Currently the bad mode feels to much as creative flight. The following suggests turning the bat mode into in more interactive flying mode with new limitations.

Fly mechanism

The new goal is to require the user to constantly interact the the game to keep the bat flying.

The bat is no longer immune to gravity, the user is required to repeatedly press the jump button to keep their y position, hold the jump button to ascent or stop pressing the button to drop down. (This should work like jetpacks from other mods)

An addition, a modification or a replacement to this fly mechanism is to introduce a slow decending mode as long as the jump button is not pressed.

Action properties

Besides the direct flying mechanism I suggest following general changes to balance the action

Vertical flying

The bat mode should no longer allow users to ascend to every height they want.
Players should only be able to fly to a maximum height. To keep is real and balanced I suggest setting the limit to the surface level + <amount> blocks

Horizontal flying

To limit the long distance travel of bats the horizontal flying capabilities of bats should be limited. After some time they should lower their flying speed to suggest a landing or slowly reduce the upwards speed to force the player to the ground

Some experiments will be necessary.

@MarioSMB what are your thoughts?

I don’t think a cap for how high a bat can fly should be needed since some bats irl can fly thousands of feet in the air. And for flight distance, kind of hard to determine how long a vampire bat can go, perhaps increase blood drain over a period of time as bat so your forced to land? (But I think there’s something like that already added?).

Closing this in favor of #1160 which we missed before, sorry.