Hardcore winter

Hotfix for 1.4.1

Mostly flora bugs, plus a couple of embarrassing ones with the strangers.

Old worlds are fine. Anything already floating fixes itself once you walk past it. The flora thinning and the new hot spring spacing only affect chunks you haven't generated yet.

Floating meadows

Plants climbed with the snow at night and then just stayed there when it melted. Net gain of a block a day. Leave it a week and you've got a field hovering over bare dirt.

They come back down now. They still ride the drift up — that part was on purpose — but the thaw puts them back where they started. If your world already has one of these up in the air, it'll sort itself out next time you're nearby.

Two related ones while I was in there.

Flowers around the hot springs never moved at all. Anything under a spruce was invisible to the whole system: it would ride up once and then sit there forever, because sheltered ground was being skipped entirely.

Tall grass and ferns were getting torn in half. Bottom went up, top stayed put, and neither piece could ever recover. Existing broken ones will clean themselves up.

There was far too much of it

Ground cover was generating about nine times thicker than vanilla's densest grass. Three quarters of every chunk had something in it. It looked like a lawn.

Cut to roughly a sixth, and it grows in patches now rather than spread evenly over everything. You can see the drifts again.

Star bloom was turning up more than once per chunk, which rather defeats the point of it being the rare one. Icicles and lichen underground are down about two thirds — the caves were carpeted.

Hot springs were clustering

Every chunk rolled its own dice, and that clumps. More than a quarter of them had a neighbour close enough to overlap, so you'd find two or three within a short walk and then nothing for ages.

They're properly spaced now. Never closer than 64 blocks, usually about 97. Same rarity overall, without the pile-ups.

Strangers

Someone could turn up while you were outside and walk to a door you happened to be standing next to. Which ruins it. The whole thing rests on somebody arriving, and it isn't much of an arrival if you watched them appear in the yard.

They only come when you're actually indoors now, and only once you've been in a while. Nipping out for firewood won't summon anyone.

If you get caught out at dusk you don't lose the roll. It waits for you.

Doors

Three, as it turned out.

Leave your front door open and nobody could get in. They'd walk in a dead straight line into the outside wall and stand there. No knock, no entry, nothing.

And with snow piled against the doorstep they'd stand on top of the drift without ever knocking, because as far as they were concerned they hadn't arrived yet. On a blizzard night. Which is when they come.

Which turned up a third one. Even once they knocked, a buried doorstep meant they couldn't actually get in — you'd open the door onto a wall of snow and they'd shove at it until they gave up and left. So now they dig. Open the door on a bad night and you may well find someone shovelling their way to it, and they'll dig themselves back out when they go.

Snow you placed yourself stopped melting

Put down a snow block and it was gone by noon. The thaw was treating anything above the original ground as weather and taking it back, so snow walls, igloos and anything you'd stacked for storage quietly disappeared.

Crafted snow blocks are now left alone permanently, wherever you put them.

Snow layers still melt — that's the storm's own snow and the whole point of the thaw. If you want it to stay, use blocks.

They run now

You could open the door, close the chat box, and beat an unarmed stranger to death while he stood there. He'd throw a couple of bare-fisted punches back and that was it — no fight, no scene, nothing.

Anyone who isn't carrying a weapon now runs. He shouts, he bolts, and he doesn't stop. He won't fight back either, because running and swinging are different decisions and a person only gets to make one of them.

He's slightly faster than you are at a sprint, so catching him means committing to a chase across open snow in the dark — and out there the cold doesn't care why you're outside.

If he gets away, he tells people. That costs you nearly what killing him would have. A dead man tells nobody, which was rather the problem.

Villages

Two in three were turning up zombified. It's now an even split — half the villages you find still have someone in them.

Only affects villages you haven't generated yet.

---

Still open from 1.4.0: the handheld lantern doesn't show in your off hand if you have NotEnoughAnimations, Punchy or Physics Mod installed.