Darmo

I do like the idea of requiring bandages for ongoing healing of hp. It could give more use to burlap and cloth. Maybe one bandage allows the slow regeneration of 200 hp or something. It could also make hot springs more interesting - maybe instead of providing accelerated regeneration, they just provide normal regeneration without bandages. If they remain as common as they are now, the player shouldn't have too much trouble finding one in an emergency. And that could open the door for magic/herbalism/alchemy to increase the healing rate.

Ah, I see. I like the notion of providing a different method of production, that has more intense time requirements, but produces a better product. trading constant attention (like the blast furnace) for a product that doesn't require a bunch of refining seems somewhat reasonable, depending on the balance, and material factors. Though really, for all we know, the processes might get totally revised and shuffled anyway.

You know, now that TFC2 is planned to have discreet islands with their own weather, perhaps a new weather type of volcanic ash rain could be added? It would be a disaster, and would pile up ash layers like snow. This ash would kill all grass and crops. But it would just affect the island the volcano is on.

I guess I've been assuming that's exactly how it was going to work. I'm pretty sure that's how Bioxx said it would be. Each island you get to go up one tier. Although I wasn't sure if the first island was going to have copper, or make you do a whole island in the stone age. I'm hoping the starting islands have copper, and not make you go through clearing it (and/or the next one?) with stone weapons.

It would at least need to be made of firebrick, or the structure and process would be cheaper than a bloomery. At least 16 sheets of bronze costs 3200 units. A large clay vessel is relatively worthless, and all other current iron processes are at best 1 charcoal to 35 units of iron, so 1 charcoal to 100 units is very cheap by comparison. And then you break the vessel and ingots pop out? No smithing required as the bloomery and blast furnace? Way too easy. But even if you up the carbon cost, and use fire bricks, and require ingot smithing, then you basically have something that mimics a bloomery, but with graphite added in. I don't think that's adding anything of value to the game, to have something that is almost the same process, and just produces an intermediate level of metal between wrought iron and steel. In my opinion it would be better to spend the development effort on processes beyond steel. Stuff that's new and different, with interesting mechanics. Not just a hybrid bloomery-blast-furnace. Something to replace the current production 'feature' of beyond-steel metals, which is just making more metal, melting it to make the next tier, and then having ingots of the previous tier vanish as you weld them on. Maybe further metals require even hotter temperatures, requiring the player to make mechanisms and blowers to stoke the furnace. Mechanisms and blowers could require a sand-casting process for the gears and other parts. These in addition to a structure made of fire brick block, and metal sheets. These can be hand, animal, or engine powered (engines requiring other sand-cast parts). The metal this produces allows the pumping of lava, opening the door for the next tier of production, a magma furnace. Maybe from magma furnace it's just a matter of adding more pumps and/or blowers, since procedural metals would be effectively unending, and you can't realistically have a new process for each tier. Overall I think it'd be better to think up more interesting processes beyond the blast furnace, rather than try to shoe-horn something between the bloomery and blast furnace. That, or shake up the entire chain.

To me it's always amazing that some ancient technologies, such as Damascus steel, were lost. The notion that many people can know a process, and still eventually it dies out, confounds in this day and age where all things are recorded. This is an interesting article though, about how a man can keep a metallurgy practice a secret despite using and widely selling it all his life, while employing men helping him, and still take the secret to his grave, less than 100 years ago. The description of the things he could do with those knives, sounds basically like magic to me, today. Note that at the end of the article when they make some guesses as to how this man made his incredible knives, one of those guesses involved 'quenching' the blade in molten lead. Interesting.

Death penalty is kind of a different subject. I agree it could use some tweaks possibly. Comparisons to real life only get you so far. I don't think most people want to be 1-shotted if they get hit in the head. Because make no mistake, if you get hit in the head with arrows and swords in real life, you're going to be either killed, grievously injured, or just have a flesh wound. There's not a lot of in-between. People want a challenge, but they need to be able to have a chance to recover from bad rng. I would say the OP nature of missile weapons stems from the player being much faster than most mobs, which affords plenty of non-risk shots. They're less OP in caves, due to the tight quarters and long draw time of TFC. I don't think the crafting speed has much to do with it, though I'm not against adding shaft related mechanics. The player will have arrows, and being able to recover arrows helps them a lot. Making crafting them take longer will mainly serve to force the player to spend more down-time. It's not going to change combat balance, imo. At the same time, you can't just make every mob faster than the player. That's no fun. But in the system I proposed, the player would very soon be required to start smithing arrowheads in order to stay effective against armored foes. The quantity of arrowheads gotten from a given ingot could easily be tweaked to the desired supply level. 1 ingot = 4 arrow heads, you're going to value those arrows. 1 ingot = 16, not so much. 1 ingot = 1 arrow head would probably draw a lot of complaints. And when the player moves to the next island, their old arrows will become less effective, eventually being obsolete. That's the beauty of the tier vs tier system. Even if the game has the same derpy slow mobs, it will force the player to upgrade in order to keep up with the damage curve. Right now in current TFC, Flint arrows will still be effective against bronze armor, and still do 50% damage vs steel armored foes, which is still plenty effective for slow mobs. In the tiered system, flint arrows would be tier 0, so vs tier 0 leather armor they'd do 50% damage. That's right off the bat. Now maybe in TFC2 having no armor is tier 0, and leather is tier 1. That'd let flint arrows (if considered tier 1) be ~75% effective against game mobs like birds and deer, since flint arrows would be 1 tier, above the mob's (lack of) armor. But if they bring those tier 1 flint arrows against a goblin in tier 2 copper armor, they'll be doing ~25% damage, which will start to eat up arrows. And flint should be utterly ineffective against wrought iron for sure. Similarly, it's very easy to make a bronze sword currently, and that'll last you forever against mobs. It's pretty effective and can be done without any smithing. But in a tiered system, it would swiftly not only lose effectiveness against higher tiered armor, but possibly also be heavily damaged if used against that armor. Requiring more frequent replacement. An aspect of the tiered system I didn't really elaborate on, is that it allows, I think, for a more controlled experience with mobs. Because in the tiered system, a basic mace for instance, could just do 200 damage. Through all tiers of metal, it remains the same. The player has to upgrade to maintain damage output vs armored foes. So even with extremely high tier mace, you could still have a bear have 2k hitpoints, and know that even a very well armed player is going to have to spend a lot of time fighting that bear. This is as opposed to currently, where in order to make higher tier weapons worthwhile, they must have quite a bit more damage output, with the result that low tier mobs quickly are dispatched in 1 or 2 shots. But if mace damage is always 200, even a 750 hp zombie would always take 4 hits (external factors aside). The player's armor will reduce the mob's damage output though, making the battle less risky. This allows other factors to play the role of enhancing damage. Smithing skill for instance, or pattern welding, and of course magic. And their enhancements can be very significant, without risking breaking the balance, because there'd be no damage curve to consider. You could design a boss mob and have a good idea of the time it will take the player to kill it regardless of player tier, because the damage output would not be skyrocketing at high tiers. Now it would be great if mobs could have more than just damage to offer. A zombie for instance might have a chance to infect the character with a disease. Large animals might have a chance to knock the character prone, or stun them, reducing the player's damage. Goblins might be able to throw nets at the player, slowing them, tangling their weapon and reducing the damage. Some mobs might do extra damage to armor. In these ways, even mobs which have very inferior attacks vs the player's armor could still pose some threats aside from pure hp damage. It's interesting, the current game treats maces and swords as basically the same. I presume that there was historical evidence presented of cast swords, which is presumably why it's allowed. But I agree it would be good to see swords take additional smithing through several steps. This could play into a class system, if there is to be a martial class, and would make smiths more valuable. Anyone can cast a blunt object, but swords should require some smithing, imho. So then, blunt objects could overall be less powerful, but easier to make. And I absolutely agree it would be great for armor to take more time, and especially if there were several grades of armor, taking progressively more time and material. This would again, play into a class/trade system where spending more points in a smithing track could allow the player to make better and better armor and weapons. That mainly depends on if the devs want to spend that time though, I think, on the extra graphics and item ids. Though personally I'd be fine with lower tier armors like chain or brigandine using the same graphic, just with different colors. As opposed to the very fancy plate system where every tier has a different style. It's unfortunate that MC has a pretty lacking combat system, but I think 1.9 will be better, and I think more attention to weapon/armor damage/resistance, along with better mobs, will play the most important role in improving the situation.

Do you have a proposal for how this might look in game? I briefly skimmed the first parts of the puddling article on wiki and it mentioned it didn't use charcoal. But it feels like the game uses charcoal as a general fuel for these processes, even in the blast furnace, to help add difficulty. So does the blast furnace also need to change, and/or bloomery? How will the progression go? Will there be an intermediate product between wrought iron and steel? It's all well and good to suggest these things, but it's probably going to help the chances of your suggestion a LOT more to make some actual game mechanics suggestions, rather than just pointing out a historical thing and saying it should be included, when the progression we have already works fairly well, imo. SO just considering the existing situation, there is indeed a very steep work gap between the 16 sheets of bronze in the bloomery, and then the 76 sheets of iron plus 110 graphite for the blast furnace. BF uses charcoal at a 1:1 ratio ore-to-charcoal, whereas the bloomery always uses 8 charcoal that don't do anything ore-wise. And in theory, after extraction wrought iron takes 3 steps to produce a finished ingot, while steel only takes two. Though in practice I imagine most people have a crucible for smelting their wrought iron, and taking that into account, plus the tedium of crucible melting and pouring, one might argue that the ingot work level is similar between the two, and they both produce a similar amount of raw material at max height (regular ore: bloomery 600 units, BF 500 units). So what process will fit in there, using an in-between amount of metal, and using a similar amount of work to refine the ingots? Or how can the existing processes be altered to allow such a step? As for tool scraps, in current TFC I don't see it as necessary - there's so much ore around, tools are pretty trivial to remake. If ore is rarer in TFC2 it might be more useful.

From what I can tell from watching videos, you do indeed have to right click to use the shield in 1.9. It doesn't just passively reduce damage. And when you right click, it raises the shield, blocking a lot of view. Even just carrying it around blocks a fair amount of view. So it does appear to come with consequences.

As far as that goes, form what i've seen of people playing vanilla MC 1.9, they've revised combat so that spamming clicks won't work, you have to allow some time to recover between swings. Plus 1.9 has shields. With any luck, maybe their new code will better allow some of these special moves and so forth. It'd definitely be nice if combat had more to it.

Well if you're allowing for missile-using humans, fine. But your poll did not make that clear. It basically made it sounds like you were offering options between existing 'normal' mc mobs and animal mobs. It did not acknowledge the possibility of humans or fantasy mobs (though I see you did add human tribes/civs to the list below the poll), which I think should be an option, if you want to cover all the options. Personally I'd like it to be a large variety of animal, human, and fantasy mobs, with the 'normal' undead stuff being still present where appropriate (crypts, necromancer army, etc). The human(oid) stuff should be easy, since the model is already there and can use the same weapons and armor as the player and just needs some skins. To me the ideal would be if each island had a variety of animal mobs as appropriate, but also some sort of civ, and that is who the player must defeat to gain control of the island. Animal mobs will be a big threat on the tier 0 islands, but will reduce in threat level as the player moves out and gets better armor and weapons, though huge animals like bison would always be something of a threat. But the player could also possibly tame them, as opposed to the controlling civ. The civs would scale in increasing threat and would be the player's main opponents. And it would be awesome if each island had a random pick from a variety of different civs. Human, orc, elf, goblin could be among the early choices. Later choices could include those same ones, just more hp and better armor, but maybe also trolls, giants, and more deadly civs that you don't see at low tier islands. A high tier island could be overrun with necromancers, and instead of natural animals they would be undead versions, plus lots of zombies and skeletons, ghouls, etc. Now yes, it would also be great if there were a config the player could toggle, to have only non-magical humans and natural mobs, for people that are into that. But I see no reason to limit the possibilities to just 'natural' stuff.

Well, I don't want to be starting rumors. I don't know that Bioxx ever specifically guaranteed those. But he's stated that you'll have to 'conquer' an island before building on it - to me conquering carries connotations of fighting a semi-civilized and organized group. He's worked on dungeon generation. This post is pretty relevant. There Bioxx said it 'may' be a fortress. To me fortress implies a tool working civilization that built it. Whether or not that is who/what is living in it now is another question. And even earlier, Bioxx stated here that TFC2 is open to fantasy elements, which is why I think that orcs etc could be in play. I'm kind of making assumptions based on those and other discussions. You know what they say about assumptions. But it would seem that the options are at least worth having in the poll, if you want the poll to be representative of the full range of possibilities.

Something to consider is how this would change the game balance. It's all well and good to say one wants realistic mobs only. However if that's the case, now you have no skeletons, so no missile weapon mobs. No creepers, so no scary explosions. Just a bunch of beasts with melee skills, easily dealt with once the player has a bow. You'd basically sacrifice challenge for realism. Unless these realistic mobs are faster than the player. Which probably would not be as fun as some people might think. That said, if you read some of Bioxx's past posts, it's pretty clear that things are headed toward having a combination of natural and 'civilized' mobs, and by 'civilized' I mean something that forms tribes or nations, and can use tools and missile weapons. Could be humans, could be orcs, could be something else. I'm hoping there's a variety of fantasy 'civilized' races. Presumably all these civs would have variants with missile weapons. So basically I'm guessing you'll see undead replaced with humans, orcs, or the like. I'd suggest adding to the poll 'lots of natural and humanoid mobs'. Because that's probably where it's headed. As for creepers, I'm not sure how they may or may not fit in. I could easily see them being replaced with like, little goblins that sneak up and hit the player with an explosive keg, or poison potion, or something.

i'm not sure that MC graphics are really up to the task of creating a truly sinister atmosphere. It'd be interesting to try though. But there's definitely the question of whether things will go along traditional fantasy lines (orcs elves dwarves), or have more of a variant theme.

His calculator allows you to specify the percentages of each alloy, so the user can control what percentages are being used for each. I actually have my own spreadsheet similar to this for figuring out what 1 ingot of each colored steel costs. But I've always wondered if I'm doing the root alloy calculations right. For instance, I came up with one ingot of blue steel costing, in the end, 265 iron, 39.25 copper, 22.5 nickel, 9.75 silver, 7.5 gold, 3 bismuth, and 3 zinc (at my own preferred percentages of course - 50% BS, 15%BB, 25%Steel, and 10%SS, and the sub-alloys having their own of course). 350 total units go into that one ingot of blue steel - which confused me at first, as I expected 300, but it's that vanishing pig iron you weld onto the black steel that does it, in the weak blue steel stage which I have at 50% BS, which means you're having 1.5 pig irons vanish, not just 1 for the weld-on BS I was considering off the top of my head. I made this after mining a ton of nickel, and wondering how long it would last me. Discovered I should have spent a lot less time on the nickel and silver, and a LOT more time on the iron. I calculated the bare minimum iron possible is 245 units, for 1 ingot of either red or blue, but you use more silver and nickel doing that. I was basically maxing out the alloys not involving iron, nickel, or silver, and then decided to prioritize saving the rares, since the 20 point iron swing, in the scope of 350 total units, is kind of minor.

The crickets thing we already have. I'd suggest: -A sort of locust/cicada sound when the ambient temperature reaches a certain temperature or above, maybe 30C. -Jungle noises near Kapoks and Acacias -A more intense brushes/leaves thrashing/sticks breaking sound when the player is moving through leaf blocks. Especially jungle ones. -Loom noise -Chisel noise when smoothing stone

I agree with Tony, it'd help make breeding meaningful if it were the only way to obtain top producing/performing animals. In this context it would be very good if the bucket could hold less than 1000mb quantities. Maybe increments of 200, or 250. Maybe the top-producing natural milk animals can do 1k, but through better breeding an animal could produce up to 2k per day. It'd also be an opportunity for actively feeding the animal to increase production. TFC2 could definitely use some changes to make animal products more meaningful. As it is, wool and meat are fairly easy to produce in quantities that make genetic variation kind of meaningless - food is easy to get after awhile, and wool only has two real uses, only one of which could be considered ongoing. Leather is also very limited in usefulness. Milk is a little more important on an ongoing basis, but still, once you have a few cows, you'll be able to produce it pretty consistently. Presumably leather and wool could become more useful if temperature and clothing make it into the game.

I avoid bears as a rule. They seem like they got a buff at some point, and are super-dangerous. From watching some LPs, though, water seems to nullify their speed/jump advantage though. Still very dangerous. If you don't have nearby water, I'd suggest (having never tried this before) maybe getting near, clearing an area of trees, Digging a bunch of 2x2x2 pits with 1-wide walkways between. Like maybe a 4x4 grid of such pits. Try to lure the bear in amongst the pits, and then shoot him, hoping to knock him into one. Don't fall in yourself or you're toast. Even then though, they can jump and hit you from within the pit. You'll want to tower up nearby and arrow him from above, outside melee range. Or, with a bit of extra constructing, you could probably enclose and suffocate him. If you don't need the hide though, maybe just leave him in the pit to despawn.

The thing is, this is a game that involves a LOT of moving. Like actual running around in-game. I've never played Unworld, but being a top down scroller, I imagine it's a different dynamic. I can only speak from my personal opinion here, but I play TFC to do things. Sometimes it's very grindy things - harvesting wood, mining, etc. But I want to be doing things. I don't want to be slowed for weeks or months, crawling around, or even slowed to walking speed. It's already bad enough when I take a slight drop, and have a slow affect for a few seconds. That's annoying. It's dangerous and something of a rush possibly in combat, and that's fine, as long as it just lasts for combat. For me the game would be unplayable if there was a good chance that when I drop a bit too far, or take a hit from a mob, I might have to spend weeks slowed. That's not fun or interesting. It has nothing to do with me making progress toward a goal. It involves no surprise or discovery. It's just slowing down the game pace to intolerable levels. The more significant the mechanic, the more game-killing it is. On the other hand, if you nerf it to be like a 5% chance, and if it happens then all I have to do is craft a crutch, then why have it? It becomes trivial. I think that if you did a survey, you'd probably find that people will tolerate a lot of debuffs, penalties, and grinding, but they would not well tolerate significant slow effects. You might be able to take away sprinting for up to a day. I could see that being tolerable, maybe. But I'd say that's it for me. You can make me do grindy things, make me travel long distances, I'll do that stuff because it's active and I'm progressing, seeing new things, discovering. But not so slowing my movement. It's the same problem with requiring sleeping - you cross a line, into making people do *nothing*. Movement reduction is not fun or interesting outside combat. My 2 cents.

What I'd like to see in one of these calculators is the ability to put in a quantity of desired ingots of black, red, or blue steel, and then an output which tells me the quantities of all the *base* metals I'll need. So not the alloys that go into the colored steels, but the base metals that go into the alloys that go into the steels. I want to be able to say 'ok, how much copper, iron, nickel, silver, etc do I need for 14 blue steel ingots to make the anvil? Then I can look at my stock of base metals and figure out where I need to fill in the gaps, and then spend a nice long session of smelting and smithing with the end result being a quantity of blue steel meeting or exceeding my goal. Or, look at a cube of 64 copper ingots, and be able to figure out simply how many blue steel ingots I can get out of that. I'd really love to see that kind of calculation.

What I meant by 'detour' was instead of going straight west into an island that will be difficult for your class, you go south or north one island, and try to head west from there, hoping the races on those islands will be easier to beat. Not just literally skip the island to the west for the next one west from that. Ideally in a multiplayer environment, the players would balance their classes, and be able to take on about anything they come across, maybe.

I agree with you there Tony. Regular missile weapons already seem pretty OP to me, so I share the feelings about ranged destructive magic. There's probably a few ways to address it. -One would be to make the game mostly focus on non-damaging magic, with damaging stuff mainly at the very top tiers. -Make damage spells short ranged so you can't snipe mobs outside their sensing range. I don't know what the animation possibilities are, but jets or fans of flame and electricity would be pretty cool. -Make ranged damage spells extremely expensive in materials or mana, so a player can't do them over and over ad-nauseam (actually, it would be kind of cool if using magic to much in short order made you nauseous!). As far as mobs, I think it would be great if there were several different island races, each with strengths and weaknesses. So one island might have orcs which are very tough, well armored, and resistant to weapons, but weak vs magic. But another may have elves, which are decently armored but also resistant to magic. As you move up in tiers there could be dragon-kin, who are immune to fire magic, resistant to most other magic, and average armor. Another trolls, who don't have armor, but regenerate very fast (unless burned), and are fast with high damage. If there is a variety of island-controlling races, the player may want to make a detour to get around an island that is more resistant to his particular class powers.

I believe you have to shift-right-click, don't you? One of those situations you get so used to it it becomes second nature and it's hard to remember exactly how you do it...

I imagine there would be a desire, for balance reasons, to have magic users use up resources over time. Keep in mind that the base game is minecraft. It's about mining (or resource gathering, if not strictly mining). So when you say they don't need to refill the staff, I think that would be unbalanced. Unless there's something else they have to do to maintain their power - using materials to gain mana or something. I'm making some leaps here and assuming that smithing will be very similar to TFC1 - it's a very good system - and likewise weapons and armor will degrade with use, as they currently do. If it's true that 'warrior' equipment degrades with use in TFC2, I think mage equipment also should.

If you're interested in modeling and/or texturing animals, contact me.