right now, I don't see an obvious reason to do this. If it turns out I was wrong later on, we can add functionality back, but we can't remove functionality after release.
the following things are currently not implemented:
- particle/sound effects when an entity extinguishes itself
- particle/sound effects when mixing different stuff in a cauldron
- powder snow cauldron
both of these things are contingent on #5169, but for the time being, the PR is functionally complete and I want to move on to something else without being stalled by the particle+sound problem (which I haven't yet decided how to solve).
now that the colour and skull type are included in the block type data, it's no longer necessary to maintain shim items to retain this information in the item data.
This commit completely revamps the way that blocks are represented in memory at runtime.
Instead of being represented by legacy Mojang block IDs and metadata, which are dated, limited and unchangeable, we now use custom PM block IDs, which are generated from VanillaBlocks.
This means we have full control of how they are assigned, which opens the doors to finally addressing inconsistencies like glazed terracotta, stripped logs handling, etc.
To represent state, BlockDataReader and BlockDataWriter have been introduced, and are used by blocks with state information to pack said information into a binary form that can be stored on a chunk at runtime.
Conceptually it's pretty similar to legacy metadata, but the actual format shares no resemblance whatsoever to legacy metadata, and is fully controlled by PM.
This means that the 'state data' may change in serialization format at any time, so it should **NOT** be stored on disk or in a config.
In the future, this will be improved using more auto-generated code and attributes, instead of hand-baked decodeState() and encodeState(). For now, this opens the gateway to a significant expansion of features.
It's not ideal, but it's a big step forwards.
