Create: Workers

Mostly a performance release. Four things a worker did had no upper bound on them, and each one is cheap in a test world and expensive on a server that has been running a while — so this is the one to take before you put workers on a shared world.

Added

• A limit on how many blocks one hat may be programmed with, maxTargets in the server config, default 24. Past it the hat refuses the click and says so. It is a performance setting rather than a taste one: a worker with nothing to do prices every input slot against every output, so what an idle worker costs grows with the size of its programme.
• hireChildren, off by default. Right-clicking a baby villager with a programmed hat now turns it away and leaves the hat in your hand. Nothing is lost by the refusal — hand the same villager the same hat once it has grown up and it takes the job.

Changed

• A hat carrying more than maxTargets blocks — only reachable from creative mode or a world made before this version — still works, but only the first 24 blocks on it are used, with a line in the server log saying so. Raise maxTargets to keep using the rest.

Fixed

• A worker given a block it can never reach no longer asks the game for a route to it forever. A funnel on a wall, a belt across a gap — anything usable from arm's length but impossible to stand beside — had the worker path to it, walk as far as it could, arrive nowhere and immediately path again, several times a second, out of a mob that looks like it is standing still. Every walk now gives up after a while and sets that block aside for a spell before trying it again. Only the haul used to do this; the idle rounds, which is the default idle behaviour, and the walk back from a wander did not.
• A target outside the loaded world no longer drags its chunk in and drops it again about once a second, generating that chunk first if nobody had ever been there. A worker held in place by a chunk loader, with a target a few chunks outside the loaded area, did it for as long as the world existed, with nothing to show why the server was busy. An unloaded target is now skipped until its chunk is back.
• A target broken and put back is picked up again. It used to stay missing for the rest of that worker's life.
• Programming a hat away from its beat no longer quietly shortens it. Blocks whose chunk had left view were forgotten, so walking off and clicking one more inventory pushed back a programme with the earlier blocks dropped from it.
• A busy worker no longer sets off on its idle rounds between every item it moves.
• An idle enderman no longer works through its own programme writing off every inventory on it.
• Workers no longer walk at a block they can already use but could never be said to have reached.
• Employed endermen cost less per tick, and their long hops do far less work choosing where to land — each hop still has to close the distance, as before.