Aliens Vs Predator: Resurrection - Aliens

AVP: ALIEN 0.2.3 - BUILD-FREE HIVES, FORCED EMPRESSES, AND A CONFIG YOU CAN SEE

A large patch. A new hive type for map makers, a way to force an empress early, the hive config finally given a file and a screen, and a long list of fixes.

CRASH FIX - READ THIS FIRST
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If you ran one of the 0.2.2-based test builds, a server-tick crash could occur on world load: "Trying to access unbound value: avp_alien:player_visit".

The chunk data store behind the new containment checks was declared but never registered, so the first thing to touch it threw. Released 0.2.2 is unaffected. Fixed.

NEW: BUILD-FREE MODE
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A config-selected hive type for adventure maps and custom playstyles. The hive claims territory, spreads resin, lays eggs, raises members and fights - but never carves a chamber or stamps a structure.

Everything a hive normally gets from building, it gets from its claim instead. Eggs are laid in a ring around the queen and in clusters spread across the territory as tendril splotches. Jelly vats grow inside those clusters. Vents appear per tier rather than per room. The queen can be set to found exactly where she is placed, which is what most map makers will want.

Twenty-five config fields cover it: territory size, how tall the hive's band of the world is, how many xenomorphs stay active, whether raids and hunting parties happen at all, how many eggs and where, vent spacing, the buy-in for invading a neighbour, and how workers retreat when attacked.

NEW: THE HIVE CONFIG HAS A FILE, AND A SCREEN
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The hive config previously had no file at all. Changes never persisted, and every world started from defaults.

It now lives in config/avp_alien-hive.json, per instance, loaded on start and saved whenever it changes. A companion README file is written beside it with plain-language descriptions of every setting, regenerated on every save.

There is also an in-game editor: /avp hive config gui. The Config button in the mod list opens it too, and if you are already in a world it takes you straight to the editor rather than asking you to type anything.

Every field on that screen shows the exact command that sets it, so there is never any mystery about how to do it by hand. Editing a value in the screen runs that same command, which means there is one way a setting changes rather than two that can disagree.

NEW: FORCING AN EMPRESS EARLY
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Feed a queen a block of royal jelly.

Out in the open, she founds a hive on the spot and emerges as its empress. A forced hive sits deliberately shallow - higher than any naturally founded one - and digs its founding chamber at double speed with the chamber's resin cost waived. It is quicker to reach and easier to find and fight, which is the trade for not waiting.

In a hive she already rules, she evolves in place and keeps her hive and her eggsack. She is the same queen; only her form changes.

A lineage can now hold more than one empress. The oldest is sovereign, and if she dies the next oldest inherits.

Placed into a hive whose throne is empty, an empress takes it, and the queen she displaces leaves to found a hive of her own - without spending one of that hive's daughter slots, since she is not a daughter being raised but a ruler being replaced.

Placed into a hive that already has an empress sitting on its eggsack, she leaves. Where she goes depends on the lineage: she founds a new hive for it if there is room, takes over a hive that still has an ordinary queen if there is not, and breaks away as a rival if every throne is held.

The eight-hive cap is untouched. What forcing skips is the maturity requirement - a lineage can crown at two hives instead of waiting for four.

NEW: BREAKAWAY EMPRESSES GET A HEAD START
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A rival empress founds one hive next to an empire that may hold eight. Without help she would be swallowed within minutes of leaving.

For three in-game days after breaking away she cannot be absorbed, and her hive raises members with no biomass cost - jelly is still charged, so she spends what she has faster rather than conjuring an army from nothing. The point is that the war is worth watching rather than a formality.

NEW: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN TWO EMPIRES MEET
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Previously, nothing. Two empresses with room left to grow could neither go to war nor absorb one another, so they sat side by side indefinitely.

An empress now attempts to absorb a rival empire when their territories meet. The defender's chance to refuse is weighed on how many hives each empire holds and how much each has banked, so a large empire rarely swallows a healthy rival but will mop up a dying one. Neither outcome is ever certain.

Losing hands the defender's lineage to the winner's crown - she keeps her hive and her queen, and only the crown changes. Holding opens a proxy war between the two empires instead.

A hive at war with another empire is now always sent reinforcements and never stripped to supply somewhere quieter.

NEW: ZOO AND CONTAINMENT PROTECTION
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Xenomorphs kept as specimens were being absorbed into nearby hives and deleted.

A growth-suppressed xenomorph is now never taken into a hive's reserves. Suppression is a deliberate act, so it reads as a claim of ownership in the same way a name tag does.

Beyond that, a xenomorph that has not moved for several minutes and is somewhere a player keeps returning to is treated as somebody's exhibit rather than a stray. Both halves are needed: something genuinely stuck in terrain has not moved either, and that one should still be recovered.

Also fixed: the name-tag exclusion only worked in the End. A named xenomorph anywhere else was absorbed like any other member.

FIXED: RELOGGING DESTROYED WORKERS
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Quitting a world could permanently delete a hive's loaded members.

During shutdown the hive banked each member and discarded the entity, but the faction data had already been written by then, so the deposit was never saved and the entity was gone from the re-saved chunk. Members are no longer banked during shutdown at all - they save with their chunk and come back.

FIXED: AN INHIBITED QUEEN DUG AFTER A RELOAD
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Clamping an inhibitor onto a queen stops her digging. Reloading the world started her again.

The claim the inhibitor gives her was never being written to disk, so she came back owning nothing and behaving like an ordinary queen. Hive locations now persist correctly whichever code path creates them.

FIXED: HIVES STARVED WHILE BEING WATCHED
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A hive observed only by a player in creative or spectator earned no biomass and spawned nothing, so it never built, never sacked, and eventually decayed.

Presence detection had been made blind to creative and spectator players along with threat detection. Whether a hive is being provoked and whether anyone is there at all are different questions, and only the first should ignore a creative player.

FIXED: A BEHEADED QUEEN STAYED ALIVE
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A queen who lost her head to a ravager ended up sprawled, headless and unkillable - immune to weapons and to /kill.

Losing her head is lethal damage, so she entered the downed state first, and the death that should have followed was then shrugged off by that very state. Losing her head is now immediate death rather than a chance to finish her.

While down she also kept her eggsack, which now detaches.

FIXED: A CHAINED QUEEN LAID NO EGGS
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A captive queen with a full eggsack produced nothing.

Every egg required the queen to be inside a hive's claim, and a queen chained in a containment cell is not. Captive queens now lay wherever they are held, with no hive and no resin required - their cap is still the single slot in front of them.

FIXED: XENOMORPHS SPUN IN PLACE BESIDE SHORE
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A xenomorph a few blocks from land would paddle on the spot instead of getting out.

It only stepped onto land that was immediately adjacent, and otherwise asked its ground pathing to reach a target on dry land from inside the water, which it cannot do. It now heads for the nearest shore, and only swims at its target when there is genuinely no shore in range.

FIXED: A QUEEN COULD NEVER SETTLE IN A FLAT WORLD
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In a superflat world a queen would wake, fail to found, pick somewhere new, sleep, and repeat - drifting further from spawn every cycle.

She refuses to found anywhere open to the sky, which is correct and is what stops hives appearing on the surface. A superflat has nowhere that satisfies it. Where a world has no cover anywhere nearby she now founds on the surface immediately, without failing first.

FIXED: A 40-SECOND SERVER FREEZE
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A founding queen pathing to a distant hive centre could stall the server for over forty seconds in a single tick, generating terrain to do it. She now refuses to path that far and settles her position another way.

FIXED: ASSAULT VENTS WERE INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM A HIVE'S OWN
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A vent dug into another hive's territory is now marked as an invader's door, so the defending hive no longer treats it as one of its own emergence points. Vents already in the ground are re-marked as their area loads.

FIXED: SMALLER THINGS
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A downed queen ignored /kill and any damage without an attacker behind it.

Founding refusals now say why in the log instead of failing silently, which is how the flat-world loop above was finally identified.

The hive's "wanted defenders and could field none" message no longer repeats every tick, and a queen being beaten while she has no eggsack no longer logs an attempt to abandon one on every hit.

ALSO IN THIS RELEASE
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A chained queen can now hang without a floor. Four anchors sharing a height above her suspend her with a four-block gap above her head, eggsack and all.

The royal cocoon is 60% size when an adolescent is transforming inside it. Adults are unchanged.

An empress can now be put on the floor and finished off the same way a queen can, without the chains and the inhibitor.

A forced empress carves her own founding chamber.

Tracked queens now show a beacon beam, so they can be found from a distance without a map mod.