Overview#
Grand Capitals replaces the small clusters of huts that vanilla calls villages with full settlements. Every biome variant is rebuilt from scratch: a proper town centre, streets that connect instead of trail off, multi-storey buildings with furnished interiors, and district-sized farm and market areas around the edges.
Generation itself is untouched. The settlements appear in the same biomes, at the same spacing, from the same structure sets the game already uses, so exploration, maps and locator behaviour all work exactly as before.
Village Types#
| Biome | What the capital looks like |
|---|---|
| Plains | The largest of the five. Stone-and-timber houses several storeys tall, a paved market square with a patterned floor, canals crossed by short bridges, and fenced pens for livestock on the outskirts. |
| Desert | Sandstone terraces stacked up a slope, a tall brick minaret over the centre, shaded walkways, awning-covered stalls and irrigated crop beds cut into the sand. |
| Savanna | Wide acacia platforms on stilts, open-sided halls, rope-and-plank walkways between raised buildings and long grain fields. |
| Snowy | Steep spruce roofs built to shed snow, lantern-lit lanes, sheltered porches and a stone watch tower over the frozen approach. |
| Taiga | Dense timber town built around a tall stone tower, terraced levels following the hillside, water channels with lily pads and covered market rows. |
How a Capital Is Laid Out#
Each capital is assembled from a jigsaw of districts rather than scattered single houses:
- Town centre — a well or fountain, the meeting point villagers path towards.
- Residential rows — houses that share walls and stack upward, each with beds, storage and lighting inside.
- Market — stalls, awnings, crates and display blocks laid out along a paved square.
- Profession buildings — every villager job keeps a dedicated shop with its workstation, so trading still works the way you expect.
- Farmland — crop beds, hay storage and animal pens sized to the settlement.
- Roads — connected paths with kerbs, steps and bridges instead of dirt trails.
Illager Structures#
The two illager structures are rebuilt as well.
Pillager outpost — no longer a single tower on bare ground. The rebuilt version stacks several levels, adds tents, supply crates, cages and a surrounding camp, so the fight has cover and approach routes to think about.
Swamp hut — extended into a proper stilted dwelling over the water, with a walkway, storage and a cauldron area rather than a bare box.
Finding the Capitals#
Because the structure sets are unchanged, everything you already use to find settlements still applies:
/locate structure minecraft:village_plains(andvillage_desert,village_savanna,village_snowy,village_taiga)/locate structure minecraft:pillager_outpostandminecraft:swamp_hut- Explorer maps and wandering-trader directions point at them normally.
Settlements only appear in chunks generated after the content is installed. Adding it to an existing world is safe, but already-explored villages stay as they were -- travel outward to find the rebuilt ones.
Loot and Trading#
Chest loot and villager trading are deliberately left close to vanilla. Chests use the same village loot tables, so a capital is not a jackpot -- it is a bigger place to explore with more chests spread across more buildings.
Every profession keeps its workstation, which means villager jobs, restocking and trade levelling behave exactly as they do in an ordinary village. Raids still work: the larger layout simply gives both sides more to fight over.
Compatibility#
The content is entirely data-driven -- structure templates, jigsaw pools and loot tables. It adds no blocks, items or entities, so:
- Vanilla clients can join a server running it; nothing needs installing on their side.
- It works alongside other content as long as nothing else replaces the same vanilla village or illager structures. Two packs that both rebuild
village_plainswill conflict, and whichever loads last wins. - Removing it is safe. Settlements already generated stay in the world as ordinary blocks; only newly generated chunks go back to vanilla layouts.
