Zombie Village 4.57.293 — release notes

What's new

• Soul Interface — a new block that plugs your Soul Well into automation. Place it touching a Soul Well and hoppers, pipes, and storage systems (AE2 storage buses, etc.) can deposit into and pull from well storage through it, in both directions, keeping exact item variants (enchanted books, damaged tools, filled containers). Crafted from a hopper, a soul lantern, iron, and stone bricks. Only the well's owner can place one against their own well.
• The Soul Well has a new look. A genuinely-round deepslate base with an animated star-void floor, a swirling soul whirlpool feeding into the mouth, cauldron-style boil-over smoke, and a slow-breathing ground glow. Same block, same recipe, same everything it does — just a proper centerpiece now. (Thanks to the ZV-Houses workshop for the model.)
• The Fuel Keeper now works with modded machines. The well already kept vanilla furnaces and brewing stands topped up with a manually-seeded fuel; it now recognizes any modded machine with a real fuel slot near the well (for example an Applied Energistics Vibration Chamber) and refills it the same way. Seed the machine with at least 2 of the fuel item so the keeper can register it, then it refuels one at a time from well storage.

Fixed

• Farmers stay at the main farm. Designating a farm now sticks across restarts, so the village farmer no longer drifts off to work scattered little plots and wander away from the field you set up.
• Underground Soul Gate sieges attack where your team actually is. Deep gates were spawning their siege up on the surface far above the gate, where it did nothing; sieges now form near your gate squad at their own depth.
• Soul Wells directly on an automation bus stay in sync. Storage changes now refresh connected systems immediately, so a bus reading the well never shows stale contents.
• The Soul Well's targeting outline hugs the visible model instead of drawing a two-block box up through the whirlpool. (The well still can't be stood on — that part is intentional and unchanged.)

Under the hood

• Added a diagnostic heartbeat for shepherd behavior to track down a rare long-idle case on unattended servers. Invisible to players; will be removed once the cause is confirmed.

Requires / compatible with

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1.224+
• Freedom Lib (required dependency — no minimum-version change this release)
• ZV-Houses (required dependency — supplies the village building templates)
• Spells & Spellcrafting (required dependency)
• JEI (optional — enables the crafting-grid quick-fill in the Soul Crafting menu)

Migration notes

• Nothing to do. Existing Soul Wells adopt the new look automatically on load, saved villages carry over unchanged, and the Fuel Keeper's saved machine registrations upgrade in place. No world reset, no config change.