Zombie Village 4.57.298 — release notes

Covers everything since the published 4.57.295 (includes the unpublished 4.57.296 and 4.57.297 fixes).

Fixed

• Underground builders no longer leap into freshly-carved pits and get stranded. They now path around drops the way you'd expect, so subterranean construction proceeds without the endless cycle of builders falling, timing out, and being replaced.
• Builders can now raise a temporary climb-scaffold column to reach ceiling work they couldn't get to before, and they tear it down when finished. Ceilings and upper walls complete properly instead of leaving unfinished patches. If you see a narrow scaffold column inside a room under construction, that's normal — it's removed when the room finishes.
• Subterranean villages build dramatically faster overall — the first layer of a catacomb completes in less than half the time it used to.
• Soul Gates no longer randomly show as disconnected from their Soul Well in single-player, and the gate list no longer turns up empty after teleporting through a gate. Gates now quietly re-establish their well link instead of detaching. (4.57.296)
• If the very first builder of an underground village dies while carving the Soul Well chamber, a replacement now spawns automatically. Previously the build could stall at zero builders until you broke and re-placed the Soul Well. (4.57.297)

Under the hood

• New op-only console-safe test command /zv subterranean testenv at <x> <y> <z> <ownerUUID> for headless test environments. Not intended for survival play — it bulk-stamps a test cube and force-loads chunks at the target coordinates.
• Builder movement attributes are now cached per tick for performance.

Requires / compatible with

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1.224+
• Freedom Lib (required — no minimum bump this release)
• ZV-Houses (required — no minimum bump this release)
• Spells & Spellcrafting (required — no minimum bump this release)

Migration notes

• Nothing required. No save-format changes; existing worlds and villages work as-is. Already-built rooms are not retroactively repaired — the ceiling and reliability improvements apply to new construction.