Seeds of Growth - A 3.14.0 Update

Well were are running a little behind schedule, and we still a few things left to complete, mostly on my end as I got busy helping to build a deck out in the hot sun this week so I haven't had the free time that I thought I would have to build the new trees world generation code. Although I haven't had as much time as I would have liked, our texture genius, Zenth has been doing some more tweaking to the textures, and correcting some of my spelling mistakes in the new blocks.

The first official Cypress tree candidate generated by minecraft.

However I finally had some time to work on world generation code for that we are using as a basis for the new trees and I finally have our first candidate for generating one of our new trees, the Cypress tree. At the moment these somewhat lanky trees have the base of their trunk that rapidly flares out the main part of their foliage and then gradually slop up to their tops. These normal cypress trees at the moment are made with a couple "building blocks" that should be able to be used on other trees without our having to copy code like was done in the old trees, making it much easier to maintain and update in the future.

Console command to to test the Cypress tree spawning parameters.

The console commands that I added for tree debugging and such have been a lifesaver in the creation of the new trees, as I don't need to chop down trees or have a large superflat world that I do my testing in to verify that the tree is generating properly, and I don't have to restart the game every time I want to tweak one of the spawning parameters. Now all I have to do is issue a console command and I can do my tweaking without ever needing to move about, or waiting for the game to reload.

A couple creepers kept in a pen by a scarecrow. The closer creeper is scooting away from the scarecrow.

Another thing that I have worked on is finally adding in the code that made the scarecrow not totally useless. Prior to my joining the ExtrabiomesXL team code was written so that the scarecrow would scare away mobs, but during the update to 1.5.x it never got merged into the main code, so we finally got around to making the scarecrow scare off mobs like it should. It should scare off all hostile mobs that have a brain, so slimes and golems should not be affected, but most other hostile mobs should. That being said I have had a creeper who really wanted to give me a hug so bad that he ignored the Scarecrow and still chased after me.