Stroam

Water collection using a well. Be aware though that wells are for gathering water, not for watering crops. Making that water available to crops what you need is a cistern. Since TFC farmland specifically searches for freshWater and saltWater, What I would do is make a multiblock with two layers. The bottom layerwould be 3x3 stone or smooth stone blocks surrounding acistern blockand top layerwould be another 3x3 stone or smooth stone blocks that is hallow in the middle. Once constructed I'd allow it to be filled by draining water from barrels placed on top of the 8 topblocks. This allows it to be filled more rapidly and if you leave the barrels there it'll effectively get filled up by rain.When it has water in it the airblock get filled with freshWater and the cistern empties at a configurable rate. Since freshWater is not a source block it can't be picked up but still counts toward hydrating farmland. So a cistern block would be made by putting smooth stone in a crafting grid with a bucket and would take on the look of thesmooth stone it was made from.

Don't you still get straw from grains?

I think a lower tier magical method would to be just periodically sick up wards around the pen with a hidden expiration date instead of headbands. Lots of cultures did that and a priest/shaman would have to come by every so often to re-ward the area to protected it against this and that.

If it's communal, then the non-magic solution is to have someone watch and take care of them while you are away.

I agree with the two different ways things. It does make you feel lucky. Where do you get baking from? Is that an actual step in processing borax?

I say the safe floor is not effective at doing what you want it to do. Nothingstops the neighbor from raising the same type of animal while you are goneand then your animals dying off because he still has above the safe floor. As far as performance goes, I don't think it'd scale well, but am currently unable to provide any proof, so that doesn't mean much. If you are looking for a way to protect animals while away for long periods of time you needs something else other than a safe floor. The only way to do that and prevent people from having unnecessary herds is imposing a death penalty and having an option for people to turn their animals into items or blocks. Heh, imagines a field full of stone cow statues and trying to go cow tipping.

Like how many steps are you talking? Crafting together a bucket of fresh water and sand orputting borax in a quern and grinding it up? Or are we talking washing sand in fresh water, then putting it in a pot of sulfuric acid for x amount of time consuming Y amount of acid then tossing it in a hot pot of oil made from animal fat or vegetable oil and skimming it off the top, then washing it a second time in distilled water sort of thing?

First of all it's a colorful depiction, not necessarily an accurate one. If itwas 1 tin ingot, any chipped gem, any sapling, a bone, and sacrificing one of the same animal I think everyone would use it if making the carves stones waseasier than transporting the animal. What the offerings are is something to work out during testing by whom ever codes it.

I am just thinking out loud here. This is a search tree problem. so H being horizontal supports and V being vertical supports. One could breadth first search to find all H that have a V and throw them into a list. As long as you don't have an empty list you could consider the first block supported. Then at that point during the next random tick one could then perform the same action with all the blocks in the list but then lets say you have a pyramid going from the world height to bedrock. You'll have tons of checks which only a high end graphics card can handle very well. So instead of following all blocks in the list lets just pick one at random and repeat the process which is very computationally friendly. If we never get rid of a list that means we have horizontal support distance times max height blocks stored at worse which isn't horrible.I think that you only need to keep track of the last list which would be 2(2H+1)^2at worse case which is quite small. That pattern continues till we hit bedrock. That takes care of placing blocks but you need a slightly different formula for subtracting blocks. For subtracting blocks you need to take the immediate H neighbors stick them in aqueue and Vneighbors in anotherqueue.From there starting with the H neighbors queue repeat the steps from the first paragraph. If they end up with an empty list then do the same as you did with the first block in this paragraph and add the neighbors to the two queues making sure the same block doesn't get added to the H queue twice, then have that block fall. Eventually you'll go through the H neighbors which will be (2H+1)^2 at max. Because no two blocks can have the same block above them and you checked for duplicates in the H queue, you are guaranteed each block in the V queue is unique andat the same level. Starting with the 1st V in the V queue you repeat the same steps with the first layer but with two new queues. This time you need check to see if any of the new H neighbors are in the old V queue or the new H queue and remove them from the queues before adding the H neighbors to the new H queue. Using this method each layer below falls before the layer above gets calculated. Which means you'll have at most (2VH+1)^2queue'd which can become quite massive but unless people are collapsing upside down pyramids it'll never be that bad. Now this does provide for some very silly things such as an infinite half arch. To solve that you need weights on H distance and V distance using straightest path to bedrock. It gets more complicated when you consider blocks having different weights and is more detail than 90% of the people playing are going to appreciate. The calculations in the first paragraph don't need to go down to bedrock, they could stop at the first gravity defying block.

You've never heard of salt flats? Large flat expanses where they test land speed records. Anyway Salt is super easy to get anywhere next to the ocean. Just poor sea water through cheese cloth and boil it. I wouldn't even bother with salt rock, we have other white rocks. Flux as taken from wikipedia. The oldest flux used for forge welding was fine silica sand. Early examples of flux used different combinations and various amounts of iron fillings, borax, sal ammoniac, balsam of copaiba, cyanide of potash, and soda phosphate. The 1920 edition of Scientific American book of facts and formulae indicates a frequently offered trade secret as using copperas, saltpeter, common salt, black oxide of manganese, prussiate of potash, and "nice welding sand" (silicate). Silica sand is really easy to come by. It's found on most beaches and river beds. The higher the melting point of the metal the more pure the silica must be with up to 98% pure for steel products. It's also very good at getting stuck in your lungs and causing long term health issues though we aren't really concerned about that in a video game. To purify silica sand you throw it into sulfuric acid, then float in hot oil produced from animal fat or plaint oil. Silica sand is also used in sand casting! Which means clay is really only good for pots. So again I would allow sand to be used for lower tier metals and either require borax or purified silica for higher tiers.

The reason I don't like a minimum number that is safe is because how does the game know that the 5 I have in this pen and the 5 I have I have in a pen 16blocks away are both suppose to count against the player? If it doesn't then the player can have 100 animals and not fear any of them getting sick because they are spaced so far apart. So at least for the illness mechanic it would have to be an all or none mechanic. If the animals never died from sickness, Again I could have a flock of 100 sheep and only keep 5 of them healthy in a separate pen, so that I could have 5 producers and a large flock of sheep just for the sake of having a large flock of sheep and it costs me nothing extra. Don't have to take care of those 95 sheep at all if there is no death penalty. I can keep breeding those 5 health ones and if one of them becomes troublesome just add it to the larger flock and forget about it.If people do want that minimum number you are right in that it could be done with a mod. If we use TFC 1 as an example with two mods, Udary and carpenters blocks, you can bag any amount of animals then store them in carpenter safe. It's so easy to find mods that safe guard your animals by putting them in item form that you need not worry about keeping up with TFC 2.

Yah I don't think grief protection is the responsibility of the mod maker. Flying mounts? I seriously doubt it. Kinda game breaking on a progressive island map. The cover is a mechanism to bring animals closer together and increase infrastructure requirements. The more animals the more shelter you need. If the heat/clothing mechanic gets added it's kinda mimicking it with animals. The salt lick thing could also work though as you would need more the more animals you had, and you'd have to replace it increasing maintenance which could be considered high or low depending on how difficult the salt lick is to obtain. I guess if you included being out in the rain in the chance of getting sick then it does the same thing and you don't need the shelter or the animal AI. The salt lick then is then my preferred option. I just thought of something that definitely should be combined with illness. Age. If the older the animal got the more prone the animal was to getting sick then you don't need age at all. It's what kills off biologically immortal creatures IRL. Yes there are some biologically immortal IRL. If you tie chance of getting ill with the age of the animal then you can extend it's life till the point it's more work to keep it alive then let it die. If it can infect other individuals around it it means you definitely want to keep them separate. Your animal health stuff could be used in the tolerance method and could give a value based on the animals stats and the factors listed below. illnessChance =( (animalAgeScaler)^(age)+tolerance(temperature, weather, sheltered, elevation, animalsInProximity, sickAnimalsInProximity) ) * (illnessDifficultyScaler) With the difficulty scalar in the config options, that would mean each server can customize the how frequently their animals get sick with just one number. If you set it to 0, then animals would never get sick. I would set the max to 1000 and then find the best default value through testing. I still think illness should result in death if not properly taken care of. I'd say the animal has to be sick for6minecraft months before it dies which I would call grossly neglected. I think while sick they should not provide any products, and if killed provide rotten flesh or diseased meat that decays really quickly. Also diagnosing sickness should follow the same kinda mechanics as proposed for crops. With these changes to the illness system then you really would need someone to watch your animals while you were away. Or there might be other solutions. Consequences if these changes were enacted. Sick animals would need to be isolated from healthy ones. You couldn't stick all your chickens in a small pit without expecting them to get sick. The animals would need to be spread out to minimize risk. You would need to kill animal before they got old and feeble which means actively mating them to keep some fresh stock. Taking animals out of their natural environments means more maintenance. Caring for animals before you are skilled enough to diagnose is a risky, though the rewards areworth it if you actually use the animals. When you leave you need to find someone to take care of them, so it's helpful it another person is trained. Pets won't last forever. You will need to make sure your animals are well taken care of such as food, water, and maybe shelter to minimize risk of getting sick.

Continuing with the tribal/shamanistic magic there is often an issue of players having to leave for a period of time. If animals have a maintenance cost,instead of risking your animals dying when you are gone, there could be a complex and expensive ritual that would take the animal and turn it into a totem. You could then perform another complex and expensive ritual that would release the animal from the totem. This ritual would require more than one person because it isn't an issue in single player.You could then have a chance of finding random totems inloot throughout the world. Now for a colorful depiction of the ritual. During the night you can hear chanting in the forest. As you cautiously get closer you see large rocks arranged in a ring with elaborate carvings all over them. You can make outthree people dancing around a cage, their shadows being cast on it by the surrounding torches mounted on the rocks. You see them laying stuff on mats under four of the rocks. You come closer to get a better view and can see gems to the north, metals to south, herbs to the east, and bone or shell fragments tothe west. A snort brings your attention back to the cage and you squint to make out a cow from the shadowsinside. Your head turns as you hear the sound of another cow being brought out by one of the dancers. Sheleads it on top of a stone table overlooking the pen and takes out the knife pointing it in front of her. The other two dancers move tostandon opposite sides of the cage on top of some carved black stones. The womanon the altar tosses a container on the cow in the pit that breaks over top the animal releasing some liquid which flows over the cow. She then plunges the blade into the cow on the altar which instantly kills it. The offerings below the stones turn into glowing magical beings who then step back into the stone. As they do so the glyphs carved all over the stones suddenly glow brightly and the cow in the pen gets lifted up in the air. Balls of light spring forth from the stones and strike the cow creating a light so bright you have to look away. The light goes away as quickly as it came. When you look back none of the glyphs on the stones are glowing anymore and the woman has jumped down into the cage. She holds up a small totem with horns in the air and the other two dancers cheer. You take the chance to slip away to think about the strange ritual you just witnessed.

So many great discussions. So little feedback.

There's been a bit on this topic already so I am gathering the pieces and putting them here. This is strictly about the process of collecting, growing, and harvesting crops. If you have any ideas about cooking or how anything discussed here could be used to that end please post here. This is also not about animal collecting, raising, and butchering animals. Those subjects can be found here and here. The main things I found doing quick searches was two posts of Darmo's which I have combined into one, and one post by me. While bees are mentioned, for a more in-depth discussion on bees go here. Darmo Stuff by me Cliff Notes because not everyone will spend the time to read for 15 minutes. Wild plant spawning decreased by number of plants and animals in the area. Wild seeds only appearing in certain climates Reduced chance to get seeds/can only get seeds from mature plants/can only get seeds from produce. Bad seed that won't grow. Plants that are not harvested in time will die and regrow. Temperature,water, and light effecting the plants. pests and blightsneeding pest/insect/fungicide. Animals messing with your crops both grown animals and birds. Growing different crops together being beneficial. Leaving space between crop fields being beneficial. Crops breeding - various resistances. weeds. fields needing to go fallow without fertilizer. farming equipment - planters, seed silos. needing lattices for berries. needing supports for fruit trees. functional use for scarecrows/ bird deterrent. Having drops tied to farming skill.

I do like the idea however it's alittle off topic. I'd stick this suggestion in it's own thread.

Funky. That's the whole point. We want farming to be a profession that not everyone does. I am going to need accredited peer reviewed articles on that before I believe it. During myyears of agricultural research I've never heard that. But if you are interested on nitrogen fixation then here's an open access book that highlights various aspects of nitrogen fixation.

Well I looked around and couldn't find the poster whom told you it wasn't possible,but unless certain functions were removed in an update or I am just miss understanding then this and thiswhich outlines ways to drop different drops based on tool used. If it isn't possible you could set it up to a right click function like you mentioned. I know I just recently used IC2 crops which only dropped crops when right clicked by had a chance of dropping seed when broken, and I know thaumcraft gives you native clusters sometime instead of ore blocks. Tinkers construct has sword that give you a higher chance for head drops. Basically there should be a way to do something akin to this method.

First I just want to point out that animals starving to death I suggested as a config option for those who want a more hardcore. You could have it false by default. Animals becoming aggressive when not well fedgets into AI which I was trying to avoid changing too much. Also your suggestion of making sure to leave them with plenty of grass so they don't starve when you leave, as pointed out by Dunkleosteus, this is pretty difficult to calculate and simulate. Personally even though it makes sense I would not put the starvation grass mechanic into the gamebecause I believeit wouldbe disabled by most servers anyway. Disease only happens by chance caused by crowding. If you have your animals in pens with appropriate distances from each other then there could be no accidents unless someone drives a herd of animals through your area.I'm working off the assumption players aren't actively trying to anger other players and are working together. The mindset I take away from your statement is that people will each have their own private ranch and be messing with each other, because you don't mess with people's herds if you depend on them for survival. If such a scenario does play out where one person trolls another you do the same thing you do IRL. You find an authority figure such as an Mod or Admin and they'll deal with it.Also the only possible ways for animals to die if age and starvation are not enabled is by player, animal, or sickness so I don't see it as an issue with sickness killing animals overtime. Salt blocks are something I never considered. The only use I know for them is attracting while animals when hunting. Animals larger than a cow! Ya, I agree they should be difficult to transport on the island and maybe impossible to get it off the island. That and your comment on grazers vs carnivores makes me wonder what you expect people to be raising. I get animals have some protection from the rain but you do see them seek shelter. You're right in that it's not a big hurdle but if you have 20 cows in a field with only 1 tree/small barn it may not be big enough to house all of them and now you have a bunch of animals in a small area which increases the chance for sickness to happen and spread. Something I forgot to mention in the that post which I just now added is sickness being able to spread. So you want to isolate your sick animals. Having sickness chancechange based on temperature and environment would be neat and add complexity to the system. The watering trough is similar enough to the food mechanic that I didn't know if it was needed but could be added along side it. Since aging was more designed for hardcore players and to limit populations I wouldn't mind if it was used more like durability. In that case I'd have breeding use no less than 45% of the durability. I like the energy based descriptors. Hmm neutering would be an interesting mechanic. Can't say I've ever played a multiplayer game where something like that was an option. For your spoiler on animal handling skill, I like all those suggestions. I agree people should be able to have a small number of pets around, like 5, but I don't agree on everyone having 50 animals without some sort of maintenance involved that if isn't done starts killing off the animals. Otherwise you have 5 people on and 250 animals taking up server resources.I also hear your points on when people leave the server for vacation or something but just like IRL they could ask someone who isn't leaving to watch after their animals while they are gone.

I guess my view is people will only depend on each other as far as they have to or if the difference in convenience to effort is great enough. In certain games, mostly WOW, there is a term PUG(Pickup Group). It refers to a group that has one or more members who are randomly assigned to the group and usually has a negative context associated with it. This negative context come from stereotypes of people joining up and deciding a group of random strangers is a good time to test something out or simply not knowing the norms of the group and doessomething contrary. As I recall, these random members you would only group with when you needed to and not much longer. By grounding the need in the basic survival of the game it brings players together that would not normally work that closely with other players for the duration of the game.Now I also understand that frustration of having to work with others may drive individuals from playing the game at all so I guess it all depends on who you are developing the game for. I also feel that mods typically make game play easier and so it's better to make the core more difficult so people can find the right balance with mods, then to make the core easier. Examples include udary, terramisc, tfc scales, automated bellows, cellars, leather water sac.

I've put a little more thought into the kiln. Instead of a modern kiln which uses mainly firebrick, it can be an Anagama kiln. These were mostly brick fronts with clay and dirt walls and ceiling. In minecraft it would look like this. The charcoal is a place holder, it should be 6 log piles and then you would close to door and use flint and steel on the door.It hold enough to fire 48 pottery at once. Yes you do have to place and break but uses a lot less fuel. The trap doors would be replace by a kiln door to activate the structure. The firebrick parts must be firebrick and the hardened clay must be a form of hardened clay and covered by another non-flammable block. I used dirt in this example. Don't have enough pottery to fill it up? Well good thing it has multiple uses, you can also dry food in it, and turn wood into charcoal!

Using a suit of mithril, potions, bow with arrows, tinker pick, torches,souleater, and making paths just on the outside of the dungeon and they go down pretty easy, though the loot isn't worth it. All of that you can get in about 8 hours with no real fear of dying or running out of food in your pack from the single player run I just did. I think this is a good part of it, but it's a glue that holds people already bonded. I am looking for the right combination to glue people together who have a mild dislike for each other. Something similar to how a house or apartment binds you to an area even though you may dislike one of your neighbors. What binds you there is the hassle and cost of moving, distance to the place you work, friends and family. The last server I was on had a setup that auto produced milk over time. After the initial setup I didn't need to do anything else. With 10 ish people on that server I could not give the milk away. People there would rather roundup the cows and milk them, than get stacks of milk free because it was more convenient for them to just go get milk then occasionally asking for some. If you want people who would otherwise not work together, you need to make going your own a lot more of a hassle then sticking to the established area. The issue is if thing become easier late game, what stops someone from taking their high level tools they've gathered and now making a place elsewhere. So far the only way I've seen is developing food into a full time profession that takes 1 or morepeople so if they were to move, food is what they would be doing because they don't have the man power to do more, or they will still be coming back to the main town to trade if they didn't focus on food.

You have put some thought into this and I have some questions. What stops someone from skipping tiers? What triggers the breeding pits formation? How do you put fish in and take them out of the pits? How do you keep track of how many males and females are in each pit?

Please read over and then post what you have written in this thread for feed back.