When placing blocks with formation wands, they get placed in some weird orientation instead of what was specified. This is in both 1.8.0 and the unreleased 1.9.0 with Baubles 1.5.2 and Forge 14.23.3.2655.

Reproduction steps: place stairs down in some orientation. Shift + right click on stairs with formation wand. Attempt to use them.

Preview:

Result:

Oddly, #703 fixes the preview but not the actual placement. With that patch applied, the preview becomes:

But the result is the same:

In neither case does the conversion wand permit changing stairs of one orientation into stairs of another orientation.

I'm not 100% sure about logs, but slabs will also pick a default orientation that is different from the one in the model block. It's easiest to display with stairs.

Is this odd orientation limited to stair blocks, or do logs and the like also do it?

I'd like to tack on this if possible. The formation wand would not place logs outside of oak for me. I was using spruce and when i shift-right click it oak appears in the box and then tells me i have zero of the item i clicked even if im holding a few stacks of spruce.

Completely different issue, but also already fixed for next release.