That is so good to play with my kids. Another in a similar vein is Spider Heck.

You know why villagers cause so much lag if there’s too many and they’re allowed to roam free? Well, rather than optimise their pathfinding logic they just… recalculate their paths every goddamn frame. They also take shortcuts in calculating their paths to reduce this overhead, so their movement is derpy and frequently kills them.

You could make the path then record all the blocks they will interact with, and only recalculate if one of those blocks changes. Boom, millions of operations eliminated, and you’ve got some spare time to make sure the paths will actually work. You could also stagger pathfinding so if a bunch of villagers need a path all at once - like you just blocked a path to where they were all going - you could spread out that load, and prevent lag spikes.

But they don’t do that, so people end up sticking them in tiny boxes on top of carpets so they stop trying to pathfind. Just absurd stuff.

I’m a developer too, and I appreciate the offer very much, but I’m not really in a situation where I could work on something like this. It’s just an idea though, anyone could run with it.

I maintain that it would be relatively simple to create an open source version of an app/protocol like this that serves people’s needs for this exact use case, and if it were designed for any community to use, it could be essentially free as you say and high quality, and be a single point of service for everyone.

If this were done right it could put all these thin platforms out of business and allow delivery drivers to establish fair terms for themselves.

This would be a really good fit for federation I think.

“Mob justice” is a boogeyman invented to distract you from the fact that the cops and the state give you no justice at all.