Core Ecosystem (Infection Mod)

- Phase 9: Rising. From Phase 8, once the colony has digested 20,000 biomass with two Guardians, 40 joined trees and two days behind it, the shell swells into a bulb with the Core hanging inside it on vein strands (cut them all and it drops, keeps working, and is lifted again in five minutes). A huge greenish-brown stalk climbs out of the top, 20 to 250 blocks, climbable, with knots every six blocks and a closed bud on top. Then three minutes of silence: every colony sound stops, units freeze, worms sink, vines lie flat, Guardians crouch, the fog thins, animals flee. Then the awakening: the ground shakes for twenty seconds, the bud tears open, the flower rises and its eight petals open over a minute, the eye darts, settles and turns to the nearest player under open sky, a slow loud heartbeat, an army of Guards bursts from the veins, and the land for 256 blocks turns to Miasma. Cut petals (200 damage each; they regrow one a day) to slow its sugar; kill the heart and the flower closes and the stalk greys. Guardian I moves to a knot, Guardian II to the bulb's top. The sounds are placeholders until the mod's own. Config section [phase9].
- The meteor's landing is felt 350 blocks away. Overwhelming within 12 blocks, halving every 80, a faint tremor at the edge. A visible blast wave races out at three blocks a tick and throws everything within 48 blocks away and upward, 10 to 15 blocks at the centre; walls and hills shelter you. A body thrown into a wall takes kinetic damage. A body under the rock itself is struck: kinetic damage through armor and no throw. Settings shake_range, shake_intensity and wave_range in [arrival].
- Veins by kind. The colony's ground takes the kind of what it ate: Overgrown Grass, Veined Dirt, Rooted Stone, Rooted Deepslate, Veined Sand, Veined Gravel, and Infested Ground for the rest. A colony gone for good turns them back into the blocks they were. Setting veins_by_kind in [looks].
- The root to bedrock. From Phase 8 a 2x2 root grows down a layer a minute to bedrock, side roots every eight blocks, a biomass a block. Rooted to bedrock, the colony's rebuild is cheaper and its revival faster; cut a two-layer gap and everything below goes grey until it regrows.
- Rain and snow. In rain the miasma sinks to the ground within ten seconds: only at ground level do you breathe it, the seeds lie thick at your feet, the sky goes grey. Snow halves the worms' speed. Config section [weather].
- Guardians: a solid body (you bump into them and can stand on them) and a walk that no longer tweaks out: it climbed every step and trunk, let go at the top of climbs and circled at speed; all fixed. Four spiders: I an orb weaver, II the Stalker a trapdoor spider (1.3x), III the Tree Warden a wolf spider (1.15x), IV the Heartwood a tarantula (1.6x), each its own shape, named in Jade and the Lens. Guardians are born: a huge sac grows on the shell's inside, holds the forming Guardian 150 seconds, splits with a wet tear, and it climbs out onto the wall. The Stalker's pit trap: two real bugs fixed (a Stalker home but off its spot never looked at its pit; a Guardian stuck in rock crept instead of sliding out).
- The large web is a real 3D web: an orb strung upright between two anchors (trunks, posts, walls, the shell), or a ground sheet that follows the terrain; hidden until something touches it.
- The Core Mesh is a wall to every other creature and every route finder, vanilla and modded; the colony still walks through.
- The advancement tab is a map: the phases a spine left to right, everything else branching off, every unearned one a lock with "???".
- Fire past the claimed land is felt by the vein it burns against and put out; the colony used to search only its own land.
- Rival infections: Spore and any mod listed in [rivals] are attacked on sight, their growth dies in the Miasma, they cannot convert our veins, and each rival mod installed counts as three players. A colony keeps running with nobody near; a pasted Core rebuilds itself; other dimensions work.
- The Colony Lens says less, as what the colony is doing and wants ("Gaining biomass by sending workers to hunt and gather wood"); sneak-use it, or /corecolony status full, for everything.
- Removed: the Enemy/Neutral/Friend standing and its three advancements. The colony is irritated at you or it is not; it still takes any chest on its land.
- Renamed Core Ecosystem. The jar is core-ecosystem-1.9.2; the mod id core_colony stays, so worlds, configs and packs keep working. License: LGPL-3.0-or-later.
- Old config files get the new defaults (numbers you changed yourself are kept).