Zombie Village

This file bundles the full run from v4.55.103 (Catacomb v1 baseline) through v4.57.252. Broad-strokes summary below.

Villager professions — the big expansion

• Cleric — active heal medic that seeks injured allies mid-fight; periodic heal aura when idle
• Shepherd — manages a fenced animal pen (shears, breeds, culls, gathers eggs)
• Butcher — runs a coal-free smoker
• Six salvage professions — Toolsmith, Weaponsmith, Armorer, Leatherworker, Fletcher, Librarian break crafted gear and books back down into their materials. Sneak-click a workstation to salvage held items, or drop items in an adjacent chest and let the village drain it automatically.
• Farmer auto-replants after harvest
• Fisherman works ponds within reach, including the fishery house
• Live workstation registry — move a profession block and the villager re-links; redstone signal force-designates the primary station

Underground catacomb villages

• Catacomb v1 shipped — the full subterranean village system: closed-ceiling detection, tunneled-chamber plot layout, guards patrolling inside the perimeter
• Sally-out defense — defenders patrol beyond the archway to clear surrounding hostiles, then return
• Stuck-mob recovery — cull for defenders trapped in dead pockets; blacklists on bad exits
• Patrol thrash fix — no more wedging at the compact-village edge

Surface villages

• All-original template pool — switched to clean-room house designs (dropped legacy MineColonies-derived residences entirely)
• _ofp visual style — open-floor-plan houses alongside the existing tighter _ybr interiors
• 24-plot compact grid — 5×5-1 surface layout with per-utility cap of 1 (no adjacent duplicates)
• Automatic lighting — surface village lights up its footprint to suppress hostile spawns
• Defender patrol ring — +20 blocks beyond the village edge
• Dealt-without-replacement pool — every template gets placed once before any repeats
• Explosion protection — village and catacomb blocks resist creeper/TNT damage

Soul Gates + remote outposts

• Roaming chunk loader — squad members keep their surrounding chunks loaded so they don't freeze at distance
• Dawn return — squads return home naturally at sunrise, spread and staggered
• Gate laborer collection overhaul — gathers minecarts, hoppers, droppers as low-tier blocks; safer container-loot handling
• Pit-escape climb rung — stuck gate laborers get an auto-placed climb scaffold
• Underground pool bridging — gate laborers fill a crossing when blocked by water
• Owner-only bodyguard mode + idle-defender scan safety
• Gate-siphon hotfix — closed a loop that starved the parent village

Village persistence + relocation

• Well-move storage carry — relocate your Soul Well and its complete inventory moves with it (dup-safe)
• Complete state capture — build progress, souls, inventory, every villager's role and position, plot grid — all preserved on well removal, restored on placement
• Duplicate-well prevention — creative-mode secondary wells stay ephemeral without polluting canonical state
• Clean disposal — kill-all on intentional well removal

Freedom Lib integration

• Freedom 0.7.x LiquidHandler — pool + wall-source escape via LiquidEscapeTrigger
• Freedom 0.3.0 scaffold-reach — villagers reach elevated build targets via climb columns
• Freedom 0.2.0 climb-scaffold — replaced old cobblestone rescue placements with the new self-cleaning climb block
• Patrol rescue with structure guard — catacomb defenders get rescue that respects village geometry

Build behavior

• Padded-stance interior builder — stays on top of completed sections, never routes outside the plot
• External roof-build maneuver — climb out of the plot, mount the roof from above, build downward
• Approach cells from above — upper walls and roofs built from above, not by reaching up
• Paced proximate placement — unreachable cells finished naturally by moving to reach them
• Border-seam fix — surface inter-plot boundaries close cleanly
• Farmer + Fisherman gravel gate — prevents them from stacking gravel into their own water/farmland
• Arm-swing on every placement — visible builder action for every block
• Deep-audit sweeps — Tier-A, Tier-B, and Tier-C code audits shipped (dozens of scenario-specific fixes)
• Live build-eligibility diagnostics — always-on visibility into what's blocking each plot

Population + roles

• Population budget model — headcount driven by completed plots (surface) or interior cap (catacomb) rather than beds
• Home pool 50/50 split — soul-economy target for defender/laborer balance
• Gate-aware budget — squad allocation coordinated with home population
• Chunk-unload safety — no longer unregister a villager just because its chunk unloaded
• Backfill promotion race fix — profession slots respect the in-queue soul before promoting
• Orphan reconcile — drain of the pre-4.57.248 orphaned-villager residue

Server performance + safety

• Hostile-hostile spawn cap — natural hostile spawns bounded across the whole forced footprint (fixes the spider-cluster leak)
• Wake-dormant tethered gates — gate-picker resolves the "can't teleport to my gates" lag transient
• Chunk-load-safe teleport-home — natural gate dawn-return force-loads the destination before validating

Commands

• /zv soulwell — locate Soul Wells
• /zv summon professions [profession] — spawn profession villagers
• /zv surface fixhere — repair a surface plot at your location

Cross-mod contract

• ZV-Houses now declared as a required dependency (alongside Freedom Lib and Spells & Spellcrafting — this file's metadata reflects the correct three)
• ZV-Houses shutter open-on-place so a closed leaf can't wall the builder out