Issue
Taterzens aren't able to detect nearby player entities, so they don't look or send messages to the player. They can still detect hostile mobs.

Steps to reproduce
Install Lithium

Workaround
Set lithium.properties to mixin.entity.collisions=false

With that, I'm assuming the issue lies here in TaterzenNPC.java, where the code is incompatible with Lithium's optimization.

Thanks for reporting!

This is still the case for messages. I'll report it in Lithium.