Although Microsoft/ Mojang does still actively work on Minecraft, a large fraction of real input to Minecraft's evolution is driven by the independent (Java) modding community. Today vanilla Minecraft has bees, but for many years modded Minecraft had bees, and in fact it had so many bees that people would routinely "nope out" of bee stuff because "Oh MY GOD. No more fucking bees". Jaded Cat's original Agrarian Skies has custom bees, which I think were pink or purple - and within a year or two everybody was sick enough of bees that they didn't want even the normal ones.
As with other creative communities there are some distinct threads, like some people are into very heavily survival focused, up-against-it packs, where e.g. gravity works properly, mobs understand the game rules and will climb up to get you, or set fires, they will upgrade their gear, etc. while people like me prefer ascend-to-godhood type gameplay where you quickly dispense with monsters and become untouchable not far into play.
In the latter style there's not a desire for "smart and interesting NPCs", in fact it's often played alone or in small groups, intentionally. In the former style the NPCs are somewhat smart, but they're a threat so if you make them too clever they'll just always kill the players which isn't much fun after a while.
I think NPCs with the type of independence of a Dwarf Fortress dwarf wouldn't be attractive to either of the sorts of player I mentioned, it may be that such people just don't play Minecraft. But it's also possible somebody has implemented it and I've never run into it. There are a lot of Minecraft mods. Curseforge lists literally thousands of them, there could be hundred like you describe and I wouldn't have noticed.
Packs might typically have a few hundred of those thousands, I might play four or five packs per year, but often the same mods recur because they're so useful or well-liked, like Just Enough Items gets used a lot, so does Refined Storage, but some weird dwarf intelligence mod could easily go under the radar not because people don't like it but because they didn't know it existed.
I reckon a lot of people had never really used Compact Machines for example until Compact Claustrophobia took off, and in that the machines are absolutely mandatory and you use them from the first minutes so you have to get very familiar with them.
Honestly it really was too much fuss about bees, in already very dense modpacks! I'm trying to get this space program off the ground so I can get back to my moonbase damnit. The reactor is melting down, I haven't got time for bees!
Most of the space mods can fuck off. So crashy and yet so bland. I did like the one where you can build arbitrary space stations, except its oxygen sealing mechanics are too sketchy so all I ever do is build an open air space station and spend as little time there as possible, wearing a space suit, until I'm immortal and don't need to breathe anyway. Advanced Rocketry maybe?
Whereas I rather liked some bee stuff. Maybe not over and over again, but I played Valdan's Sky Bees a while back and I really enjoyed that again, with modern huge bees and so on.
As with other creative communities there are some distinct threads, like some people are into very heavily survival focused, up-against-it packs, where e.g. gravity works properly, mobs understand the game rules and will climb up to get you, or set fires, they will upgrade their gear, etc. while people like me prefer ascend-to-godhood type gameplay where you quickly dispense with monsters and become untouchable not far into play.
In the latter style there's not a desire for "smart and interesting NPCs", in fact it's often played alone or in small groups, intentionally. In the former style the NPCs are somewhat smart, but they're a threat so if you make them too clever they'll just always kill the players which isn't much fun after a while.
I think NPCs with the type of independence of a Dwarf Fortress dwarf wouldn't be attractive to either of the sorts of player I mentioned, it may be that such people just don't play Minecraft. But it's also possible somebody has implemented it and I've never run into it. There are a lot of Minecraft mods. Curseforge lists literally thousands of them, there could be hundred like you describe and I wouldn't have noticed.
Packs might typically have a few hundred of those thousands, I might play four or five packs per year, but often the same mods recur because they're so useful or well-liked, like Just Enough Items gets used a lot, so does Refined Storage, but some weird dwarf intelligence mod could easily go under the radar not because people don't like it but because they didn't know it existed.
I reckon a lot of people had never really used Compact Machines for example until Compact Claustrophobia took off, and in that the machines are absolutely mandatory and you use them from the first minutes so you have to get very familiar with them.