Zombie Village 4.57.283 — release notes

What's new

• Soul Crafting: place a crafting table within 3 blocks of your Soul Well and right-click it to open a well-backed crafting menu — a crafting grid on top and a scrolling, searchable window over your village storage right below it. Click materials straight from storage into the grid, and every craft automatically re-pulls the consumed ingredients from storage, so shift-clicking the result mass-crafts until the well runs dry. Complex nested recipes stop being storage archaeology. Grid contents return to the well on close (even if you disconnect); sneak-right-click still opens the plain vanilla table. Exact item variants are preserved throughout — enchanted, damaged, or filled ingredients refill as exactly themselves.
• Fuel keeper: seed a single piece of fuel into a furnace, blast furnace, smoker (or blaze powder into a brewing stand) near your Soul Well, and the well keeps it topped up — exactly one item at a time, of exactly the fuel type you seeded, for as long as village storage has fuel. Swap the fuel item to change the type; break the station to stop. Lava buckets work correctly (the returned empty bucket doesn't confuse it), and junk items can never enroll.
• Storage place-back: the Soul Well storage window (and the Soul Crafting window) now accepts items placed onto it — click a carried stack anywhere on the storage area to deposit it, right-click to deposit exactly one. No more shift-click-only deposits.

Fixed

• Two item-duplication vectors in the village storage GUI closed: double-click gathering could vacuum display copies off the storage window without debiting storage, and removing ingredients from the new crafting grid could leave a stale takeable result. Both found by internal adversarial review before release; neither was ever reported.
• Mass-crafting is capped at 64 crafts per shift-click (vanilla-equivalent), bounding server work per click.

Under the hood

• The Soul Crafting menu is built on the storage GUI's variant-aware machinery (one shared code path); the storage window's read-only display slots are now excluded from vanilla's pick-all sweep at the menu level.
• Full JUnit suite green (910 tests). All features verified on a live dedicated server.

Requires / compatible with

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1.224+
• Freedom Lib (required)
• ZV-Houses 0.1.148+ (required)
• Spells and Spellcrafting (required)
• No dependency minimums changed since 4.57.281 — existing modpacks stay compatible.

Migration notes

• None. Existing worlds carry over automatically. The fuel keeper and Soul Crafting are opt-in by placement — nothing changes at existing wells until you put a crafting table or fuel station inside the 3-block bubble.

Wiki (MC-parent: apply with this push)

• .planning/wiki-additions.md — (1) new Soul Crafting section/page, (2) new Fuel Keeper section, (3) storage/vein-miner/shepherd additions to existing sections, (4) an APPEND to the already-published "Balance changes" page: the soulbound-x-Gravestone fix note (SS 2.12.37). Keep wiki + CF description consistent (feedback_wiki_cf_consistency).
• Related: SS 2.12.37 (soulbound x Gravestone) has its own SS-side CF handoff — if both ride one push session, publish SS first so the balance-page claim ("fixed in SS 2.12.37") is true on CurseForge the moment the wiki updates.