What?

Currently, hunter camps seem somewhat awkward to me. Especially the fire places, because Minecraft 1.14 added campfires. Furthermore, multiblock tents seem to me a better fit, because they could provide actual shelter to the hunters, are more interesting to explore for new players, are more aligned with vanilla minecraft in style (the tents at pillager outposts are multiblock structures) and allow for easy location-dependent changes to their designs, e.g. different tents for savanna biomes.

Sometimes, I have found camps, whose spawns I found somewhat irritating. It feels weird to find one on top of a tree or inside a modded structure. Even more so, when due to their location the hunters are stuck or the tents are quite a bit apart e.g. in hills. I don't know for certain that these still are issues, because I haven't played the mod for some time. If they are, this might resolve those too.

I see multiple problems with this idea, which I will detail below

1. size
   The current Hunter camps are pretty small and because of that don't disturb the surrounding landscape very much. I think that larger camps (as far as I'm concerned it is unavoidable with multiblock tents to keep their size) are much more noticeable. If they're well designed though, this might be a positive thing.

2. version support
   This idea is for newer versions, as campfires don't exist before 1.14 and this design is targeted at "modern minecraft". So for older versions this wouldn't make sense to implement, so that old versions would either have their support dropped or this mod would need to have to branches, for pre- and post 1.14. I don't think either is pleasant or wanted. I checked curseforge and I think this mod only supports newer versions, but I am not certain.

3. generation and dependencies
   As I state below, I don't know much about generating structures in code. I think the easiest way to add this is to make use of the Structure Gel API, but this would draw in a dependency and as camps are non-optional (they can be disabled in the config but it's not like with the Guide Book) this dependency would either be a necessary one or camps would only spawn if it is installed. Again, I think both are quite not great, but as it's a pretty common API nowadays I think making it a required dependency is acceptable. The alternative is a custom implementation, which requires much effort, is prone to errors and is maintained by this project.

I should check this thread every now and then and can respond to feedback or problems here. If there is anything else, you can reach me on discord; I'm Cactus DualCore#0239

EDIT: Forgot to mention, this would allow for fire places and camps to be removed somewhen. Probably not immediately, for backwards compat, but they could be made inobtainable in survival first, e.g. by switching their loot tables.

Mod experience

Personally I think it give this mod a cleaner feel, but besides that? This does not touch any mod features so it should be fine (except not-too-valueable blocks for players)

Contributions

I've worked with Minecraft Modding before and I consider myself good enough at building in minecraft to design the new camps. If wanted, I can implement this on my own and make a pull request, though it might take some time before I come around to finishing this, especially because I don't have much experience with world generation.

This conflicts with #118. I don't think respawning multiblock tents are wanted. On the other hand, in that issue's discussion, "hunter forts" are mentioned. These could go well with this.

(Sorry for the closing and reopenings, my Browser's laggy and I misclicked)

In config/vampirism-common.toml I noticed an option useVanillaCampfire which defaults to true with a description

Use the vanilla campfire block instead of Vampirism's much cooler one

I assume the current tent generation is preferred over vanilla-style multiblock camps, so I wanted to add that my idea described above is just that: an idea. Despite me seeing more advantages in my approach, I believe all things concering a mod should in the end be decided by its author(s).

Thank you for your suggestion.

Yes, you can configure Vampirism to use the vanilla campfires instead of our custom ones. I like ours more, hence, they will stay the default.

I do like the fact that they are quite small and therefore fairly easy to generate and don't disturb the landscape too much, as you said. I agree that having bigger hunter camps, would be quite nice as well.
We are still planning to introduce more and bigger structures in the world. But we haven't come around to this and it also tends to be annoying due to the time-consuming debugging process.
Maybe we can keep the small tents (and #118), and additionally introduce some rare, but bigger camp structures.

The library you have linked looks interesting, but we probably want to avoid hard dependencies.

But we haven't come around to this and it also tends to be annoying due to the time-consuming debugging process.

I should have some spare time on hand in the coming weeks, so If wanted, I could try to make a draft for this and show this to you.
As this would be a prototype, I would prefer to use Structure Gel, but this can be removed later for any actual implementations.

I personally still think replacing the small tents is preferable, but this is preference. If you want to talk to me about the advantages I see, I'd prefer Discord over Github though.

If you are really motivated to do so, we appreciate your contribution :)

A few notes:
I still don't like the idea of replacing the small (but still multiblock) existing tents with (much )larger structures.
We rely on these for spawning hunters in the world as they do not naturally spawn without tents. Having larger structure would mean making the structure more rare (and more sensitive to other mods modifying terrain generation and preventing them from being generated at all). Hence, hunter density would decrease and it might become more difficult to find any.
I think both variants can happily co-exist. And if we should eventually notice, that the larger structures are fulfilling every purpose well, we could still get rid of the tents.

Structure-gel: As mentioned, I don't like having more dependencies. Especially not on non (permissive) open-source projects. a) the new structures are entirely optional and only generated when structure gel is installed, b) for a prototype it is also fine, however, it might be difficult to implement the actual standalone generation later on without interfering with structure-gel's license.

If you want to discuss this further, I don't have much time during the next two weeks, but maybe @Cheaterpaul has. Maybe, you can contact him on Discord.