Fletcher's Trestle: 2.8.0

Standing Orders. The Garrison is finished: the Bolt Warden gets its real look, in the wood it was built from, and a soldier's manners to go with it, and the Emplacement becomes an iron-banded trestle whose crossbow swings on a yoke. Abandoned Ranger's Watchtowers hold old garrisons waiting to be woken, eagles learn to fly properly and to live like eagles, and the mod gets real sounds.

🏰 The Garrison

• No longer a work in progress. Real models, textures and animation for both halves of it.
• The Bolt Warden is a wooden toy soldier in a shako, with a clockwork heart turning behind a brass porthole and a wind-up key in its back that spins faster the busier it is.
• Eleven woods. A warden is made of the log you wind up (the middle of the top row), oak to warped and bamboo, and modded logs get the closest match. It drops two of those logs when it's destroyed.
• Cracks and repairs: it cracks in three stages as it takes damage, and a plank patches it up.
• A real crew: it winds itself up before it runs to a post, cranks the reload, rocks back when it fires, and shuffles round behind the crossbow as it traverses. Its eyes and heart glow while it's on duty.
• The high ground counts: an emplacement's range is measured across the ground, and its crossbow tilts down to 80°, so a post up a wall or a tower covers as much ground as one at its foot.
• Smarter about posts: it favours a Scope for a far target and a Magazine for a crowd. A target that leaves a post's cone is followed to the edge, and the warden runs to another post that can take the shot.
• Out of bolts, it shrugs, puffs smoke from its key and moves on to the next loaded post. A crossbow that's still loaded gets its last shot first.
• Manners: it salutes players walking by (not ones sneaking past), wanders over to tinker with its crossbows when off duty, and cowers away from a player who hits it. It still never fights back.
• The Emplacement is an iron-banded trestle with a turntable. The crossbow lies in a cradle on a swivel yoke that turns and tilts with the aim and stops visibly at the edge of its cone, and the quiver hangs on a leg.
• Sounds: clockwork ticking, winding up, the reload crank, an empty click, cracking and patching, with subtitles.
• New advancement: Field of Fire, for a Bolt Warden you built, with three or more posts to man, shooting down a captain.

🗼 Ranger's Watchtower

• A new structure in forests, taigas, hills and savannas: an abandoned rangers' lookout, a stone base with arrow slits and a bunk room under a tall timber trestle, a railed platform and a hipped roof. An eagle has nested on the peak.
• A garrison waiting to be woken: three emplacements on the platform, one still holding a worn crossbow, and the unwound T of a Bolt Warden. The chest beside it always holds a Mechanical Trigger.
• Loot: a modular bow or crossbow or a quiver, plus arrows, flax, iron, emeralds and the odd spyglass or eagle egg. The barrels hold fletcher's and taiga house loot.
• It only stands on level, dry ground: never half-buried in a hillside or out on the water. For modpacks, the structure type that does this, fletcherstrestle:level_jigsaw, takes any jigsaw structure.
• Its stonework weathers differently every time, and a trapdoor over the ladder keeps a warden from falling down it.
• New advancement: The High Ground, for finding one.

🔊 Sounds

• Real recordings replace the vanilla stand-ins for the eagle (Yellowstone bald eagle calls), bows (longbow and recurve draws and releases), the Bolt Warden (clockwork ticks, a ratchet for winding and cranking, an empty trigger, cracking and hammering) and the Steam Box's hiss. All public domain or CC0; credits are in the README.

🦅 Eagles

• They fly like birds now. Smooth, steered flight that banks into turns, glides, flares to land and swerves around obstacles, with proper pathfinding when the way isn't clear. Once landed, an eagle walks short distances instead of taking off again.
• New animations: a real wingbeat with a strong downstroke, gliding, landing, head glances, tail flicks, and legs that actually walk.
• Wild eagles have lives: they ride thermals and ridges, roost at night and shelter from storms, hunt rabbits and fish to feed their eaglets, and defend their nests, with warning dives before the real ones.
• Your eagle circles overhead while you travel and waits on a lookout when you stop, flies at your wing when you take off on an elytra, dives at mobs that hurt you, and goes fishing now and then. The whistle cycles its orders (fetch, guard); sneak and use it to call your eagle back.
• Care: eagles moult the odd feather, unless you set their feathers with honeycomb, which rain washes off. Badly hurt, an eagle glides down and limps; feed it a rabbit or a fish to heal it. Hit while carrying prey, it drops it.
• Five new advancements: Death From Above, Wingman, Growing Up, Keep Your Distance and Looking Sharp.

🐛 Fixes

• The Weighted Blunt's bonus for long shots never applied. It does now.
• Archery targets, eagle perches and shaving horses now turn with a structure when it generates rotated: a turned Fletcher's Camp had its shaving horse facing the wrong way.