Desire Paths

Desire Paths

Carve natural trails through the landscape

 

Desire Paths is a relatively simple mod which adds automatically created dirt paths into the game.

 

Features

• Repeatedly walk the same route and a dirt path will start to form.
• Tall grass blocks will be shortened and ultimately destroyed as you walk over it.
• Abandoned routes will slowly regrow leaving behind no trace.
• Dirt paths give a slight speed boost relative to how trampled they are.
• Highly configurable so you can adjust it to your playstyle.
• Builtin compatibility with the great Terrain Slabs mod.

 

Open to suggestions on improvements and features for the mod, though there is no guarantee I will implement them.

 

Technical Details

• Soil paths have seven stages of grass-coverage. The lower the grass-coverage, the greater the speed boost.
• By default, soil paths will regrow one stage every 48 to 56 in-game hours. They will ultimately regrow to either a verysparse, sparse or normal soil block following vanilla logic for the max grass stage.
• Snow layers will be compacted down to a minimum layer of one in winter and will only trample the soil underneath to a minium stage of 4.

Known issues:

None at the moment - but please feel free to let me know in the comments if you find a bug / incompatibility

 

Mod Removal

If you so desire to remove Desire Paths, then some steps must be undertaken to avoid unsightly ? blocks all throughout your world.

Do not remove the mod immediately, instead use the DisableForRemoval option in the config first.

If this option is set to true, no new paths will be created and all existing paths will be immediately converted to normal grass blocks on load. It is recommended to keep the mod installed until you are confident that all chunks which might contain path blocks have been loaded to avoid "?" blocks. The mod is effectively disabled in this mode and it is safe to keep installed.

 

Note on performance. I am unsure of the performance impact on large worlds with many players and paths although, I haven't noticed any impact myself. The initial implementation is more of a proof of concept. If performance appears to be an issue then I will look into a better solution.