Hostile Humans Unified

This release consolidates equipment, configuration, personal progression, soldier feedback and combat-navigation changes since 3.5.5. Automated checks do not replace in-game acceptance testing.

#### Combat and movement continuity

- Retreats anticipate route endpoints and close pursuers' changing direction, retain existing routes while planning, and bridge exhausted ground routes with collision/floor-checked local steps. Idle recovery and movement helpers no longer overwrite retreat speed. Five-tick progress checks restore movement input before local recovery and independently budgeted path repair, without forcing intentional stationary behavior to move.

- Movement continuity after hits/landings now preserves native escape routes until replacements are ready, keeps retaliation from preempting retreat, and tracks actual progress across path changes. Shared navigation recovery handles moving recovery actions, clears stale movement input, and repairs interrupted retreat routes despite counterfire.

- Better Combat elevation handling shares attack origins and reachable in-box aim points across spacing and attacks, preserves pitch through windup, and handles tall/overhead/lowered targets without relaxing live range or visibility checks.

- Formally hired humans drop their full backpack and equipped inventory with original counts, durability and NBT. Death snapshots preserve hiring status and replace duplicate owned drops; hired reinforcements bypass temporary no-drop flags. Wild humans and unhired temporary support retain their existing rules.

- Better Combat windups retain opponent-facing orientation through delayed impact instead of turning toward navigation nodes. Ground/water movement remains available; facing releases after impact and yields to retreat or invalidated attacks. Hits still use live geometry and visibility.

- Owner logout preserves movement and combat orders, target acquisition and configured pickup. Following pauses when the owner is unavailable without stopping authorized combat; legacy automatic-standby flags are cleared.

- Automatic soldier messages now share per-owner budgets. Chatter defaults to a 60-second interval and three messages per five minutes; status reports have separate limits, bounded batching and deduplication, with critical health prioritized. Limits are configurable with bilingual comments; player-initiated hiring and command confirmations remain immediate.

- Mobile shield defense now restores interrupted ranged routes, preserves melee pursuit and participates in navigation stall recovery. Physical hit reactions are shortened without resetting damage immunity.

- Personal online progression replaces the world calendar. Rank unlocks and spawn equipment use the same nearby player's progress; sleep and vanilla time commands no longer advance difficulty. Commands can target an online player; world-time synchronization is removed. Timers settle in 200-tick batches with logout/shutdown settlement and read-only snapshots for asynchronous spawn queries.

#### Equipment, configuration and maintenance

- Reworked equipment integration: registered Spartan weapons/shields are imported once into native weighted configuration pools with persistent receipts. Spawn-time replacements were removed; deleting imported rows keeps them deleted. Custom weights are respected, and empty shield pools no longer create vanilla shields. Known stock guidance is refreshed without overwriting custom notes.

- Added `natural_spawn_firearms_enabled` for extra firearms in natural spawns and automatic natural battles. Existing firearm chances, whitelists and growth scaling remain; disabling it leaves other gear and existing entities untouched. Gunners retain their configured melee weapon, with both weapons counted toward the spawn cap.

- Unified spawn weapon caps: two for Roamers, three for Tier I–III. Conditional second/third rolls default to 55%/36%/9% for ordinary melee allocations, or 55%/45% for Roamers. Ranged backups and guns count toward the cap; extra weapons go into the backpack. Bonus pools only fill additional slots, never replace the main hand. Later looting and owner loadouts are not capped.

- Lowered default Roamer armor to 60% leather, 30% chainmail and 10% iron, removing diamond and high-end Immersive Armors sets. The default pool is weighted below Tier I. Only the exact former stock Roamer armor pool is migrated; custom entries/weights and other ranks are preserved. Existing gear, owner loadouts and loot pickup are not reset.

- Fixed prolonged retreat after melee humans, including Roamers, recover their health. Once actual health meets the resume threshold and is no longer low, the minimum retreat commitment can end without a mandatory 24-block gap. Short-lived pressure retreats remain protected; stopped retreat goals release their escape routes and flags, including shore handoffs.

- Fixes melee stalemates on steps and near attack-range edges. Spacing requires actual weapon hitbox eligibility and visibility, not nominal reach alone; Better Combat aligns its upswing and impact with the opponent, including height differences. Explicit melee backsteps/flanks are distinct from stale ranged strafing. Failed paths retain pursuit retries; 30 ticks without actual movement trigger a rate-limited alternate-route attempt, with a brief execution window that ends immediately on target change. Defense/weapon interruptions retain valid targets; hold-position and retreat rules remain intact.

- Separates hostile wild-human dialogue from hired soldiers' daily, command and status responses. Adds Chinese/English localization and speaker names, without friendly soldiers using eviction lines.

- Radio commands and direct interactions share feedback. Owners receive food-exhaustion and actual equipment-break notices; equipment switches do not count as breakage.

- Synchronizes recruitment terms to clients so contract descriptions match server payment. Invalid item settings reject payment; when contracts are also currency, the held hiring contract is reserved for its separate consumption.

- Configuration upgrades fill missing options and bilingual guidance while preserving custom values and malformed files. Damage guidance explains multiplicative global/tier factors and prevents firearm bullets from also receiving melee scaling.

- Documents fractional natural-spawn multipliers. Removes the Roamer's extra 1/200 gate and duplicate low-weight entry, sharing the common admission policy while retaining its weight-10 single-unit entry and existing date, safety, light, density and cooldown checks.

- Adds optional natural equipment progression, reaching baseline quality on days 40, 50, 70 and 80 by default. Start dates, early equipment, firearm chances, enchantments, totems and tridents are configurable. Progress applies at spawn, not to existing units; flares, beacons, eggs, commands and fixed structure units are exempt.

- Moves equipment customization into the seventh module, `equipment.json`, with shared melee, ranged, reserve, offhand, shield and weighted armor pools for all four ranks. Supports mod items, quantities and enchantments; removes legacy equipment datapack loading and the separate Tier III enhancement patch.

- Unifies native gear and optional Spartan weapons/shields, Immersive Armors and TaCZ generation with per-rank switches, followed by reserves and progression. Removes duplicate ranged rolls and Tier III generation passes.

- Fixes the Curios badge slot namespace and player assignment, retaining all five badge tags. Reads functional badge slots only and includes Tier III in the existing back-slot assignment.

- Rejects boats, Create seats and other mounts, clearing saved riding/sitting state to prevent automatic mounting from disabling combat. Autonomous targeting includes Endermen while respecting soldier modes and faction relationships.

- Removes the old chest-seeking/lid-opening goal, associated block-entity mixin, interface and setting. Ground-item pickup and soldier inventories remain available.

- Incoming-arrow prediction accounts for drag, gravity and both entities' motion. Ranged attacks and predictive blocks use bounded interruption windows with consistent defensive facing; quiet distant threats no longer sustain blocking. Defensive movement does not inherit jump conflicts or stale loaded gunfire timers.

- Applies pickup permissions consistently across movement/combat modes and incidental pickup. Area-guard items and routes remain within the area; stopping pickup does not cancel a newly started combat route.

- Replaces `HostileHumansEquipmentPatch` with formal inventory custody and shield-durability modules. Single-slot exchanges scan all 30 backpack slots; pickup commits only with sufficient total capacity, and stowing has a world-drop fallback. If another mod cancels the drop, replacement aborts without losing the old equipment or committing a partial inventory transfer.

- Vanilla and TaCZ shield wear share one policy, retaining player-style durability and Unbreaking for hired soldiers. Rejects non-finite damage and prevents durability-cost overflow. Break sounds/reports share per-slot deduplication without treating offhand swaps as breakage.

- Removes unregistered water/trident goals, an empty goal base, replaced movement controller, no-op naming bridge, inactive flurry state and unused legacy options. Deletes empty combat-task refresh calls, a write-only jump cooldown and ineffective periodic work.

- Uses the formal spawn pipeline directly. Melee reserves are generated only at spawn rather than manufactured periodically after loss or breakage; existing tools and empty-handed retaliation remain available.

- Normalizes legacy configuration aliases once instead of repeating fallbacks in runtime getters. Retains necessary save/config migrations, animation bridges and optional-mod entrypoints.

- Shares armor, hand and backpack NBT codecs. Empty saves remove stale keys, preventing removed items from reappearing when a tag is reused, while preserving slot, durability and item-NBT formats.

- Removes unused `basePatch` resource overlays and updates both READMEs, configuration guidance and audit records. Adds item-conservation, empty-save, growth-boundary, wiring and packaged-artifact checks; independent checks do not replace in-game testing.