Wither Skeleton Archers in Fortresses

Using commands, wither skeletons are capable of wielding bows, and even inflict fire damage on a hit with them. This datapack/server-side mod replaces the skeletons that spawn in nether fortresses with such wither skeletons, making these structures more difficult. Regular sword-wielding wither skeletons are unaffected.

Original: The original datapack my datapack is based off of was abandoned three years ago, and performs the replacement whenever a skeleton spawns in the nether on nether bricks (or related blocks). It also wouldn't work in newer versions, as it did this nether check using Dimension:-1 instead of the newer format Dimension:the_nether. My datapack instead uses a predicate to detect whether a skeleton is in a nether fortress.

Versions: The only differences between the legacy version (1.15 - 1.18.2), the 1.19.x version (1.19 - 1.19.4), and the modern version (1.20+) are syntax-based in the code; each one works the same way. This is necessary because the feature field in location predicates was renamed to structure in 1.19.3, and the alternative predicate type was renamed to any_of in 1.20.

Mod Compatibility: It is currently impossible to detect whether an entity is in any structure that has a given tag, so instead I used any_of/alternative to allow for modded fortresses, such as:

• Apocalyptic Fortress (hexfortress:nether_fortress)
• Dungeons and Taverns (minecraft:nether_keep)
• YUNG's Better Fortresses (betterfortresses:fortress)

This mod is also compatible with any fortress mod that keeps the minecraft:fortress namespace. If you have a modded structure that isn't on this list that you'd like this datapack to be compatible with, you can edit the file data/wsaif/predicates/in_fortress.json and follow the format there to add it.

Uninstalling: This datapack is safe to remove from your world, but doing so won't revert any existing wither skeleton archers back to skeletons.