HELM

Fixes the farm, adds $farm, and adds glowing outlines.

Farming

$farm is new. It looks around for ripe crops and works through them one at a time, breaking them with the right tool, planting the empty ground again, using bone meal, and walking over to pick up the drops.

With no range it works everywhere it can see. With one it stays within that many blocks of where you typed it. $stop ends it.

What was fixed along the way:

• It stopped and gave up when the last crop was taken. It now says Nothing to harvest right now. Still watching. once and keeps checking the field, so anything that ripens is picked up without typing the command again.
• It told itself a field was empty before it had looked at it. It now waits for the first sweep to find something before deciding anything.
• A harvest threw away the walk it was doing. Harvesting now keeps the route it was on, the search it was waiting for, and the step it was in the middle of.
• It stalled the tick and jumped on the crops. Work is spread across ticks, and seeds are only planted when one is actually held, so HELM does not walk across a field to stand on bare dirt it cannot plant.
• A sweep no longer stalls the game. Reading that many blocks at once was felt as a hitch, so a scan spends a small slice of each tick and carries on from where it left off, starting with the chunk the player is standing in.
• Trapdoors are walked through instead of mined.
• Crops found as it swept are used straight away, rather than waiting for the whole scan to finish, so $farm starts working almost immediately.
• A rescan no longer empties what is already known. Once a scan has finished, its results stay in use while the next one runs. A new scan starts empty, so using its part-finished result dropped most of the known field every time one began, which showed as the outlines flickering and the targets vanishing.
• It no longer searches again and again for the same job. It would arrive, find nothing it could do, then rebuild every target and print a line in chat every tick until stopped. It now stays where it is and looks again when the player moves, when it has just worked something, or when a rescan finds a different amount of work.
• The player's height is read from the block they stand in, so a step that climbs back to where it was heading keeps going instead of stopping.
• A diagonal keeps going when the player ends up a block off its height, and a step keeps walking forwards while it climbs back, instead of losing the step.

Silhouette outlines

The blocks a route is going to mine, the ripe crops farming is working through, and the drops worth collecting are now drawn with a glowing outline. These are not lines around boxes. Each one is drawn as its own shape into the outline framebuffer the game already uses for glowing entities, which is then edged, blurred and blended back over the world, so a crop glows as a crop and an ore block glows as a block.

Colours take #RRGGBB, 0xRRGGBB, six hex digits such as 4CE0E0, or a plain whole number, and are shown and stored as #RRGGBB.

Silhouettes are hidden by terrain, the same way a glowing mob is. outline.enabled off turns all of them off and leaves route drawing alone.

Dropped item cache

Farming no longer works from a hardcoded table of what each crop drops. Whenever HELM breaks a block it notes where, and watches that spot for items. Whatever turns up there it treats as something worth collecting, so anything a server, mod or config changes about a crop still gets collected. An item type stays wanted for five minutes, refreshed each time another of that kind turns up.

Mining works the same way as soon as it breaks blocks of its own, because both go through the same breaking path.

A drop that lands in water is now collected by swimming to it. An item does not sink, it rides the surface, so the block above it is air and the bot could never stand there. A drop in water is now aimed at the water block it floats on, which is exactly the block a swimmer occupies, so the route runs out across the surface of the water. A drop in the middle of a pool is reached the same way as one at the edge.

Aiming

• Planting now aims at the nearest reachable spot on the top face rather than at the middle of it. The middle of a block's top face is half a block away from the player on each horizontal axis, so a block that was within reach on its near edge could be well outside reach at its middle, and farming gave up on farmland it could have planted. A face is tried as nine spots, nearest first, and the middle of the face is among the nine, so nothing that used to work stops working.
• Planting on a log uses the same search across the open side.

Water

• Rising through water is a pillar that places nothing. When the block below the player is water and the block they are rising into is water too, HELM swims the column instead of building it, turning to face the middle of the block above and holding there until it has risen into it.
• Any step taken while in water presses jump when the player is more than three fifths of a block below the height that step is heading for, which is what carries a player up off the bottom of a lake.

Movement and inventory

• movement.allowInventory actually rearranges the inventory while walking, moving tools, placement blocks and farm supplies between the hotbar and the rest of the inventory, with slots 0 and 8 kept stocked.
• movement.inventoryTickGap accepts 0, for a move every tick.
• Placement blocks are parsed once instead of on every read.

Documentation

docs/USAGE.md is a command reference and docs/FEATURES.md is an index again. The detail belongs in docs/FULLYEXPLAINEDFEATURES.md.