Zombie Village 4.57.285 — release notes (covers 4.57.284 + 4.57.285)

What's new

• JEI one-click crafting from the Soul Well (when JEI is installed): browse any crafting recipe in JEI while the Soul Crafting menu is open and click "+" — the grid fills itself, pulling ingredients from village storage first and your inventory as fallback. Shift-click "+" fills a full batch. Missing an ingredient? The rest still fills and JEI highlights the missing slots in red, so partial recipes are one gather trip from done. Recipes that can't be auto-filled (fireworks, armor dyeing, and other "combine anything" recipes) show a disabled button with an explanation instead of a dead click.
• No JEI required, ever: Zombie Village does not depend on JEI. The integration loads only when JEI is present, ships none of JEI's code, and the mod runs identically without it. REI/EMI-style viewers could be wired to the same internal seam later.

Fixed

• Sneak gestures now work with an occupied offhand (4.57.284): holding a totem, torch, or shield in your offhand no longer blocks the sneak + empty-main-hand gesture that opens the Soul Well hub and gate picker. (Vanilla treats "an item in EITHER hand" as a reason to skip block interactions while sneaking; the well and gate now opt back in when your main hand is empty.) Sneak-placing a block from your offhand against the well/gate face is the one trade-off — move a step aside to do that.
• Big-well crafting menus got much cheaper for the server: mass shift-click crafting and batch fills now refresh village-storage viewers once per operation instead of once per item pulled. On a late-game well with thousands of stored stacks this is a large reduction in per-click server work.

Under the hood

• The fill travels as a plain vanilla recipe id over ZV's own network channel; the server re-resolves and validates everything (item-conserving by construction — grid contents return to the well before every fill). A flood guard caps fill requests.
• JEI API is a compile-time-only dependency pinned to the pack's build (19.27.0.336); the shipped jar contains zero JEI classes (verified). Dedicated servers with or without JEI are unaffected — JEI loads plugins client-side only (verified against JEI's own bytecode).
• Version handshake note: ZV network channels are registered required, so a pre-285 client is refused at connect by a 285 server with a clear message — update the client pack rather than mixing versions.
• Full JUnit suite green (910 tests). Five adversarial review passes across two rounds before release. Live-server UAT passed ("crafting using JEI menu and the + works great").

Requires / compatible with

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1.224+
• Freedom Lib (required)
• ZV-Houses 0.1.148+ (required)
• Spells and Spellcrafting (required)
• JEI (OPTIONAL — enables the one-click recipe fill; everything else works without it)
• No dependency minimums changed since 4.57.283 — existing modpacks stay compatible.

Migration notes

• None. Existing worlds carry over automatically.

Wiki (MC-parent: apply with this push)

• .planning/wiki-additions.md — (1) the 2026-07-12 Warden/Super-Bosses balance append (carried from the previous handoff window), (2) JEI one-click crafting append to the Soul Crafting section, (3) offhand gesture fix note, (4) a CONDITIONAL edit to the Super Bosses bullet that only applies if SS 2.12.38 has published (see the marker in the file). Keep wiki + CF description consistent (feedback_wiki_cf_consistency).
• Ordering: if SS 2.12.38 (minion Super-Boss exemption) rides the same push session, publish SS first, then apply the conditional wiki edit; otherwise skip that edit and leave the existing "until a future SS update" phrasing in place.