Speed and Combat

Speed & combat — how fast it acts and how well it fights

Two settings that change how a companion feels more than anything else in Blockpal.

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Reaction speed

"Its actions are too slow."

They were, and it was not one thing. Blockpal had accumulated a dozen separate invented delays — a pause between plan steps, a randomised "reaction" jitter, a head that could only turn 22° per tick, a five-second gap between thoughts, a rate limit on looking, a cap on how much script could run per tick. Individually each was defensible. Stacked up they made a companion that was never actually busy still look idle.

The worst of them: the think cooldown was measured from when the previous round started. A bot that finished its script in one second then stood still for four before it was allowed to think again.

Now every one of them resolves from a single setting.

Speed	Feels like	Step pause	Head turn	Re-thinks every	Mining
instant	No waiting at all	0 ticks	180°/tick	1 s	2×
fast (default)	Snappy but believable	2 ticks	55°/tick	2 s	normal
human	The old, deliberate feel	8 ticks	22°/tick	5 s	normal

/ai speed              # what it's set to
/ai speed instant      # (ops) change it

Also on Settings → Behavior → How fast it acts.

What speed does not do

It never makes the bot cheat. Mining still costs real block-hardness time at fast and human; reach limits, tool speeds and pathfinding are untouched. instant doubles mining speed and says so — it is the one setting that trades realism for pace, and it is not the default.

A companion that finishes a script now re-plans immediately rather than waiting out a timer, which is the single biggest improvement of the lot.

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Combat skill

The old behaviour was: notice a monster, walk at it, swing. That is how something that has never been in a fight behaves.

Skill	What it does
basic	Walks in and swings. The pre-3.26 behaviour, kept so nothing regresses.
skilled (default)	Holds a range instead of standing inside the enemy's swing, circles on an irregular beat, raises a shield between its own swings, backs off and eats when badly hurt.
expert	Adds crit timing (jump, then strike on the way down) and bow work at range.

/ai combat             # what it's set to
/ai combat expert      # (ops) change it

Also on Settings → Behavior → Fighting.

All of it goes through the same keys and mouse buttons a player uses — the swing still has to reach, the shield still has to be in the off hand, the bow still has to be drawn and the arrows still have to be in the backpack.

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Fighting players (PvP)

Off by default, and narrow when on.

A companion that swings at people is a griefing tool, so every one of these must hold before a swing can reach a person:

1. allowPvp is on — ops-only, and an upgrade never turns it on.
2. The target is not the bot's owner, and not anybody the owner trusts.
3. The target is actually playing — not creative, not spectating, not invulnerable.
4. The bot was provoked: that player hurt it or its owner in the last ten seconds, or the owner named them with /ai attack <player>.

There is no configuration in which a companion picks a fight. It defends, or it does what its owner directly told it to do about one specific person. An ordered fight lasts 60 seconds and is deliberately not saved — it never survives a restart or turns up in a world file.

/ai admin pvp on          # (ops) allow it at all
/ai attack <player>       # (owner) point your companion at someone

Vanilla still has the final say. A server with PvP disabled refuses player-to-player damage in its own hurt path regardless of any of this, so a companion there can swing and nothing will land.

The decision is made in exactly one place (combat/PvpRules), and every path that can produce a swing — a script calling attack(), the combat brain, a learned policy pressing the button — goes through it. There is no second check to forget to update.