Better Than Wolves

Oct 24th, 2014

• Added gravel and sand slabs. This was done mainly for the sake of making gravel a more effective early-game road building material, with sand also being added for consistency and largely because it was a "free" addition in terms of development effort once the work for gravel was done.
• Added a new storage block for ender pearls made out of 9 of them in the crafting grid, which also replaces the functionality of obsidian within the corresponding beacon. The reasons behind this will become more evident as the end game is added to BTW, but part of it is that it's intended to give more utility to mob traps in the end dimension. This unfortunately also means that any obsidian beacons you may have in your world will cease to function and will need to be replaced with the ender pearl version.
• Added a new system for despawning items dropped on player death. Instead of using the regular item despawn timer, these items will disappear one Minecraft day after the player dies (20 minutes real time), regardless of whether the chunks they are in are loaded or not. This makes the behavior of these items more consistent regardless of whether you are near original spawn or not, and reduces the effectiveness of gamey behavior like avoiding the area in which you died so that the items don't despawn. It will also hopefully further encourage the building of infrastructure like road and rail networks to quickly return on death. Note that in single player if time advances to the next day due to a death, this is taken into account by the system and it does not cause you to lose the time in between in terms of item despawn. Also note that this change will not affect items dropped on death previous to installation of this version, so if you have any lingering in the world, they will despawn as normal.
• Added ambient sounds to blocks containing silverfish to provide warning to players that may be tunneling into infested areas. I became aware that it was possible (although rather rare) to get randomly ganked by silverfish in the early game if you happened to dig in the wrong place.
• Changed the restrictions on villager breeding slightly to be a little more forgiving: peasants will only breed to create peasants. Butchers & Blacksmiths will breed to create both their own type, and the other. Librarians and Priests function together in the same way. The chances are higher when breeding of producing offspring of the class of the parents, but occasionally a child will be born at the same social level, but of the alternate class. I changed this because finding a village with a librarian but no priest was potentially very frustrating in the late game given how difficult villages can be to find at times.
• Changed wolves to think that villagers are rather tasty and villagers to not think very highly of them as a result.
• Changed wolves to howl less frequently in general as the howling could get rather crazy if you were in an area with a large wolf population.
• Changed cows to sometimes spawn with distended udders (fair point Vioki ;) ).
• Changed (further balanced) a few of the villager trades, and fixed a couple that were buying for excessively high value.
• Changed the way the names of some items in the mod are capitalized for consistency both internally and with vanilla. Things like "Pile of Dirt" instead of "Pile Of Dirt".
• Changed the way the decapitation bonus for mobs trapped between a chopping block and saw works so that it should apply much more consistently.
• Changed the player's initial spawn location so that it won't occur in jungles due to the night impossibility of surviving there initially. This does NOT affect your respawn location after death with Hardcore Spawn, only original spawn, nor does it affect existing worlds, only newly generated ones.
• Changed the "/time" command to display both the current overworld time and the total overworld time. This is mainly a debugging tool for myself, but I thought it worth mentioning in case it causes any confusion. The total overworld time is an internal variable that isn't affected by such things as the time being set through server commands, or advancing due to HC spawn, and thus is useful for stuff like the item despawn after player death thing mentioned above.
• Fixed problem where child animals and villagers wouldn't be subject to possession while traveling through the nether.
• Fixed problem where the Buddy Block wasn't detecting the growth of wheat, carrots, and potatoes. Note that in the case of carrots and potatoes I also fixed things so that Buddy only reacts if there's a visible change in the plant's state, and it will no longer react to internal invisible changes. In other words, Buddy will react to 4 growth states with carrots and potatoes, not 8.
• Fixed a few out of place white pixels in the Chocolate Milk texture.
• Fixed a small problem with the collision volume on the fences the mod adds, when they are connected at a 90 degree angle.