August 2026 dev log: the website, one-click bundles and a combine that wouldn't climb

August was the month the mods stopped living only on my computer. The site went up, the packs got bundled into downloads people can actually install, and I found out how many things break the moment something leaves your own setup.

12 August: the site goes up

lostlogicstudios.com went live with its first three pages: the Magic Pack, the Farm Sim Pack and Night Lite. Magic got its proper name the same day (it was “LLS Magic Wands” until then), and the fire staff took over from the studio logo as its pack icon. The next day the machinery went out as a mod of its own, LLS Farm Vehicles.

15 August: every texture is mine

Before anything else went public I checked every texture in every pack against vanilla Minecraft’s. Colour-shifting a vanilla texture doesn’t make it yours: the pixel layout is still Mojang’s. So the check ignores colour entirely and only compares the pattern of where each shade sits, which sees straight through a recolour. It found six files that started life as vanilla textures. They were redrawn, and the rule since then is simple: every texture that ships is drawn from scratch.

16 August: the Hoggoyles get their real model

The dungeon guards finally got their own model, rigged and animated, in place of the stand-in they’d been wearing. Their look is a tusked hog face on two legs, which is where the name came from later. The mender now casts lightning instead of fireballs, and both of them hit harder.

17 to 21 August: horses on the farm, and a combine stuck on one block

The draught team went in: horses that pull farm tools. Seats turned out to be trickier than they look. When one rider gets off, Bedrock shuffles everyone else down the seat list, so the order riders get off in matters. And a seated rider never “moves” as far as the game is concerned, so anything animated on a rider has to run off a clock, not off how far they’ve travelled.

Then the biggest bug of the month. All five driveable machines refused to climb one block. At a crawl it failed every time; at full throttle it worked maybe one time in ten. A bug that changes with speed and feels random is nearly always two things racing each other, and it was:

• The script checked the ground under the centre of the machine. A combine is 2.2 blocks wide, so its edge hits a wall long before its centre does.
• When a move was refused, the machine was put back wherever the game’s own collision had pushed it, with no ground check. The game pushes stuck things down, so the machine slowly burrowed into the ground.

Now the check covers every block under the machine, a refused move always settles it back on the ground, and a machine that’s somehow ended up inside the terrain gets lifted out.

21 August: LLS Core

The shared dungeon layer was renamed LLS Core, and it’s now the shared layer under every LLS pack, not just the dungeon ones. It broke the trader totems and maps in my older test worlds. Worth it, to have clean names from here on.

24 August: one download instead of four

The four farm mods became one download, the Farm Sim Pack, with one switch to turn on instead of four. The three magic mods and Core became one too: the Magic Pack.

Then the bundles wouldn’t install. The file looked perfect: right size, opened fine in Windows, every folder where it should be. Minecraft just refused it. Windows’ own zip tool writes its folder paths with backslashes, the zip format expects forward slashes, and Minecraft follows the format. So it saw one oddly named file instead of a pack. The bundles are built with my own zip step now, and it checks the paths every time.

Machines also stopped floating on water that day. Deep water puts the driver off, and a one-block ford gets driven down into instead of perched on top of.

25 August: clothes, a bucket and garbled dashes

Farm Clothes arrived: leather and wool sets first, then gold and diamond later the same day, sixteen pieces in all. Missing Blocks started riding along inside the Farm Sim Pack, with the path slab and a new Wooden Bucket. It’s crafted from planks on day one, and it fills, pours, milks and drinks like the real thing.

Snails and eyes started spawning on their own too: four shell colours by biome, and the Wandering Eye in swamps.

And the Farm Sim page went live with junk where every dash should be. Something had re-saved the file with the wrong text encoding, and each dash turned into three garbled characters. I fixed it, and it came back in September. More on that next month.

26 August: the doors and fences move into Missing Blocks

Enhanced Doors and Enhanced Fences stopped being separate mods and moved into Missing Blocks: 144 barn doors, 36 double-wide gates and 24 fences in one download. The gates were the hardest thing in the pack. A Bedrock block’s collision can’t be taller than one block, and a fence needs to be one and a half to keep animals from hopping over. I wrote that whole fight up in making a gate swing.

27 and 28 August: a quiet killer and a bad balance call

A number written as 0 instead of 0.0 in a mob’s file makes Bedrock throw the whole mob away. Nothing errors. The mob just goes invisible and does nothing. Any tool that reads one of those files and writes it back quietly drops every .0, so now nothing rewrites them that way.

The gargoyles were renamed Hoggoyles on the 28th, to match the tusked hog face they’ve always had.

And I made the combines wider (5 to 7 blocks, 7 to 9), then put them back the same day. On paper a scythe cut more blocks per second than a combine, so I thought the machines were losing. They weren’t. The scythe’s number is its best swing, and it never keeps that up once you add walking and turning. The combine cuts every tick it rolls. Wider, they were wildly overpowered.

What August taught me

• A file that looks fine isn’t proof. The zip, the dashes and the 0.0 were all invisible until something read them strictly.
• A bug that changes with speed is a race. Find the two things fighting.
• Compare like with like. A burst is not a rate.

Next month: the big farm update, Magic goes public, and someone asks me for horses.