Hostile Humans Unified

- Fixes melee spacing repeatedly stopping navigation when backward movement is blocked or fighters overlap. Humans try safe backward and lateral steps, then yield to normal pursuit if none is available instead of waiting for an external push.

- Melee spacing stays inside effective attack reach with at least half a block of margin. Short-reach weapons no longer inherit an excessive fixed minimum; pursuit and spacing use the same threshold.

- Hired humans' armor now uses independent three-second wear cooldowns for all four slots instead of one shared set-wide gate. Each piece loses at most one durability point per event, retaining Unbreaking and fire-resistant-item handling.

- Standardizes the derivative mod source license as GPL-2.0-only and updates the corresponding license notices.

- Adds per-tier recruitment item IDs and quantities, supporting registered items from other mods while retaining emerald defaults. Contract and insufficient-payment tooltips reflect the selected item; invalid settings block payment, and creative hiring remains free.

- Missing Better Combat weapon profiles fall back to vanilla melee, reach and cooldown. After a weapon breaks, humans can use stored tools or fight empty-handed when no tool remains.

- Area guards can retaliate against distant attackers while retaining nearby-threat switching. Out-of-area combat lasts up to 20 seconds before returning to the post; incoming hits can restart combat and the timer. Idle pickup retains movement ownership and stays within the guarded area, including its path.

- Roster ordering, tier groups and counts share an immutable view, invalidated immediately by hiring, dismissal, transfers and reordering to avoid repeatedly filtering the whole roster.

- Loot candidates share a batch-local inventory capacity/eviction summary instead of repeatedly traversing every slot. Empty slots, compatible stack merging, protected items and replacement thresholds retain their behavior; the summary is never used for actual transfers or cached across ticks.

- Shore-step probes deduplicate block columns, avoid repeated fluid/collision reads and reject unloaded chunks. Surface scans reuse fluid states already read during the same scan. Potion loot scoring uses a single effect pass with the original priority order; recovery-food scoring avoids repeated property reads.

- Firing-lane and emergency retreat/lava searches use separate server-wide candidate budgets with rotating waits to reduce simultaneous pathfinding bursts. Waiting retains search progress instead of triggering failure fallbacks or stale-search resets. Tactical fallbacks no longer add an extra path to the final candidate batch.

- Investigation and alert events share same-tick neighborhood queries across block, door and damage notifications. Equipment, durability and enchantment changes invalidate stale loot-value decisions without clearing failed-path cooldowns. Recovery-potion selection avoids parsing the same effects twice.

- Tactical repositioning now compares all candidates incrementally, evaluating at most four per human per tick. Firing-lane and ally-spacing scores and pre-path upper-bound filtering are retained; provisional routes run immediately and navigation changes only when the selected route improves.

- Optimizes same-tick badge and stored-firearm queries, firing-position prefilters, failed path retries, incremental water/lava searches, tactical ally queries and loot scoring; reduces repeated reflection and unnecessary audit string construction.

- Reuses same-tick owner-protection spatial queries while checking each target's relationships live. Single-pass equipment classification, cached roster ordering, independent read throttling and leaner pagination reduce repeated work. Bulk recalls of loaded soldiers are also processed incrementally; individual recalls remain immediate.

- Retreat route selection is incremental, with at most four candidate path attempts per human per tick. Usable provisional routes run while selection continues; duplicate planning, repeated candidate paths and unnecessary navigation restarts are avoided.

- Loot scoring is incremental, examining at most 64 new candidates per tick while retaining committed-pile priority. Inventory changes invalidate stale screening decisions. Passage checks allocate fewer collections, and predictive jumps avoid repeated shape probes of the same block.

- Firing-lane searches retain and process all candidates incrementally, distinguishing pending work from failure so shore fallbacks do not interrupt them. Repeated bow/crossbow absence scans and full scoring for supply-presence queries are reduced without changing weapon or supply priorities.

- Unloaded-soldier recall no longer blocks while loading chunks: at most four loading requests start per tick, with sixteen active recall tickets server-wide. Queue time does not consume the loading timeout. Routine roster refreshes avoid full entity NBT snapshots; saves and entity removal retain complete snapshots.

- Adds configurable beginner protection and natural-spawn unlock dates. By default, protection lasts one day; Roamers and Tiers I–III unlock on days 3, 5, 10, and 20. Automatic battle encounters respect these dates; support flares and hostile beacons remain unaffected.

- Adds `/hostilehumans day get/set/add/sync`. All dimensions share the Overworld calendar plus a saved offset. Sleeping advances the mod date, edited dates continue following the Overworld, and the offset can be reset to resynchronize.

- Missing options are added to existing configurations without resetting custom settings. Calendar offsets persist per world.

- Splits configuration into six module files under `config/hostile_humans_unified/`, preserving bilingual descriptions and firearm-list examples. Legacy settings migrate with a retained backup. New modules take precedence; malformed modules fall back independently without overwriting input or resetting other modules.