Player Wraith - linking overworld features to nether

[SterlingRed]

I know there’s been some discussion about how boring portal grids are to find villages and any other structures needed at the beginning of the late game. I had a thought that might not be possible to code but here it goes.

The player can create a “wraith”, a gollum of themselves in the nether. The wraith can be summoned by building a gollum, whatever materials make sense and is summed by the player drinking a combination of several negative potions followed by throwing a soul urn at the gollum. When the gollum comes to life, the model is the same as the players. The health stats then are inversely related between the wraith and the player. When the player is at full health, the wraith is at low health. When the wraith is at max health, the player is almost dead. The wraith is immune to lava, fire, and fall damage. The wraith also takes whatever inventory the player has when summoned. The wraith automatically uses a pickaxe to mine in the nether in the direction of the nearest populated village, builds a portal there and goes through trying to kill all of the villagers zombie or healed.
The player can remotely kill the wraith by healing themselves fully with a potion as auto healing is disabled when a wraith is active. All items the wraith has are lost when it dies. The intent is the player is all but disabled while a wraith is active…but there should be some mechanic or reason to have the player do something so it’s not just afk. Idk what that is though.

There’s a lot of intricacies to be worked out if this is implemented obviously but I have no idea if this is possible as essentially I imagine it working as a second player which I don’t think is possible in ssp, so it might require the player to switch to smp to make this work right. I have no idea how chunk loading is going to work with this or even if it’s possible to know where a village is from the nether without the overworld loaded. Cost of the wraith should be very high, but not so high as to cause the player to build a portal network instead of using wraiths to find villages. I have no idea if this would be interesting, but it is on theme with btw. To prevent wraiths from being stuck navigating nether terrain they should be summoned at the ceiling.

[EpicAaron]

I had a similar idea a long time ago before sleeping was added! Instead of an autonomous player creature, however, I thought that the player could just switch between his steve body and his golem body.

In order to cut down on insane travel times, a golem could be used to explore or work at a village without the player's main body having to leave home. I was thinking it would be expensive, mystery meat and diamonds to create, then animate with a soul urn.

The player could switch perspective between the two, but the player is vulnerable when in the "golem trance."

I wonder if having another player entity could also solve the chunk loading issue. Maybe that is easier than creating a chunk loading block?

[dawnraider]

Unfortunately that'd be really difficult to implement. Possible, but outside the scope of what I would want to spend time on, largely due to opportunity cost. The AI for that would be incredibly non-trivial, potentially performance intensive, and would require it to also be a chunkloader, which could potentially interfere with current plans for chunkloading. There's also no logic in 1.5 to find where a village will generate but hasn't yet, the game can only find where villages (and other structures - this is why the range on soul sand piles is pretty small) have already generated.

[SterlingRed]

Unfortunately that'd be really difficult to implement.

I am not at all surprised! Figured I’d say it anyway in case I was wrong or there was a simpler way to do it. Can’t wait for all the stuff you already have in flight and what migrating to 1.6 enables!