Routes

The road-building update — and Routes stops being a Cobblemon mod. 🛣️

⛰️ Roads stop diving underground at the first hill

• A small rise no longer turns a road into a tunnel. The decision was being made on the height of whatever was standing on the ground instead of the ground itself, so a wooded hillock — sometimes a single tall spruce on the route — read as a mountain. The road would bore a sealed pocket a few blocks under the surface while the rest of it carried on over the top, and you would find a stretch of road buried under your feet with no way in or out. Roads now measure the land, and a tunnel is only dug through a hill that is genuinely in the way and long enough to be worth a passage. (#112)
• Tunnel mouths are junctions you can walk through. Where a bore ends, the road now comes down to meet its floor — cutting an approach or raising an embankment over the last stretch — instead of stopping against a wall of rock with the passage sitting below it. The passage keeps going until it genuinely reaches daylight, and the road picks it up level, one step at most. (#112)
• Roads are planned against the mountains that are actually there. The height the planner worked from was sampled before the noise that turns a smooth ridge into a jagged peak, so in high country — windswept hills, groves, jagged peaks — the world stood many blocks above what the plan believed. A road would be laid across a mountain the plan never saw, and then paved over its spikes one by one. The profile a road is built on now reads the real, jagged terrain. (#112)
• Roads are graded. A road was laid on whatever the ground happened to do, so crossing broken country it became a staircase of drops nobody could climb — an audit over one mountain range found thirty-nine unwalkable steps on open road, one of them fifty-one blocks tall. Roads are now built to their planned profile, cutting into a rise and embanking across a dip to hold the climb the "maximum grade" setting allows. The full width of the road sits at one height too, so it never straddles an edge with half of itself dropping away. (#112)

🌉 Water is crossed on top of it

• Bridges are built above the water, not on the riverbed. The height a road was planned at came from the ground under the water, so a crossing dived to the river bottom and the bridge was decked down there with the river flowing over it. A road now rises to meet its crossing and the deck rides clear of the surface. (#117)
• Deep water is crossed on the surface too. Paved, lantern-lit corridors along the seabed are gone: a stretch of water is either a bridge or an open lane you swim or sail, whatever its depth. (#117)
• A bridge holds its height. The step that keeps a road's climb gentle treats anything standing proud of its surroundings as a bump to flatten — and a crossing standing clear of the water is exactly that, so a bank a little lower than the waterline dragged whole spans back under. The waterline is now a floor the smoothing cannot go beneath, and approaches rise to meet it like a causeway. (#117)
• A bridge that runs out into open water ends in a slipway. Where a deck meets a stretch you swim, its last span comes down flush with the surface, so you step off it into the water instead of finding the planks stop in mid-air a block above it. (#117)
• The road does not fill the sea. A road decides what it is from its centre line but is wider than that, so along a shore part of its width stood in open water and was built up to meet the rest — raising banks of earth out of the sea. Water is crossed or swum, never filled in. (#117)

📐 Diagonal roads and tunnels stop duplicating their fittings

• A road running diagonally is the same road as one running straight. Everything was laid out against the nearest compass direction rather than the way the road was actually going: diagonal roads came out half again as wide, and because the compass direction flipped from one block to the next along a diagonal, handrails, tunnel frames, bridge pillars and lamp posts were placed on all four sides at once. They now follow the road's real direction. (#114)
• Fittings come in the right quantity. A tunnel frame is two posts and a beam, not a five-post wall; a lantern row is a lantern on each side, not five. And they are spaced by distance travelled, so a curving or diagonal road spaces them like a straight one instead of stretching every gap. (#114)

🛤️ Roads leave town like roads, not like a pair of tracks

• Roads heading the same way are one road until they part. A town connects to each of its neighbours separately, and nothing in that ever considered direction — so two neighbours lying the same way each got their own road, and the pair ran side by side for as long as they had a bearing in common. Now they share a single road, and it forks exactly where the destinations pull apart: roads bound for nearly the same place stay together almost the whole way and separate at the end, while roads that diverge at once never merge at all. A fan of several destinations comes out as a tree of forks rather than a bundle of parallel tracks, and every fork is signposted. (#111)
• A road starts at the edge of town, not in the middle of it. Roads stopped a fixed twenty blocks from a settlement's centre point — but that point is where the game starts building a village, not where the village ends, so the road was paving its way in among the houses. A road now stops at the town's real edge and hands over to the street it meets there. (#112)

🪧 Signposts

• Roadside fingerposts. Every so often along a road there is now a post telling you which road you are on and which way each of its towns lies — not only at the junctions and the town gates. (#111)
• A fork out on the water gets a jetty to stand on. Roads fork where their destinations part, and that can fall in a lake or a bay; the signpost there had nothing to stand on, so the junction went unmarked at exactly the spot you most need telling which way to go. It now gets a small railed deck on piles, lit, and the sign stands on that. (#111)

🏘️ "Spawn in city" means a city

• A new world's spawn lands in a settlement that is really there. The spawn was placed from the same quick read of the world seed the road network uses, which says where a village may generate — the game still has to build it, and sometimes it does not, so players were being put down in an empty field with roads leading to it. The spawn now checks with the game itself, for every kind of village the mod builds roads to. It also lands you on dry, solid ground, so a town on a shore no longer drops you in the water. If it cannot tell either way it still uses the nearest town rather than leaving you in the wilderness, and /routes debug spawn places it on demand for a world that has already had its one attempt.

🛣️ Roads wander a quarter less

• Roads bend a little less for the same route curviness setting, at every value of it. They still follow the country rather than ruling a line across it; they just stop weaving for its own sake.

• Ops get step reporting in /routes debug gaps: every place a tunnel, a bridge or a road hands over to the next at an unwalkable height is listed with its coordinates and the size of the step, so a broken hand-off is a number instead of something you have to spot from the air. (#112)

🌍 New worlds start with a map worth looking at

• Spawn pregeneration — a new world now quietly generates a circle of chunks around spawn the first time you enter it, so your first look at the map already shows towns and the roads between them instead of an empty grid. It runs in the background and never delays getting into the world. Set the size on the ROUTES tab at world creation, or set it to 0 if you would rather it did not. Worlds that already exist get it once, on the next time you load them. (#130)

🪢 The Escape Rope moves to Cobblemon Nuzlocke & Soul Link

The rope goes with the rest of the Pokémon content. Its most important rule — you cannot rope your way out of a battle — was the last thing this mod asked of Cobblemon, and Routes now has no Escape Rope, no items at all, and not one line that mentions Cobblemon.

Install Cobblemon Nuzlocke & Soul Link 1.1.0 and nothing changes: the rope crafts the same, works the same, and still takes you to the nearest town of the road network. Every rope you already own survives, wherever it is sitting — in a chest, a shulker, an item frame, or a world made before the mod was even renamed. Nothing to redo, nothing to craft again. (#123, #127)

If you don't install it, you lose the rope and keep everything else — the roads, the towns, the map, the waypoints.

🎛️ Change any setting without remaking the world

• /routes config — list shows every setting and what it currently is, get asks about one, and set changes it (operators only), with reset putting it back to the mod's default. Every option the create-world screen offers is there, with the same limits: the command refuses a value the slider could not have produced.
• A change sticks. It applies immediately and is written into the world, so it is still there after a restart — the whole point, since the settings you chose at world creation used to be the only ones you would ever get.
• A Config button on the mod list, on both loaders — Mod Menu on Fabric, the mod list on NeoForge. That screen edits the defaults new worlds start from; a world already in progress has its own settings, which is what /routes config and the create-world tab are for.

💬 The commands answer in your language

• /routes speaks Spanish now — the network summary, the town and route listings, what is nearest to you and what the chunk you stand on is painted as. Command output was the last corner of the mod still hard-coded in English.
• The generator's diagnostics moved out of the way. The seven gen2… tools are now /routes debug bench, debug towns, debug graph, debug paint, debug areas, debug verify and debug gaps, alongside debug structures. They used to sit in the same list as the commands you actually use, so typing /routes offered gen2gaps before list. Their output stays in English on purpose: it is read next to the server log.

📍 Map markers you can filter

• Towns, routes and areas each get their own Xaero waypoint set — Settlements, Routes and Areas — so you can show or hide a whole category from Xaero's own waypoint screen, and the mod's markers stop landing in among your personal ones. Markers you already have are matched by position, so updating never leaves you with two of anything.
• Activating a waystone no longer drops a second marker on its own town. The waystone still takes the town's name; the town is still discovered. It just stops arriving twice. (#93)

⚙️ The world-creation tab actually configures the world

This is the big one, and it is a fix rather than a feature.

• What you pick on the ROUTES tab is what your world gets. The tab saved your choices with the world and the generator then went and read the config file instead, so most of that screen quietly did nothing — the road surface, Routes per city, Cities include, spawn-in-city. Every option on the tab is now the one your world actually runs on, each time you load it.
• Your global settings stay yours. A world's rules apply for as long as you are in that world and your own defaults come back when you leave, so playing one world can never rewrite the settings the next one starts from.
• The road knobs are on the tab now — road width, longest road, curviness and steepest climb. They were hidden precisely because of the disconnection above; with it fixed, they belong in front of you where the rest of the road settings are.
• Cities include folds up. The structure list is one line you expand, showing how many you have ticked, instead of several hundred toggles burying every option underneath it. It still lists every structure your world actually has, grouped by the mod each comes from. (#131)

✨ The chunk paint toggles instantly

• Turning Chunk paint off and back on used to make the world map re-render itself both times. It now flips like the layer it always looked like. (#64)
• The tint and colour controls no longer write the config file to disk on every single step of a slider drag, which is what made dragging them feel sticky.

🛣️ It runs on a plain Minecraft world now

Roads, towns, named routes and areas, waypoints and the painted map have nothing to do with Pokémon — so from this version Cobblemon is not required, and is not even declared as a dependency. Install Routes on a vanilla-ish pack and it works. Install it next to Cobblemon and nothing changes.

⚔️ Route trainers moved to Cobblemon Nuzlocke & Soul Link

The trainers that stand along the roads, challenge you on sight, and duel each other were the last Pokémon feature living in here. They now ship in Cobblemon Nuzlocke & Soul Link 1.1.0, together with their settings — trainer density, sight range, challenge delay, skirmishes and the trainer entity id, which have left the ROUTES tab and the config file and turn up on the NUZLOCKE tab instead.

If you play with route trainers, install that mod (1.1.0 or newer) and carry on. Your world remembers exactly which stretches of road it has already populated, so nothing is placed twice and no route suddenly doubles up on trainers.

If you don't, you lose nothing you were using, and the mod no longer asks you to install Cobblemon to get roads.

The gyms beside towns went with them, for the same reason: the gym list is COBBLEVERSE's and the markers are named after Gym Leaders. Towns still get a gym placed right next to them — it is Cobblemon Nuzlocke & Soul Link that places it now, and the setting moved to the NUZLOCKE tab under the same name. Worlds in progress keep every gym they already have, and no town is given a second one.

Two smaller things go with them: the "you can't Escape Rope out of a battle" check now asks Cobblemon politely and simply doesn't apply when it isn't installed; and the battle-crash guard from 1.0.6 (#31) moved into the Nuzlocke mod, which is where the battles it protects come from.

Removed

• Every route-trainer setting: route_trainers, route_trainer_entity, route_trainer_density, trainer_los_range, route_trainer_challenge_delay_ticks, route_trainer_skirmishes. They keep the same names in the Nuzlocke mod, so worlds in progress keep their choices.
• The Gyms beside towns setting, and the gym structure list that came with it. Both live in the Nuzlocke mod now, under the same names.
• The Escape Rope, and with it every item this mod had. It lives in Cobblemon Nuzlocke & Soul Link now, and answers to all three of the ids it has ever had so no world loses the ropes it holds.
• Cobblemon as a dependency, on both loaders and on both stores.

Closes #128, closes #126, closes #64, closes #93, closes #123, closes #127, closes #130, closes #131.