Villagers moving off their normal route and breaking placed items
Hey there! So I updated my Villager Paths maps for 1.6 and myself and a lot of others have experienced Villagers not walking on their normal route. While I am not sure if this is a "bug" per se, I do believe it might be an unintentional side effect from one of the Villager's behavior changes.
As far as I have experienced, and learned from those who reported it to me, Villagers go off path and break their kegs and such due to player placed paths and floors. In the initial 1.6 path notes, we have "NPCs now try to avoid walking through trees and other terrain features." Paths and Flooring placed are classified as “TerrainFeatures” just like trees and such, thus causing this to happen. The behavior is locked in overnight, so removal or placement of a path as a villager is walking has no effect right then, but will the next day.
So, I figured I'd report this, as I don't believe this was intended. It has caused a lot of difficulty and frustration for people who like to put a lot of work into decorating various areas of the Valley. I've been suggesting removing paths or using furniture items placed somewhere along that path to get the villager to "phase" through their things and not break anything, but it can be hard to track all potential routes to avoid or block off.
I have experienced this in my modded files, and vanilla files on PC, in English. I've attached some images of The Ocean and Tidepools to show what happens when paths get placed. The mod I mad/used is just to recolor things to green and red for easier visuals so I can properly track this. In the first picture is our normal Ocean path maps, without flooring being placed, the red indicating areas of traffic. I started placing my recolored crystal flooring down on the trails and then anyone who walks here would head for anywhere along their path that flooring wasn't placed, resulting in the second image which is what I had left after they stopped trying to do that as empty spaces were likely too far. The red shows all my placed paths and all areas that they walked. It's a huge difference.
Oh! And I think this might be why Forage items show up on top of peoples paths and flooring too.