Hardcore Winter 1.4.5.1

A fix release, mostly. Several of these were bad enough to quietly end features for the rest of a world — strangers that stopped visiting for good, loot that vanished, a greenhouse that switched itself off. There's one new thing too: the sea is back.

Your existing world is fine. New chunks generate the oceans and everything in them, so walk out past where you've explored and you'll find the sea. Start a new world only if you want a coastline near spawn.

The ones that were ruining runs

• A bandit you refused to spare couldn't be killed. He begs, you say no — and from that moment your sword did nothing to him. Fire and falling damage still worked, which is a strange way to find out. Worse, his scene never ended, and only one stranger can be out there at a time, so nobody on the server ever got another knock on the door.
• Nor could a bandit who threatened to break in and then couldn't get there. Block his path and he'd stand outside forever, with the same result — no more visitors, for anyone. He now gives up after a couple of minutes and leaves.
• Strangers couldn't find you upstairs. The search for your door only looked a few blocks up and down, so if you slept on the third floor, nobody ever came. It now looks well below you, which also covers a cellar or a dug-in floor under your house. (A bunker at the bottom of a shaft still isn't found — that's a different direction, and it's on the list.)
• And it could pick the wrong door. It used to choose whichever door was nearest, which from upstairs meant a balcony. Now it uses the lowest door in the building — your front door — and drops him at the furthest spot outside it that he can actually stand on, so a door facing a cliff no longer leaves him at the bottom of one.
• One door in the wrong place could cost you every visitor. A cellar or mine entrance below the house could pass the "is this a real door" test and then fail the "is the player behind it" test, and you'd be skipped — every night, permanently.
• A bandit was destroying what he stole. If he grabbed a second stack, it replaced the first in his hand and the first was simply gone. Both come back now, off his body or when you spare him.
• Your greenhouse stopped working if the roof was too high. Snow landing on the glass only melted if your fire was within eight blocks of the snow itself — and your fire is on the floor. So anything over about seven blocks of headroom kept its roof buried, the daylight never got in, and nothing told you why. Fires now keep glass clear from up to 24 blocks below, and 24 blocks of headroom is the tallest greenhouse the mod will recognise.
• Freezing killed you in the two seconds after you refuelled your lantern. The cold had already decided to hurt you before the warmth registered, so the game punished the save rather than the mistake.

Strangers

• You can't read a stranger by counting how long he waits any more. Refugees used to be more patient than bandits, which told you what he was before anything else did. How long he'll wait is now rolled fresh each visit, the same range for everyone.
• He robs bodies, not your storage room. He used to pick up anything on the floor within ten blocks, which in a base with an item sorter meant the sorter. He now only takes what's lying where the fight actually ended.
• Losing him isn't the same as dying to him. Run out of his sight and he'd behave as though he'd won — a free rummage through whatever was on the ground. Now he leaves empty-handed, because he didn't win, he lost you.
• Someone walking away no longer says goodbye twice, or complains about being ignored on his way out.
• If you log in while a stranger is already at someone's door, he now appears in your player list like everyone else, instead of talking in chat as a name that isn't there.
• Large bases work properly — the check that decides whether you're home used to give up partway through a big build and conclude you weren't.
• A door at the bottom of a mineshaft isn't a front door, and isn't treated as one.

Cold

• The weather matters when you're caught without a light. Cold now builds at different speeds depending on the night: mild, normal, heavy, blizzard. Normal is exactly what you're used to. Standing in the open with nothing to protect you, that's about 75 seconds before the cold starts hurting you on a mild night, 37 on a normal one, 25 on a heavy one, and 19 in a blizzard. The warnings before dusk are worth listening to now.
• A lit lantern still keeps you comfortable whatever the sky is doing. That hasn't changed and isn't going to: the lantern is the answer to the cold, and the danger is the fuel. A blizzard doesn't beat your lantern — running dry on the way home does.
• A roof is no longer a campfire. Shelter with no heat source in reach used to thaw you as fast as a furnace, which meant digging a hole made you immune and the best way to play a game about keeping a fire alive was to never light one. An unheated room now lets the cold creep up — but it stops short of real harm, so you'll be frozen and miserable rather than dead. Fire is still the only thing that warms you back up. (shelterChill=0 restores the old behaviour.)
• Leather is warm. Each piece of leather armour slows the cold, and a full set halves it whatever the weather is doing. Iron and diamond do nothing for the cold — they never did, there was just no way to tell.
• The cold won't kill you while your lantern is lit. Freezing stops just short of finishing you off if you have a lit lantern in your off hand, and the lantern thaws you from there. Without one, it still kills. (coldCanKill=true removes the safety net.)
• Being cold costs food in proportion to how fast you're actually freezing, instead of all-or-nothing. Standing out by a placed torch now costs a little food, where it used to cost none.
• Your cold survives a server restart, and no longer survives your death.
• A part-burnt handheld torch no longer turns into a stick when you take it out of your off hand. It keeps whatever's left in it, and you can still place it as a torch.

Greenhouse

• A torch is no longer enough for the growth bonus. Glass and daylight still keep crops alive, but doubling their speed now wants a furnace, glowstone or a campfire. A greenhouse that beats a normal world should be something you built, not something you lit. (greenhouseBonusTier=1 restores the old rule.)
• The soil tells you what's wrong. Green sparkles mean it's growing at double speed. A snowflake means the problem is the sky or the glass. Smoke means your fire is too weak or too far away.

Trader

• Carrots and potatoes cost iron or fish now, not emeralds. Nothing in this world makes emeralds — there are no mountains, so there's no emerald ore — which made a plantable staple depend on a currency you might never see. Carrots are 4 iron or 40 cod; potatoes are 5 iron or 48 salmon. Emeralds still buy the golden apples, the berries, the glowstone and the rarest seeds.
• Kelp is sixteen for one iron, down from two for two. It spreads up its own water column on its own, so the old price was really just selling you the week you'd have spent waiting. It's the cheapest thing he carries and the one most likely to change a camp.

The sea came back

• Frozen oceans generate again. The basins were always there under the ice — the water, the depth, all of it — they'd just been painted over as ice spikes, so nothing lived in them.
• Which brings back icebergs, kelp forests, seagrass, squid, salmon, nautilus, drowned, cold ocean ruins, shipwrecks out at sea, and monuments in the deep.
• Cut a hole in the sea ice and go down. There's a reason to now.
• The sky over water is the storm's grey rather than a clear summer blue, so there's no seam at the coastline, and the frozen flora still grows in the ground beneath.

Abandoned camps

• Snowy abandoned camps generate now. 26.3 added them to the game and then put them in no biome this world contains, so a frozen tent where somebody didn't make it has been sitting in the files and nowhere in the world. Only the snowy kind belongs out here, so they're rare — expect thousands of blocks between them, and treat finding one as a find.

Under the hood

• The sweep that kills exposed plants does about a tenth of the work it used to, at the same rate. Plants buried more than eight blocks deep are now left alone, which is the part of the saving that isn't free.
• The cold check no longer rescans hundreds of blocks around every player every single tick.
• Greenhouse checks stop looking for a roof after 24 blocks instead of scanning to the top of the world.