Ars Zero

Added

- Conjure Arcane Shield, a tier-two Manipulation glyph with a stationary spherical barrier, projectile and melee absorption, durability, a 60-second base lifespan, and full support for Amplify, Extend Time, Split, AOE, Anchor, and Sustain.
- Full-bright layered Arcane Shield visuals, item model, icon, recipe, documentation, and English, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese localization.
- Staff of Aetherwalk, which creates an AOE phantom-block path under the caster while channeled.
- A rainbow Creative Filial, installed by default on the Creative Spell Staff.
- All seven static staves ship in production: Telekinesis, Aetherwalk, Demonbane, Geometrize, Convergence, Lakes, and Switcheroo.
- All seven static staves are now exclusive Lich boss drops. Their crafting recipes and Telekinesis's generic Ars Nouveau dungeon-loot injection were removed.
- A player-killed Lich drops one random static staff, with Looting able to increase the stack up to four staffs at Looting III.

Fixed

- Staff Begin, Tick, and End phases now advance independently and no longer wait forever for projectile Begin spells to hit a target.
- Empty Begin phases advance into Tick correctly for staves, circlets, and turrets.
- Beam split origins and AOE beam formation are stable and consistent across player and turret casts.
- Beam's default lifespan is now ten seconds instead of five ticks.
- Temporal Context ignores removed targets and resolves each stored entity UUID only once, preventing duplicated falling blocks and drops.
- Multiphase turrets reset runtime power state on load and clear stale cast contexts when a cast ends.
- Circlet tick-delay updates target and synchronize the exact temporary/equipped stack.
- Staff rendering now uses the correct model hierarchy, GUI transform, tier bones, preset filials, and central source crystal behavior.
- Fire and Water voxel periodic environmental effects no longer execute immediately on their spawn tick.
- Large explosions use bounded incremental block processing and respect protected or immutable blocks.
- Entity claiming, voxel timing, Ice and Fire integration, and dedicated-server particle timeline safety fixes from the 1.21.1 work are included.
- Necropolis loot composite entries now use groups, allowing every weighted child to participate instead of always selecting the first alternative.
- All static staff entries are registered in production and remain available through the lich staff item tag.
- Optional Ars Elemental ingredients now resolve through a safe item tag, invalid 1.21-only glyph IDs were mapped to their 1.20 equivalents, and the Blight Archwood Leaves loot predicate uses the 1.20 schema so all loot tables and recipes load cleanly.
- Blight Forest frequency uses a startup-available common configuration and TerraBlender is declared as a required dependency.