2.12.1

The ocean actually goes somewhere now.

Waves were always a bit of a con. A cork on a swell goes round in a circle and ends up where it started, so you could park in the middle of the sea, go get a snack, and be exactly where you left off. Currents are the boring honest version: water that is genuinely moving and will take you with it whether you noticed or not.

There's four of them. Wind drags the surface along at about 3% of its speed but shoves it sideways as it goes, and each layer down gets pushed round a bit further, so if you dive deep enough the water is running backwards. That's a real thing, some Norwegian guys figured it out in the 1890s because their ship kept drifting the wrong way. Tides now actually flow instead of just going up and down, fastest halfway between high and low water and dead still at the top and bottom. Waves hitting a beach at an angle drag water along it, and that water escapes back out to sea through narrow channels that will absolutely take you with them. And there's big slow permanent wheels of water locked to world coordinates, so if you find one going your way it's a free ride, forever, same spot every time.

The depth thing is the good bit. Currents get read at whatever depth you actually are, so a boat and a sub 30 blocks under it feel completely different water. Picking a depth is a real decision now.

Which is what the Current Locator is for. New block. Craft it with prismarine crystals, copper and a compass, stick it on the seabed or bolt it to your sub, and the water fills up with little darts of light riding the actual current. Blue is slow, red is fast, head for the red. It also tells you which depth has the best flow in the direction you're already pointing, which is the number a submarine actually wants.

The arrows were a bit much for me so now there's colour, brightness, size and a switch to stop them moving. Cool Blues at about 0.4 brightness is nice if the rainbow is a lot.

The readout for the current locator can be in any corner now.

The coastline scanner fires rays sideways from that height, and from one block too high every ray immediately hits air and it decides there's land two blocks away in every direction. In the open ocean. Both answers went in the same cache and whichever one refreshed last won, so it kept swapping between "open sea" and "you're on a beach". The two answers were 179.8 degrees apart. Fixed, and there's a test suite with actual terrain in it now so it can't come back quietly.

Everything's off with one switch if you'd rather not have any of it, and it's all server-side in multiplayer so nobody argues about which way the sea is going.