Darmo

Or more to the point, will TFC2 be? I think the general nature of minecraft predisposes it to be primarily a building game. Because it's the thing it does well - huge open procedural worlds with the player building whatever they like. Games like Ark and Fallout4 are trying to reach out from their FPS base, and add some building. But it's not on the level of minecraft, and the worlds are fixed. Building is minecraft's strong suit, I would argue.

Fun idea, but I agree with subarctic, the existing missile weapons would need rebalanced in order to make a sling attractive, if the sling has wonky usage mechanics. Also leather should be an option for creating the sling. I'd say just use rocks as they are. It'll presumably have a reduced damage output vs other weapons, so they'll need a lot anyway.

Could be an interesting addition. As long as the food in the trough doesn't rot, and as long as animals don't die from lack of food, it should be workable for SMP, I think. The previous suggestions of reduced offspring, reduced weight for meat, and reduced production of milk/wool, would all be suitable penalties, without killing off the player's hard-earned animals. It's also a good idea to have it be seasonal, so it's not a constant grind. I suppose maybe grass would have to change color based on seasons, in order to show when the animals have to start being fed via trough. If animal health came into play, they could become sick as well, and part of healing them might be feeding them from a trough, regardless of season, in addition to whatever medicine might be required.

With smiths, you are referring to the notion of the alloy system being less cut-and-dry, and more about different ingredients adding different properties? I'm honestly a bit skeptical of that idea, but I guess we'll see. The build-your-own spell thing, I don't know. It seems to me like it could be very difficult to balance, nevermind the implementation. I've played a couple games that had such a system, and it seems like it ends up with tons of min-maxing, and just seems very bland. Just my personal experiences. My background is good 'ole Dungeons & Dragons, so I'm kind of biased probably, towards more defined spells. Limited customization might be more manageable. So you have a ranged damage spell, and the player can choose the damage type, range, and AoE, which are all tradeoffs. Maybe an armor spell that grants a specific tier of armor, and the tier, duration, and area of effect are tradeoffs. But things like an armor spell that grants a bunch of resistances and also flight and a a light aura, that seems to me like a bit much. Scribes, I kind of imagined as being linked to a study object - a lectern perhaps, or desk. I was imagining the NPC being linked to the lectern, similar how golems in Thaumcraft get linked to chests or other objects they're meant to interact with. Maybe the player, when they first pay the hiring fee to the scribe, the scribe gives the player a contract, and that's the object used to link them to the lectern (same role as golemancer's bell in TC). This contract vanishes somehow if the scribe leaves due to neglect (not sure exactly how that would trigger). The player can fire the scribe by giving them back the contract. The lectern could have a spot to store paper and ink, which is what the scribe uses to make the notes they produce. The research points accumulate on the scribe, so it behooves the player to make sure to take care of the scribe, lest the research be lost. Also the player can hire multiple scribes. But only one scribe can be using any given bookcase at a time. It might be good if, once assigned to a lectern, scribes do not move, so as not to overly burden the processor with pathfinding. Basically, I envisioned all mages employing scribes for the purposes of making the books they use to make items in the upper tiers, if not also for player spell learning. Player research is mainly for learning spells, and producing the books the scribes draw on to make to make notes the player uses to produce the item-ingredient books and learning books.

Some more thoughts on how magic could play out. I rather liked Thaumcraft's system of requiring the player to examine every block and item with the thaumometer (at least, the older versions). I liked how that sort of simulated the player researching the natural environment to learn how to harness it's energies. Depending on how difficult the initial entry into magic is desired to be, this could be taken even further. Some thoughts: BLOCK RESEARCH The Mechanic The Meta NPC Scribe Research MAGIC TIERS & DELIVERY So those are some thoughts I've had of late, on some possible systematic aspects of magic. .

To be clear, I wasn't meaning to say it's a bad thing - skill webs don't have to be logical, they're just game progression devices. Skill webs are simple to understand and balance, and that's not a bad thing. It just depends on which direction the devs want to go. Simple hard divisions, or softer but more complex, arguably more believable divisions. Or a mixture.

That's true. Perhaps there would have to be other ways to gain xp, similar to how smelting gives xp in vanilla. This could play out as 'special' xp tracks for each stat. So you have your player levels, which can be used for any stat. But separately each stat has an xp track that the player improves by doing things involving that stat. So just by doing tons of smithing they can gain enough xp to level their STR or CON, but *only* those two. This skill-specific tracking kind of already happens with skills, and maybe it's just the skill. So once you get your blacksmithing to adept, you can raise your str/con again, without having to grind mobs. But this also uses the next player xp step at level 5, so you're not 'doubling up' on points. You'll either have to get to player xp level 10 (at which point you can pick any stat), or get to the expert level of blacksmithing. You could also do other skills to raise their stats, but you would have to get them up to expert as well. You wouldn't get a stat point for them at adept, because you already took your adept point at blacksmithing. I don't know that I'd go the route of players spending multiple points on a skill. I think it may be best from a player understanding perspective, to keep it as a skill web, with simply 1 point used for 1 skill on the web. Although something similar to Fallout perk system might interesting, if the skill in question has enough depth to have multiple levels of benefit. I would consider Earthboundflyer's skill web system much harder to explain logically. What logical reason could forester, smith, carpenter, adventurer and farmer have to conflicting? They're all just manual labor. I consider trade friction to be more about dissolving boundaries, allowing a player to pursue as many things as they want at the lower tiers. EBF's system is more of hard division system, based on a skill web. Simpler, but less believable imo.

Personally I'm not super into the notion of having to sacrifice just to maintain my farms and stuff. However, I'm definitely on board for gods to be a factor in the game. So I find that a certain island, the inhabitants worship some certain god which gives them a special bonus of some kind. Keep things a bit random so players don't just know when they see the mobs exactly what powers they have. Maybe there's a temple somewhere on the island, that's extra difficult, and has better resources or something. And if the player destroys it, thereafter every so often they can be attacked by cultists, wherever they are. Something like that. But on the player side, I'd be more inclined toward gods being mostly a magic thing - clerics and druids, to us D&D analogies. I'd probably prefer their influence to be very minor or not at all for non-magic players. Just my opinion.

I've been thinking about this for awhile, and I'm interested in seeing what others think with regard to whether or not 'classes' would be a desireable thing for TFC2. By classes, I mean arranging the game mechanics such that players are discouraged from pursuing multiple major occupations (smithing, magic, etc), not only due to the time involved, but due to in-game mechanical limitations. I'm making a big assumption here that there will actually *be* multiple classes. Maybe that won't even be true. But I thought it would at least be worth raising the topic. I feel like this would help solidify the notion of separate roles on multiplayer servers. Right now, everyone more or less ends up the same I think; if they play long enough, they're expert smiths, or nothing (nothing that takes much time anyway). Their respective smithing skills may end up different. But everyone is a smith. My concern is, once there are other big-time trades, will the player be able to be ALL of them? I think by not allowing players to be everything, you bring replay value to the single player experience, and increase the value of teamwork on multiplayer servers, especially if some enemies are built such that they require, for instance, both mages and warriors to defeat reliably. I don't think full-on compartmentalized D&D style classes is a good idea, but there's a few different ways to accomplish this notion without classes, including stat points, and trade friction, but they're kind of a separate topic, and more of a true suggestion, so I wanted to start a discussion topic first, and see if anyone else has any thoughts on this. Would this improve the feel of the world, and increase the replayability of the mod? Or would it frustrate players, who generally seem to like to be able to do any and everything with one character, from what I can tell?

Phyllite is a really terrible rock type imo. Hopefully the mid layer is better. You say it's mostly dry grass, is there any clay?

I would suggest reading this post, the clothing post, and the regional difficulty post. They're long, but if you read those three, I think you'll have a pretty good idea where things are going.

In general I'd say the innate trait thing isn't really a great way to go. If it's skill related, then maybe the player doesn't want to pursue that skill. So now they have to spam-create characters till they get the bonus they want, or live with being sub-optimal compared to people who got the trait associated with that trade. If they don't find out till well into their career, they're going to be disappointed when the find out and it's not what they actually wanted to do. If it's random bonuses to hunger, damage resistance, that's better as it's generally useful, but those are things that imo would be better done temporarily via actual trades, such as magic or alchemy (or permanently via item enchantment). Giving a player a permanent buff like that is going to be either op, or so minuscule as to make no noticeable difference I think, and it will take away from buffing trade skills. And again, what you're likely to end up with is 1 or 2 that are most useful, and players will just recreate until they get what they want. I think it's better to give players a direct choice - either via a skill web like earthboundflyer's suggestion, or stat points/trade friction per my suggestion (or both)

I've been for some time thinking about how a real chemistry profession could look in TFC, before there were TFC2 forums. I was going to wait until I had a more fleshed out system, but now with magic entering the discussion, I feel like I should present this idea, because originally I'd envisioned it as a more 'believable' version of magic. This will be a long post, but I'll spoiler it to break it up. INITIAL THOUGHTS I've seen some posts by Bioxx that suggest it should not be the goal for any one person to be good at everything, and furthermore that the game is meant to cater to multiplayer, as opposed to single player. In that vein, I think that chemistry could be made into a technology tree somewhat like the metal tech tree we have. I think it could facilitate a great many effects, which would be *like* magic, without being magic, for those who want a less fantasy experience. I think this system should be on par with the smithing system in terms of complexity and time investement. As part of my initial thoughts, I considered, what is it that makes the smithing system so great? The blacksmithing system in TFC is pretty genius really. I think chemistry has to have a similarly complicated system, with an associated skill, in order to justify the great results that can be produced. If we examine the blacksmithing system, it has a few salient characteristics that make it what it is: - large investment in materials and time - randomness which requires player to re-learn the actual smithing part every game - a benefit for increased game-skill (higher durability) - several things to keep track of including: -the status of your 'production center' (pit kiln vessel, bloomery, or blast furnace) -the heat of the item in the forge (don't let them melt) -the amount of flux in the anvil -the durability of the hammer in the anvil -the 'staging' of the items heating (i.e. if you're going for a helmet you'll be more efficient if you can always have the next thing require being heated up, whether that be ingots, another sheet to weld to the one you just made, etc. It gets important on items like a breastplate composed of 8 ingots, which cannot all heat at once) In my opinion it's that last thing that separates a great smith from an average one. Most people can learn the 'recipe' for a given item after a little time, but being able to effectively manage all the different tasks and factors to keep a smooth work flow is what really makes it a profession I think. All that said, I don't think it's a good idea to make chemistry like blacksmithing, to use the same GUI and tasks. Chemistry as a profession should have it's own 'flavor' about it, not be a smithing gui with different labels. So what is it that sets chemistry apart? The smithing system as it is, is a lot of materials grinding, and a lot of banging on anvils, with a little randomness thrown in to spice it up. I think what would set chemistry apart is to embrace the experimental nature of it. Make it a system with tiers and material grinding, but more randomness. I think the essence is to force the player to experiment, to advance their trade. The TLDR In light of the thought process above, I think that chemistry should depart from the MC and TFC norm, and embrace some degree of randomness as integral to the process. The game minerals will have random 'profiles' assigned to them, and this will change with each world seed. The player will have to experiment to figure out which minerals have been assigned which profiles in every world. This will require a suspension of disbelief, as there will be recipes which make no irl sense. The result of this will be especially evident in a multiplayer environment. I think that if done right, chemists would be a breed apart from other players, requiring not only a lot of time invested just to produce, but even to gain the knowledge in the first place. Players will not be able to just look up the recipe for a given concoction on wikipedia and grind some bellows. They'll actually have to put in the experiment time. The result being that chemists could have actual knowledge, gained in game, that they could either share, or keep to themselves, thereby protecting their professional value. Blacksmithing has some random knowledge, but it's not entirely vital to the system - you bang away long enough you'll get there. most of the barrier to entry in blacksmithing is the material production grind time on higher level metals. However, if the system is to be complex, there must be useful results, or it will be wasted dev time and player time. THE USES AND EFFECTS The previous posts I could find on chemistry/alchemy were mostly herbalism, or things that really wouldn't affect gameplay much imo. But if chemistry is to be a full on tech tree like metals, it needs to have concrete benefits that people will want, and will be willing to put time into. I'll leave herbalism out of it, as it's been suggested in the TFC1 forums, and could be related to chemistry, but would be sort of a side-branch. I'll separate the uses into 'effects' and 'products'. EFFECTS These would basically be modifiers to existing TFC items. They might have an associated product that is crafted with the item to get the effect, but the effect is what you're after. These might be: - Increased durability for tools and weapons (I suggested this in the TFC1 forum under "Case Hardening") - Increase damage for weapons (I suggested this in the TFC1 forum under "Pattern Welding") - Increased speed for tools (Possibly related to the above) - Increased Torch light radius (various tiers) - Increase Torch Intensity (originally intended to affect zombies as daylight. Maybe obsolete in TFC2) - Increased Torch duration (various tiers) - Permanent 1m radius low light torch effect upon burning out (basically for finding them again in the dark after they 'go out') - Illuminating arrow effect (basically a torch you can shoot, perhaps of reduced duration, possibly modifiable as above) - Coal/Charcoal enhancment to make each individual fuel piece last longer - Coal/Charcoal accelerant for forge (applied to fuel, the item above a specific fuel slot heats faster) These could be cumulative (a brighter, longer lasting, permanent glow effect torch) or not. It could get progressively harder to add additional effects to the same item. PRODUCTS These would be something that does not already exist in the game. I'm kind of violating the one-idea rule, but I'll just touch on them, to try to keep within the scope of this thread: - brazing material for repair of armor and weapons - Flammable oil/phosphorus grenades - poison gas grenades - Slippery oil grenades (mobs in affected space cannot move out of it) - Lantern fuels (coal oil, ethanol or alcohol for burning - these could have enhancements similar to torch above) - Lead/silver solder (if pipes ever become a thing) - gas fuel (for gas lamps) - Paint (a use for lead) - fertilizer - 'synthetic' flux -'tiered' flux (special fluxes to weld high level metals) - glue (make cobble not fall, keep natural stone in place?) - dynamite - sleep darts (would allow chickens to be put in inventory, a pig or sheep to be carried on back, put bears to sleep, etc) So those are some of the ideas I've had so far. I didn't include the stuff that would be internally used in chemistry itself. If natural cavern cave-ins are ever fixed, I feel like the torch stuff alone would be pretty attractive. If chemistry is to be a trade in its own, it has to have an extensive list of beneficial products, or nobody will bother. These ideas were written before magic was back on the table, so they don't even touch on how chemistry could tie in with magic. I felt I needed to establish that there *could* be a lot of benefits to chemistry, which is why I made the list. Discussions on specific products should probably be kept to a different thread, so this one is just about the chemistry process overall. THE PROCESS This is super-long, so buckle up. Presumably chemistry would have 'tiers', similar to the metal system, but different. The tiers would be based somewhat on the tool, like anvils, but also would require more complex concoctions, with more conditions, as you move upward. I'm going to present my initial thoughts on *a* way. I'm no chemist though, there's probably a lot I'm missing and mixing up. TIER 1 The player starts by crafting a mortar and pestle. They use this to make [mineral] dust. I think the mortar and pestle should require the player to actually move the handle around in a circle. So players can't set up a multi-pestle station like they can with quorns. The results will be X units of powder. This player then must craft some glassware (I'll have a separate post regarding glassworking). The first three will be a boiling flask, a condenser, and a vial. How they fit together - whether each takes an entire block or what - is for another discussion. Each mineral will have assigned to it based on world seed, a 'solvent' and a 'solution profile'. The solvent will be randomly selected. Example solvents are distilled water, citrus juice, alcohol, and turpentine. Each solvent will have it's own process to obtain of course (alcohol solvent would require distilling existing alcohols into a pure form). The player places their mineral dust in the boiling flask, with some solvent, and boils it for X amount of time. If the player used the correct solvent, The result will be solution in the vial. If they used the incorrect solvent, there will be a generic 'sludge' left in the boiling flask, which is useless, like unknown ingots. By process of elimination, they'll arrive at the correct solvent. An optional idea, glassware could have durability. each time the player uses a set of glassware, it loses durability. This represents the accumulation of deposits. The player can wash their glassware in a barrel, to regain most (but not all) of what was lost each use. This comes from chemical majors I knew in college who basically said half the job is washing glassware. It's not necessary, but it opens up opportunities for better qualities of glass, or self-cleaning class, later in the tech tree, and also provides some churn of glassware, to help justify a glassblowing trade. Also, if each piece of glassware retains knowledge of it's most recent 'residue' this can be used later to cause unintended effects, such as explosions. So now the player has vials of solution (or mixture, or suspension, or whatever). These vials no longer have any data link to the mineral they were made from. These are the "solutions" the player has for the next tier. The wiki will have profiles of each solution, to help the player identify them. But the vials themselves will have only colors. The rest of the into will be in metadata, obtained by further experimentation, OR, if the player has a high enough chemistry skill, they can see these characteristics by holding shift, like with food taste. As an example, each solution could have four characteristics: color (obvious), taste, ph, and a flame color. With four characteristics, and four options in each characteristic, you can cover 32 different minerals, and no two will have the same combination. I had a picture of how this chart works out, but for the size limit is super-low for this post, so maybe later. The color is easy to tell, the taste simply by right clicking with vial in hand (this uses up the vial). The PH via..some method (requires production of litmus paper, but does not use the vial). And the flame color by right clicking on a fireplace with the vial (uses up the vial). So, in the course of identifying which solution a given mineral prodcues, the player will be required to A) grind up, B ) distill it which will take time, and C) distill and use 3 vials to be absolutely sure which solution it is. They will need at least 25 units of solution to successfully test it. They will need a seperatory funnel or graduated cylinder to split it up, if they have more than 35 units and don't want to waste it. As the player gets better, their chemistry skill will allow them to identify these characteristics simply by shifting. Color requires no skill. taste requires some, ph more, flame color even more. If the player does this for each mineral, they will be able to cross-reference the results with the wiki solution profiles, to determine which solution is produced by which mineral. At this point the player can use these solutions to make things. These can involve multiple solutions, or solutions plus other things. These recipes will be defined - we cannot expect players to willy-nilly randonly combine solutions and other stuff. If desired, some may be used to produce certain specific named chemicals, this would allow the derivation of chemicals that, if we were staying 'realistic' would require a bunch of other minerals and elements with no in-game use. The experimentation comes with the determining which minerals produce which solutions, but the use of the solutions to produce final products needs to be defined for players in the wiki, because random combinations of 29 solutions to produce a product is probably way too much randomness. At very high skill levels, the player will be shown the name of the mineral the solution was derived from via shift key info (remember, the mineral derivation will be random each seed). So in the early skill, the player will need to carefully organize their vials, with signs. Because the items themselves will not make it totally obvious. I'm hoping storing this info in the shift-info spots makes the idea more feasible, as there's a only a few colored vial items, rather than one for each mineral. Now, it's worth pointing out, the assignment of solution profiles to minerals may need to be defined slightly, and maybe not use every mineral. If it's totally random, you could end up with graphite being the solution used in tons of chemistry recipes, making graphite doubly scarce. So certain extremely rare mineral may need to be excluded from tier 1 distillation. Of the ones left, it may be good to has an 'abundant' subset, such as bronze materials, a useless subset, and a rare subset, and the abundant and useless get used a lot, which the rare are used in recipes which require less raw material. TIER 2 and above In tier 2, the player uses more advanced processes. Solutions are further refined combined produce reagents (so there will only be half as many reagents as solutions), which are the next level of production chemicals. Reagents are not necessarily liquid. They can be gases. I haven't fully explored this, as things get complicated. So I'll just give general thoughts: Ways to make it more complicated, are to require liquids be distilled at a very specific temperature (falling out of range ruins the batch - solution is a bunsen-burner like item where the temperature is more easily controlled) or in the presence of certain gases. Some combinations may produce gasses, which require the player to seal the joints with clay. At least until they have the proper material to produce glassware with lapped joints. Some things may be required to be distilled from metallic containers - gold or platinum. More glassware will be brought in - filters, Y joints to allow dual-distillation, or fractional addition. The player may have to carefully watch the PH of solutions, and add buffering agents to keep it in spec. Or ad them to get it to a certain point, similar to the blacksmithing interface. The possibilities are almost endless. Additionally, there could be better glass types (borosilicate for instance) with more durability. There can be larger glass vessels for doing mass distillation of bulk chemicals. In order to incentivize actually experimenting to determine correct solutions, certain combinations of solutions will produce bad affects, such as explosions, fire, poision gas, etc. Some recipes will produce specific acids (nitric, sulfuric, hydrochloric, hydrofluoric, etc) these acids require a specific container at the output or else they destroy the incorrect one, and the blocks below. And if it goes really wrong, acid explosion! It could get very complex and interesting. The key will be making sure the system is determinate enough that the player can reasonably determine what is what. The very top tier might have totally random recipes for incredible effects, perhaps 1 ingredient from each 'tier' (solution, reagent, colloid etc) As you go up in tiers the number of options is reduced by half each time because each successive tier requires two products form the previous to make. But even then a random selection each from 28 choices, 14 choices, and 7 choices, would be almost impossible, even if no special conditions of combination were required. Almost certainly not worth the time. So it would be best if there were somehow other limits. To make the uber potion requires 1 acid, 1 product used to improve torches somehow, 1 that heals, etc. Each would be randomly selected from a sub-set, so the pure weight of combinations would be less. The system could also be simpler, obviously, and an actual chemist could probably contribute a lot. But again, I think it could be a very fun and useful addition to the game, could play in with magic well, and should be significantly randomized to make experimentation the key feature. This randomized use of generic solutions, reagents, etc, allows an extensive system without people getting up-tight about having to include some essoteric materials that will have no other in-game purpose, just because irl those essorteric materials are used to make a thing. Thanks for reading my gigantic idea, I hope you've enjoyed it, and please do comment.

Though it's true that Rust Never Sleeps, irl rusting to the point of actually losing significant amounts of metal is a very, very slow process (unless accelerated by other factors such as salt). It's not really worth modeling this in game imo. Lets just assume the player oils their stuff once in awhile. Magical/alchemical rust is another matter, but would simply be a durability reduction I think, no need to have a separate system. Beyond that, stainless is a relatively modern invention, and I believe it is impossible for a blacksmith to weld in traditional blacksmithy ways. The irl methods involve noble gases and arc welding. Not that either of these couldn't just be ignored - TFC2 after all. But, they are arguments against it.

It looks like six basic trades, actually. I assume this is done with a tech tree where the player selects the branches, utilizing levels apparently, and this allows them to use certain skills? These are 'hard' separations of skills? That is, if you haven't selected Forester, you cannot mine at all, since mining only appears under the forestry trade? As ChunkHunter says, it seems like it would make single-player very difficult. Personally I think I'd prefer a system with softer limits between the more minor crafts of the game. I do love that automatons are in there though!

This page will tell you under what conditions the animals spawn. Check your F3 screen and see if the areas you're in meet the conditions for any of them. Cows and horses are generally limited to somewhat dry plains areas (rainfall <500). Sheep also have some rather tight conditions. Pigs are by far the most common in my experience, as far as animals you can actually domesticate. But even within suitable conditions they can be a bit rare. It may indeed just be a case of bad rng.

I am glad that was understandable despite my inconsistent descriptor use. After thinking on it a bit, I said that the stomach - hunger as we're calling it now - wouldn't need a meter but after considering, that may not be a good idea. In my example the player was eating discreet pieces, but higher tier foods might count as multiple pieces in one meal. So it may be good for the player to have some idea where their hunger is. Or they could just know by a text echo of 'you're full'. But, if the hunger number spread is small, rather than a bar it could be a small icon at the left end of the nourishment bar. Maybe in the shape of a tiny stomach, ala Don't Starve. Or just a circle that gets progressively bigger as the character gets fuller. Either way the nourishment and water bars might have to scoot to the right in order for such an icon to be big enough to be useful. Alternatively, the bar could change color. Darker green for empty, light bright green for full. Just a couple thoughts to try to save having another entire bar, but still have some indicator for the player.

Technically you don't need metal tools as it is now. You just need a large clay vessel. But of course you'll be out all the grain avenues, leaving only a few possible alcohol precursors. As for a handle, pretty sure you can already do that. Though I don't think it makes a durability difference. I could get behind that being a thing though. But as for bone tool heads, the game would have to be drastically reworked so that stone isn't literally everywhere, because right now stone is far far easier to get. Or, stone tools would have to be harder to make. I'm not sure that could realistically be done though, while allowing bone tools to be easier, and still make them fit reasonably below the metal tier. You could limit the types of stone that can be knapped. Which is logical. I'm not an expert on these things but off the top of my head I'd say you could remove all sedimentary stones from the list of knappable stones (except chert apparently, which is specifically mentioned as knappable on some web pages). This would however depend upon TFC2 (which is the only place this major a change could happen, and the forum this suggestion should have been in) having more animals than current, otherwise they would be too few. But even in that scenario, the first time the player would have no weapon. So they're going to have to punch an animal to death. That seems a bit much to me. Are we going to allow pointy fire-hardened sticks as spears next? The whole thing just doesn't seem that worthwhile to me, in the overall scheme of things.

That's all well and good, but I'd assume the player is an adult when they start the game. So they have tastes generated over the life they had before being stranded or whatever. Moreover, taste provides an easy logic-gate to having individually seeded experiences. Nutrition, from a logic standpoint, is much more cut and dry. It's true that different people can have different dietary needs, but TFC does not having blood tests and stuff. So how are they to divine what they need? The food groups aspect is simple and serves the nutrition aspect well. And I also like your suggestion from the other thread Tony, of having a separate system of requirements to get hp *above* 1000. Maybe through 'vitamins' or something. I thought that might be a good way to incorporate higher tier dishes. It's not like it has to be either/or. Both things can be involved in the system. I think personalized taste is much more accessible and easy to understand, for the part of the system that requires some figuring out on the player's part. We can have more complexity as things progress: FOOD TIERS Tier 0 food - raw foods - spoilage can be very fast to slow - provides NO satiation - meets basic food groups for hp up to 1000 - does NOT meet vitamin groups for hp above 1000 - slow to eat Tier 1 food - simple combos like salads, sandwiches - Spoilage is faster for the most part - provides satiation, in response to more closely meeting player taste - meets basic food groups for hp up to 1000 - does NOT meet vitamin groups for hp above 1000 - normal or fast to eat Tier 2 food - cooked dishes requiring specific portable tools (frying pan, kettle) - includes hot drinks, omelets, flapjacks, spit roast - Spoilage faster for the most part - can make durable foods with no vitamins or satiation - provides satiation, in response to more closely meeting player taste - meets basic food groups for hp up to 1000 - meets vitamin groups for hp above 1000 - normal or fast to eat Tier 3 food - cooked dishes requiring non-portable process blocks, and tools (Cauldron or oven in combination with frying pans, baking pans). Includes casseroles and other things that take a long time. Perhaps combination metals (or those could be in an even higher tier). - spoilage very fast - can make very durable foods that provide some satiation and vitamins - provides super-satiation*, in addition to normal satiation - meet basic food groups with higher bonus for hp up to 1000 - meets vitamin groups with higher bonus for hp above 1000 - normal eat speed only * - super-satiation would be another hunger bar that overlaps the normal one, in a different color. Once this bar is depleted the player goes through the normal hunger bar. Only high tier foods can fill into the super-satiation bar. Once into the super-satiation bar, the player cannot eat any more. This will incentivize eating lower tier food first, to get close to max on first bar, and then eating the tier 3 meal. This could conveniently simulate a multi-course meal, sort of. Stamina bar and/or stat points, if added, could further be affected, stat points would perhaps be tier 4 or above foods only. LIMITED EATING Furthermore, things could be complicated by limiting how fast the player can eat. Basically you take the tier 0 food, and limit the player to only being able to eat enough to slowly progress. So to use arbitrary number examples because I don't know the real numbers, say tier 0 raw food restores 4 fullness per piece eaten (I'm using the new system of discreet pieces, rather than oz). The max 'fullness' bar is 50. But the player's 'stomach' (this does not have a hud meter) only holds 5 pieces of food. So they can only eat 5 pieces at a time, filling their fullness by 20 and stomach by 5, then they have to wait. Say their stomach goes down at 1 piece per hour, while their overall fullness goes down 2 per hour. So they eat 5 pieces, and in 5 hours they can eat their fill of again, but their overall fullness has gone down 10 in the meantime, so they only made 10 progress in the fullness bar during that 5 hours. In this way, if your hunger gets extremely low, you cannot just fill it immediately by eating raw tier 0 foods. If you almost starve, it will take you 20 hours to fill your hunger bar again with tier 0 food no matter what, because the stomach limitation means you can only make 10 fullness progress per 5 hours. However higher tier foods give more satiation, filling up the fullness bar more for the same pieces, so with good enough food you can fill your fullness up in one sitting. There's a little danger here in naming, in that tracking the stomach fullness separately from the other bar (probably referred to as hunger by most) may seem counterintuitive or weird - like saying the player has two separate stomachs. It may be better to try to call the overall bar a 'nourishment' bar or something. Hopefully that can be arranged so as not to offend peoples' sense of logic. This provides yet another marked difference between food tiers, just in terms of convenience and fullness. depending on the number spread, it may allow the cooking skill to straight up add satiation to the food. This would be especially good if we go with a simplified system where the skill isn't going to provide useful information. If we have several food tiers, I would suggest that a given tier only contributes to a certain skill ceiling. So tier 1 food only helps advance the novice skill. Tier 2 foods can advance the novice skill level, or the next level if that's where the player is. And so on.

Ah, that makes sense on the decay mechanic. As far as taste, it's true it's twice the information, but I think that the information will be more readily understandable, as it would describe the taste of the food in an absolute sense, and then how the player feels about that. Rather than trying to make the player decipher both those features from one descriptor. I was still proposing the descriptors start vague, and get more precise as skill levels up. I guess when you were talking about a 'preferred food' system I thought this would also basically nullify the cooking trade, as I was understanding it to just mean the player tasted a given food once, and found out if they liked it or not. If there was still going to be a taste component, I did not pick up on that. I thought I was actually proposing a way to save some of that system, and the associated skill benefits. I had intended to come back and make a few more suggestions, regarding skill dictating what dishes you can make, and a brief re-hash of my spice suggestions from the old thread. Plus maybe a stamina bar as another thing that food could benefit (regens faster the better food you've been eating) - although I'm sure stamina was suggested quite a lot on the old suggestion forum. TFC2 now though, right? 0-5 SCALE But ok, so 0-5 preference for each base food. How is this conveyed to the player? A verbal description, or actual number? Do they have to try the food at least once? Do they get a text echo on the screen? That seems like it would get super-annoying. Separate inventory tab that lists all the food they've tried, and how they feel about each one? Or maybe it's just a tooltip. They wouldn't have to actually try the food for a tooltip, but they'd have to have it in hand, which is probably good enough, and probably simplifies coding vs tracking if they've tried each food. But really, this suggestion is just numbered taste, simplified to a much smaller scale, but over all food items. And I'm not seeing how the cooking skill plays into this early part. Skill could still play a part in food prep though, which is probably more logical to most people anyway. Either a hard limit on what dishes you can make at what skill level, or a minigame that gets easier with higher skill. The overall dish taste could be averaged over the ingredients, or take the higher (most liked), or use a grand total of all ingredients. A grand total might allow for more flexibility. For instance the player's skill could add a bit to the total when making the dish. There could also be spices, and maybe the player has a preferred spice which can add to the total. There's more complexity that could be added, though I'm not sure if that's desired. The player could move beyond salads and sandwiches, to making actual meals - fry eggs, fry bacon, make pancakes, combine them on a plate. Spit-roast you have to baste every so often. Stew where you add certain ingredients at certain times. That sort of thing. Fast-spoiling but highly beneficial. Is it desired to have new process blocks and tools, like an oven (there could be a really fun wood stove GUI), cauldron, or frying pans? Tea/coffee? It does seem like the limitation is largely benefits. To have very much complexity and/or greater difficulty, the benefits need to increase commensurately. BENEFITS So what is out list of benefits currently? - Speed - certain dishes are eaten instantly, as opposed to bite-by-bite - Satiation - extra hunger bars filled beyond what the base ingredients would use - Nutrition - more complex dishes fill a little bit of all nutrition, even if they don't in fact contain those specific food groups - Delayed regeneration - per op, delayed health regeneration that kicks in if the player is damaged within a certain time period Those could be mix-and-matched to a degree. I'm not sure how far you could take it without getting op, or too complex. But certainly more than two dishes I would think. Mix in spoilage time and there could be more powerful/complex dishes that spoil faster. Some that are filling, keep well, but don't provide satiation, etc. I would think we'd want to avoid too many magical effects from food. The "well-fed" bonus does seem like it could be compelling, if it increases player walking-speed/carry-weight/mining-speed (mostly mining speed imho). If a stamina bar were added, it could be another significant benefit (plus alcohol, tea, and coffee could affect it directly). I've also been preparing a stat point suggestion for a new thread, though I probably won't have time to post it this weekend (out of town), and that could be tied in as well (may as well stop me here if you don't want to read that). Overall I'm curious if the desire is mainly to clarify the system but keep it about at the complexity level it's at now in terms of items involved, or to expand the skill into a more complex thing, with process blocks of its own, closer to a full-on trade (though I doubt it'll ever really reach that status).

This raises a lot of questions for me. But to start: STACKING Food stacking rather than weight sounds ok to me. I'd assume that one food unit would equal about 5oz of the current system, so any harvesting/butchering bonuses would simply result in more individual food items of that type. Seems totally fine to me. DECAY So using an ark-style decay system (I've never played Ark), how will the stacking work when you have a stack that's decayed partially, and you add a fresh food? Does it do a weighted average? This would be like Don't Starve, which I have played. At low stacks, you can effectively 'refresh' your existing food with new food by averaging. But there's a tipping point where adding fresh to too big a decayed stack basically results in mostly losing freshness, because it's a weighted average. I think it'd work. I never really minded the food management system as it was, but then, I stuck with mild climates and just harvested food as needed, so it was never a problem for me. Presumably the decay timer would still be paused on smp servers, if the player doesn't log in for X hours. I agree with Micmastadon, that it will change the preservation dynamic. Right now I favor settling in mild climates around 7k latitudes, and just leaving the food in the ground continually, and harvesting it whenever I need it. Avoid having to deal with preservation at all, really. The new system sounds like it might make that non-workable, depending on how long the decay timers actually are. 5 minutes sounds rather too short to me. But, depending on what the goals are for cooking and the food system in general, maybe that's where you want to go. If there were ways for the player to process raw food into forms that are more durable - hard tack, biscuits, etc, that would be fine I think. Pickling could remain the ultimate preservation, but effectively non-transportable, while certain food preparation methods could add greatly to durability (at the sacrifice of satiation and regen mechanic). So with a few different prep methods, the player can choose whether they're preparing for battle, preparing for a long trip, or something else. I think that would be good. TASTE Now as for taste, I don't think it's necessary to toss that baby out just yet. I think perhaps one of the major problems with the TFC1 taste system is that the taste profiles are relative to the player, and the way it was described was not really good. It could be confusing when a food said "not sweet" and yet, you know that food adds sweetness, either through pure logic (it's a pile of sugar) or because your sandwich is very sweet, yet none of the individual ingredients indicate any sweetness. This is confusing. I think it would have been better if "not X" had LITERALLY meant it had 0 of that flavor. For TFC2 I think we should have more descriptors - barely, hardly, kind of, somewhat, fairly, rather, very, extremely, ridiculously, absurdly. That's 10 right there. So associate those to the various 10ths of flavor scale (I'm not sure how far the actual numbers go). The player could have half as many descriptors to start with (but anything above 0 still gets a descriptor), then the full 10, then actual numbers at intervals of 5 or whatever, and finally exact numbers. And then the key: the descriptors are the same for everyone, so that its logical to new players. So 45 savory gives the same descriptor for everyone. I think just having a uniform descriptor system might help a lot. Then, the player has to determine where on this uniform scale this particular character falls. The way this is done could vary in a few ways. It probably won't be as subtle and require as much experimentation as the TFC1 system, but it will still likely be more involved than just a preferred food system would be. It could be as simple as the player, when they hold control over a food - where it right now shows the player's relative opinion of the flavor - it would instead have two components for each flavor. First would be the absolute flavor area of the food. Second would be what that player things of that flavor. So it might show saltiness as "Extremely". That will be followed by one of a few player preferences for that point. Perhaps "meh, ok, good, excellent! woah!, and yikes! Or something like that. The player knows that meh is far below preferred, ok is getting closer, good even closer, and excellent is almost exact. woah is too high, and yikes is way too high. So what you get is a uniform taste profile scale, and a uniform player preference scale. And it's just a matter of aligning the two. I think this would be easy for even new players to grasp. If they still have trouble just make it explicit: "way too little" "not enough" good, excellent, "too much" and "way too much". PREFERRED FOOD I think preferred food could also be a thing, providing a further satiation bonus for the player perhaps. But my concern is, will the player have only 1, or a few? Personally I'd junk any character that had fish as a preferred food (if it could be found out early on). I was kind of hoping that maybe in TFC2 crops would have a more geographically varied distribution, since it will have distinct whole-island climates with different weather and everything. If I had one preferred food in the tropics, and I didn't want to be there, it'd be a bit disappointing. Though not the end of the world. It might also be rolled into the prepped food, as a sort of further tier above task. I'll probably post more thoughts at a later date. But these are my immediate thoughts.

Well, yes, my op pointed out I was assuming that there would actually be some other 'classes' eventually, which I probably should have said 'trades'. But magic at least has it's own thread. It seems likely it might end up in the game. If there could be a few branches of magic, they could be mutually exclusive. But even if there is only ever one magic path, and smithing, it'd still be good to make it hard/impossible to do both, I think. And by hard/impossible I mean you can maybe do the lower levels of both with one character, but with difficulty, but the higher tier benefits are impossible to have both of in one character. In this context I was trying to use 'trade' or 'class' to mean a system which takes a lot of time investment from the player, down a defined progression, and hopefully involving some actual skill, as opposed to simply grinding up a skill bar. So ya, smithing is currently the only one. People can say that they're a miner or farmer, but really those don't take a lot of time, or any skill. Both have an associated skill, but the benefits are minimal, and not particularly exciting.

Ya, that's an option. Honestly, I'm hoping that a lot of the animal and material situations in TFC2 are significantly different from TFC1, not to mention possibly new transport options, so I'm not super hung up on exact materials necessarily. But in the current game animals are a big deal, and the ability to just carry them on your back to me devalues that significantly, if it can be done too cheaply. I don't think it's too uncommon to have a saw by day 3, and to me that's a bit too easy. Though limiting to babies does make it better, as the player only finds adult animals initially, so they'd at least have to find and tame a few enough for them to have babies, and then wait for them to be born. I guess that's probably a pretty significant wait, so not as op as I'd initially thought. Still, at best I'd still say just 1 lamb, and disallow calves. Personally.

Well, I think that's kind of the default mode, isn't it? Just have the trades and the player pursues any/all of them as far as they want? I was assuming that's how it would probably be, unless plans were made otherwise. One of the places these thoughts come from, was watching Chilm's LP of the witchery mod for normal MC (an older LP, to be sure, but good). It has all these interesting branches - witches, vampires, werewolves, necromancers - and he just basically goes through them each one by one and does them all with the same character. It seems to me like the experiences are devalued when the player just tries and discards these roles like articles of clothing. In the later roles he gets what should be pretty great powers, but basically they just get a shrug because he's already been more powerful in a previous role. It seems to me the player's choices would be much more impactful if they had consequences and limitations. In a single player game, it could be motivation to retry the game more times, in more ways. On large multiplayer servers, perhaps it could help create more tightly woven communities if one player cannot master all things. Perhaps there is actually some benefit to having a person specialized differently than oneself, because they will in fact have a much easier time due to the way they built their character, or how the systems function. Specialization that you yourself cannot gain, no matter how many hours you put in, because of how you built your own character, or how the systems work. i was originally going to pose this question, and also a proposal for how it could work, in one topic. But it seemed like a rule 5 violation after I wrote it out. So I thought I'd pose the general question first.

It's a good idea, though as others pointed out there's mods that have the same effect. If such a thing were in TFC2, I'd advocate for the cage only holding chickens and piglets. No lambs, no calves. They're too big. I'd also like the recipe more expensive, though I'm not sure what that would be.