The Hush — v0.4.0

AI & Behavior

• New "Dormant" State: The Hush can now temporarily pause its activity. It includes an optional timeout that can direct it back to a specific target afterward.
• Ceiling Crawl Overhaul: Completely rewrote ceiling movement. Features improved edge detection, directed leap-offs, smart mantle transitions, and a persistent stalker memory system.
• Light Sabotage System: The Hush can now actively target and extinguish lights. Added full support for modded light sources using Forge tags (handles torches, lanterns, campfires, candles, open fires, redstone lamps, and jack o'lanterns), making it highly compatible with custom modpacks.
• Proximity Heartbeat: An intense heartbeat audio cue now plays when an invisible Hush gets dangerously close to a player (includes a per-player cooldown to avoid audio spam).
• Improved State Syncing: Internal movement and entity states now use numeric IDs synced directly to the client, improving tracking precision and network stability.

Visuals & Audio

• Animation Overhaul: Fully rewrote entity animations (spanning roughly 3,200 keyframes) to deliver much smoother, creepier, and more refined movement cycles.
• Spatial Audio Adjustments: Added explicit attenuation distances to ambient, step, and watching sounds for more accurate 3D audio positioning.
• Render Bounds Fix: Updated the entity geometry's visible bounds to fix visual clipping and improve overall rendering behavior.

Content & Lore

• Cursed Pages Redesign: Redesigned entirely as pure lore items. They no longer display live player telemetry or statistics, focusing instead on unique, atmospheric horror text for each variant.
• New Advancement: Added "The Sun Still Remembers You" — unlocked by escaping back to the surface after surviving a Hush encounter.
• Revised Descriptions: Cleaned up several advancement descriptions to make them more evocative and punchy.
• New Death Messages: Added six thematic death lines to the game:
  • Silenced by the darkness
  • Became a memory
  • Heart stopped in the dark
  • Stopped checking behind them
  • The dark claimed…
  • Taken somewhere the cave had room for

Configuration & Modpack Customization

• Config Overhaul: Split the configuration file into nested modules (GameplayConfig, SpawnConfig, FeatureConfig, DifficultyConfig) featuring pre-baked cache values and robust runtime reload support.
• Dimension & Biome Filters: Added explicit controls for allowedDimensions, blacklistedDimensions, allowedBiomes, and blacklistedBiomes to easily control where the entity can appear.
• Heartbeat Controls: Added sliders to fine-tune both the proximity heartbeat range and its audio interval.
• Spawn Pressure Tweaks: World-age gating, calm/haunted spawn percentages, and minimum player distance are now fully configurable to help balance modpack progression.
• Daylight Despawn: Added a dedicated slider to configure how many ticks the Hush takes to despawn when exposed to daylight.

Performance Optimizations

• Tick Complexity Reduction: Split the core tick handler into lightweight delegate components (SeenFreezeEvaluator, HushEnvironmentTracker, HushStateMachine) to drastically reduce overhead and game lag during active entity processing.
• Raycast Caching: Squeeze-opening lookups are now cached per tick to prevent redundant raycasts.
• Sight Check Optimization: Multi-ray sight checks were unrolled from loops into direct calls, significantly reducing memory allocations per tick.
• Memory Management: The entity model now properly caches resource locations and bone references, eliminating per-frame garbage collection and preventing micro-stutters during rendering.
• Nest Generation Speedup: Created a pre-computed lookup table for nest room generation, completely eliminating around 1,458 repetitive trigonometry calls per nest.
• Block-State Lookup Fix: Cached the ice movement check to stop the mod from doing heavy block-state lookups every single tick.
• Height Enforcement: Fixed spawn height checks to correctly respect config-baked boundaries.