Unit Hiring/Warrior FAQ

This page lists some of the questions and concerns that people have about hired warriors.

How much Alignment do I need to hire a unit?
This depends entirely on what kind of unit you want to hire. Search this wiki for the kind of unit you're interested in, and check out its alignment requirement.

Can I hurt my hired units? Can hired units hurt one another?
No. Strikes from your sword will not hurt hired units in the least, and arrows/other projectiles you shoot at them will simply bounce off the units. The same thing happens when hired units accidentally shoot one another.

Why do my mounted units suffocate?
Mounted units will suffocate if they do not have at least three meters of headroom. To avoid this problem, make sure that your hired cavalry is kept out of caves, and that any place you plan to bring them into has three meters or more of headroom.

Why doesn't the Summon horn of Command summon my units?
The horn will only call your units if you're standing in a safe, unobstructed space. It will not call your units if you're in air, water, on a non-solid block, or there is not enough room for the unit to stand in (e.g. you can summon Orcs into a one-block wide hole, but not Olog-hai).

Also, the horn cannot summon units from far away - this is simply a result of the way Minecraft works. Only nearby areas of the world are loaded, meaning that if you move too far from your hired units, the horn cannot summon them because they physically do not exist in the world. (This is the same reason that crops don't grow when you're too far away from them, furnaces don't smelt, and so on.)

An exception to this is if you're on a multiplayer server and you travel far away from your units, but another player stays close to them, they will still be loaded and you'll be able to summon them over any distance.

Can you make NPCs that lead other NPCs into battle / better hired unit AI / etc.?
Sir or Madam, you have unrealistic expectations of what can be done in Minecraft. This is a voxel-based sandbox game, not a war game. Whenever someone asks for something like this, it makes me wonder whether if you'd ask the developers of your favourite RTS or FPS game to add building blocks and fully deformable terrain to their game...

Such a feature could in theory be added but it would take a long time indeed to develop and debug it. Time which, at the moment, is more wisely spent building up the world of Middle-earth. However, there are rumours that the next Beta might have something along the lines of this...

At the present time, there are hireable NPC's that help improve the performance of your hired units; they're called Banner Bearers. If your Alignment is high enough, you'll be able to hire one.