Changelog

All notable changes to Cute Difficult, in reverse chronological order.

Versioning was informal during development. v1.0.0-beta is the first public release.

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v1.0.0-beta — First Public Release

The mod is feature-complete enough to release. There will be bugs, there are TODOs, but the core works.

Release state

• 9 elemental kitsune with unique personalities, offerings, and passives
• 9 parallel blessings + the Great Blessing
• Friendship arc with petting, naming, baby kitsune
• Witness memory with propagation
• Spirit HUD with compact icons
• 5-tier quality system
• Custom bestiary with GUI

What got done in v0.9.x → v1.0.0

v0.9.8 — Kitsune Passives Update

All kitsune from tail 1 now have environmental auras and element immunities.

Added:

• 9 environmental auras (Kasai melts ice, Mori speeds growth, Kaminari strikes hostiles, etc.)
• 9 damage immunities (Kasai → fire/lava, Kaminari → lightning, etc.)
• KitsunePassivesHandler — both layers in one handler, server tick + ALLOW_DAMAGE event

v0.9.7 — Fox Rage + Icon HUD

Added:

• FoxRageHandler — kitsune remembers the player who hit them and retaliates for 10 seconds even under the Great Blessing
• Compact icon HUD — replaced the "✦ Great Blessing of Inari ✦" text that overflowed the panel with three golden stars + per-element icons (sparkle for active, gray dot for inactive)

Changed:

• FoxHostility.canAttack now checks rage before the Great Blessing check

v0.9.6 — Critical Fixes

Fixed:

• /cd fox summon was spawning the wrong fox. Race condition: a vanilla FoxEntity was being spawned → instantly replaced by FoxSpawnHandler with random element and random tail count, overwriting what the player requested. Fix — spawn KitsuneEntity directly, bypassing vanilla.
• ResonanceBlessingHandler skipped players in Creative. Which meant during testing (always in Creative) blessings never worked. Removed the creative skip — only Spectator is excluded now.

v0.9.5 — Spirit System Repair

Fixed:

• Spirit commands (/cd spirit X add N) showed the right text but saved nothing. Root cause: SpiritData.ensureObjectives existed as a method but nobody was calling it. SpiritData.set with null objective was silently no-op. Fix — added the call to SERVER_STARTED.
• Players were joining without SpiritData.initializePlayer being called. Fix — added it to the JOIN event.

v0.9.4 — The Great Refactor

The most painful session in the mod's history. We spent hours trying to compile this error:

required: Type
found: Element,FoxPersonality,int,int,long,int,String,long

Turned out — vanilla net.minecraft.entity.passive.FoxEntity has an inner class named FoxData. When our KitsuneEntity extends FoxEntity referenced FoxData, Java auto-resolves to the vanilla inner type (inherited types win priority over imports), not ours. All those "method not found" errors were about the vanilla FoxData, not ours.

Changed:

• Mass rename: com.cutedifficult.spirit.FoxData → com.cutedifficult.spirit.KitsuneData. 15+ files via sed.
• Split KitsuneData (data holder with public final fields) and FoxStorage (cache + NBT logic). One class one responsibility.
• Removed back-compat 6-arg constructor, replaced with KitsuneData.of6(...) static factory.

v0.9.x — Client HUD + Persistence

Added:

• Spirit HUD overlay (server-to-client packet flow). Replaced broken vanilla sidebar scoreboard.
• Toggle keybind (H by default, rebindable in Controls).
• Background fade at 60% opacity for readability.
• Right-center positioning.

Fixed:

• FoxData persistence across world reload. Hybrid cache + NBT, with try/catch around super.readCustomDataFromNbt for the vanilla NPE.

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v0.8 — The Cute Update

Soft features balancing the cruelty.

Added:

• Baby kitsune (kits) — 30% chance to spawn next to a loaded trusted (trust ≥ 50) adult kitsune.
• Mourning — when an adult kitsune dies, all kits within 8 blocks sit at her body and weep splash particles for 30 seconds.
• Sleeping pose — at night (game time 13000–23000), kitsune with trust ≥ 50 and a player nearby curl up.
• Petting — right-click eligible (trust ≥ 30) kitsune with empty main hand. +1 trust, 1-hour real-time cooldown per fox.
• Name binding via name tag — apply a vanilla-named name tag to bind a permanent custom name. Hash deterministically biases personality.
• All hostile mobs jump intelligently — no more standing on a fence and farming.

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v0.7 — Quality Over Quantity

Restored HP, shifted difficulty to gear quality.

Added:

• 5 quality tiers (Crude / Common / Fine / Superior / Masterwork)
• Auto-roll on first inventory entry
• Combat multipliers (attack + defense scaling)

Changed:

• Player max HP restored to 20 hearts
• Legacy half-HP modifier stripped on join

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v0.6.x — Stability & Persistence

A long bugfix sequence that produced the final architecture.

Fixed:

• FoxData persistence across world reloads (hybrid cache + NBT)
• Foxes attacking through walls (added LOS raycast)
• Trust gate leaking (centralized in FoxHostility.canAttack)
• Witnessed-killing override
• Bestiary GUI render layering (renderBackground override)
• Bestiary GUI opening reliability (custom Screen via packet flow)

Added:

• Three attack variants per element (Basic 60% / AOE 25% / Beam 15%)

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v0.6 — The Resonance Pivot

Rewrote blessings.

Changed:

• 9 parallel blessings instead of one-dominant
• Great Blessing of Inari = all 9 active simultaneously

Added:

• Bestiary system (Scroll of Inquiry + Bestiary of Inari)

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v0.5 — Social Layer

Added:

• Blessings (element status effects on offering milestones)
• Curses (mirror system for offended kitsune)
• Witness memory

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v0.4.x — Custom AI

Painful AI rewrite.

Changed:

• Abandoned the FoxEntityMixin approach. KitsuneEntity extends FoxEntity as a separate type.
• Custom goal set (initGoals doesn't call super).

Fixed:

• PrioritizedGoal.hashCode() NPE (always call setControls in constructor)
• Vanilla addTypeSpecificGoals NPE on KitsuneEntity (try/catch)

Added:

• Close-range dash attack (KitsuneMeleeGoal)
• Proactive aggression (FoxAggressionHandler)

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v0.3 — The Kitsune Birth

The most ambitious session. Built the core spiritual system from nothing.

Added:

• 9 elements with kami names, offerings, colors, biome affinity
• FoxData record (later renamed to KitsuneData)
• FoxPersonality with 7 hidden traits
• Tail HP scaling (1 → 10 HP, 9 → 100 HP)
• Element aura particles
• Flight for Yurei/Tengoku 5+ tails
• FoxOfferingHandler
• Per-element elemental attacks
• SpiritData scoreboard objectives
• /cd fox debug commands

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v0.2 — Cruelty Foundation

Added:

• Permanent hunger
• Charged invisible creepers
• Worst-stats horses
• Smart mobs (3× follow range, door-breaking)
• Spider abilities (pounce + web)
• Skeleton melee swap
• Sniper arrows (5%, 2× speed / 1.5× damage)
• FPV phantom drones with LOS detonation
• Furnace overheat → explosion
• Greedy chests (50% per pool)
• Greedy villagers (rising prices)
• Crafting sabotage (15% per close)
• Totem of Undying gamble
• 2.5× slower crops
• /cd debug commands

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v0.1 — Initial Skeleton

• Fabric mod setup (Loom 1.7-SNAPSHOT, Loader 0.16.5, Fabric API 0.102.1+1.21.1, Yarn 1.21.1+build.3, Java 21)
• Path of Peace via chat triggers
• DESIGN.md started

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Notes from the Journey

This mod was built in a long collaborative pair-coding session. Several recurring pitfalls worth flagging for future devs (including future me):

1. The Compact Middle Packages trap. IntelliJ Project View can render assets/cutedifficult/models/item/ as assets.cutedifficult.model.item — three dots looking like one folder with a long name. The file system is correct; IntelliJ is just being clever. If resources mysteriously won't load — check this setting first. Cost of skipping: hours.

2. A vanilla inner class shadows your import. If you extends a vanilla class and write an identifier that matches a vanilla inner type — inherited types win priority. Use unique names or fully-qualified imports.

3. Item.use() is unreliable. Other UseItemCallback subscribers can intercept the chain. Logic in callback handlers, not the Item subclass.

4. Cache + NBT is the right architecture for entity-attached data. Pure NBT round-tripping triggers vanilla code paths (readNbt → addTypeSpecificGoals) that can NPE on custom subclasses. Pure in-memory cache loses data on save. The hybrid survives both.

5. Exponential spawn bugs are surprisingly easy to write. Always cap reinforcement chains: parent flag "has summoned", children flag "cannot summon". Test that two consecutive low-HP triggers don't compound.

6. Spirit/Karma are orthogonal, not opposites. High Spirit + high Karma = tragic hero. Not opposition, but the geometry of the Shinto ethical model.

7. When you see weird symbol errors across thousands of lines — check if there's an impostor class shadowing your import. See lesson #2.

8. When commands "work" by text but have no effect — check that underlying state actually persists. Scoreboard objectives must exist before you can set scores on them.

9. Refactoring through sed — if all errors are one pattern, mass replacement via regex is faster than file-by-file editing. The cost of a regex error is one too — but it surfaces all at once.