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This release contains the following changes:
WARNING: This release substantially changes the rules of mob spawning, in ways that can result in brutal and unexpected dismemberment. Please make sure you understand the following changes thoroughly before playing in an existing world, lest you come home to a Creeper to the spleen, or to find your rustic wood mob trap's output has dropped to nothing.
-Added a new mob-spawning system that is listed as individual changes below, but as a summary of how it all works: mobs can now spawn on almost any shape of block, but are restricted by the materials they can spawn on. No mobs can spawn on wood, giant mushroom blocks, Mycelium. or Bedrock. Jungle spiders are the only mobs that can spawn on leaves (as before). In the nether, mobs may only spawn on Netherbrick or Netherrack (as before). That's it, that's all.
-Added new flammable giant mushroom blocks. This will not affect blocks already placed in your world, but since mushrooms will now potentially grow into giant flaming emblems of the apocalypse, be sure to check in on any farms you have that might be affected.
-Added Blocks of Iron and Gold Ore. These can either be created in the crafting grid with 9 ore, or through piston packing. They can be smelted in a Kiln for a full ingot, which provides both a means of smelting in bulk, and an alternate method of automating ore smelting.
-Added the ability to see where mobs can spawn in the Nether while wearing Ender Spectacles.
-Changed all mobs to be able to spawn on pretty much any kind of block. I may have missed some, but the goal here is to reach a point where if there's room for a mob to reasonably stand on a block, it can spawn there. If I forgot any, I'll correct them in the future, so please don't rely on block shape to prevent mob spawning anymore as it may change at any time.
-Changed mobs to not be able to spawn on blocks primarily made of wood (a thin surface layer like on Pistons and Turntables won't prevent spawning). The overall intent here is to make mob spawning less block type and more material dependent, both so that there's more of a progression and internal consistency to being able to build with spawn-proof blocks, and to further emphasize the unique building properties of different block types. Any flaming death that results is purely coincidental, as is any perceived glee I may seem to express at such events.
-Changed mobs to be able to spawn in 1-block high gaps if their body shape allows it. This mainly applies to the various types of spiders, but also prevents exploiting certain block shapes to create player walkable areas that mobs can't spawn in.
-Changed mobs to be able to spawn on ice. This was done to prevent frozen bodies of water from being big safe zones, especially in the early game.
-Changed mobs to be able to spawn on glass blocks to prevent glass from being a non-flammable, non-gravity-affected, non-mob-spawning, commonly-available, uber-material-of-doomy-doom-doom.
-Changed slimes to not be able to spawn on wood (like other mobs) in addition to their existing spawn restrictions, which remain unchanged from previous releases.
-Changed Ender Spectacles to accurately reflect all the changes to mob-spawning in this release. If you're uncertain if a particular block type can spawn mobs on top of it, then Ender Specs are an ideal way to find this out.
-Changed (refactored) how the burn times for various blocks work internally for the sake of simplifying the related code a bit.
-Changed (refactored) a metric dung-ton of block code, both vanilla and mod, in the process of fixing the collision thing I describe below. Please let me know if you run into any new weird block behavior, as it would be exceedingly unlikely that I didn't make a single mistake in the process. On the bright side, I made a number of small unlisted improvements as I went along as well.
-Changed a number of blocks to render fewer non-visible faces to help with performance, in the process of refactoring their code.
-Changed cows to panic if you attempt to milk one that doesn't have a full udder.
-Fixed a problem where spiders targeting something other than the player could wind up hanging around without despawning for an exceedingly long time.
-Fixed a few vanilla problems where mobs (and other entities, like items) would sometimes fall through slabs and other sub-blocks, which became more noticeable now that mobs can spawn on them. This is not related to the various visual glitches which can occur along these lines with entities bouncing between positions, but rather the entities themselves sometimes actually passing through the block. Major thanks to Alexander Gundermann (taurose) for diagnosing and thoroughly documenting several Minecraft collision bugs here: https://github.com/taurose/Unglitch, as the information he has provided has been invaluable in resolving some of these issues. This fix only covers the first issue (the race condition) he describes (as well as some secondary issues I discovered), but I'll likely be verifying and fixing a number of the problems he documents in upcoming releases. Suffice it to say there are a LOT of collision issues in 1.5.2.
-Fixed vanilla problem where mobs and animals would get stuck in blocks and sometimes suffocate on chunk load. This corresponds to item 3 (Floating Point Errors on Entity Load) in the documentation linked above. Note that when loading old saves or chunks you may still see such errors occur, as the mobs in question will have already been saved embedded within those blocks, but it won't happen again to any new or non-embedded mobs after that first load.
-Fixed vanilla AI/pathfinding problems with animals getting stuck in fence corners (or the corners of other partial blocks) and refusing to move unless pushed out. I greatly reduced such entities lingering excessively around non-corner edges as well, as they were often times trying to move through those blocks instead of pathing away from them before this fix.
-Fixed a problem where ground cover (snow and ash) resting around cobble walls would change the shape of the wall.
-Fixed an issue where Hand Cranks could no longer rest on top of Mill Stones, for I am a river to my people.
-Fixed a problem where dedicated servers would crash on startup if they were using the mod's config file.
-Fixed a problem with the Saw block playing a sawing sound when first placed, and under some other odd circumstances.
-Fixed a vanilla problem that was limiting the number of mobs that would spawn in flat areas with lots of ground cover like snow, or tall grass. This was particularly noticeable in superflat worlds where it would prevent mobs from spawning entirely, but affected general mob spawning as well.
-Fixed a problem where Iron Chisels could not be stuck as blocks into Cobblestone.
-Fixed a problem where Pickaxes could be stuck as blocks into glass.
-Fixed a problem where Jack'O'Lanterns would still drop a torch when extinguished by water, even though they are now crafted with a Candle.
-Fixed a vanilla issue where some chunks would not properly render, even though they were fully loaded on the client, resulting in lines of missing chunks in the world. Much thanks to Andrés del Campo Novales for providing a very simple solution to this problem here: https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-129 . Please let me know if you see any new chunk or visual oddities as I suspect there might be a bit more work to be done here. I've seen what felt to be a few weird things here and there, but overall this feels like too big an improvement to do without.
-Removed the config files options for limiting slime and nether mob spawning. Given the extent to which mob spawning has now changed, configuring individual aspects of its behavior is no longer feasible, and I do not believe these options were used much anyways.
-Removed all the high-efficiency crafting recipes involving stone sub-blocks, as they were rendered obsolete by the inclusion of Stone Bricks in the last release.
Happy Holidays Everyone!
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