Banner

"‘Éomer, my son! You lead the first éored,’ said Théoden; ‘and it shall go behind the king's banner in the centre. […]’"

- The Return of The King, The Ride of The Rohirrim

Banners are faction-specific entities that were added in. They can be placed and bear faction symbols. Banners can be placed either on a wall or on the ground.

Banners are also wielded by hire-able units called banner bearers. There is a banner bearer for most factions that have a banner.

List of Banners
Banners are crafted with one wooden plank of any type, one stick and one block of wool. Banners of Lothlórien, use mallorn wood planks and sticks. Some faction banners need an additional ingredient. Each banner has to be crafted on the corresponding faction's crafting table.

Banner Protection
Banners can also be used to claim land by placing them on a block of bronze (protects 17x17x17), silver (33x33x33), or gold (65x65x65). You need at least +1 alignment to the respective faction. Within the given range, no enemies of the banner's faction can spawn and players that are excluded by the banner cannot set or destroy blocks, nor open doors or containers. They also can't set custom waypoints there. Explosions can no longer destroy terrain inside a banner-protected area as of with the exception of throwing exploding termites within an area you have access to. By protecting an area, you will gain the achievement "The Conqueror".

This feature can be disabled and configured via the config file. You can also set a cooldown time for warning messages there. The whole mechanics is most useful and important for playing on servers.

When you press the F3-key, you can see the banner, highlighted in green, and the protected area, shown by a green cube (for some reason, banners and their protection cube sometimes become invisible on servers, though the protection is still in effect).

Right-clicking a protection banner will display a banner GUI, which has two options: Faction protection and whitelist protection.

Faction protection allows the modification of blocks only by players who have the amount of alignment entered into the textbox, which has to be at least 1. As you can enter higher numbers than your own, that way you can exclude yourself from modifying the area.

Should your alignment to your banner's faction sink below the set value, you won't be able to break your own faction banner. But it's always possible to access its GUI, as long as you can reach it, and change it to whitelist protection. After that, you will be able to break it.

In case that you walled your faction banner in, and then lost the respective alignment, you've got a problem. Either ask someone else with enough alignment to the banner's faction to make a way for you, or do some quests, to regain enough alignment to grant you access again.

Whitelist protection allows the modification of blocks only by players whom you list in a group of textboxes. The default number of whitelist player slots is 16, but this can be changed by using the + or - buttons next to the list. The player that placed the banner is automatically added to the list and cannot be removed.

Since the introduction of fellowships in, it's also possible to add those by typing   in front of the name. The Mod checks the name and tells you, if the name doesn't exist, to prevent typos. Also, the whitelist entry changes automatically, if the fellowship's name is changed.

The self-protection option in the banner GUI will default to on; this prevents enemy or non-whitelisted players from breaking the banner manually (whereas if it is off, anyone can break it). Self-protection might be disabled via the config file.

If two banners' protection areas overlap, the intersection area will be protected according to both rules. Only players who conform to both banner requirements can modify blocks. It is not possible to place a protection banner where it might overlap with another player's banner protection. Thus there are no known legit ways (other than a banner with self-protection disabled) to take over already claimed land.

Banners with custom protection data (most commonly, a long list of whitelisted players) can be duplicated. Breaking a placed banner will yield a banner item with the NBT data of the original. Crafting this custom banner with another banner of the same faction in a vanilla crafting GUI will yield two copies of the original banner, with data intact. Also, a custom banner's data can be cleared by placing it by itself in the crafting GUI and taking out the cleared banner of the result slot. These features were added in.

There is a rumour that placing a banner on one of the metal blocks already mentioned will cause NPCs of that faction to spawn. This is not true. If NPCs spawn, it is because of the biome they are in. Placing Gondor banners in Mordor will not let Gondorians in, it will only keep the Orcs out.

This feature was added in and then tweaked in several updates.