Retold

Feature release focused on a richer, persistent Aender, safer portal travel, and the first in-game discovery path for the Air Temple.

Player-Facing

• Journeyman cartographers now sell an Air Temple Explorer Map for 12 emeralds and a compass after the world reaches Stage 2. The map marks the nearest Air Temple with an exact X.
• Aender terrain now keeps the same reality across disconnects, saves, normal game/server restarts, and recovery after a crash. Volatile terrain receives a new seed only after the last player actually travels out of the dimension.
• Fresh worlds use improved Aender terrain composition that removes buried overlap surfaces and lets trees and boulders continue cleanly across chunk borders. Existing saves retain legacy generation, including newly explored chunks.
• Entering the Aender now charges for at least five seconds and waits longer when necessary until an asynchronously prepared 5x5 arrival core is genuinely safe and every already-loaded chunk in the destination view is current, stable, or blank. Old terrain is therefore removed before travel instead of visibly disappearing around the arriving player. The transition no longer forces that core, or the whole view-distance square, to generate synchronously, and preparation happens without technical action-bar text during normal gameplay.
• Automatically created Aender portal counterparts now search nearby island terrain first and use a supported floating platform at Y=100 when the destination area is entirely void, instead of appearing near the dimension floor.
• The Aender portal now preserves the Nether portal's exact animated pattern, timing, and transparency while recoloring it to the vivid Aender green palette at resource-load time. Its particles use the same palette and emerge above the horizontal surface with a gentle upward drift instead of spawning partly underneath it where players could not see them.
• Leaving the Aender now schedules all loaded volatile chunks for TPS-paced blanking before regenerating them incrementally in concentric rings from arriving players, preventing old and new island layouts from forming full-height seams or rebuilding in arbitrary coordinate order. Stabilized chunks remain intact.
• Blanking volatile Aender chunks now removes their non-player entities immediately, preventing mobs and dropped items from falling through the temporary empty terrain before regeneration reaches them.
• Aender deletion and regeneration now measure average server tick time and dynamically use available tick headroom. Recent chunk cost prevents the queue from starting extra work that is unlikely to fit; stale chunk-load callbacks and portal searches no longer bypass the queue with synchronous regeneration.
• Multiplayer Aender volatility now follows actually player-tracked generator regions instead of waiting for the entire dimension to empty. An area may change after its last watcher leaves even while other players remain elsewhere; regions watched by any player and stabilized chunks are never reset.
• Placed and broken blocks in Aender chunks now survive saves, quits, restarts, and normal crash recovery while their regional reality remains current. Persistent chunk signatures distinguish saved player edits from terrain that genuinely needs regeneration, and the obsolete unstable-chunk save/read interception no longer discards those chunks.
• Aender grass now spreads, responds to bonemeal, becomes snowy, and reverts to Aender soil under cover. Aender leaves now track logs, decay naturally, and drop renewable saplings and sticks; player-placed and upgraded legacy leaves remain persistent.
• Aender trees now form a complete renewable wood family with wood and stripped variants, planks, stairs, slabs, fences and gates, doors and trapdoors, redstone components, signs, hanging signs, boats, and chest boats. The family supports normal recipes, fuel, composting, axe stripping, tags, and survival drops; its current purple textures are explicitly AI-generated placeholders.
• Retold content now appears alongside equivalent vanilla content in Building Blocks, Natural Blocks, Functional Blocks, Tools & Utilities, Ingredients, Spawn Eggs, and permission-gated Operator Utilities; Retold does not add a separate creative tab. The Aender Stabilizer and Chronolith are available in ordinary Functional Blocks, while only the development portal frame is operator-gated. Aender Eye and Gale Core now have functional spawn eggs, and previously hidden block items have modern client-item definitions.
• Added credited AI-generated placeholder textures for the previously missing Aender Chronolith model and the new Aender Eye and Gale Core spawn eggs.
• Fresh worlds now assign either Aender Plains or an experimental inverted Aender Desert to each floating island. Stacked islands can have different biomes; plains islands use broad rolling surfaces, while desert islands are wider and flatter with denim-blue sand, periwinkle sandstone, lavender cacti, a rose-lavender atmosphere, and rising energy spores. Both biomes now vary between distinct island silhouettes, irregular height clusters, eroded openings, warped detached satellite fragments, biome-specific dunes/basins/undersides, clustered vegetation, and rare spires or impact-like energy craters. Volatile regeneration changes biome data together with terrain, while stabilized chunks preserve both.
• Substantial round and elongated plains islands and plateau or dune desert islands can now contain winding cave networks. Large eligible islands always receive at least one valid main passage and often receive multiple passages. Main routes use asymmetric broad turns and local meanders instead of following one nearly straight line; many split at interior junctions into shorter curving side branches, some of which end in chambers. A main passage may open at either or both ends through restrained surface, cliff-side, or underside entrances without carving fragile, split, crescent, twin, shelf, or strongly eroded islands into arches.
• Added Aenderite Ore in diamond-like deposits inside Aender Stone, biased toward island undersides. Most veins contain 3–4 or 4–8 blocks, with rare 8–12 block veins. It requires a Netherite Pickaxe, drops Fortune-compatible Raw Aenderite, and can be smelted or blasted into Aenderite Ingots; the ingot has no crafting use yet.

Technical

• Added a data-driven Air Temple map-destination tag and a server-authoritative cartographer interaction hook. The hook preserves existing saved offers, supports already-generated cartographers in upgraded worlds, and avoids duplicate map trades.
• Added a GameTest covering Stage 1 gating, Stage 2 availability, preservation of existing saved offers, map marking, trade cost, and duplicate prevention.
• Added versioned AenderRealityData for the persisted reality seed, global and regional epochs, and fresh-world generator selection. Reality changes are saved before new terrain can generate.
• Added generator V2 with order-independent island-interval composition and chunk-halo placement for large decorations, then generator V3 with deterministic per-island 3D biomes; upgraded saves retain their persisted generator version.
• Added AenderBiomeSource, vertically resolved island-biome selection, regeneration-time biome replacement, and deterministic coverage for differently themed stacked islands.
• Cached each chunk's island candidates and horizontal terrain columns during 3D biome filling, avoiding repeated full island searches for every vertical biome cell.
• Added deterministic JUnit coverage for terrain interval composition and a GameTest for Aender reality serialization and legacy-version fallback.
• Extended Aender volatility coverage to verify the blank intermediate state used by progressive reality regeneration.
• Added deterministic tests for the adaptive tick-time regeneration budget.
• Added multiplayer region-lifecycle tests covering shared regions, watcher departure, final disconnect preservation, and transient dimension-transfer tracking gaps.
• Added the serialized retold:aender_chunk_reality chunk attachment with explicit current/stale states. Chunks upgraded without the attachment adopt their saved blocks into the current reality instead of being destructively regenerated once.
• Unloaded Aender chunks now evict their duplicate runtime generation signature while retaining the persistent chunk attachment, bounding that cache during long exploration sessions.
• Added Aender terrain-block tags, loot tables, and GameTest coverage for vegetation support, mining categories, harvesting behavior, and signature cache restoration.
• Split loaded-chunk replacement, entity reconciliation, heightmaps, lighting, and packet resends out of AenderChunkGenerator into AenderLoadedChunkReplacement and AenderChunkSectionEditor.
• Renamed the misleading runtime signature diagnostic to Aender cached chunk signatures.
• Added an indefinite, TPS-aware portal preparation state machine with unit coverage for its transition gate and a 5x5 asynchronously prepared safety core.
• Added deterministic coverage for Aender counterpart surface selection and the Y=100 void fallback.
• Added the data-driven Aender tree grower, NeoForge stripping/composting data maps, complete wood-family resources and entities, and GameTest coverage for renewal, tags, loot, stripping, signs, and boats.
• Added a pure deterministic Aender cave planner with cross-chunk tunnel continuity, guaranteed main passages on large eligible islands, asymmetric cubic turns, bounded connected branches, branch-end chambers, biome-specific vertical movement, conservative terrain-shell rules, overlap protection, and independent surface/side/underside profiles at both main endpoints. JUnit tests cover continuity, curvature, connected junctions, large-island guarantees, double-ended entrance balance, and fragile-archetype exclusion; GameTests verify actual cave carving and surface-cap breakthrough.
• Added a pure coordinate-deterministic Aenderite vein planner with cross-chunk coverage, Netherite-only harvest tags, ore loot and cooking recipes, vanilla creative-tab placement, survival GameTest assertions, and deterministic JUnit tests for structure and real-sampler frequency. Diamond-style retuning raises the same 9,409-chunk probe from the original 3.6% ore-bearing chunks to 31%, averaging about three placeable ore blocks per sampled chunk.