Latitude

A performance pass and one world-generation change on top of Beta 5: Latitude does less repeated work while chunks generate and while the HUD is on screen, and Mushroom Fields goes back to being a vanilla island. Beta: shipped for testing before the 1.5.1 stable tag.

Improved

• Less repeated work while chunks generate and while the HUD is on screen. A check for the Mushroom Fields island no longer runs heavy trigonometry for every block in the world, several per-column debug values are no longer computed when their debug switch is off, biome lookups on the compass HUD are cached per tick, and the loading-screen compass is drawn in far fewer draw calls. Apart from the Mushroom Fields change below, worlds generate exactly the same terrain and biomes: the same seed gives the same map, cell for cell.
• Mushroom Fields are vanilla islands again. Latitude no longer reserves a spot in the ocean and builds an island there. Mushroom Fields now appears exactly where vanilla would put it: on the low natural islands the terrain itself raises in the deepest ocean, in any climate band. The flat sea-level apron and stepped terraces of the built island are gone with it. Small worlds may have no Mushroom Fields at all, as in vanilla. Existing worlds keep any built island they have already generated; unexplored ocean follows the vanilla rule.

Fixed

• The create-world screen's "start with compass" choice no longer carries over into other saves opened later in the same session.
• Cycling the world size with the arrows no longer rebuilds the screen and steals keyboard focus from the world-name field.
• A closed create-world screen no longer stays in memory, together with the world data it loaded, until the game exits.
• When a /locate search is already running, the second player is now told whose search it is and that only one runs at a time, instead of being promised a result that never arrives.
• Development-only and unreachable code no longer ships inside the public jar.
• Reopening an existing Latitude world shows Latitude's loading screen from the start again instead of Minecraft's until the last second.

World-generation changes apply to newly generated terrain. Existing chunks keep their current biomes.