Risen — Undead Army 2.12.64

Focus: the three first-party mods. Second-largest first-party wave since the modpack launched (ZV alone spans 6 versions and adds a whole liquid-handling system). Everything else is routine bugfix bumps.

First-party headliners

Zombie Village 4.57.317 → 4.57.323

• Liquid handling arc — villages now deal with water and lava instead of fighting them. Builders seal adjacent liquid sources with cobblestone, or walk out to neutralize/isolate feeds they can't reach from the build site. Flooded footprints get plugged and cleared. Catacomb crews trace flooded sheets upstream and plug the single feeding source instead of fighting every wet cell. Aquifer bands no longer wedge stair shafts.
• Defender and gatherer causeways — a defender that has to swim on patrol, or a gatherer whose route to a resource fails across water, builds a permanent 2-wide cobblestone causeway across it. Lava crossings get automatic guard rails. Villages converge on the same crossings instead of littering ponds with parallel bridges — in testing, a village that swam constantly went to zero swimming once its causeway network settled. Roles share the causeway system: no duplicate builds, no starting two bridges at once.
• Gatherer safety fixes — no more pillar-towers over open water from pit-recovery machinery, no more entombing own feet with protected cobble at village grade.
• Gatherers still skip cobblestone bordering liquid — your player-built bridges are safe.
• Freedom Lib 0.10.1+ now required at mod load (was previously a soft floor that crashed mid-game if violated).

Spells & Spellcrafting 2.12.63 → 2.12.64

• Spell targeting overhaul. Victim-targeted spells (Acid, Snare, Hold Monster, Chain Lightning, Push, etc.) now honor your crosshair — the creature under your reticle is the creature that gets hit. Fast, lunging, or small enemies (spiders, baby zombies, bats) land reliably.
• Line of sight is now required — the old ability to strike enemies through walls/floors is gone. Glass and other see-through solid blocks stop targeting; tall grass and crops do not.
• "No target in sight" feedback replaces silent fizzles. Reagents are still consumed once a cast fires — check your aim.
• Wall of Fire and Blink land at your cursor, even if something crosses your aim line mid-cast.
• Your own Risen minions no longer soak hostile casts aimed past them.
• Acid kills now award XP and full player-kill loot (previously granted neither).
• Update client and server together — the 2.12.64 client is refused at login by a 2.12.63 server (and vice versa) by design.

ZV-Houses 1.1.3 → 1.1.8

• Modded blocks now fit blueprint deposit slots. Any building block that matches a slot's material — vanilla or from block-variant mods (Chipped, Quark, Create, etc.) — can be deposited. Thousands of decorative variants now count, no mod hardwired.
• Salvage pays off. Tear a structure down and its blocks flow into a blueprint: stone/brick variants, terracotta, concrete, sandstone, quartz, deepslate, lodestone/lapis/clay/mud bricks, wood of every type, and more.
• Rough vs refined stone still respected across all of it — raw stone (cobble, andesite, tuff, deepslate, etc.) fills rough slots; processed variants (bricks, polished, tiles, cut) fill refined slots. A refined wall still refuses raw cobble.
• Ores, metal/gem storage blocks, raw dirt/sand/gravel/ice, and machines are correctly kept out of stone slots.

Third-party updates

Ten mod bumps, all routine bugfix / patch releases:

Per-mod details in each mod's own CurseForge changelog.

Datapacks

Unchanged. All six global datapacks (day length ×2, netherite loot, more ancient debris, brutal-boss payouts, Warden level 80, Ice & Fire Dread restore) still ship. Note on the Dread pack: Ice & Fire jumped from beta.1 to beta.3, so if their new build restores the dropped Dread worldgen internally, this datapack becomes redundant but harmless. Leaving it in until confirmed unnecessary.

Upgrade notes

• Safe world upgrade — no chunk regen, no config wipe.
• Update client and server together (SS 2.12.64 client/server contract, above).
• Standing villages pick up the new liquid behavior on first load — expect defenders and gatherers to start building causeways at existing water bodies within a few in-game days.