Changelog

1.0.0 — the first crossing

• THE CHURCH AND THE CRYPT — the church (a hand-built 32x32x48) rises once on the plateau, floor flush with the ground, read from its own marker vocabulary: gilded blackstone = the Broker's post, lodestone = the crypt stairwell, lectern = the ledger (markers dissolve once read). Beneath it the CRYPT is carved: a stairwell descending below the rivers to the WEEK ROOM, where seven day-shelves hold a rolling week of the dead — click a shelf to read that day's fallen and open their grave books. The year's halls lie sealed beyond the north arch. (Placeholder architecture; the builder's crypt kit replaces the carving when it exists.)

• THE WAR BELOW THE MOON — an eternal three-sided war in Charon's Echo, invisible to the living, joinable by the dead. The KEEPERS (iron golems, creakings, allay couriers) hold the yards; the RESTLESS (parched, bogged, stray) rise from the active grave field; the HOLLOW WIND (vex, breeze) raids both. The war is fought at the FRONT — the field currently receiving burials; filled fields are settled ground forever. Living players are untouchable and harmless (the war cannot see them); sniffers and allays are civilians. Payment moved to the stone: the crossing is free, and touching your grave offers the choice — pay the fare (obol), pay the toll (XP), or TAKE THE OATH: enlist with the Keepers or the Restless, receive a loaned phantom kit, and serve war-service-minutes (default 15) at the front. Each enemy downed shaves war-kill-credit-seconds off the clock; serving out is a free resurrection. Enlisted dead of opposing sides can fight each other — defeat means downed (respawn at muster, war-downed-penalty-seconds added), never death; your items were in the grave all along. /charon oath shows your service; /charon oath quit pauses the clock.

• THE STYGIAN ORCHARD — plant the Withered Grove in the overworld. The Broker, a trader who stopped wandering long ago, stands in Charon's Echo selling Stygian Seeds (config orchard-seed-price, default 32 emeralds). Plant one on solid ground: it grows in two stages (small tree, then a grown elder) while its chunk is loaded. Grown trees hang Tollfruit from their chains — a mangrove-root bud that sculk slowly seals, then ripens into a glowing froglight. Break the ripe fruit (anyone may), and craft 4 Tollfruit → 1 Charon's Obol. The tree itself drops NOTHING as blocks: breaking any part of it without a netherite axe fails; with one, a felling ritual crumbles the whole tree to nothing and returns only its seed. Per-player tree cap (orchard-tree-cap, default 3). Trees only grow into open ground and wait politely when blocked. Fruit per cycle is a weighted roll (1–4); the tree rests after a full harvest. Wild elders in Charon's Echo bear fruit too — the one thing the living may take from the graveyard — and elder growth has its mysteries.

• Big-slot decor (ruins, wild elders) tolerates relief 5 on its footprint — flat-ground demands left the wilds with no big pieces at all; wild elders are deliberately rare (~1 in 5–6 big slots).

• Fixed: graveyard chunks already loaded at server start (forceloaded areas) were dropped from the decoration queue and never decorated.

• Fixed: saved studio plots created under an older layout could overlap the widened base rows — default-row plots now re-fit to the current layout on every load. /charon plot new <category> <category> no longer doubles the prefix, and /charon plot remove <name> (admin) deletes a builder plot.

• Graves face WEST, the way of the dead; ghosts arrive facing their own epitaph.

• Headstone size classes: small 3×3×3 markers, standard 4×4×4 stones, large 5×5×5 monuments (new default-set rows headstone_small_1..4, headstone_large_1..2). The TERRAIN picks the class per grave — flat ground rolls the full mix (60/25/15), slopes drop the monuments, rough spots take only small markers — and only the chosen stone's footprint (+1 ring) is terraced, so small stones hug the land. Classes fall back to each other until templates exist.

• SETS — style families: /charon set new <name> [size] stakes a gold-bordered, owner-sized (32–256) area in the Studio; plots stake free-form wherever the builder stands (/charon plot new inside a set). Lifecycle: open (any gravekeeper builds) → set trust (steward + set invited builders only) → set approve (locked; every exported piece enters generation at once) → set reopen (additions ship after next approval). Each region of Charon's Echo draws from ONE approved set (seed-deterministic), falling back to the default set for uncovered categories — styles never mix mid-field. No minimum content: a trees-only set is welcome. Set templates are namespaced (<set>/<piece>).

• World seed now shapes the graveyard terrain — every server's Charon's Echo is unique (regenerate the dimension after updating)

• Gravekeeper builder roster: /charon builder add|remove <player> — rostered builders may build in Charon's Echo and the Studio and use studio/export/place/plot commands without op; both dimensions are otherwise build-protected

• Studio content pipeline: /charon plot new <category> <name> stakes a new correctly-sized plot at the end of its category row (headstone/tree/big_tree/clutter/ruin/building), /charon plot approve <name> (admin) promotes an exported build into generation, /charon plot list shows categories and pending/approved builds

• Graves remember their headstone variant: approved headstone templates are pasted per grave (stable choice per grave), placeholder otherwise; /charon rebuild-graves re-terraces and re-pastes the whole yard from the records to upgrade old graves

• Field gate signs glow and are written on both faces

• The full death loop is live: a soul-fire death portal rises at the death site — walk in to pay Charon (consumes an Echo Shard, or he takes half the grave's XP) and cross to your grave in Charon's Echo; graves are allocated on a square spiral of 40×40 fenced, terraced fields (48 plots each, soul lanterns on the corners) with generated headstones (name / cause / day on the sign); touch your stone to reclaim items + XP, then the return portal beside the grave carries you back to a safe spot at your death site, alive; reclaimed graves persist as "— at rest —" memorials; portals are pure particles, no blocks, and a relogged ghost always gets its return portal back

• Project scaffold: Fabric / Minecraft 26.2, Loom 1.17.12, JDK 25, sgui

• Charon's Echo graveyard dimension: monochrome rolling hills (pale moss / tuff / deepslate), church plateau at origin, winding river with small ponds, no caves, End-style void skybox, fixed time, silent gray-tinted custom biome, no natural mob spawns

• Terrain is built by a real registered chunk generator (charons_echo:graveyard) at the noise stage, so vanilla computes lighting and heightmaps correctly

• Studio authoring dimension with labeled plot grid for hand-building structure templates

• Death loop core: death is intercepted (no drops, no death screen) — items + XP are captured into a persistent grave record and the player rises as a ghost at the death site: invisible with a soul-particle silhouette, flying, invulnerable, no world interaction, gray name (charon_dead team), charon.ghost tag, tethered to a 24-block radius around the death anchor; ghost state survives relog/restart and is re-asserted every tick against other mods

• /charon revive [player] restores the oldest unclaimed grave (items + XP) and lifts the ghost state — interim testing path until portals land

• Obol crafting (runtime-injected so the result keeps its components): 1 echo shard + 1 gold ingot + 1 soul sand → 1 Charon's Obol

• Charon's Obol item (marked vanilla echo shard with glint + lore, crossplay-safe): soul-bound — the one item death cannot take; /charon obol [count] gives them (crafting/buying later). Renamed from "Echo Shard" — vanilla already has one.

• Commands: /charon studio, /charon export [name], /charon place <name>, /charon visit, /charon back (gamemaster-level)