Grey Goo Redux

# Changelog

Everything that changed in Grey Goo Redux, newest first.

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## 0.5.2

The Extraplanar portal became something you watch instead of something that appears, Terra
seeds grew from governing one chunk to nine, Aetherial's four swarms learned to triage, and a
guard now stops other mods from throwing you across the world when you step out of a portal.

### Extraplanar Goo

**The ring assembles and dismantles one block at a time.** A landing platform and a porch on
each side grow outward from the plane, the frame carves in around them, and then the portal
surface materialises cell by cell in a scattered order — about twenty seconds each way on a
healthy server, and the same in reverse when the pair comes down. The pacing is measured in
ticks rather than seconds, so on a heavily loaded server it stretches to match — it stays in
step with the world instead of placing blocks in bursts to hit a stopwatch. The order is fixed per portal and saved, so
quitting mid-build and returning continues exactly where it stopped rather than starting over.
All six pacing intervals are config keys if you want it faster or slower.

**Every portal now has somewhere to stand.** Both ends carry a 7×5 platform under the ring and
a cleared 3×2×2 porch on either side, so stepping through never lands you inside rock, in a
fluid, or in mid-air. Everything it places is restored exactly when the portal dies, and the
teardown waits for you to step clear before putting a block back where you are standing.

**Arriving somewhere you were not sent is now caught and undone.** Some dimension mods run
their own exit rules — you leave their world and they relocate you a moment later, overruling
whatever sent you. Observed twice, from two unrelated mods, once landing 5,000 blocks from the
portal. The mod now re-checks your position for a second after every crossing and puts you
back, up to three times, logging each correction. The return trip only dismantles the pair once
you are confirmed home, so a blocked crossing no longer dissolves your way back.

**Destinations pick better ground.** Sites keep clear of dimension ceilings and prefer open
space over the first technically-valid band, which stops rings being cut into the roof of the
world or buried in a cave below the surface.

### Terra Goo

**One seed now governs a 3×3 square of chunks instead of one.** Placing a seed captures all
nine at once and reports how many it remembered; the confirmation message only appears once
every chunk in the zone is genuinely saved to disk. Repair speed per seed is unchanged — a
seed still restores at the same rate, now spread across whichever chunks in its zone need work,
and adding more seeds anywhere in the zone speeds up the whole thing. Uprooting the last seed
ends the epoch for the entire square.

A chunk belongs to exactly one zone, so a square overlapping an existing zone simply yields
those chunks and says so. Zone size is configurable (`terra.zoneRadiusChunks`) from a single
chunk up to 5×5. Seeds placed by earlier versions keep their original single-chunk behaviour.

### Aetherial Goo — The Swarms Now Triage

**All four swarms hunt by default.** Nothing is held in reserve. Every one of them can be off
fighting a hundred blocks away, and an emergency pulls home exactly as many as it needs.

**When something goes wrong, a swarm teleports to you instantly** and locks into an orbit that
follows you exactly, however you move: sprinting, falling, riding. It used to fly home at a
fixed speed, which is not much of a guardian at the moment you are drowning.

**Emergencies are handled in a survival hierarchy**, worst first:

1. **Health** — the one that actually kills you; everything else kills you by way of it
2. **Oxygen** — drowning is the fastest clock you can be on
3. **Fire**
4. **Mana** — if you have any; see below
5. **Food** — starving takes minutes
6. **Gear repair** — nothing about it is lethal

You have four swarms and six possible emergencies, so the ranking decides who gets help first.
In practice food and repair are the ones that wait, which is the right pair. A swarm keeps the
job it is already doing, and the moment one need is satisfied that swarm either returns to the
hunt or picks up whatever was waiting.

The swarm you actually watch — the primary cloud — is the **last** one called home, so it takes
three simultaneous emergencies before it stops fighting.

**Mana support, if you run a magic mod that has it.** Aetherial can now restore mana for
**Iron's Spells 'n Spellbooks** and **Ars Nouveau**. It engages when your pool drops to a
quarter and refills at about 4% a second, and the death rescue tops it up too — being revived
with an empty pool is being revived disarmed. It sits above food deliberately: a caster out of
mana in a fight is disarmed, while a hungry one is merely hungry.

Neither mod is required. Grey Goo Redux does not depend on either, does not list them, and
behaves exactly as before if you have neither installed.

**Attack damage halved.** An Aetherial pulse now removes 10% of a target's maximum health, or
5% for a boss — ten hits and twenty hits. It was five and ten, which trivialised almost
everything. It is still true damage that ignores armour, shields and resistances.

**The swarms hunt in a better order**: whatever is actively attacking you first, then bosses,
then whatever is nearest. Previously a boss that had not yet picked a target queued behind
whichever skeleton happened to be closer.

### Commands

Two new commands, `/greygooredux` with `/ggr` as a short alias:

- **`/ggr purge`** — removes every Goo in every dimension immediately. Terra seeds and their
  snapshots survive, as they do for the automatic failsafe.
- **`/ggr purge <type>`** — removes just one kind, everywhere.
- **`/ggr status`** — reports what is alive, per type, per dimension. Cheap enough to run while
  the server is already struggling, which is when you will want it.

Purging needs operator permission; status does not. These exist because the automatic
catastrophic failsafe only fires at extreme, sustained lag, and there is a wide band below that
where a world is unplayable and nothing was going to rescue it.

### Containment

**Every spreading Goo is now watched, not just Grey and Prismatic.** Water, Lava and Void
previously had no population limit at all — a Water Goo could take an entire ocean while the
Prismatic sent to clean it up was the only thing being contained. Set
`watchdog.watchAllSpreadingTypes = false` if you would rather let them run.

**Containment now converges instead of oscillating.** A purge spares ten seeds so your Goo
survives; if that same Goo re-triggers the alarm before the cooldown elapses the next purge
keeps a third of them, and the one after keeps none. A fast-spreading Goo can no longer regrow
past the emergency threshold every eight seconds and farm the watchdog forever.

**Prismatic can no longer be configured slower than what it hunts.** Its speed is a multiple of
the fastest other Goo, but the safety ceiling used to override that — set another Goo fast
enough and the cleanup Goo ended up at half its prey's speed, permanently unable to catch it.
It now keeps a fixed lead regardless.

### Performance

**Terra scans for damage five times less often, and costs about 80% less because of it.** It
re-reads a whole chunk to find what needs repairing, which is its single largest cost, and it
was doing that every tick. Anything you break or blow up still flags its chunk and jumps the
queue, so this delays noticing damage nothing reported, not repairing damage you caused. Tune
it with `terra.auditSpacingTicks`, or set it to 1 for the old behaviour.

**The Prismatic hunt no longer allocates on every step.** Picking which way to move built a
list, six objects and a comparator and ran a sort to find the smallest of six numbers, tens of
thousands of times a second during a big fight. Same decision, none of the garbage.

**Terra repairs in every dimension, not just the first one.** A single scan slot was shared
server-wide and the Overworld always claimed it, so with three or more zones there a Terra
seed in the Nether or the End would sit armed and never repair anything at all.

### Fixed

- Crossing a portal no longer strips effects granted by equipment — armour sets, beacons,
  Curios charms. The effect was never actually lost: the server kept it and simply never told
  your client, and for a permanent effect nothing ever corrected that. Vanilla's own
  cross-dimension path sends those updates; the one used here does not.
- Arrival protection now genuinely protects. It never has before, in any version — the field it
  set only suppresses damage under a condition that was never true.
- Riding into a portal is refused rather than silently leaving your horse or boat behind in the
  other dimension.
- A portal that another mod refuses to let you through now says so, instead of trying three
  times and then reporting the wrong reason.
- Portals migrated from the previous build could leave two indestructible blocks behind
- A portal's far side could be left standing forever as an unbreakable ring, with a new one
  every round trip, if you walked away before it finished dismantling
- The return trip could dismantle your way home a fraction of a second before another mod
  moved you somewhere else entirely
- The landing platform could be removed from under you while you stood on it
- Arrivals could choose a spot filled with lava over a perfectly good one
- The travel cooldown was not saved, so quitting inside a portal sent you back through on login
- Death and respawn during a crossing could drag you back into the dimension that killed you
- Rings could be sited against a world's ceiling with their top rows silently missing, or
  underground in a cave beneath the surface you were aiming for
- Destinations could be placed outside a small world border
- Aetherial's four swarms never actually converged around you during a death rescue. The
  signature moment of the whole feature has never once worked; they stayed where they were
  fighting
- The Ender Dragon took literally zero damage from Aetherial, and under the new hunting order
  the swarms would have fixated on it
- Standing in fire or lava let the first hit through, which at low health could burn the entire
  death rescue and then leave you unprotected
- A portal dismantling itself could bury you in the terrain it was carved from if you stood
  watching it, and could entomb the horse it had just refused to carry
- Building a portal could freeze the server for half a minute while it searched for a
  destination
- The arrival guard could drag you back to a portal for simply walking away from it on a busy
  server
- Arriving with a Resistance potion active permanently stripped its icon and particles
- Terra could rebuild the entrance passage of a portal built inside its zone, walling the ring
  into the hillside it was carved from — or reflooding it underwater, so you arrived swimming
- Terra could get stuck endlessly restoring the edge of a lake whose source had been eaten,
  flickering forever and never settling
- Arriving through a portal could put you inside a chest, sign or banner
- An emergency cleanup could trim a small, harmless Goo because something else entirely was
  slowing the server down
- A repeat outbreak that never quite reached the emergency threshold could be cleaned up with
  full survivors forever instead of being brought under control
- Setting the survivor count to zero was quietly overridden to one
- An operator purge was announced to everyone as an automatic emergency
- The mod reported the wrong version number to its own diagnostics

### Configuration

New keys in `greygooredux-server.toml`, all documented in the file itself:

- an `[extraplanar]` section with the six portal animation intervals and the landing platform
- `terra.zoneRadiusChunks` — 1 for the default 3×3 zone, 0 for a single chunk, 2 for 5×5
- `terra.auditSpacingTicks` — how often Terra scans for damage; raise it if Terra costs you
  frames, lower it if damage takes too long to be noticed
- `watchdog.watchAllSpreadingTypes` — set false if you would rather let Water and Lava run
- a `[hearth]` section, for a Goo that is not finished yet

**Licence changed to MIT.** Modpacks are welcome to include this mod.

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## 0.5.0 — 2026-09-02

All eight Goo systems present: Grey, Void, Prismatic, Aetherial, Water, Lava, Extraplanar and
Terra. Per-dimension infestation watchdog, catastrophic server-side purge, and a
singleplayer-only client framerate failsafe. Terra seeds and snapshots survive the purge.

Live-validated across two sessions in a 265-mod pack: 95,315 successful restorations against
3 failures, with Terra rebuilding multiple chunks bottom-to-top after a nuclear-scale
detonation.

_There was no public 0.5.1; everything from that cycle is included in 0.5.2 above._