@OffsetMonkey538

Turns out there’s been a bug for a whileeeeee (possibly the entirety of since I ported to 26.1?) where you can put an “empty” soul gem (with one soul inside it), so that was something I had to fix. Just a one line change tho, but still quite an embarrassing change.

Anyway uhh yeah finished the docs, fixed that bug, fixed some more bugs and… oh yeah, made the built-in datapacks enabled by default as that just makes more sense.

Finally a devlog of the mod itself again (I wanted a break from writing the docs, that’s exhausting 😭)

• Fixed description of speed and damage upgrade showing “Format error”: I was trying to use the % sign in the text, but item descriptions passes it to String.format which treats % as a formatting character. Using %% escapes it though and becomes a literal % character.
• My PR to Reliable Recipe Viewer was merged at some point so its RecipeViewMenu#updateByPage method is now public, so I was able to remove the slightly concerning java reflection I used to make it accessible and call it
• Added an RRV page explaining how to acquire soul essence.

Finished writing all the item pages and oh god it’s 3:30 AM as I write this i really need to sleep 😭😭😭

Had to add a new SmithingRecipe astro component for the smithing recipe, which was fun. Also made the normal CraftingRecipe a bit smaller as it was wasting too much space

Wrote a few more pages and figured out how to get embeds on discord (and i guess other sites) working.
Turns out you gotta add some open graph metadata to get the image and title and description to show up

Made a fun little astro component for rendering a crafting recipe. It definitely worked perfectly fine at the start and I definitely know how to CSS

The docs now show the item slot texture behind the item icons in page titles cause I thought that’d look cool.

Also started with actually writing the docs by doing the page for soul essence. It has a video which is cool I guess

Set up empty pages for all the blocks and items, fought quite a bit with astro/typescript to get the PageTitle override to correctly display the icons.
Turns out astro’s optimized Image stuff doesn’t support animated images, no matter how much you try to force it to, so I ended up having to use the basic img tag

Started working on setting up a docs page for the mod. Mainly want it for explaining the data driven configuration, but having full pages to give more detailed explanations of the different features is also probably a nice touch.

Made a new icon for the mod as well, it’s pretty much the same but higher res because the 256x256 one looked weird on the docs page.

The docs are done using Starlight like all my other docs pages (see those here) and lives at https://ultimate-mob-farms.docs.cursedmods.com/ and on the docs/master branch in the repo

Currently it’s just the landing page, but it’ll have more stuff soon enough

Added an RRV screen showing what items can be acquired from the Compact Mob Farm.

Shows the entity, the items it drops and the required tier upgrade level. Hoping this also helps with confusion on how stuff works

Added a progress bar to the Compact Mob Farm GUI that hopefully makes it much easier to understand when it’ll damage the entity and it doesn’t look like it’s just doing nothing lol, especially with the 30 second default time

Waow that’s quite a bit of stardust 😅 Quite happy with this project and the ratings it got on the first ship :D (except the one that accused my devlogs of being written by ai… My writing is not that bad, right? )

I noticed in the shipwrights’ review video that how upgrades work is not very obvious, they were trying to put a tier upgrade into a soul fan, which only accepts width, height and depth upgrades. It was mentioned in ratings that stuff is a bit hard to figure out in the beginning as well.

So to fix that, I added some silhouettes of the supported upgrades shown in the slots and also a hover tooltip saying what’s supported.

Oh and i’ve also added 26.3 support now

School starting with september really hit my productivity on this mod like a truck
I am realizing the deadline for stardance is getting real close, so I think this is probably the point where I’ll have to ship it. There are still some TODOs in the code and bugs that need to be squashed and porting to 26.3 (which released like this week, thanks mojang ) and so I haven’t been comfortable marking the latest release as 1.0.0 yet or making announcements elsewhere, but the mod is now perfectly usable and I like where it is.

Changes since last devblog:

• 26.2 support
• Injecting some items into vanilla loot chests
• Advancements

26.2 wasn’t actually as painful as I thought it’d be, which was a nice surprise. Adding advancements was a bit more of a pain with 26.2 support though as I needed custom criteria for some of the advancements (one for putting a soul gem in the compact mob farm and another for using a soul gem on a spawner) and Mojang, in their infinite wisdom, decided to move a bunch of advancement stuff around in 26.2.

Getting closer and closer to the actual release… could this be the last devblog before that?

Still not quite 100% about if the required kills for each mob are balanced, but it’s probably good enough. Definitely better than everything being 10 kills tho. Felt very off-balance when withers, which are hard to spawn and hard to kill, and pigs, which are just everywhere, required the same amount of kills to capture.

Notable changes:

• Show soul capturing recipe in rrv when checking usages of spawn eggs
• Show tooltip with entity name when hovering entity in soul capturing rrv recipe
• Add item descriptions
• Fix being able to insert items into the compact mob farm inventory
• Make amount of kills required for capturing an entity different per entity.
• Update compact mob farm recipe (now uses soul spikes in the middle instead of stone bricks)
• Store soul gem colors as hex strings in entity tiers config. Much more understandable and easier to manually change the overrides config or whatever
• Make built-in packs use the mod icon using a mixin instead of copying the icon into the packs. This shaves like 80kb off the final jar which is quite a bit of unnecessary duplicate crap
• Remove some log spam that was for debugging

• checking the recipe for a specific soul gem now only shows that specific entity instead of all soul capturing recipes
• soul capturing recipe now shows up before the duplication recipe
• soul gems can now be searched by the name of the entity they contain
• fix compact mob farm gui not rendering vanilla background overlay
• allow filling soul gem when held in the main hand
• fix dedicated server crashing

Running in a dedicated server would crash because there are quite a few places where I referenced client-only classes in places that the jvm will load on the dedicated server as well. Mostly in the different block entity classes, where I had a clientTick method that had ClientLevel as one of it’s parameters. Even though that method would never get called on the dedicated server, java still wants it to exist when loading the class because it’s part of a method’s definition.
My current solution is very very awful… I moved those things into methods in the client initializer and… well… yeah… it just looks and is awful: https://git.offsetmonkey538.top/OffsetMods538/Ultimate-Mob-Farms/src/commit/0.0.7/modded/src/main/java/top/offsetmonkey538/ultimatemobfarms/modded/UltimateMobFarmsModdedClient.java#L65

The real, foolproof solution would be using the split sources feature of loom, which creates a second source set and makes the main source set unable to access client classes. Only problem is that it’d be a bit annoying to fully get set up in my multiloader-version gradle system and would most definitely need many changes on MonkeyLib538 as well and I just am not up for doing that atm.

Fixed compact mob farm inventory not working correctly and being incompatible with other mods’ item movement stuff. The whole point of the transfer API on both fabric and neoforge is the transaction system, where each change must store a snapshot that can be returned to if needed; Turns out ignoring the TransactionContext and not saving any snapshots is a bad idea 😅 I’ve tested and it’s compatible with create fly (see screenshot where a compact mob farm with a blaze is being used to feed a blaze burner for a steam engine) and most probably other mods as well.

Added Reliable Recipe Viewer integration that explains soul capturing

Bunch of refactoring, bug fixes, balancing, etc. Release notes can be seen on the forgejo release or on modrinth, I’m not gonna copy paste em here (this is version 0.0.5 right now)

It is now actually reviewed on Modrinth, took two weeks for that to happen (Gosh I remember when review times were like less than 24 hours ). I’m still keeping it unlisted until I get a 1.0.0 release out, but if anyone wants to check it out and share feedback or anything, then it’s right over here: https://modrinth.com/mod/ultimate-mob-farms

Before a v1, I still need better rrv and item descriptions integration, some more balancing changes, advancements, quite a few bugfixes and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting at the moment.

Made soul fans placed at different locations use a different starting frame offset, so they don’t all look the same (see before and after videos).

The way this is implemented is a bit interesting…
There’s no easy “use this model but offset any texture’s animation by 1 frame” as afaik the frame index is global per texture. What Minecraft does allow is each block state variant actually being an array of variants that the game will choose between using afaik a hash derived from the block position. This is used in vanilla for things like stone and deepslate, which have mirrored and rotated variants so caves look less repetitive or whatever.

As each texture has a global frame index, I am duplicating the soul fan texture and just changing the order of the frames in the accompanying animation metadata file and creating separate models which point to the different textures and then those models are used as variants in the blockstate.

What’s even more fun is I am using datagen for duplicating the texture and creating the animation metadata files, which definitely isn’t concerning at all. This also required me to make a pull request to fabric api because the FabricCodecDataProvider assumes all files it generates are .json files, but animation metadata is .mcmeta. (The PR isn’t yet merged so I resorted to…. injecting a mixin into fabric api, definitely not cursed at all I swear)

Added particle effects for soul fan. Figuring out where to spawn em was quite fun actually, though I did have to add a custom particle (reuses the vanilla “small gust” texture) because turns out most particles won’t obey the velocity you give them and just do their own thing, which was a bit annoying.