# Hardcore Winter 1.5 — The mammoth has arrived! Something big is walking out there in the white. You'll hear it before you see it: a low rumble under the wind, then a trumpet call that carries for half a mile. The herds didn't all vanish. The biggest ones just learned to live with the cold. <!-- IMGUR: upload "mammoth files/mammoth_showcase.gif" and replace the link below -->  --- > **A note on the wait.** Yes, this one took a while, and sorry about that. In my defence, > you can't rush a mammoth. It's three tonnes of wool and it moves at its own pace. It also > needed a lot more than a new model: it eats, sleeps, shakes the snow off its back, fights > back, carries your gear, lights your way and keeps you warm. I'd rather hand you > something finished late than something half-done on time. Thanks for sticking around. > **Your existing world is fine.** Mammoths find you wherever you walk on the snowfields, > explored or not. No new world needed. --- ## The Woolly Mammoth <!-- IMGUR: upload "mammoth files/screenshots/2_herd_on_the_snowfield.png" and replace the link below -->  - **Herds roam the snowfields.** One or two adults, sometimes with a calf in tow. Walk for a minute or so and you should come across one. - **Peaceful, until you hit one.** Then it charges you, and the rest of the herd joins in. It tosses you with its tusks, and if you crowd it or stand too close, it rears up and stomps the ground around it. An adult has 80 health (40 hearts), shrugs off knockback, and hits for 5 hearts on Normal. Hurt a calf and every adult within 16 blocks comes for you. - **A tamed mammoth defends itself** against anyone but you. Hit your own and it just backs off. - **They live out there.** They graze, digging down through the snow to reach the grass underneath. They lie down to sleep at night, shake the snow off their backs, scrape at the drifts and trumpet at nothing in particular. A sleeping mammoth wakes if you touch it, and wakes *fast* if you hurt it. - **Wild herds don't pile up.** Mammoths you leave behind wander off for good once you're far enough away. Tamed, saddled, named or leashed ones stay where you left them. ## Taming and riding <!-- IMGUR: upload "mammoth files/screenshots/1_saddled_mammoth_shaking_snow.png" and replace the link below -->  - **Hay bales tame them.** Ten bales and it's yours, with hearts to show for it. Wheat and apples heal, but they won't win it over. A wild mammoth won't let you climb on. - **The Mammoth Saddle** is the only saddle that fits. A horse saddle won't do. ``` Leather Leather Leather Chest Gold Ingot Chest Leather Lantern Leather ``` A soul lantern works too. The recipe is in your recipe book from the start. - **Ride it like a horse**, and sprint to break into a run. - **Saddlebags.** A saddled mammoth carries 15 slots of storage. Sneak and right-click to open them. Take the saddle off and the bags spill onto the snow. If it dies, the saddle and everything in the bags drop with it. <!-- IMGUR: upload "mammoth files/screenshots/6_saddlebags_inventory.png" and replace the link below -->  <!-- IMGUR: upload "mammoth files/screenshots/5_riding_up_the_mountain.png" and replace the link below -->  ## The saddle lantern The lantern hanging off the saddle stays lit as long as the saddle is on. - **It lights the snow around you** as you ride, and lights up a whole caravan of them. - **It keeps you warm.** Riding a mammoth is as warm as sitting by a furnace: body heat and lantern together thaw you out even in a blizzard. Anyone standing within 3 blocks of a saddled mammoth gets the lantern's warmth, the same as holding one. - **It never needs oil.** That's the reward for taming one. ## Stomp While riding, **hold jump to charge the bar, then let go.** The mammoth rears up and slams its front feet down. - Everything on the ground within 3–5 blocks takes 3–6 hearts and is thrown back. The fuller the bar, the bigger the stomp. - It spares you, other players and your own tamed animals. - It has a 5-second cooldown, shown on the jump bar. - The mammoth doesn't jump anymore. It climbs a block and a half without needing to. ## Breeding - Feed two tamed adults at full health a **hay bale** (or a golden apple) and you get a calf. - A calf grows up in about 20 minutes. Feeding it hay speeds that up. ## Mammoth Meat - An adult drops **8 Mammoth Meat**. - Raw, it's a decent meal (3 drumsticks). **Cooked, it's the best meat in the game:** 6 drumsticks and steak-level saturation. One kill feeds you for days. - Cook it in a furnace, smoker or campfire. A mammoth that dies on fire drops it ready cooked. ## Icy Goblin changes The goblins were everywhere, and they hit too hard for an early-game enemy. - **They hit softer:** 1.5 hearts on Normal (was 2.5). - **They're slower.** A sprint gets you away now. - **They spawn less often:** weight 6 (was 10), in groups of 1–2 (was 1–3). - **Daytime is no longer goblin time.** They were the only monster that could spawn in daylight, so by noon the whole monster cap was goblins. Daylight spawns under open sky are now cut to a quarter, and no more than three gather in one area.

# Hardcore Winter 1.4.5.1 A fix release, mostly. Several of these were bad enough to quietly end features for the rest of a world — strangers that stopped visiting for good, loot that vanished, a greenhouse that switched itself off. There's one new thing too: the sea is back. > **Your existing world is fine.** New chunks generate the oceans and everything in > them, so walk out past where you've explored and you'll find the sea. Start a new > world only if you want a coastline near spawn. ## The ones that were ruining runs - **A bandit you refused to spare couldn't be killed.** He begs, you say no — and from that moment your sword did nothing to him. Fire and falling damage still worked, which is a strange way to find out. Worse, his scene never ended, and only one stranger can be out there at a time, so nobody on the server ever got another knock on the door. - **Nor could a bandit who threatened to break in and then couldn't get there.** Block his path and he'd stand outside forever, with the same result — no more visitors, for anyone. He now gives up after a couple of minutes and leaves. - **Strangers couldn't find you upstairs.** The search for your door only looked a few blocks up and down, so if you slept on the third floor, nobody ever came. It now looks well below you, which also covers a cellar or a dug-in floor under your house. (A bunker at the bottom of a shaft still isn't found — that's a different direction, and it's on the list.) - **And it could pick the wrong door.** It used to choose whichever door was nearest, which from upstairs meant a balcony. Now it uses the lowest door in the building — your front door — and drops him at the furthest spot outside it that he can actually stand on, so a door facing a cliff no longer leaves him at the bottom of one. - **One door in the wrong place could cost you every visitor.** A cellar or mine entrance below the house could pass the "is this a real door" test and then fail the "is the player behind it" test, and you'd be skipped — every night, permanently. - **A bandit was destroying what he stole.** If he grabbed a second stack, it replaced the first in his hand and the first was simply gone. Both come back now, off his body or when you spare him. - **Your greenhouse stopped working if the roof was too high.** Snow landing on the glass only melted if your fire was within eight blocks of the snow itself — and your fire is on the floor. So anything over about seven blocks of headroom kept its roof buried, the daylight never got in, and nothing told you why. Fires now keep glass clear from up to 24 blocks below, and 24 blocks of headroom is the tallest greenhouse the mod will recognise. - **Freezing killed you in the two seconds after you refuelled your lantern.** The cold had already decided to hurt you before the warmth registered, so the game punished the save rather than the mistake. ## Strangers - **You can't read a stranger by counting how long he waits any more.** Refugees used to be more patient than bandits, which told you what he was before anything else did. How long he'll wait is now rolled fresh each visit, the same range for everyone. - **He robs bodies, not your storage room.** He used to pick up anything on the floor within ten blocks, which in a base with an item sorter meant the sorter. He now only takes what's lying where the fight actually ended. - **Losing him isn't the same as dying to him.** Run out of his sight and he'd behave as though he'd won — a free rummage through whatever was on the ground. Now he leaves empty-handed, because he didn't win, he lost you. - Someone walking away no longer says goodbye twice, or complains about being ignored on his way out. - If you log in while a stranger is already at someone's door, he now appears in your player list like everyone else, instead of talking in chat as a name that isn't there. - Large bases work properly — the check that decides whether you're home used to give up partway through a big build and conclude you weren't. - A door at the bottom of a mineshaft isn't a front door, and isn't treated as one. ## Cold - **The weather matters when you're caught without a light.** Cold now builds at different speeds depending on the night: mild, normal, heavy, blizzard. Normal is exactly what you're used to. Standing in the open with nothing to protect you, that's about 75 seconds before the cold starts hurting you on a mild night, 37 on a normal one, 25 on a heavy one, and 19 in a blizzard. The warnings before dusk are worth listening to now. - **A lit lantern still keeps you comfortable whatever the sky is doing.** That hasn't changed and isn't going to: the lantern is the answer to the cold, and the danger is the fuel. A blizzard doesn't beat your lantern — running dry on the way home does. - **A roof is no longer a campfire.** Shelter with no heat source in reach used to thaw you as fast as a furnace, which meant digging a hole made you immune and the best way to play a game about keeping a fire alive was to never light one. An unheated room now lets the cold creep up — but it stops short of real harm, so you'll be frozen and miserable rather than dead. Fire is still the only thing that warms you back up. (`shelterChill=0` restores the old behaviour.) - **Leather is warm.** Each piece of leather armour slows the cold, and a full set halves it whatever the weather is doing. Iron and diamond do nothing for the cold — they never did, there was just no way to tell. - **The cold won't kill you while your lantern is lit.** Freezing stops just short of finishing you off if you have a lit lantern in your off hand, and the lantern thaws you from there. Without one, it still kills. (`coldCanKill=true` removes the safety net.) - Being cold costs food in proportion to how fast you're actually freezing, instead of all-or-nothing. Standing out by a placed torch now costs a little food, where it used to cost none. - Your cold survives a server restart, and no longer survives your death. - A part-burnt handheld torch no longer turns into a stick when you take it out of your off hand. It keeps whatever's left in it, and you can still place it as a torch. ## Greenhouse - **A torch is no longer enough for the growth bonus.** Glass and daylight still keep crops alive, but doubling their speed now wants a furnace, glowstone or a campfire. A greenhouse that beats a normal world should be something you built, not something you lit. (`greenhouseBonusTier=1` restores the old rule.) - **The soil tells you what's wrong.** Green sparkles mean it's growing at double speed. A snowflake means the problem is the sky or the glass. Smoke means your fire is too weak or too far away. ## Trader - **Carrots and potatoes cost iron or fish now, not emeralds.** Nothing in this world makes emeralds — there are no mountains, so there's no emerald ore — which made a plantable staple depend on a currency you might never see. Carrots are 4 iron or 40 cod; potatoes are 5 iron or 48 salmon. Emeralds still buy the golden apples, the berries, the glowstone and the rarest seeds. - **Kelp is sixteen for one iron**, down from two for two. It spreads up its own water column on its own, so the old price was really just selling you the week you'd have spent waiting. It's the cheapest thing he carries and the one most likely to change a camp. ## The sea came back - **Frozen oceans generate again.** The basins were always there under the ice — the water, the depth, all of it — they'd just been painted over as ice spikes, so nothing lived in them. - Which brings back icebergs, kelp forests, seagrass, squid, salmon, nautilus, drowned, cold ocean ruins, shipwrecks out at sea, and monuments in the deep. - Cut a hole in the sea ice and go down. There's a reason to now. - The sky over water is the storm's grey rather than a clear summer blue, so there's no seam at the coastline, and the frozen flora still grows in the ground beneath. ## Abandoned camps - **Snowy abandoned camps generate now.** 26.3 added them to the game and then put them in no biome this world contains, so a frozen tent where somebody didn't make it has been sitting in the files and nowhere in the world. Only the snowy kind belongs out here, so they're rare — expect thousands of blocks between them, and treat finding one as a find. ## Under the hood - The sweep that kills exposed plants does about a tenth of the work it used to, at the same rate. Plants buried more than eight blocks deep are now left alone, which is the part of the saving that isn't free. - The cold check no longer rescans hundreds of blocks around every player every single tick. - Greenhouse checks stop looking for a roof after 24 blocks instead of scanning to the top of the world.

# 1.4.4 Hotfix for 1.4.3, plus a trade rebalance. ## Strangers - You can pick a question while he is still talking; it waits for him to finish. - He talks slower, and only prompts you after 40s of silence. - Right-clicking a refugee gets "please stop touching me" at once. A double-click is one grab, not two. - No more getting stuck on the open door on the way out. ## Trader - Tiers turn at days 6, 14 and 25 (was every 20). - Tier 0 is priced in iron and what you can farm. Emeralds from tier 1, diamonds only at tier 3. - New: beehive with 3 bees (tier 0), slimeballs (tier 0). - Dropped: lantern. - Potato 2 emeralds, golden apple 8, golden carrots 5, sweet berries 3. ## Bees - Some trees in the buried hollows carry a bee nest with bees in it.

# Minecraft 26.3 Port to Minecraft 26.3, with a reworked trader. Requires Fabric Loader 0.19.5+ and Fabric API 0.161.0+. Old worlds load; if something looks off, generate a fresh chunk first. ## Trader - Carries 26.3's dappled-forest plants, which never grow here: poplar sapling, red shrub, shelf mushroom. - No longer sells fish oil. Melon seeds cost cod instead of oil. - Dried kelp replaced with apples. - New: live kelp, wool, glowstone (tier 2), cocoa beans (tier 2). - One of bread, coal or glass is always in stock.

Hotfix for 1.4.1 Mostly flora bugs, plus a couple of embarrassing ones with the strangers. Old worlds are fine. Anything already floating fixes itself once you walk past it. The flora thinning and the new hot spring spacing only affect chunks you haven't generated yet. ## Floating meadows Plants climbed with the snow at night and then just stayed there when it melted. Net gain of a block a day. Leave it a week and you've got a field hovering over bare dirt. They come back down now. They still ride the drift up — that part was on purpose — but the thaw puts them back where they started. If your world already has one of these up in the air, it'll sort itself out next time you're nearby. Two related ones while I was in there. Flowers around the hot springs never moved at all. Anything under a spruce was invisible to the whole system: it would ride up once and then sit there forever, because sheltered ground was being skipped entirely. Tall grass and ferns were getting torn in half. Bottom went up, top stayed put, and neither piece could ever recover. Existing broken ones will clean themselves up. ## There was far too much of it Ground cover was generating about nine times thicker than vanilla's densest grass. Three quarters of every chunk had something in it. It looked like a lawn. Cut to roughly a sixth, and it grows in patches now rather than spread evenly over everything. You can see the drifts again. Star bloom was turning up more than once per chunk, which rather defeats the point of it being the rare one. Icicles and lichen underground are down about two thirds — the caves were carpeted. ## Hot springs were clustering Every chunk rolled its own dice, and that clumps. More than a quarter of them had a neighbour close enough to overlap, so you'd find two or three within a short walk and then nothing for ages. They're properly spaced now. Never closer than 64 blocks, usually about 97. Same rarity overall, without the pile-ups. ## Strangers Someone could turn up while you were outside and walk to a door you happened to be standing next to. Which ruins it. The whole thing rests on somebody *arriving*, and it isn't much of an arrival if you watched them appear in the yard. They only come when you're actually indoors now, and only once you've been in a while. Nipping out for firewood won't summon anyone. If you get caught out at dusk you don't lose the roll. It waits for you. ## Doors Three, as it turned out. Leave your front door open and nobody could get in. They'd walk in a dead straight line into the outside wall and stand there. No knock, no entry, nothing. And with snow piled against the doorstep they'd stand on top of the drift without ever knocking, because as far as they were concerned they hadn't arrived yet. On a blizzard night. Which is when they come. Which turned up a third one. Even once they knocked, a buried doorstep meant they couldn't actually get in — you'd open the door onto a wall of snow and they'd shove at it until they gave up and left. So now they dig. Open the door on a bad night and you may well find someone shovelling their way to it, and they'll dig themselves back out when they go. ## Snow you placed yourself stopped melting Put down a snow block and it was gone by noon. The thaw was treating anything above the original ground as weather and taking it back, so snow walls, igloos and anything you'd stacked for storage quietly disappeared. Crafted snow blocks are now left alone permanently, wherever you put them. Snow *layers* still melt — that's the storm's own snow and the whole point of the thaw. If you want it to stay, use blocks. ## They run now You could open the door, close the chat box, and beat an unarmed stranger to death while he stood there. He'd throw a couple of bare-fisted punches back and that was it — no fight, no scene, nothing. Anyone who isn't carrying a weapon now runs. He shouts, he bolts, and he doesn't stop. He won't fight back either, because running and swinging are different decisions and a person only gets to make one of them. He's slightly faster than you are at a sprint, so catching him means committing to a chase across open snow in the dark — and out there the cold doesn't care why you're outside. If he gets away, he tells people. That costs you nearly what killing him would have. A dead man tells nobody, which was rather the problem. ## Villages Two in three were turning up zombified. It's now an even split — half the villages you find still have someone in them. Only affects villages you haven't generated yet. --- Still open from 1.4.0: the handheld lantern doesn't show in your off hand if you have NotEnoughAnimations, Punchy or Physics Mod installed.

Hotfix for 1.4.0 - Sheep now spawn. They were missing entirely, so wool and beds were only available from loot or traders. - They spawn through the custom wildlife system, same as cows and chickens — a pair at a time, restocked near you. Existing worlds are fine, no new save needed.

# Hardcore Winter 1.4.0 — patch notes ## Why any of this The last build had you walking. Crops die under open sky, the herds are thinned, and the one thing that fixes farming — the greenhouse — wants seeds, glass and a steady heat source before it does anything at all. Until all three landed there was nothing to make, only things to go and find. Twenty or thirty minutes of crossing snow looking for the next thing you need is not difficulty, it is just distance, and it is not fun. So 1.4.0 adds work you can do where you already are. The **Fish Trap** fills while you are busy with something else. The **hot springs** are warmth you can stand in instead of fuel you have to carry there. The **caves coming back** means digging is worth something again rather than being one grey tunnel in every direction. The springs answer the other half of it too. The ring around the water grows short grass, and grass breaks into **wheat seeds** — so a spring is somewhere you can walk out of with the one thing the greenhouse actually needs, without waiting for a trader to knock. There is sugar cane along the waterline as well, renewable the moment you have a single stalk. That was the real gate: not the glass, not the fire, the seeds. The buried oases have always had both, but you had to find one first. The shape I was aiming for is **vanilla's own loop**. In vanilla you gather, you craft, you build, and the thing you built makes the next gather better — everything you need is reachable from where you are standing, and progress comes from what you put down rather than how far you walked. This mod had broken that. It took the early production away without giving you anything to make in its place, so the loop turned into *walk until you find something*, and that is a different game. So the trap is sticks, and sticks never run out. It produces where you put it. More fish means a bigger pond, which is digging — the thing you built making the next gather better, which is the loop running again. Seeds from a spring restart farming, farming feeds the greenhouse, the greenhouse feeds you. And where a rule still had to be decided, I let vanilla decide it. Its fishing rod checks for open water, and failing that check does not stop you fishing — it only costs you the treasure. So a bucket poured into your floor still catches fish, just slowly enough that the lake is obviously worth the walk. Nothing is refused with a message you would have to guess the meaning of. **None of it makes the world softer.** The trap only ticks while its chunk is loaded, so it fishes for you around camp and stops the moment you wander off. Cramped water catches at 6% against 60% under real lake ice, so the walk still pays. Wanting more fish means digging a bigger pond, which is building rather than shopping. And a hot spring is still a warm patch in the open, with the storm on all sides of it. The intent was to give the early hours something to build toward, not to take the winter out of it. ## Content - **New block: `hardcore-winter:fish_trap`.** Waterlogged-only; refuses placement outside a water source. Catch level `0-3` is held in the blockstate, so it needs no block entity and persists for free. Fills on random tick, right-click empties it into cod or salmon. Cannot be picked up with a bucket. - **New feature: `hardcore-winter:surface_oasis`.** Geothermal springs on the surface, 1-in-25 chunks before site rejection. Runs in `TOP_LAYER_MODIFICATION` after `minecraft:freeze_top_layer`, or the pool is iced and the ring snowed over by the same chunk's own generation. Magma scores as a tier-2 heat source; shroomlight on the pool floor keeps vanilla's random-tick freeze off the water. Plants short grass, fern, dandelion and poppy around the rim and sugar cane along the waterline, so a spring is a seed source as well as a heat source. - **Fish Trap recipe** (8 sticks), loot table, and an unlock advancement using a `minecraft:tick` criterion, so the recipe is known from world start. ## Worldgen - **`overworld.json` switched from a fixed biome source to `multi_noise`**, carrying vanilla's full climate table. Every surface parameter cell is remapped to `ice_spikes`, so nothing above ground changed. `deep_dark`, `lush_caves`, `dripstone_caves` and `sulfur_caves` are preserved, which brings the cave biomes back. - **Removed the `has_structure/ancient_city` override.** Cities gate on `deep_dark` again instead of the whole world, which restores vanilla rarity. - Added `has_structure/shipwreck_beached` and `has_structure/pillager_outpost`. - **New `CaveBiomes` class** re-adds the mod's underground flora and the oasis-adjacent decoration to the four cave biomes, in an order matching `ice_spikes.json` exactly. Applied as one modification rather than several, because the static `addFeature` helper applies in id order rather than call order and shuffled them, which contradicted the biome file and refused to generate at all. - Underground oasis outline is now lobed rather than a true circle. ## Client rendering - **New `StormState`** holds one eased view of storm strength, sky exposure and gust phase, sampled by the render thread. - **`StormFogMixin`** (`FogRenderer.setupFog`): visibility closes in with the storm tier and tightens further on gusts. Distances only ever tighten, so underwater and blindness keep priority. - **`StormSkyMixin`** (`SkyRenderer.extractRenderState`): sky colour, star and rain brightness track the storm. - **`ColdGradeMixin`** (`LightmapRenderStateExtractor.extract`): skylight cold, block light warm. - **`ExperimentalWarningMixin`** (`WorldOpenFlows.confirmWorldCreation`) and a new inject on `PrimaryLevelData.worldGenSettingsLifecycle` suppress the experimental prompt on world creation *and* on load. They are separate code paths. - Removed the `MobEffects.DARKNESS` pulse on blizzard nights. ## Config - New keys: `stormFog`, `skyGrading`, `suppressExperimentalWarning`. - The config file is now rewritten on every load so new keys appear in existing installs — except after a failed parse, where it is left untouched. ## Fixes - **Every buried oasis had an empty barrel.** All of them, in every world, since the feature shipped. The loot is in there now. - **Icicles and icicle clusters pointed the wrong way** on cave ceilings, and the clusters hung a little clear of the stone as well. - Buried oases are no longer perfect spheres — the walls come in and out now. - No more "experimental settings" warning every time you make a world.

# Strangers at the Door It's the middle of the night and something is knocking. Chat says a player joined. There's a name on your tab list. Through the window there's someone standing in the snow, and they're asking to be let in. They're not a player. But you have no way of telling. --- ## Someone is at the door every few nights Three kinds of people walk out of the blizzard, and **nothing about them tells you which is which.** Same skins. Same names. Same knock. One of them is freezing to death and needs your fire. One of them is carrying things you cannot get anywhere else. One of them is going to wait until your back is turned. The only way to find out is to open the door. ## Talk to them first You get a conversation — real questions, and they answer in their own words, with their own typos. Ask where they came from. Ask how long they've been out there. Ask if they're alone, and if they say *"just me, now"*, ask what happened to the others. They only have so much patience. Every question spends some of it, and once they've told you something they won't tell you again. Push too hard, accuse them of something, and they'll stop talking to you. Sometimes their story changes. If you notice, you can call them on it. ## Let them in They come in, find your fire, and stand there until dawn. You go to bed with a stranger in your house. If they're hungry, they'll ask. **Throw them some food** — drop it on the floor, or hold it out and right-click. If they're honest, morning comes and they thank you and press something into your hands before they go. Somebody's record. A stopped watch. His father's compass. Seeds, if you're lucky — and in this world seeds are worth more than diamonds. Sometimes a map to the home they walked away from, still stocked, still standing. If they're not honest, you find out when the blade comes out. **You get a warning.** You hear it drawn, and there's a moment before the first swing. Beat them down and they'll beg — let them live and they'll tell you where their cache is buried, or finish it and take what they're carrying. Your call. ## The trader Let him in and **right-click him** — he opens his pack. He's carrying a different stock every time, and he sells the things this world stopped producing. **Seeds. Saplings. Glass for a greenhouse.** He takes metal — and he takes work. A stack of coal, a season of fishing, a pile of bones. If you've spent the winter keeping a fire and a fishing hole going instead of mining, he'll still deal with you. A living sapling costs a full stack of coal. It's the last tree in the world and he knows exactly what it's worth. ## They remember what you do Kill people at your door and word gets around. Nobody tells you. There's no meter, no number, no notification. You just start noticing that the knock is always trouble now. > *they said u fed a man up here* > > *i heard u dont open. i had nowhere else* Feed people and that comes back to you too. --- --- ## Something else is out there **Icy goblins.** Small, quick, and they do not care what time it is — they don't burn in the sun and they don't skulk in caves waiting for dark. You'll meet them crossing open snow at noon, usually in twos and threes. They're faster than a zombie and they hit harder, and they aren't only interested in you. **They hunt wolves and goats**, because they're starving too and there is very little left alive out here. If you keep animals, they are competition. Kill one and you get what it was carrying to survive on — coal, bread, torches, a bit of salmon. Sometimes iron. Rarely, the axe it was swinging at you, or the lantern it was carrying. They have their own voice. You'll hear them before you see them. --- ## The world got colder and stranger **20 new frozen plants** grow across the world — blooms, lichen, icicles, crystals. They rise as the snow stacks around them and sink back down as it melts. Nine of them **glow blue in the dark** and light up the snow around them. Find a hollow full of frost crystals at night and you'll see what that's for. Works in vanilla, and **shader support added for Iris.** **Snow now hangs off cliffs**, sagging over the edge under deep drifts, so the drops look as deep as they are. ## Fixes - Thawing snow no longer melts down to bare dirt - Plants no longer stop snow from building up around them - Snow no longer left hanging in mid-air after a thaw - Your breath no longer falls out of your mouth like spit - Oases generate correctly again --- *Known issue: with **NotEnoughAnimations**, Punchy or Physics Mod installed, the handheld lantern doesn't show in your off hand. Being looked at.*

## Hardcore Winter 1.2.0 — Sled & Wildlife Update Two big additions in this release: a craftable Sled for traversing the snowfield, and a complete overhaul of how wildlife inhabits the world. ### ❄️ New: Sled A wooden sled built for the frozen wastes. Craft, place, ride. - **Recipe**: 1 spruce boat + 2 iron ingots - **Slides on snow & ice** with boosted friction values (0.95–0.98 depending on surface) - **Climbs 1-block steps** so small drifts don't stop you - **Speed-capped** to keep momentum honest in a survival setting - Custom item icon and in-world entity texture The sled isn't just a toy — it's the answer to the new wildlife system. Read on. ### 🦊 Wildlife overhaul Animals are now part of progression — you need cows, chickens, and rabbits for leather, feathers, eggs, milk, and rabbit hide. But this is still hardcore winter, so they're **deliberately rare**. The old biome spawn lists weren't producing variety in ice spikes (most creatures silently failed vanilla placement, leaving only goats and wolves). Rebuilt the system to give the player a path forward without breaking the lonely-tundra atmosphere. - **Wolves & goats remain dominant** in ice spikes — they belong here - **Custom spawn layer** adds rabbits, foxes, polar bears, cows, and chickens at controlled rates - **Cold variants** for all spawned animals: snow rabbits, snow foxes, cold-biome cows & chickens - **Population caps near each player**: 2 rabbits, 1 fox, 1 polar bear, 2 cows, 2 chickens - **Spawn rate**: ~3% chance per 5s — encounters are genuine events, not background noise - **Pigs removed** from the ice spikes spawn list — they don't belong in -40°C - Animals stay where they spawn — once you find them, they're there ### 🐄 Intended progression loop The design is: you go *out* to find animals, and you bring them *back*. The sled is your tool for this. 1. **Explore** the snowfield until you find a wandering pair of cows or chickens 3. **Breed** at your base to build a sustainable stock for leather, eggs, milk, etc. 4. Repeat with a different species. Each found pair is a small victory. That's the loop. Cows and chickens are scarce on purpose — you're meant to **earn** your livestock, not stumble into a free farm. ### 🛠️ Notes - No worldgen breaking changes — safe to update an existing world - The sled is purely additive; existing boats are unaffected

# Hotfix 1.1.2 ## Fixes - **Strongholds not generating** — Strongholds were accidentally excluded from the custom biome definitions, preventing them from spawning entirely. This has been fixed. *Please update as soon as possible — sorry for the inconvenience!*