Tolkien Tweaks - Mobs Edition

Arda, a second overworld of the mod's own, reached through the Arda portal. It stands at the overworld's height, under its sky and its clock, on the same coordinates, and no vanilla biome grows there: the country it holds is drawn rather than computed. A grid of 48 by 36 countries, the proportions of the maps themselves and so 24,576 by 18,432 blocks, is read through the world's own noise, which warps a border by up to 192 blocks so a drawn line comes out organic, and the height is blended between neighbouring countries with a smoothstep, which is what turns a drawn coast into a shore and a drawn wall into a slope. The Misty Mountains run from Mount Gundabad to the Gap of Rohan, which is what leaves Eregion and the Vales on their flanks; Ered Luin walls the western seaboard behind Lindon; Mirkwood lies behind the Anduin with the Wild Wood and the Brown Lands below it; and Mordor stands in its ring of ash - Ered Lithui across the north and Ephel Duth down the west - with Nurn and the Sea of Nurnen inside and below it. The map's own seas become ocean, banded by latitude so the water off Forodwaith is frozen and the water off Haradwaith warm; a land column within three blocks of the waterline reads as a beach; and the seven rivers the maps name - the Anduin, Brandywine, Greyflood, Isen, Celduin, Forest River and Entwash - are cut where they are drawn. The height a country is drawn at is the height it stands at, so every range rises where the map puts it and every field lies flat where the map has none; the world's own noise still supplies what it is good at, the aquifers, the veins, the deep stone and the caves, and water is laid to sea level wherever the map draws ground below it. A lit Arda portal carries you between the two worlds at the same coordinates, arriving at a doorway already standing within sight of the crossing or, when there is none, at an ammolite doorway the mod builds and lights where you stand, so a traveller is never left without a way home; the staff lights a portal on either side, and a place in Arda is the same place it is in the overworld, so a base built at the Shire's origin comes out in the Shire's fields.

Seven countries of Arda had no biome of the mod's own to stand on, so each has one. Wild Wood covers the wood between the Anduin and the Brown Lands, which lets the Old Forest stay the Barrow-downs country its own lore asks for; Rohan is the Mark, the grass between the Misty Mountains and the white wall; the White Mountains are the wall itself, snow on the tops and stone under the feet; Dunland is the wild hill country north of the Isen; Lindon is the Grey Havens' coast behind Ered Luin; Gondor is the fields between the white wall and the sea; and Eriador is the empty middle of the north where Arnor's towns once stood. Each carries the plants, the fog and the mobs of the country it stands for: the Mark and Gondor are the free peoples' fields with their riders and their townsfolk, Eriador keeps company and hobbits, Lindon keeps elves, Wild Wood keeps goblins, spiders and brigands, and the White Mountains are troll country and wild as they should be.

Arda's countries know which of them are safe to walk at night. A tolkienmobs:peaceful tag names the free peoples' heartlands - the Shire, Lindon, Eriador, Rohan, Gondor, Lórinand, the Gladden fields, Forochel, the Blue Mountains and the Iron Hills - and no biome in it spawns a hostile mob, so a traveller can cross the west of the map as safely as the Shire has always been; a tolkienmobs:hostile tag names the enemy's country and the wilds that answer to it, and those biomes keep their hostile spawns whatever folk live among them, so a road through Mordor or the spiders' wood stays dangerous. Two tags of the maps' own reading, tolkienmobs:snowy and tolkienmobs:windswept, are published beside them.

The southrons' and the orcs' traders are met in the countries that keep them. Haradwaith's creature list carries a southron trader beside the mumakil - one entry of five, so a meeting every sixty-odd chunks of the country - while Mordor and the Ash Mountains, which share one list, carry an orc trader as the only creature they have, at a hundredth of their chunks; Nurn keeps the same trader among its farmers. A trader is placed only while a chunk is being made, never by the tick pass that keeps topping up the mobs around a player, so a country seeds its merchants as it is drawn instead of gathering them around whoever stands still in it, and each one arrives with vanilla's own visit timer. Measured in a fresh world: four southron traders over 256 chunks of Haradwaith and one orc trader over 256 of Mordor, both carrying spawn_type: CHUNK_GENERATION.

The seven countries drawn for Arda are met in the overworld too. They were only in Arda's biome list, so a player exploring the overworld's Tolkien region could cross the whole of it without ever standing in Rohan or Gondor, however much of the map those countries cover. Five take the vanilla slot whose ground they share - the Mark the savanna's grass, Ered Nimrais the stone peaks, Dunland the last windswept hills, Lindon the cherry grove's green land, and Gondor the meadow rather than the Shire's plains - and two take cells the region's own slots had left over: the Wild Wood the warm rolling half of the forest, whose flat half is Lothlórien's, and Eriador the cool dry flats beside the Shire's fields. No older biome of the mod gives ground up for them, and nothing of vanilla's the region had not already renamed. Measured in a fresh overworld with no player online, all seven answer /locate biome within 2,500 blocks of the origin - the nearest, the Wild Wood, 45 blocks out - and each stands on the ground where it was found.

A traveller's tent is met in the wilds. wild_tent is a structure of its own now, one piece dropped straight onto the ground it was found on, with a #tolkienmobs:has_structure/wild_tent tag of the twelve countries a road crosses rather than any that has towns of its own: the Wild Wood, the two Mirkwoods, Fangorn, the Old Forest, the Barrow Downs, Dagorlad, the Marshes, Firien, Hithaeglir, Dunland and Eriador. It is placed once every twenty-eight chunks, eight chunks of separation, so a tent is a find on the way somewhere rather than a feature of the country. Measured in a fresh world, /locate structure answered a tent 1,189 blocks from the Arda origin and it stood at -798,69,-877 in tolkienmobs:eriador with its campfire and its chest twelve blocks apart, exactly as the template lays them out.

A wilderness tent keeps a traveller's chest. tolkienmobs:chests/wild_tent rolls two to four times, with one bonus roll, over six things a night out in the wild actually asks for: cram in ones to threes, two to four torches, four to eight arrows, a bottle of grog, flint and steel, and pipe-weed in ones or twos. The weights favour the food and the light, so a tent usually gives you something to eat and something to see by, and the pipe-weed only now and then. The wild_tent template's own chest names the table, so a tent that stands in a world fills as it is first opened.