Scythe Mod Update 5.2

A major stability and gameplay correctness update focused on persistent ability state, Withering Minion lifecycle, Farmer Scythe compatibility, projectile reliability, combat targeting, multiplayer behavior, and cross-version consistency.

Fixed

Persistent Ability Cooldowns

Scythe ability cooldowns are now stored as persistent server gameplay state.

• Active cooldowns no longer reset when the player leaves and rejoins the server.
• Active cooldowns no longer reset after a server restart.
• Remaining cooldown time is preserved across reconnects.
• Blood Harvest now uses the same persistent cooldown system as other scythe abilities.

Bloody Scythe

Blood Harvest

Blood Harvest targeting and failure handling have been corrected.

• Blood Harvest now remembers the exact players marked when the ability is activated.
• Only killing one of those marked players can complete the Harvest.
• Killing an unrelated player during the Harvest window no longer counts as a successful Harvest.
• Logging out during an active Blood Harvest no longer allows the player to escape the failure penalty.
• Leaving the server during the kill window now records the Harvest as failed.
• The normal Blood Harvest failure effects are applied when the player next joins.
• Blood Harvest targeting now uses a true spherical radius instead of the previous cube-shaped effective area.

Blood Blender

• Blood Blender now remembers which hand was used to activate it.
• Main-hand and off-hand activation now follow the same combat behavior.

Withering Scythe Minions

Withering Minion ownership and lifecycle handling have been significantly reworked.

Persistent Minion Ownership

Minion limits are now tracked through a persistent owner-based registry instead of only searching for nearby entities.

• Minions remain associated with their owner even when their chunk is unloaded.
• Minions in another dimension still count toward the owner’s minion limit.
• Moving far away from existing minions can no longer be used to bypass the maximum minion count.
• Unloaded minions are no longer incorrectly treated as missing or removed from the registry.

Distance and Dimension Handling

Minions now safely return when they can no longer remain with their owner.

• If a minion moves more than 160 blocks away from its owner, it is returned instead of remaining abandoned in the world.
• If the owner changes dimension, existing minions are returned rather than attempting to follow the owner using coordinates from the wrong dimension.
• Returned minions refund souls according to their remaining health using the existing health-based refund rules.
• Soul refunds no longer depend on the player still holding or carrying the same Withering Scythe at the exact moment the minion is returned.
• Refunds that cannot immediately be stored are kept safely and applied once an appropriate Withering Scythe becomes available.

Logout Persistence

Withering Minions now handle owner disconnects safely.

• When the owner logs out, their active minions are removed from the world and stored as dormant minions.
• Dormant minions preserve their remaining health.
• Dormant minions preserve their remaining lifetime.
• Minions are restored near their owner when the player returns.
• Logging out no longer destroys active minions or silently loses their invested souls.

If a minion cannot immediately be restored:

• The game retries restoration up to 5 times.
• Restore attempts occur once per second.
• The dormant snapshot remains persistent between attempts.
• If no valid spawn position can be found after all attempts, the minion is safely removed and its appropriate soul refund is returned to the owner.

Minion Spawning

Minion summoning now validates the spawn location before committing the summon.

• The game searches for a collision-free position around the player.
• Minions are no longer intentionally spawned inside invalid or obstructed spaces.
• Souls are not consumed if no valid spawn position can be found.
• Durability is not consumed for a failed summon.

Farmer Scythe

Protection and Permission Compatibility

Farmer Scythe world interactions now execute with the actual player as their source.

This applies to:

• Crop harvesting.
• Mass Harvest.
• Growth Acceleration.
• Area tilling.
• Other Farmer Scythe block modifications.

As a result:

• Claim and region protection mods can correctly identify the player performing the action.
• Protected blocks can reject Farmer Scythe actions normally.
• An invalid or protected block can be skipped without preventing the ability from processing other valid positions.
• Farmer Scythe automation no longer behaves like anonymous server-side block modification.

Growth Acceleration Persistence

The “one boost per planting” rule is now persistent.

• Accelerated crops remain marked after server restarts.
• Relogging no longer allows the same planting to receive another Growth Acceleration boost.
• The stored state tracks the dimension, block position, crop type, and crop growth state.
• Normal growth after acceleration does not incorrectly clear the marker.
• Replanting a crop at the same position correctly creates a new planting that can be accelerated again.
• Replacing the crop with another crop also clears stale acceleration state.
• Crops removed by automation, environmental effects, or other non-standard paths no longer permanently poison that block position.

Bountiful Harvest Drop Handling

Passive doubled drops now use the final result of the normal drop pipeline instead of recalculating the crop loot table.

This improves compatibility with:

• Fortune.
• Silk Touch where applicable.
• Loader drop hooks.
• Modded loot modifications.
• Modified crop drops.
• Cancelled or replaced drop events.

The Farmer Scythe now duplicates the actual resulting drops rather than independently generating another set of loot.

Fire Scythe

Lock-On Fireball

The homing fireball now preserves its target more reliably.

• The locked target UUID is saved with the projectile.
• Fireballs no longer permanently lose their target simply because the target entity or chunk was temporarily unloaded.
• After losing access to the entity, the fireball attempts to reacquire its saved target for up to 2 seconds.
• If the target becomes available again during that window, homing resumes.
• Dead targets and targets that move into another dimension correctly release the lock.

Target visibility has also been corrected.

• Initial lock-on now requires line of sight.
• Fireballs can no longer initially lock onto targets through solid walls.
• A locked fireball receives a 1-second line-of-sight grace period when its target briefly passes behind an obstacle.
• Short obstructions no longer immediately destroy the lock.
• If visibility remains blocked beyond the grace period, the target lock is released.

Toxic Scythe

Toxic Orb Persistence

• Toxic Orb acidity is now saved with the projectile.
• Acid-enhanced Toxic Orbs no longer lose their acidity after chunk unloading, entity serialization, or world reloads.
• This behavior is now consistent across supported versions.

Golden Scythe

Persistent Golden Marks

Golden Scythe marks now survive normal server lifecycle events.

• Marked entities remain marked when their owner disconnects.
• Golden marks survive server restarts.
• Marks remain associated with the correct player.
• Dead or invalid marked targets are cleaned up normally.

Golden Rain

Golden Rain now charges only for targets that were actually newly marked.

• Already marked entities are no longer counted as new applications.
• Repeatedly casting Golden Rain over the same targets no longer charges the full cost for effects that were already active.
• Golden Rain now uses a true spherical radius.

Midas Touch

• Midas Touch can no longer select entities through solid blocks.
• Entity targeting is now limited by the first blocking surface along the player’s line of sight.

Combat Targeting

Area-based offensive abilities now use a shared targeting system.

This affects abilities including:

• Blood Harvest.
• Toxic Aura.
• Toxic Orb.
• Withering Aura.
• Frozen Storm.
• Golden Scythe area marking.

Spherical Ranges

• Ability radii are now actual spherical distances.
• Bounding boxes are only used to find possible targets before the real distance check.
• Targets in the far corners of the old cube-shaped search areas are no longer incorrectly affected.

Valid Enemy Filtering

Combat-oriented abilities now distinguish valid hostile targets more consistently.

• Allied players are excluded.
• Friendly entities are excluded where appropriate.
• Unintended passive animals are no longer treated as combat enemies by offensive scythe abilities.
• Target filtering is now consistent between abilities instead of each ability implementing slightly different rules.

Freezing and Withering Damage

Damage attribution has been corrected for damage-over-time effects.

Freezing

• Freezing damage now retains the player who originally applied the effect.
• Kills caused by Freezing can correctly credit the Scythe user.
• Vanilla and modded systems receive more consistent kill attribution.

Withering

• Withering damage applied by the Withering Scythe now retains the actual player source.
• Soul rewards and normal kill attribution now use the same owner information.
• Scythe-applied Withering is no longer treated like unrelated environmental Wither damage where player attribution is available.

Freezing Effect Timing

Freezing damage timing is now consistent across supported Minecraft versions.

• All versions now use the same elapsed-time damage model.
• Refreshing the Freezing effect no longer unexpectedly changes the phase of its damage ticks.
• 1.21.11 no longer follows different Freezing damage timing from the other supported targets.

Death Reward Safety

Forge and NeoForge death handling has been made safer around other mods.

Rewards are now finalized only after the death is confirmed.

This applies to systems including:

• Withering soul collection.
• Frozen Heart rewards.
• Essence-related kill rewards.
• Blood Harvest completion.

If another mod cancels or prevents a death:

• Scythe Mod no longer grants rewards for that cancelled death.
• Blood Harvest is not incorrectly completed.
• Souls and other kill rewards are not awarded for an entity that ultimately survived.

Changed

Farmer Scythe Performance

Large-radius Farmer Scythe abilities have been optimized without reducing their gameplay area.

• Spherical block offsets are now calculated once and reused.
• Large-area abilities no longer rebuild the full radius geometry on every activation.
• Block scans reuse mutable positions instead of creating thousands of temporary position objects.
• The Mass Harvest and Growth Acceleration radius remains unchanged.
• A radius-20 scan still covers the same 33,401 block positions as before.

This reduces repeated CPU work and temporary object allocation when using large Farmer Scythe abilities.

Combat Attribution Tracking

Temporary combat attribution state has been redesigned.

• Player entities are no longer held through long-lived strong references.
• Attribution stores player UUIDs instead.
• Expired entries are removed automatically.
• Cleanup is now periodically batched rather than scanning temporary attribution state every server tick.
• Runtime state is cleared safely during server shutdown.

This prevents old combat records from unnecessarily accumulating during long-running server sessions.

Runtime State Handling

Several gameplay systems now share persistent world-level state instead of depending on the lifetime of the current player session or Java process.

Persistent state now covers systems including:

• Ability cooldowns.
• Pending Blood Harvest failures.
• Withering Minion ownership.
• Dormant Withering Minions.
• Pending Withering soul refunds.
• Farmer Growth Acceleration markers.
• Golden Scythe marks.

This makes relogs, chunk unloading and server restarts behave consistently with the intended gameplay rules.

Technical

Cross-Version Compatibility

Updated version-specific code paths for supported Minecraft and loader targets.

• Updated player permission checks for the 1.21.11 API.
• Updated entity position and world access for 1.21.11.
• Updated dimension-key handling for the 26.x API.
• Corrected player-attributed Freezing and Withering damage source creation across Fabric, Forge and NeoForge.

Regression Coverage

Expanded cross-version regression checks for the systems changed in 5.2.

Coverage now includes:

• Persistent cooldowns.
• Blood Harvest marked targets and logout failure handling.
• Withering Minion ownership, restoration and refunds.
• Farmer Scythe permissions and persistent crop state.
• Farmer final-drop duplication.
• Spherical combat targeting.
• Toxic Orb serialization.
• Fireball target serialization and reacquisition.
• Fireball line-of-sight handling.
• Golden mark persistence.
• Freezing and Withering damage attribution.
• Freezing tick parity.
• Cancelled death-event handling.
• Runtime state cleanup.
• Version-specific API compatibility across all supported targets.