[Suggestion] Pigeon used to send individual items to far distances

[SpiderKolo]

I don't see them scaring massive spiders... though it would be nice if another mob in general had that perk... but I think them being able to travel far distances to deliver either a single item or book would be neat feature.

Perhaps if Bundles were to be reenabled (by this or another mod), it would be a perfect way of sending more than just one item.
In very late game you could send Shulker Boxes using Pigeons too!

They could be sent to specific blocks which can store items and could be interacted with Redstone.

[ThePoultryMan]

I think I've figured out how to do this. I'm going to add a letter item that players can right-click with to open a GUI. In this GUI, players can put an item, a message, and the coordinates where you want the pigeon to go. As long as the letter has coordinates and an item or a message, the letter can be sealed. Right-clicking on a pigeon with a sealed letter will make them go to the coordinates and drop the letter. When a pigeon drops a letter, the letter will become "dropped" and can be opened by right-clicking it. After the pigeon drops the letter, it will fly back to its owner. (Pigeons will only take a letter if it is from their owner.)

What's going to make this hard is pigeons flying to the coordinates, and the letter GUI. However, the rest of it shouldn't be too hard.

[twome]

You could make it much easier coding-wise / lighter resources-wise by only allowing the pigeon to begin its journey when it has open sky overhead, then pathing it up to reach a certain altitude (eg server max render distance to nearest player) before simply teleporting above the destination (with a random time delay before arrival at destination based on naive distance). The unreliable time would be very pigeon-like. To avoid exploiting any imbalance and for flavour you could also add maybe a 5% chance the pigeon loses the letter during transit.

[ThePoultryMan]

While I would love to add this feature, it is quite annoying to do so. There are many issues with my implementation that break the system, and I don't even know where to start when fixing them. Developing this feature has not been fun. Because of this, I'm making no plans to continue to work on this, but I might come back to it occasionally. All development is going to be shifted over to 1.18.2-x/letters.

This doesn't mean that we'll never have carrier pigeons, but don't expect them, either.