Did a few more things today. Solved the Take Cover problem using player.inventory. It contains what item the player is using. Should really be obvious considering I was using it to check what armor the player was wearing. It think its just a case of tunnel vision, I was used to using EntityPlayer to determine whether the entity could see the player, if the player was using an item, if the LOS was obstructed. It only made sense that  I should be able to determine what item the player was using. Well I was wrong.

Hours to debug, seconds to fix. Awesome.

Wasted several hours trying to draw a health bar on the screen, or anything for that matter. Tutorials always seem to go for containers. I'm sure when I figure this out it'll be something stupidly simple. Eventually the custom overlay will extend to the player seeing a 'glare' in deserts or when looking at the sun. I'm wondering if I should add panting sounds for the player when in the desert / running. Might get annoying.

Was planning on working on the TreeEnt some more but thought I really should finish the vulture. This'll give me a good AI base for other flying entities like owls. Got the model and animations complete. All I gotta do now is make it fly. Which may not be so simple. I was going to modify the newAI so that it would go to a random height near the target, but the problem is the pathfining is hardcoded with a check for if on ground or if swimming. Meanings I'd also have to create my own navigator. It probably wouldn't be that hard, but I think I'll probably get equitable results for half the work by just deriving from the Ghast entity. Dragon might be of help to, but its convulated by its multiple parts. 

Alas, I have promises to keep and minutes to go before I sleep.