Designing copper golems with day jobs
On Sunday Market you can hand a copper golem a Work Order and it takes a job: hauling, stoking furnaces, sorting chests, sweeping, farming or collecting. The golems walk their routes, move only real items and work only while a player is within 64 blocks. These are the reasons behind each of those rules.
By Sunday Market · Published
A copper golem on Sunday Market can hold a job. You craft a Work Order from copper, paper and a tool, hand it to a golem and tap the containers it should work between. From then on the golem walks the route and does the chore while you get on with your evening. There are seven jobs, and all seven follow three rules: the golem walks, it moves real items, and it works only while a player is within 64 blocks. We built it that way so automation on a long-running survival server stays part of play and never replaces it.
Automation you can watch
Most Minecraft automation is invisible. An item drops into a hopper at one end of a base and comes out of a chest at the other, and nothing in between shows you how it got there. That works, but it turns a base into plumbing. We wanted the chores on Sunday Market to happen where you can see them.
A Work Order golem walks its route. It carries 16 items per trip, one item type at a time, in its copper hands. If you wall off the path between its two containers, the golem cannot reach the drop-off, and its readout tells you so. You fix it the way you fix most things in Minecraft, by clearing the path.
Right-click a golem with an empty hand and it answers in a speech bubble: its job, its status and its oxidation. The status words are plain English, such as hauling, idle, needs a route and drop-off full. Each golem also mutters to itself while it works, in one of four personalities, from the Grumbler to the Deadpan. The chatter has no game effect. It makes a base full of workers feel lived in, and it tells you at a glance which golem is busy and which one has stalled.
Seven jobs, one recipe
Every Work Order is a shaped recipe that shows up in your recipe book: a copper frame, a sheet of paper in the middle and the job's tool below it. Swap the tool and you get a different job. The slip is used up when you hand it over, so one slip buys one job, and re-tasking a golem later costs another.
| Job | Tool in the recipe | What the golem does |
|---|---|---|
| Courier | Hopper | Carries items from one container to another |
| Stoker | Furnace | Keeps a furnace, smoker or blast furnace fed |
| Restocker | Barrel | Keeps a container topped up to a target |
| Janitor | Brush | Sweeps up dropped items and banks them in a chest |
| Sorter | Comparator | Files one source into several chests by what they already hold |
| Farmhand | Hoe | Harvests and replants mature crops around itself |
| Collector | Bundle | Picks ripe produce, empties enrolled furnaces and banks it all in a chest |
The jobs fall into three groups. The Courier, Restocker and Sorter move items between containers. The Stoker feeds furnaces, and it takes from its pickup only what that furnace accepts: fuel for the fuel slot, smeltables for the input slot. The Janitor, Farmhand and Collector work the ground within 8 blocks of where they stand. The Janitor banks dropped items, the Farmhand tends wheat, carrots, potatoes, beetroot and nether wart and leaves the harvest on the ground, and the Collector picks the produce the Farmhand leaves alone, such as sweet berries, melons, sugar cane and amethyst.
We kept each job narrow. A Sorter lifts an item only when some destination chest already holds that type, and anything with no home stays in the source, never guessed at. A Restocker pulls only the deficit, topping each listed item up to a stack of 64 by default. A narrow job is easy to predict, and you can plan a base around a worker whose next move you can call. The full binding steps for each job are on Routes and Filters.
The limits are the design
Every limit on a Work Order golem closes a path that would otherwise turn golems into a machine that plays for you.
| Rule | What happens | What it prevents |
|---|---|---|
| A player within 64 blocks | Outside that range the golem hibernates | Offline item flow and all-night head starts |
| Containers within 48 blocks, same world | The job stays inside one base | A server-wide pipe run by one golem |
| Golems walk every route | A blocked path stalls the job | Work you cannot see or fix |
| 16 items per trip, one type at a time | Throughput has a ceiling | Golems replacing every hopper line |
| Items never duplicated or voided | A full drop-off makes the golem hold its cargo and retry | Lost items and duplication bugs |
Binding is physical too. When you hand over a Work Order, a 30-second bind window opens and the golem talks you through each tap in a speech bubble. You right-click the pickup, then the drop-off. No coordinates, no commands.
Why it stops short of AFK play
The 64-block rule is the one players ask about most. The Work Orders FAQ answers the offline question in three words: "No, by design."
The reasoning comes from the rest of the server. The economy pays coins for what you do while you play, and none of the automation systems earns coins or plays the game for you. If golems kept working with nobody around, a player who logged off next to fifty golems would come back ahead of a player who spent the evening building. On a world with no scheduled resets, that head start would grow every week for as long as the world runs.
So golems move what you have already gathered. They sort your mining haul, feed your smelters and keep your fields replanted, and they hibernate when you walk away. The rule also shapes how you build. Because a golem works only near a player, the smelting room belongs beside the storage hall and the farm beside the house, close to where you spend your time.
Ownership and trust
The first player to give a golem a job owns it. Only the owner, the players they trust and staff can re-task it, so nobody can walk up to your courier line and repurpose it. To trust a friend, you hold that player's head and right-click the golem. The permission lives in the world, as an act you perform, not a command you type.
A whistle works the same way. Hold a copper ingot, sneak and right-click the air, and every golem you own within 48 blocks glows for a few seconds and comes to heel. It is handy for a headcount before you rebuild a room.
Caring for a worker
Copper weathers, and golems are copper. On Sunday Market a golem works at full speed at every oxidation stage, so weathering costs you nothing until the last stage, when a fully oxidised golem freezes into a statue. A frozen golem glows so you can find it behind the wheat field, and an axe scrapes the patina off one stage at a time. Wax a golem with honeycomb the day you hire it and oxidation stops for good. Golem Care covers follow mode, name tags and the rest.
After a big batch of work, a golem sometimes brings its owner a flower. It carries no buff. The wiki calls it a gift, and that is all it is.
Try one job first
Start with a single Courier between the chest where you dump your mining trips and your storage room. Craft the slip with a hopper at the bottom, hand it over, tap the two chests and watch the golem walk the route once. You will see the whole design in that one trip, and the Work Orders guide has the other six jobs when you want them.