code by Minecraft Comes Military, MIT License (LICENSE in the jar). The soldier, sentry, frontliner and pilot skins, the field radio model, its recipe, the language files and the English phrasebook were made for this mod. Raider voices are vanilla sounds referenced by name. Every bundled file is listed in CREDITS.md.

Community & support

Bug reports, feature requests and build previews live on the Discord:

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