The Unburied — Forest Horror

# The Unburied 1.2.0 — The Forest Remembers

The forest encounters now use deliberate stalking, changing pursuit patterns and
periods of recovery. The headless watchman and the recurring haunting remain the
center of the mod.

## Stalking and hunting

- Added explicit watching, stalking, direct pursuit, silent pursuit, ambush, false
  retreat, attack wind-up and recovery states.
- A discovered watcher can hold a motionless stare before retreating through the
  forest. Looking at it does not automatically make it vanish immediately.
- Added bounded flank searches and a short recent-position trail for indirect
  approaches. Repositioning uses navigation rather than repeated teleportation.
- Stage I favors cautious stalking. Stages II and III can choose ambush routes and
  more determined pursuit.
- Melee attacks now have a visible preparation and recovery interval. Stage III
  has a twenty-tick wind-up, and stepping out of range can cancel the strike.
- The hit rechecks line of sight at execution: moving behind newly placed cover
  during the wind-up can cancel damage rather than using a stale sightline.
- Stuck navigation attempts bounded recovery, then ends the encounter if it cannot
  recover. Existing encounter timeouts and opportunities to escape remain.

## Haunting Director and atmosphere

- Added a server-owned, individually saved pacing state: hidden tension,
  atmosphere deadlines and quiet recovery after scares or escapes.
- Added sparse positional footsteps, branch-like wood snaps, stage-specific
  murmurs and brief client-only ash traces.
- Some event deadlines deliberately produce a longer quiet interval.
- Director events respect night, forest, Overworld, respite, unavailable players
  and AFK protection. They do not change terrain or load distant chunks.
- Preserved the existing suppression of an ordinary repeating ambient-mob sound
  loop for bound stalkers; sparse director cues now add deliberate pacing.

## Animations and jumpscares

- Added behavior-aware poses for still observation, cautious movement, pursuit,
  attack preparation, recovery, damage recoil and death settling.
- Reset rig transforms before each world render to prevent poses carrying over
  between entities or from a previous action.
- Added forward-rush, side-reach and distant-glimpse jumpscare presentations.
  Variants reuse the actual model, stage textures and existing custom stingers.
- Prevent overlapping presentations and reject events in inappropriate gameplay
  states. Disconnecting, menus, loading overlays, sleep and world changes clear
  the active presentation and its stinger.
- Added client controls for jumpscares, overlay motion, optional subdued red
  flashing, personal atmosphere and sound intensity. Screen flashing defaults off.
- The default natural jumpscare cooldown remains 7,200 active-world ticks
  (six minutes at 20 TPS), tracked individually and saved with the world.

## The Lost Watchman

- Added the rare Abandoned Watchpost to supported forests in newly generated
  terrain. The small ruined lookout uses vanilla timber, mossy stone, a broken
  platform, cobwebs and a loot chest.
- Added Torn Watchman's Journal, Faded Patrol Notes and Unmarked Burial Record.
  Reading reveals a concise localized fragment privately to its reader.
- Watchpost chests contain one random lore fragment and modest vanilla supplies;
  they do not bypass final-stage rewards.
- Lore is optional and has no quest or progression requirement.

## Configuration and safeguards

- Added validated server settings for encounters, progression, pacing, difficulty,
  biome rules, global/local stalker limits, spawn protection, AFK protection and
  optional watchposts.
- Added explicit owner checks at the attack and natural-jumpscare paths.
- Added duplicate-owner cleanup in the natural encounter scheduler.
- Spawn candidates avoid the player's immediate forward view and respect player
  clearance, collision, fluid, terrain, world-border and loaded-region checks.
- Added world-unload/server-stop cleanup for ephemeral director presence and trails.
- New saved pacing fields safely default when loading older haunting records.
- Fixed the Windows Gradle wrapper to return the actual Java/Gradle exit code
  instead of masking failures when the batch script exits.

## Preserved gameplay

The default cycle still starts with three Minecraft calendar days of observation,
followed by three increasingly dangerous hunt stages:

| Stage | Health | Base damage | XP |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| I | 40 HP | 5 | 12 |
| II | 54 HP | 7 | 18 |
| III | 70 HP | 9 | 26 |

Deaths during the mature hunting phase advance the personal stage, capped at III.
Defeating the bound stalker grants 24,000 active-world ticks of peace, then the
three-day observation cycle starts again. Sleeping advances calendar observation
but does not shorten active-tick respite or jumpscare cooldowns.

Existing stage textures, progressive coat wear, entity/item IDs, recipes, rewards,
Watcher's Charm, Gravebound Charm and optional forest biome tags remain.

## Scope and verification

This release adds no new model geometry or custom audio recordings. It extends
poses and presentations on the existing rig and uses the mod's existing OGG assets,
plus a vanilla wood-break cue. Quiet recovery does not alter other mods' audio.
The optional Watchman's Bell is deferred.

All four target builds passed their dedicated-server GameTest aggregate and each
captured sixty real Minecraft-rendered frames. DEV 0.2.0 passed its two server test
cases and sixty-frame render check. Artifact metadata, intermediary mappings,
resources and release/DEV separation were checked during packaging.

Standard `remapJar` encountered a restricted-Windows ZipFS write-check defect;
the included directory-remapping helper produced verified installable JARs.
See `TEST_PLAN.md` and `MIGRATION_AND_LIMITATIONS.md` for evidence and the remaining
manual survival, natural-worldgen, Biomes O' Plenty and real multi-client checks.