Zombie Village 4.57.299 — release notes

Fixed

• The Soul Well in underground catacombs now stands ON the room floor instead of being recessed one block into it. New subterranean villages build the Soul Well chamber with the well seated properly on the floor row, the way the room templates always intended.
• Existing catacombs are completely safe: villages built before this version keep their original geometry forever (the fix is applied per-village and only to newly-founded villages). Nothing is re-carved, re-verified, or visually changed in worlds you have already built.
• Fixed a rare restart race where a freshly-loaded Soul Well could discard its saved village layout and start a brand-new build over the existing catacomb (the bootstrap dispatcher could fire before the saved village finished restoring). The saved layout now always wins.

Under the hood

• New per-village anchor system: all subterranean grid math flows through a single per-village anchor carrying the geometry cohort, enforced at compile time so future code cannot mix the two.
• Test-environment scaffolding updated to the seated-well geometry.

Requires / compatible with

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

Migration notes

• Nothing required. Existing worlds load unchanged; only villages founded on 4.57.299+ get the new well seating. One caution: do not DOWNGRADE below 4.57.299 while a new catacomb is mid-construction (finished villages are fine to downgrade, though the well will not gain the new seating retroactively).