blocks.json lists a block's states in getPossibleStates() order -- the property
cartesian product -- and separately marks which one is the default. The parser
declared only id and properties, so the default flag was dropped on the floor
and nameToStateID returned states[0]. Those differ for 642 of the 1168 blocks.
What that produced, measured rather than guessed: every redstone vein in the
world was lit=true and glowing, every sunflower was placed as its own top half
with nothing under it, and oak stairs came out upside down and waterlogged. It
also quietly disagreed with the StateGrass, StateOakLog and StateOakLeaf
constants next door in encode.go, which are the real defaults.
Now it starts from the default state and applies the properties it recognises,
keeping the default's value for an unknown key or an illegal value -- which is
what vanilla does when it reads a palette entry. That matters on the disk path:
a chunk written with a property we no longer know used to decode to a random
corner state instead of something sane.
The signature grows an ok result, because air was doing double duty as both a
real block and "no such name".
Separately, blockPaletteEntry filled the Properties compound by ranging a Go
map. nbt.Compound preserves insertion order precisely so encoding is
deterministic, so saving one chunk twice produced different region-file bytes
for every multi-property block. Keys are sorted now.
LevelChunkSection puts two shorts in front of every section: nonEmptyBlockCount
and fluidCount. We wrote the first and then a literal 0 for the second, under a
comment claiming it was a reserved field that vanilla always leaves at zero.
It is not reserved and vanilla does not.
So every client was told every section is fluid-free, in a world where the
aquifer now fills oceans, lakes and flooded caves. The golden test did not catch
it because its fixture is a superflat chunk whose real fluid count is zero.
The count is per block state, not per block: a waterlogged stair holds a fluid
while a dry one does not, and the flag for that comes from the block-state dump
added with the heightmaps.
writeHeightmaps computed "highest non-air" once and wrote the same 37 longs
under all three ids, on the stated assumption that our terrain has no leaves or
transparency. That stopped being true the moment the generator grew trees and
flowers.
Vanilla's three client heightmaps stop at different blocks: WORLD_SURFACE at the
first thing that is not air, MOTION_BLOCKING at the first that blocks motion or
holds fluid, MOTION_BLOCKING_NO_LEAVES at the first such thing that is not a
LeavesBlock -- an instanceof, not the minecraft:leaves tag. The client places
rain and snow particles off MOTION_BLOCKING and lands a fishing bobber on it, so
a tree canopy reported as solid ground rains under itself.
Neither blocksMotion() nor the leaves test is derivable from blocks.json: the
first reads cached VoxelShape collision geometry and the forceSolidOn/Off
properties, the second is a Java class check. So the Java dumper grows three
flag bits and the whole thing is renamed for what it now is -- block state
properties, not just lighting. tools/VanillaBlockStateDump.java writes
internal/world/block_properties.bin at format 2; the light bytes are unchanged
byte for byte and only the previously unused high flag bits moved.
Verified the dumper round trip while doing it: recompiling the old
VanillaLightDump against the jar reproduces the committed binary exactly, so the
data really does come from the runtime registry and not from a stale checkout.
CLAUDE.md now carries the command to rebuild it.