Flatts's Things

v0.4.0 - 2026-09-08 - "Common Ground"

Added

• Grass and mycelium slabs, which completes the terrain set at eleven families. They were held back from the first nine on purpose: the others needed a property, these need a system.

  They spread and die back the way their full blocks do. Covered grass reverts to a dirt slab. Uncovered grass creeps onto nearby dirt, whether that dirt is a slab or a full block. And a dirt slab beside a vanilla grass block greens itself - which is the direction vanilla cannot do on its own, because its grass looks for a dirt BLOCK and will never see a slab. Running it backwards from the dirt slab covers that with no second mixin.

  Plants grow on them, on the seven soil families and on a top or double slab only - a bottom slab's surface is half way up its own block, so a flower on one would sprout floating. That needed saying in two places at once: which families is a tag question, which halves is a blockstate question, and a tag cannot answer the second.

  The sides show the surface spilling over the edge. Grass, podzol and mycelium paint their fringe across the top of their side texture, so a slab takes the top half of it whichever half of the block it is - otherwise a bottom grass slab would be dirt on all four sides with the green stopping dead at the top face.

  Spreading only crosses between matching halves: a bottom grass slab does not green a top dirt slab, because they do not touch. Bonemeal works on a grass slab except as a bottom one, where the plants would sprout floating half a block above it. Mycelium is not bonemealable, because vanilla mycelium is not either.

• Terrain slabs. Nine half blocks of the ground rather than of the things you build with: dirt, coarse dirt, rooted dirt, podzol, mud, clay, gravel, sand and red sand. Vanilla gives stairs and slabs to bricks and planks and nothing at all to the floor. Three blocks in a row give six slabs, which is vanilla's own rate.

  They behave rather than only looking right. Gravel and sand fall, and a top slab knocked loose lands as a bottom one instead of coming to rest floating with a gap under it. Podzol takes the snowy side under snow, but only as a top or double slab, because a bottom slab's upper face is half way up its own block and a snow layer above it never touches. Rooted dirt grows hanging roots when bonemealed, and refuses as a top slab, where the roots would start eight pixels low and could not survive anyway. Mud is two pixels short, so you sink into it exactly as you do a mud block.

  Mining one gives half of what the whole block gives. A podzol slab yields a dirt slab, the way a podzol block yields dirt. Clay gives two clay balls. Flint comes only from a DOUBLE gravel slab, which is a whole block's worth, so cutting gravel into slabs and putting it back together is exactly neutral - and rolling flint costs you the block, the way it does in vanilla.

  Gravel is crafted six-for-twelve rather than three-for-six, at the same rate. Three gravel is already this mod's own gravel-to-flint recipe, which is shapeless, so it matches any arrangement of three and no three-gravel slab recipe could coexist with it.

  Grass and mycelium were named in the same request and are deliberately not here. They spread, die back and carry the snowy state, and none of that has an obvious reading on a half block. They will arrive with that behaviour rather than as models that only look like grass. Snow blocks came out too: three of them is already vanilla's snow layer recipe, and a snow layer is a stackable partial snow block, so vanilla effectively has that one already.

• The woodcutter takes logs. It only took planks, so a log put in the input offered nothing at all. A log now cuts into its planks at exactly the rate a crafting bench gives - four, or two for bamboo, which is the one family that breaks the pattern - and into a stripped log or a bark block one for one. Bark and stripped forms are accepted as inputs too, so anything in a wood family can go on the bench. Stripping costs an axe its durability in vanilla and costs the saw nothing; bark is a quarter cheaper than the bench, which is the same size of saving the stonecutter already grants on stairs.

• Sticks, buttons and shelves on the woodcutter, from an audit of everything a crafting bench makes out of wood alone. Two sticks per plank, one button per plank, one shelf per stripped log - every one of them the bench's own rate.

  What is deliberately absent is the more interesting half. A cut consumes exactly one item, so anything costing more than a plank on a bench would come out proportionally cheaper: a door or a pressure plate twice, a trapdoor three times, a fence gate or a boat five. Doors, trapdoors, pressure plates, fences, fence gates, signs and boats are all left on the crafting table for that reason - the same reason vanilla's stonecutter cuts nothing costing more than one stone.