Zombie Village 4.57.323 — release notes

Rollup of 4.57.322 + 4.57.323 — causeway wave 2: gatherers join the bridge-building program, plus a shoreline safety fix for their pit machinery.

What's new

• Gatherers now build causeways too. A resource across water — whether the route fails outright or the walk stalls at the shore — gets a permanent 2-wide cobblestone causeway toward it, the same bridges defenders build. The target is held while the crossing goes up; once across, the gatherer walks over and mines it. Declined or impossible routes fall back to the old behavior (site skipped) unchanged.
• Causeway crossings from both roles now share one set of manners: bridges are reused and extended rather than duplicated, a route that says no is left alone for a while before re-asking, and a mob busy with one crossing never starts another.

Fixed

• Gatherers no longer treat lake-level ground as a pit: standing on a causeway deck or at the water's edge no longer triggers pillar-jump recovery (which could build cobble towers over open water) or reactive floor-filling.
• Fixed a long-standing bug where a gatherer standing slightly below village grade could brick its own feet or head cell with protected cobblestone while "filling a pit" — the fill level was derived from the Soul Well, not the mob. It can no longer place at or above its own feet.
• A stale bridge session left over from a villager changing roles can no longer be adopted by the new role's work (it now expires untouched).

Under the hood

• The causeway trigger is now consumed at two seams in the gather AI (pick-time unreachable + walk-stall), both pre-gated so dry terrain failures never invoke it. Retry pacing is bounded at one route probe per 25 ticks per villager.

Requires / compatible with

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1+ (the Risen pack ships 21.1.244)
• Freedom Lib 0.10.1 or newer (required — unchanged from 4.57.320)
• ZV-Houses 0.1.148+ (unchanged)
• Spells & Spellcrafting (unchanged; current release 2.12.63)

Migration notes

• Existing worlds carry over — no action needed.