XercaPaint — Update Notes

A survival-focused update that turns painting into a real resource loop, spreads paintings across the world, and adds server-side control. All new mechanics are off or non-invasive by default — nothing changes for existing worlds unless you opt in.

✨ New Features

🎨 Paint costs dye (per-colour charge)

Painting is no longer free. The palette now stores a separate paint charge for each of the 16 basic colours.

• Refill a colour by crafting the palette together with that dye — orange dye refills only orange, blue only blue, and so on (+256 per dye, up to 4096 per colour by default).
• While painting, each pixel consumes charge from the colour it uses. Mixed/custom colours are estimated against the basic colours available on your palette and consume them proportionally.
• The palette tooltip shows the remaining paint for every unlocked colour.
• Fully configurable and disabled by default (see Configuration). Creative mode never consumes paint.

🖼️ Paintings in world generation

Canvases, easels and palettes can now be found while exploring:

• Cartographer houses (villages): a palette (~40%) and an easel (~25%).
• Woodland mansions: a large canvas (~50%).

Implemented as Global Loot Modifiers, so they cleanly add to the target chests only.

💰 Villager & wandering trader trades

• Cartographer: blank canvas (novice), easel (apprentice), large canvas (journeyman) for emeralds.
• Wandering trader: painter's palette.
• Toggleable via config.

🏆 Advancements

A proper advancement branch with toasts: The Artist's Way (craft a palette) → Blank Canvas (get a canvas) → At the Easel (get an easel).

🔒 Protected (waxed) paintings

Wax a signed painting with a honeycomb in the crafting grid to lock it. Waxed paintings can no longer be edited on an easel — perfect for preserving finished artwork on shared servers. The tooltip marks them as Protected.

⚙️ Server configuration

A new server config file (xercapaint-server.toml) with grouped sections:

• [painting] — dyeCostEnabled (default false), chargePerDye, maxCharge.
• [import] — importEnabled, importRequiresOp, importOpLevel (gate /paintimport on public servers).
• [trades] — villagerTradesEnabled.

Note: server configs are per-world (saves/<world>/serverconfig/ in singleplayer, world/serverconfig/ on a dedicated server). The file in the global config/ folder is only the template for new worlds.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fixed dedicated-server crash: client-only packet handlers (e.g. CloseGuiPacketHandler) are no longer loaded on the server. Packet registration is now split by physical side.
• Fixed world-load crash: the config was being read before it was loaded during world creation; all config access now safely falls back to defaults until the config is available.
• Fixed broken drop loot: paintings/easels/palettes were dropping from every block due to an invalid loot condition id (minecraft:loot_table_id → neoforge:loot_table_id). Drops are now correctly restricted to their target chests.

➕ New Recipes

• Palette from wooden slabs — an alternative to the planks recipe:

  slab slab slab
  slab slab

• Wax canvas — signed canvas + honeycomb → protected canvas.

🔧 Under the Hood

• The 16 basic palette colours now live in a single shared source (PaletteUtil.BASIC_COLORS) used by both client rendering and server-side charge accounting, guaranteeing they always match.
• Crafting dyes onto a palette now preserves its other data (custom colours and existing charges) instead of resetting it.