Reverting to pulling from Blender.org since Gemini led me astray that GitHub had the official releases (it does not)

blender/init.sls

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 {% from "blender/map.jinja" import blender with context %}
 
-# 1. Download and extract directly from GitHub Releases
+# 1. Download and extract directly from download.blender.org
 blender_extract_tarball:
   archive.extracted:
     - name: {{ blender.archive_dir }}
@@ -9,6 +9,9 @@ blender_extract_tarball:
     - enforce_ownership_on: {{ blender.archive_dir }}
     - options: '--strip-components=1'
     - if_missing: {{ blender.archive_dir }}/blender
+    # Pass a modern browser User-Agent to bypass CDN bot filters
+    - http_headers:
+        User-Agent: 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'
 
 # 2. Maintain generic symlink pointing to active version
 blender_opt_symlink:

blender/map.jinja

@@ -1,22 +1,26 @@
 {% set default_version = '4.2.0' %}
 
+{# Extract major.minor (e.g., '4.2.0' -> '4.2') #}
+{% set version_parts = default_version.split('.') %}
+{% set default_major = version_parts[0] ~ '.' ~ version_parts[1] %}
+
 {% set defaults = {
   'version': default_version,
   'install_root': '/opt',
   'bin_dir': '/usr/local/bin',
   'desktop_dir': '/usr/share/applications',
-  'download_url_base': 'https://github.com/blender/blender/releases/download'
+  'download_url_base': 'https://download.blender.org/release'
 } %}
 
 {# Merge pillar data under the 'blender' key over defaults #}
 {% set blender = salt['pillar.get']('blender', default=defaults, merge=True) %}
 
 {# Derived variables #}
-{% set tag_name = 'v' ~ blender.version %}
+{% set major_version = blender.version.split('.')[0] ~ '.' ~ blender.version.split('.')[1] %}
 {% set archive_name = 'blender-' ~ blender.version ~ '-linux-x64.tar.xz' %}
 
 {% do blender.update({
   'archive_dir': blender.install_root ~ '/blender-' ~ blender.version ~ '-linux-x64',
   'symlink_dir': blender.install_root ~ '/blender',
-  'download_url': blender.download_url_base ~ '/' ~ tag_name ~ '/' ~ archive_name
+  'download_url': blender.download_url_base ~ '/Blender' ~ major_version ~ '/' ~ archive_name
 }) %}