September 2026 dev log: the big farm update, Magic goes public, and the first horse

September started as a farm month and ended as a horse month. The middle had a computer in it, a few bosses, and the Magic Pack’s first public download.

1 to 5 September: getting the farm update ready

The draught animals were dying, and nothing was wrong with them. My farm test world sits at noon with the daylight cycle switched off. With the clock stopped, the day never changes, so the farm’s once-a-day feeding never came round again. Most animals looked fine because their hunger was paused too. The draught animals were the exception. Their stamina drained on real time, which keeps going when the clock doesn’t. So their food stopped while the drain carried on at full speed. Now both run off the same clock, and the rule I took away is that anything that uses something up has to read the same clock as whatever refills it.

The cabs were the wrong size for their drivers. I built a ruler into one of the cabs and measured the tallest player model in a tall hat. The top of the hat sits 1.75 blocks above the seat. Two machines, the 5240 tractor and the big combine, had the driver’s head through the roof. Others were built to an old guess and came out a whole unit too tall. Every cab is sized from that one measured number now, never by eye.

Two more from that week:

• One comment line kills a whole animation file. A single // note in an animation file makes Bedrock throw the file away, and several unrelated parts stop moving at once.
• Tyres need three steps of depth. Tread bars, the band and the sidewall each have to stand out by more than a pixel, or the tyre reads as painted on. Every failure looks like a paint problem, not a model problem.

6 and 7 September: the big farm update

The Farm Sim Pack update went out. Every vehicle was reworked with new models and new handling, and the 5240 Row-Crop Tractor joined the F-20. Also new: the Barge Box Wagon, the Gravity Grain Wagon, engine sounds on every machine, a wall-mounted Crop Calendar, apple trees you shake to bring down the ripe fruit, a proper payoff for raising your own meat, and winter that melts over the first few days of spring instead of all at once.

And a stool you can actually sit on. Bedrock has no way to make a player sit, so the stool rides you on an invisible seat, and my first maths sank players half a block into it. That one has its own write-up: Bedrock has no sit button.

A day later: roomier cabs across the fleet, new badging on every machine and new pictures everywhere. And the garbled dashes from August came back, 177 of them across three pages. This time the site got a guard: the build now refuses to publish a page with garbled characters in it, and names the file and line.

9 and 10 September: a computer you sit at

LLS PC went on the workbench: a computer you sit down at, with other LLS packs as apps on its desktop. Its Store app sells things for XP, like an enchanting table does. Floppy discs are coloured by what they are, and a glint means a rare one. Each colour has to be its own item, because Bedrock fixes an item’s icon when the pack loads and can’t swap it per item.

The PC’s data centre is in the End, and I wanted it foggy. Fog in the End only tints the sky, not a sealed room, so I tested it in game and leaned into the dark instead.

13 to 18 September: boss work

Boss attacks taught me timing. An attack swung on an even back-and-forth looks like a lame horse. A real strike is a slow wind-up, a blur, and the whole body behind it. A few other things from that week:

• The End is tagged as a cold biome, so cold-biome farm animals were spawning in the End.
• The Watchdog blames whoever was running at the time. When the game hitches, the Content Log names a pack, but that pack may just have been unlucky. Check whether the whole machine stalled first.
• Scripts can’t pathfind. There’s no “walk over there” a script can call. Movement has to come from the mob’s own behaviours.

24 September: someone asks for horses

The first community request for the studio: a player asked for realistic horses on Bedrock, like SWEM on Java. That’s where LLS Equestrian began. Moving like it’s alive came first, then looks you can customise, then light care.

Two horse models got thrown out on the first day for looking deformed: one copied straight off a reference model, one built off real anatomy. The style that stuck is much closer to SWEM’s, and a build check fails the model if it drifts from its targets.

25 September: real coat genetics

Coats come from eight real colour genes, two copies each, so a horse can carry a colour it doesn’t show. The whole system is in real horse coat genetics. The first test went well apart from roan, which read as “just a black horse”, and its white flecks looked digital, like squares slapped on. It took a few goes to get hair that looks like hair.

26 September: feet that stop sliding

The legs were clocked off the game’s own “distance walked” counter, and that counter runs at about four times real blocks. So the feet skated. Clocking the stride from ground speed instead took foot slide at the walk from 13.2 pixels down to 7.1, and at the gallop from 8.6 to 3.7. It looked way better straight away. The same day: breed bodies (the Clydesdale first), manes that don’t show skin through them, life animations, and the Equestrian page on the site.

27 to 29 September: six days of horse

• 27th: breeding and foals. Troughs became shared with Farm Options, so water and feed work the same in both. Hitched horses got a tether, and it was the top fix on the list.
• 28th: hoof care, illness, mucking out, the breeds and the Horse Radar. The first sick horses were too hard to spot. The cough looked like a yawn and the hung head wasn’t hung enough. The cues got much plainer.
• 29th: lunging, the round pen and arena gear. The first ground poles and jumps were one block wide, which is useless with a horse this size. They’re four wide now. Blankets and stable treats went in the same day.

The Magic Pack went public on the 29th, as a beta: Magic, both companions and the Sulfur Dungeons in one file. Magic Companions, Missing Blocks and Night Lite got downloads of their own, and Magic Clothes had its first build.

30 September: the Doggoyle, and the empty dungeons

The Doggoyle joined the dungeons: the Hoggoyles’ guard dog, tamed with a golden apple. Its paws stay planted at every gait, worked out live in Molang: paws that stay planted.

And the dungeons turned out to have no Hoggoyles in them at all. Three enemy rooms per dungeon had been the plan from the start, but it never made it into the code. Every dungeon has at least three now. A feature you planned isn’t a feature until it’s in the build.

What September taught me

• One clock. Whatever drains and whatever refills have to run on the same one.
• Measure, don’t eyeball. The cab ruler and the foot-slide numbers both beat my eyes.
• A request from one real player is worth more than ten ideas of my own. Equestrian is proof.

Next month: the first Equestrian test build, a world that froze every 18 seconds, and carriages.