Tellus: Atlas & Wildlife — 0.9.12 to 0.9.17

0.9.17 — Urban Recovery & Riparian Habitats

Urban recovery

• Added /taw urban reload to restore missing settlement nodes from the nearest urban area.
• Uses the adaptive preparation system and restores only one settlement node at a time.
• Added a protected recovery option for regions deleted before 0.9.17:
  • /taw urban reload force
  • /taw urban reload confirm
• Forced recovery requires confirmation within 30 seconds to prevent accidental village duplication.

Riparian wildlife

• Capybaras, caimans, crocodiles, otters and other large riparian animals no longer accept every small water source as suitable habitat.
• Narrow rivers surrounded by predominantly arid terrain are now rejected.
• Narrow waterways in humid environments remain valid, but use smaller assisted groups and reduced local population limits.
• Refined the western boundary of Neotropical and South American freshwater ranges to prevent Amazonian fauna from appearing in Chile.
• Habitat results are cached and only inspect already-loaded chunks.
• Existing animals are not removed; these changes affect new spawns only.

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0.9.16 — Adaptive Urban Preparation

• Urban settlements can begin preparing before the player reaches the city.
• Only one settlement node is prepared globally at a time.
• Preparation prioritizes the village closest to the approaching player.
• Uses staged temporary chunk tickets instead of loading an entire city.
• Preparation automatically pauses under high server load:
  • Starts below 38 MSPT.
  • Pauses at 45 MSPT.
• Temporary tickets are released after sustained pressure, timeout or player departure.
• Pending preparation is saved between server restarts.
• Vegetation preparation can advance in small 0.5 ms batches each tick, making tree and leaf removal far less noticeable.
• Added:
  • /taw config urbanprepare true|false
  • urbanPrepareAhead=true|false
• /taw urban now reports preparation status and average MSPT.

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0.9.15 — Fauna Range Review & City Entry Titles

Geographic fauna corrections

• Replaced oversized South American rectangles with stepped ranges that respect the Andes.
• Prevented capuchin monkeys, toucans, anteaters, potoos, caimans, anacondas, capybaras and several freshwater animals from appearing incorrectly in central and southern Chile.
• Added more accurate continental ranges for crocodiles.
• Restricted mudskippers to Africa and the Indo-West Pacific.
• Refined shoebill, seal, seagull, rattlesnake, leafcutter ant, cichlid, tetra and manatee ranges.
• Desert scorpions now require a genuinely arid surface during runtime spawns.

City entry titles

• Entering an urban area now displays the city name as a large title.
• Added a soft village-bell sound when entering a city.
• Multi-village cities share one complete urban detection radius.
• Added a 350-meter exit margin to avoid repeated boundary triggers.
• Added a 30-minute cooldown per player and city.

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0.9.14 — Silent Vegetation Preparation

• Village vegetation scanning no longer removes blocks while the terrain is being examined.
• The process now uses two phases:
  1. Silently record vegetation targets.
  2. Remove the recorded blocks shortly before placement.
• Scanning and removal use separate 0.75 ms budgets.
• Tall grass and large ferns are removed before village placement.
• Dirt-path repair now recognizes tall grass and large ferns as removable obstructions.
• No cleanup phase forces chunk loading.

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0.9.13 — Country Journal Scrolling & Larger Cities

Exploration Journal

• Physical geography entries are now organized by country.
• Long discovery lists scroll independently on the left and right pages.
• Added mouse-wheel and draggable-scrollbar support.

Urban Centers

• Increased settlement counts:
  • Regional: 1 settlement.
  • Major: 4 settlements.
  • Metropolis: 7 settlements.
  • Megacity: 12 settlements.
  • Megalopolis: 20 settlements.
• Existing settlement positions and identifiers remain unchanged.
• Previously generated cities only receive their missing outer settlements.

Village paths

• Added conservative post-placement dirt-path repair.
• Repairs unsupported or vertically displaced paths without modifying valid structure blocks.
• Path repair never loads chunks and uses a strict 0.75 ms budget.

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0.9.12 — Smooth Tick Scheduler

• Distributed periodic systems across a 40-tick scheduler instead of running everything on the same tick.
• Fauna, rivers, terrestrial assistance, Urban Centers, population management and player discovery now use separate scheduler slots.
• Reduced the frequency and cost of local fauna censuses.
• Limited Tellus bed scanning to 64 chunks and approximately 1.5 ms per pass.
• Limited population placement to 16 sites per pass.
• Added bounded resident and iron-golem placement searches.
• Failed placement attempts now use increasing cooldowns and stop after four attempts.
• Removed unnecessary scans across every loaded chunk.
• Reduced Urban Centers geographic queue work to approximately 2 ms per pass.
• Split tree clearance into small batches.
• Replaced the growing list of processed empty chunks with compact persistent bookkeeping.

Compatibility

• Network protocol remains 1.
• Versions 0.9.14 through 0.9.17 primarily contain server-authoritative behavior changes.
• TAW 0.9.16 clients can connect to a TAW 0.9.17 server.
• The 0.9.13 client is required only for the newer per-country scrolling Journal interface.