Zombie Village 4.57.286 — release notes

Fixed

• Gate squads can never get permanently stuck again. A gate laborer wedged in terrain that none of the Freedom rescue systems can solve (sheer-walled cavities, deep-slate pockets) used to stand frozen forever — especially at deep gates, which deliberately never run the dawn return cycle. Now, after roughly five minutes of continuously exhausted rescue attempts at one spot, the gate recalls the whole squad home through the same ferry the dawn return uses: everyone lands safely at the Soul Well, the laborer's gathered haul is deposited, the squad members rejoin the village as Defenders, and the gate staffs a fresh squad automatically.
• The recall is deliberately conservative: only time spent with every rescue actually failing counts toward it. A laborer riding a rescue pillar out of a pit, fighting off a mob, productively mining a vein in one spot, or simply holding position at its gate will never be recalled.
• Laborers wedged while in a holding state (full inventory, low health, squad regrouping) previously never even attempted self-rescue — they do now, and are covered by the same recall.

Live verification

• Shipped against a real incident: four squad members frozen for 100+ minutes at a deep gate on the test server. On the first boot with this version, all four were ferried home within ~5 minutes of server start, rejoined the village, and were re-dispatched into fresh working squads — zero losses.

Under the hood

• The recall reuses the existing dawn-return path end to end (spread landing at the well, entity-tracker refresh, role flip, squad-slot cleanup) — no new transport mechanics. Two adversarial review rounds plus a fresh-eyes verify pass before release; full JUnit suite green (910 tests).

Requires / compatible with

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1.224+
• Freedom Lib (required — no minimum bump; uses existing rescue APIs)
• ZV-Houses 0.1.148+ (required)
• Spells and Spellcrafting (required)
• JEI (optional — one-click recipe fill, since 4.57.285)
• No dependency minimums changed since 4.57.285 — existing modpacks stay compatible.

Migration notes

• None. Existing worlds carry over automatically; already-wedged villagers from earlier versions are recalled by the same mechanism on first load (this is exactly what the live verification exercised).

Wiki (MC-parent: apply with this push)

• .planning/wiki-additions.md — one section: the Soul Gate stuck-squad recall note (append to the Soul Gate page). The July 12 mod-update-wave note was already applied in an earlier pass. Keep wiki + CF description consistent (feedback_wiki_cf_consistency).