morganiq

But they aren't cheap—they require 1 log per, making them equivalent to a wood log support beam. The difference is purely aesthetic. It's arguable whether the game should allow a wood pile to remain as an apparent support structure, rather than dropping its items as soon as it becomes unsupported. But it might be worth leaving it as a quirk for reasons of popularity.

I agree—overfeeding would be great. Or more specifically, there's probably an optimal range of performance between maybe 25% hungry and 50% full, at which one should be able to, for example, run at full speed and attack with maximum strength. Outside that range, if you're super stuffed or really hungry you should be slower and your maximum strength should be less. In the case of starving (maybe between 75% and 100% hungry), overall health should be very weak—maybe 75% weak. The idea would be to stay in the center of the range, not to the right—which requires vigilance. (IRL you never run, swim, or do any other intense workout out on a full stomach. It's really uncomfortable and digestion saps energy for a while, then once you've finished digesting you're at maximum performance levels. Personally I prefer close to an empty stomach—i.e., perfectly in-between, which would be zero on this meter—when I begin a long-distance run.) Edit: the above may be a littletootrue-to-life though. :-p

I meant that I agree, Kitty's idea is great and should be implementedin addition to making hungerbar deplete less while sleeping.

Not being able to sleep is a great idea—although my point about losing less hungerbar while sleeping than while awake still stands.

It's a subtle difference, and of course it's easy to just interpret each bar as a quantity: when it's full, you're flush, and anything short of that is some degree less than perfect. I guess the clincher for me is the fact that the player gets the Slowness effect when "thirst bar" reaches a certain positivelevel. To me, that doesn't make any sense: blue bar = water, and I've still got some, right? So why am I slow? Wrong: less than 50% blue bar actually meanslackingwater, not having less—i.e., I'm solidly in the negative, not mildly in the positive, which is why I'm getting affected by the lack of it. I see the unipolar bars as an oversimplification, and for most games that's totally fine—but TFC being about survival and realism believability seems perfectly suited to describing health in more real-world terms. I don't just want to see a green bar: I want to know that I've crossed the mental set-point into "hungry" zone, and to what degree I'm feeling that hunger, because I can imagine how that feels in my stomach. Psychologically, it affects you differently. Edit: Another interesting data point is the fact that the player spawns with 50% health and 50% hunger. That doesn't seem to make much sense unless you interpret it as "neither" rather than 50%. Everyone is perfectly healthy when neither hungry nor full, neither strong nor weak—in fact, arguably, that's the ideal state. But the current presentation makes it look lacking.

So does the rule stated on the wiki about surface samples indicating ores in the top layer (or in the upper part of the middle layer, if the top layer is thin) not apply if the top layer is not a Cassiterite-bearing stone? Do you have to look to the bottom layer in that case? Regardless, in this case, in the area where the surface ores were found the top layer is Dolomite, the middle layer is Andesite, and the bottom is Rhyolite—none of which are Cassiterite-bearing. The stone does morph to Quartzite on the outlying edges of my grid; I'm not sure if that was the top or middle layer, and I definitely didn't check the bottom—but in any case the surface samples were found squarely in the middle of the Dolomite area, and if the rule on the wiki is correct, I shouldn't need to worry about the bottom layer anyhow.

All health meters (health, hunger, and thirst) are currently unipolar meters: a full bar is interpreted as 100%, and an empty bar as 0%. So, taking hunger as an example, a full bar is "completely full"—but at anything less than that, the bar's meaning becomes ambiguous: does a 50% hunger bar represent "50% hungry," or "50% full," or even "completely in-between," orsome other descriptor? This is because real-world huger feelings are bipolar adjectives—that is, fullness andhungerare mutually exclusive: you only feel one at a time, and each is felt in varying degrees. Put together on a positive-negative axis, they indicate very well whether you're satiated or hungry: one can easily and unambiguously see that to the right side of zero, you're some degree of satiated, and to the left, you're some degree of hungry. Notice that under this system, the three possible descriptions I used above for the unipolar 50% each translate to separate locations on the bipolar bar: "50% hungry" is −50%, "50% full" is +50%, and "completely in-between" is zero. Also note that the same bipolarness applies to thirst ("fully quenched" to "completely parched") and health ("extremely strong" to "extremely weak"). Additionally, it could be nice if each bar varied in hue, similarly to the durability meter on items. So, for example, hunger could vary from 100% green on the right to 100% yellow on the left; thirst from 100% blue to 100% orange; and strength from 100% red to 100% baby-poo-brown. This way, the rich, rightward red-green-blue colors indicate health, and the sickly, leftward yellow-red-brown colors indicate weakness. To switch the health bars to bipolar would probably be a purely cosmetic change—I doubt if there would actually need to be any change to the underlying game mechanics at all—but I think it would be nice if meters used this more natural, unambiguous presentation.

Sleeping for long enough, and with a sufficiently-empty stomach, can result in death by starvation immediately upon waking. This is mostly an annoyance, but it's also unbelievable because it's not true to real-life body mechanics. Currently the game seems to assume the body depletes its hunger at the same rate overnight as while awake, and catches up immediately upon waking. IRL, one rarely goes to bed on a full stomach, and one's body not only uses less energy during sleep than when awake, it also takes time to become hungry in the morning after its fast (although hunger, when it does come, sometimes has a rapid onset). There are many possibilities for improved implementation details, but here are two examples: Deplete the hunger bar by the same amount as currently, but at ½ to ¼ of the current rate. Immediately deplete the hunger bar by ½ the current amount, plus an additional ½ at the slowed rate.#2 would better simulate real-life reduced energy consumption overnight, plus the phenomenon of delayed but somewhat brisk onset of hunger at breakfast. But any change that makes it less likely that you'll die faster than you can switch to your food would be more believable IMO.

Update: extended central gallery 24 in each direction, and side galleries 12 in each direction, on all three levels. Total volume covered is now 120×96×72, or about 96×96×72 beneath each surface sample (i.e., 48 in each direction, 72 down). No hint of Cassiterite on the propick. I don't want to go creative or MCEdit because there's plenty of other ore down there that I don't want to see. It's more the principle: is surface ore supposed to be a guarantee, or not? If so, within what horizontal range? And is the vertical range accurate? Should I go even deeper?

Ah…so, not quite the sort of volume I expected then. In that case, an approval system which allows even anonymous users to make unapproved edits would probably get you the most volume. It would also allow you to get a sense of registered users' merit, and grant unmoderated access accordingly. Yikes! That's a bummer. But when they're eventually created, would you consider allowing anonymous users to edit them too, at least on a trial basis? With that few new users registering, even with anonymous edits allowed there would probably be very little traffic on the Talk pages, but at least it would encourage participation and net you a few more pieces of feedback.

Aight, guess I'm expanding horizontally. I'll post an update later. Thanks!

Well, again, I'd just point out that the IRC and forum users you've granted access to, based on IRC and forum merit, have not evinced any wiki merit at all. So how effective does that make the current system as a predictor of wiki merit? I feel like you need to grant permissions based on wiki participation, not some other form, because they do not correlate, as evidenced by the current system itself. Out of curiosity, do you know how many wiki accounts are created each week? Most of those users, when they see they still can't make any edits at all—not even Discussion edits, or sending messages via User pages to a moderator—will give up. They don't think to look in the forums, much less IRC—that's either counterintuitive, or it's just not worth the trouble. That's probably your most significant barrier to getting good contributions currently. You may believe that showing community investment makes for a good wiki editor, but I'd argue that that's not what a wiki needs. That's what a wiki moderator needs—but the wiki itself, in order to thrive, simply needs volume: lots of eyeballs, lots of contributions, and lots of moderation. It needs to harness the power of a low barrier-to-entry to attract a high volume of edits and either filter them down to the good ones, or have a large enough active user base to moderate by reversion or correction. The former is what you will likely need to start out with; the latter, having a solid base of other moderators you can trust, is the goal—and that goal won't be reached with the current system of merit. Obviously you will get poor contributions with the good ones—that's just in the nature of a wiki. But the current system results in no contributions at all. Which would you rather have: lots of edits of varying quality, or none at all? There are tradeoffs to both: a thriving wiki means lots of activity but lots of moderating; a closed wiki means lots of DIY.It's possible that granting more open access (whether in the form of approvals or just User/Discussion pages) would actually increase your workload rather than decrease it, at least in the short term—in which case I'd say that's just a necessary step towards attracting other trustworthy mods who can share your workload. But I believe that a substantial enough percentage of edits would be good, and the benefits of building a large user base are great enough, to make a more open system a worthwhile investment.

Another edit: On the Forge page, it says the auxiliary slots on the right are for ceramic molds. I was incredibly confused when I lost an ingot attempting to melt into a pick mold, and only now have finally realized it means the item whose name is literally Ceramic Mold—which is the unshaped ingot mold. No other ceramic molds will work, which it would be helpful to clarify. Thanks!

I'd love to help out, but this isn't necessarily an application to edit—I just wanted to share some thoughts about the restrictions. While I understand the importance of limiting edits to trusted sources and editing for appropriateness, the current system obviously results in very few contributions. (I get the impression that Kitty is pretty much alone right now.) The crux of the problem, as I see it, is that new players are the most likely to rely on and thus have immediate edits for the wiki, as well as the most likely to have the energy and motivation to make changes. I feel like there's a way you could harness new-user energy while still incorporating approvals for untrusted users. In fact, I feel like a thriving wiki actually requires both novice and experienced users: novices to suggest immediate clarifications based on their experience learning through the wiki, and experienced users to moderate and contribute more advanced material. A wiki relying solely on experienced or trusted users will, I think, inevitably become stale. A couple of ideas of ways you could more safely allow new-user contributions to grow the wiki: The FlaggedRevs MediaWiki plugin allows moderators to approve edits before they are shown to the public. I haven't used it, but it's very stable and seems like the go-to option for doing this.You could simply unrestrict User and Discussion pages, so that anyone who wants to contribute indirectly can do so—right on the wiki itself, rather than having to come to the forum. (Having to come to the forum to suggest wiki changes probably represents the single biggest attrition factor by far.) Contributions could come in the form of a question or suggestion on a Discussion page or a full-scale mockup of a completely revamped page in Userspace that an admin can simply copy/paste, possibly with editing, rather than starting from scratch.Either of these would allow unprivileged wiki users to be promoted based on merit on the wiki itself, rather than on the forum—which is important because trustworthy participation in the two does not, as a rule, correlate. At any rate, those are my thoughts. I too am a new user who has already seen many opportunities to contribute based on my learning experience, and would love to be able to act on that. But more importantly, I'd love for everyone who uses the wiki to be able to act on that, in a way that allows admins like Kitty to cherry-pick and filter existing contributions rather than generate everything from scratch. In my view, that's the only way the wiki will be able to thrive. Thanks! Edit: *cough*sameusername*cough*

None of the individual stone pages currently redirect to the Ores & Minerals page; they're all there. Were you referring to pages for individual ores? Did that exist in the past? I was talking about stone pages, not ore pages. I too would love to see them merged into the Stone page, since most of them contain the same boilerplate information with differing ore/mineral availability—the same thing the chart on Ores & Minerals provides. Incidentally, when you do eventually merge the individual stone pages into the Stone page, I'd love to see a lineup screenshot of life-sized samples of all stone types, together with their smooth, dirt, and brick variants. Preferably showing multiple raw stones connected, as it's difficult to compare a single, isolated stone to a wall of them. Just a thought. :-)