HELM

First tagged build. The focus of this release is pathfinding and movement correctness: routes get chosen more sensibly, steps mine and place only what they actually need to, and the diagnostics needed to debug any of it are in the session log.

Pathfinding

• Remaining distance is priced in ticks, not in blocks. The search used a Euclidean straight-line estimate, which is optimistic about obstacles it has not met yet. On the route in the report that changed a 29 step path into a 174 step path, and the long one is the one that arrives.
• Block lookups are indexed, not scanned. Cached block states are now indexed by block id rather than compared by identity, using a primitive long keyed map. The search spends most of its time here, so this is most of the speedup.
• A goal outside the loaded world can be walked to. The route is planned towards the goal's column instead of the exact block, and the final approach is planned from wherever the player actually ends up. The destination stays exact, so the walk re-plans as it goes.

Movement

• A diagonal no longer mines. A diagonal is only offered when one side is clear at feet, knee and head, so the player can walk round; it never needed to break anything. HELM was mining a block anyway, which swung the arm for about 110 ticks, exhausted the step budget, abandoned the route, re-searched, and picked the same diagonal with the same two blocks. Fixed.
• Sprinting past a knee-high block on a diagonal now checks all four side blocks, both at the feet and at the head, rather than only the two at the feet.
• A fall stops mining at the landing. The break list ran one block past the destination, so the player turned and swung at the floor they were about to land on. It now stops at the destination level.
• A fall only mines when the top of the column is blocked. The four blocks directly below the player are checked fresh every tick. If they are clear the player just drops, instead of turning around to mine leaves and logs further down a column they were never going to reach. This was the visible cause of mining an unreachable block on the way down out of a tree.
• Each step breaks only the blocks that step needs, in the order it needs them gone, and re-reads the live world while doing it.
• Pillaring keeps its facing. The rotation now keeps the current yaw and takes only the pitch, so the camera does not swing sideways on the way up.

Aiming

• A placement aims and raycasts from the same eye. Placing a block under the player is done while sneaking, but the rotation was computed from the standing eye position while the raycast started from the crouching one. The two disagreed about which face was being hit, so the side faces never verified and the aim fell through to the last option that did, which is the top of the block below. Now it turns to look at the face it is actually building against.
• The crouching eye position was below the player's feet, 1.47 blocks too low.
• Block traces no longer stop on water sources when the player is not sneaking, which was failing placement checks that should have passed.
• Reach is measured from the block's real centre, using its collision shape, rather than always from the middle of the block.

Diagnostics

• The session log now records the command, the whole route with the kind of every step and the blocks each step breaks, and the player's position every tick while a route is walked.
• Mining logs the block being worked on, the held slot and item, and whether the game accepted the break, so a block that refuses to break can be told apart from one that was never in the way.

Notes

• Sprinting is not given up on a parkour. A parkour still costs what it always did, so a player that keeps its sprint through a jump keeps its reach.
• Sprinting off the bottom of a descent is unchanged.