What are NPCs

NPCs are the standing characters of your server: shopkeepers, quest givers, guides, decoration with a name. Unlike mobs, they don’t fight, wander or despawn. They stand where you put them, look like players out of the box, and survive restarts. [Image here: A player-model shopkeeper NPC standing at a market stall, name floating above]

​

NPCs are not mobs

NMEntities keeps the two fully separate: NPCs never appear in the Entities menu and can’t be spawned with /nme spawn. Everything goes through the /npc commands.

​

They look like players by default

A freshly created NPC is a real player entity wearing the steve model with a skin, so it looks like a player from the start (this is the same approach the Citizens plugin uses). Swap the look any time: another skin with /npc skin, one of your own models or any entity type with /npc type. Switching to a model or entity type makes the NPC that kind of entity instead. Because a player-type NPC is a genuine player entity, two things are worth knowing:

• It shows up in a world’s player list (world.getPlayers()), so other plugins that count players in a world, like some mob-spawning or sleep-percentage logic, may count it. It never appears in the tab list, in the online-players list, or in the world save.
• It faces and moves like a real player: look turns only the head, and a right-click to select or talk is an ordinary interaction.

Player-type NPCs render on every supported Minecraft version (1.21.4 through 26.2), skins included. If you’re ever on a version this build predates, the console says so and model-based NPCs (/npc type <model>) keep working there.

​

How NPCs behave

• They stand still (AI off), make no sounds and can’t be hurt.
• They face the direction they were placed in, or track the nearest player within 8 blocks when their look option is on. Turning look off freezes them facing wherever they were looking at that moment.
• They can glow and float (per-NPC glowing and gravity flags).
• They can react to right-clicks by running any named effect: greetings, shop commands, quest hooks. See Creating an NPC.
• They can hold a branching conversation with clickable replies. See NPC Dialogs.
• They’re never saved with the world. NMEntities respawns each instance from config when its chunk loads, so a crash or restart can never duplicate or lose one.
• /nme reload re-reads the NPCs/ folder and respawns everything.

​

Definitions and instances

One NPC can stand in many places at once. The NPC itself (its base, model, skin, name, flags) is the definition; each spot where it stands is an instance. Place your “Shopkeeper” at every market in every town: rename the definition once and all of them update, remove one instance and the rest stay. This split runs through the whole system, and the commands are divided along it: some act on the definition (all instances at once), others on the one instance you have selected.

​

Where to go

• Creating an NPC: the five-minute walkthrough.
• NPC Files: the YAML format behind it all.
• NPC Commands: the full /npc reference.
• NPC Dialogs: branching conversations with clickable replies.