Zombie Village 4.57.281 — release notes

What's new

• Built-in vein miner: sneak and mine any ore with the right tool to break the whole connected vein. Fortune and Silk Touch apply, tools take normal durability per block, ores drop their XP, and protection mods keep their say on every block. All modded ores work automatically (anything tagged c:ores or named *_ore — ancient debris included). Configure in-game with /zv veinminer — including sneak off for always-on vein mining and max <n> for the vein cap (default 64).
• Shepherds now run a real production loop: they breed their animals below the herd band and cull above it, keeping pens at a steady size while the village stockpiles meat, leather, feathers, and wool. Every species accepts the shepherd's universal feed (wheat / carrots / seeds).

Fixed

• Professions can no longer be permanently lost. A profession villager that died, was dismissed, or was reassigned used to leave its workstation silently locked forever — the replacement villager could never take the job ("dead profession slot"). Workstation claims now track exactly who holds them, are released the moment the holder leaves for any reason, and existing worlds self-heal old stuck claims automatically on first load.
• Working professions (Farmer, Fisherman, Shepherd) are no longer dragged off their post by the return-to-village leash — they stay at their farm, fishery, or pen.
• A Leatherworker's cauldron that catches rain is still recognized as its workstation — filled cauldrons (water, lava, powder snow) no longer silently break job designation, salvage, and claiming.
• Placing a Soul Gate in a different dimension than its Soul Well is now refused with a clear message, and the gate item is returned. Previously the item was consumed and the gate sat permanently dormant with no explanation. An already-placed cross-dimension gate shows as honestly dormant — break it to recover the item.
• Your own villagers no longer block you from sleeping — a defender patrolling near your bed used to trigger "You may not rest now, there are monsters nearby." A villager only blocks your sleep while it is actively fighting you.
• Soul Wells no longer lose their stored items and wand upgrade when the well is broken and placed back down.
• Village builders no longer stand idle without building (house plots over caves, steep plot edges, and builders drifting off their own plot are all closed).

Under the hood

• Workstation claims are claimant-keyed (UUID) with a periodic reconcile sweep; release is exact on every exit path (death, dismissal, demote, re-anchor) and never needs the claim's chunks loaded. Save format is backward compatible.
• Full JUnit suite green (910 tests). Every fix in this release was verified on a live dedicated server, including a scripted kill-and-replace test of the profession fix.

Requires / compatible with

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1.224+
• Freedom Lib (required)
• ZV-Houses 0.1.148+ (required — supplies every house template; without it villages spawn but no houses build)
• Spells and Spellcrafting (required)
• No dependency minimums changed since 4.57.273 — existing modpacks stay compatible.

Migration notes

• None required. Existing worlds carry over automatically; old stuck workstation claims from earlier versions are detected and released on first load (you may see a one-time batch of "reconcile released stale workstation claim" lines in the server log — that is the self-heal working).
• Modpack note (Risen — Undead Army): the external ore-vein-miner datapack-mod was removed from the pack in favor of the built-in vein miner — do not run both.

Wiki (MC-parent: apply with this push)

• .planning/wiki-balance-page.md contains the wikitext for the modpack "Balance changes" page (risenundeadarmy.miraheze.org) — first publication of the standing balance changelog, covering the 2026-07-10 boss tuning and the 2026-07-11 full-pack fairness sweep + netherite availability datapacks. Keep wiki + CF description consistent (feedback_wiki_cf_consistency).