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infinity46

Easier way of making charcoal?

45 posts in this topic

4.) Seriously, why would a new mechanic to make something easier, when this mod is supposed to add challenge to the game.

Once you've figured out how to do it, charcoal making isn't challenging, it's merely tedious. A challenge presupposes that there is some skill to be mastered or some difficulty to be overcome. There's no skill or difficulty involved in walking from tree to tree and hacking it down, except perhaps the difficulty of not falling asleep while you do it.

In a well wooded area with no sequoia and no attempt made to collect saplings or replant, it takes me 11 minutes of real time to collect the 29 log piles needed to build a charcoal pit which will yield about 150 charcoal. If I want to avoid raping the landscape then I need to collect and replant saplings which pushes the time needed up to about 25 minutes, even if I use a scythe. While that may be realistic/believable, it makes for poor game play. It's simply too much time of the player's time which has to be spent on an unchallenging, repetitive task. We need to get that down to just 3 or 4 minutes.

So what can be done about it?

  • Increasing the amount of charcoal you get from each log pile wouldn't change the amount of time required to collect the wood, but it would reduce the frequency with which you need to create charcoal pits. That would help a tiny bit, but not enough to be worth it.
  • Reducing the amount of charcoal needed by the bloomery would have a similar effect. Again, the improvement would be small and not worth losing the beautiful symmetry and historical accuracy of the 1:1 ratio of charcoal to wood.
  • Doubling the rate at which scythes give saplings could significantly reduce the time for replanting since you'd only have to scythe about a third of the trees before having enough saplings to replant them all. Again, that won't help with the time it takes to collect the wood, but it would improve gameplay for those of us who like to maintain healthy forests near our home bases.
  • Assuming that each tree gives you, on average, 8 logs, that means you have to cut down 58 trees for a 29 pile charcoal pit. It takes about 4 seconds to fell a hickory tree with a bronze axe so just under 4 of the 11 minutes is spent chopping down the trees, with the remaining 7 being devoted to picking up the logs and walking between trees. If we were to double the speed of the axe that would shave two minutes off of wood collection. That's a good step in the right direction, but still not enough.
  • We could introduce a new tool which fells a tree with a single blow, much as a scythe can shave off half of a tree's branches with a single blow. That could cut wood collection time down to 7 minutes. Again, good but not good enough. We need to somehow reduce the time spent picking up the logs and/or moving between trees.
  • What about a tool which cuts down all the trees within a 10 block radius? That would probably do the trick, but you can kiss believability goodbye.
  • What if trees gave more logs? A good example of this is the sequoia. I haven't found any sequoia in my game, so I can't go and measure it, but from watching someone else play it looks like you get around 8 times as much wood as from the average tree. That wouldn't exactly cut the collection time to 1/8th since you still have to pick up the logs, but it would probably cut it to around 1/6th meaning less than two minutes for wood collection. Now that's what I'm talking about! Unfortunately, sequoia do not give saplings and therefore cannot be replanted, so we would either have to enable saplings on sequoia or come up with a different tree which gives, say, 4 times as much wood as the average tree *and* provides saplings. That would bring the wood collection time down to 4 minutes, which is acceptable.
  • What about a replacement for charcoal? Charcoal is used because the reduction of iron requires a very pure source of carbon, which most grades of coal cannot meet. However, if you convert the coal to coke, then you could use it in a bloomery. That would require a coking oven. Historically, coking ovens weren't developed until the 17th century, but the technology isn't terribly advanced and the coking of coal could have been done in a modified charcoal pit. It's much faster to mine coal than it is to chop down trees, so that would eliminate the bulk of the tedium associated with making fuel for bloomeries.
Of those, my favourite is #7. Either have sequoias drop saplings at a sufficient rate for sustainable harvesting, or else add a type of tree which provides four times as much wood as the average hickory and drops saplings. Not only would it make charcoal production less tedious, but it would give yet another reason to go out and explore the world, looking for that magical tree.
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Use willows. average is a bit over 1 stack per tree, lots of leaves to easy chop them with the scythe. Pretty fast once you made a nice willow farm. I don't really see the problem with Charcoal... it's supposed to be limited, so you think about how you want to use it and not just smelt all the ores you find to eventually use them another day.

About your ideas:

Not compatible with the spirit of TFC are: 5, 6.

could be done but i don't think bioxx would: 1, 2, 3, 4

Then there is number 7: It's being discussed if trees will grow into bigger trees, but slower and in stages....but that lies in the future.

And number 8: i'd like to be able to make coke, but i fear it's not also not in the way that bioxx wants to go.

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And number 8: i'd like to be able to make coke, but i fear it's not also not in the way that bioxx wants to go.

If you check the texture files of TFC, there is a texture for a "coke" item, but there is no way to obtain it. I think it wouldn't be there if Bioxx didn't wanted it to be implemented, don't you?

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Use willows. average is a bit over 1 stack per tree, lots of leaves to easy chop them with the scythe. Pretty fast once you made a nice willow farm. I don't really see the problem with Charcoal... it's supposed to be limited, so you think about how you want to use it and not just smelt all the ores you find to eventually use them another day.

Now I feel a bit silly for not thinking of using willows. I don't have any near where I've set up base, but I have come across a couple during my wanderings and they would indeed fit the bill.

Thanx for the reminder!

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If you check the texture files of TFC, there is a texture for a "coke" item, but there is no way to obtain it. I think it wouldn't be there if Bioxx didn't wanted it to be implemented, don't you?

There also are colored beds since like may in the texture files... I think bioxx added a lot more into them than he really wants to add. It may be a relict of the first days when the ideas were not perfectly ironed out... but i'd like to be surprised by bioxx. As said... i'd love to make coke!
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sorry men, but.... it's TRASH idea! All is nice with charcoal now... About coke... Bioxx is thinking about it.

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1939: "When You Drink a Dr. Pepper You Drink a Bite to Eat."

What is that even supposed to mean!
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What is that even supposed to mean!

Dr. Pepper is actually ground up broccoli and steak, obviously.

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LSD, America's most misunderstood psychoactive drug.

(PLEASE, get this reference. Actually, you know what, here's a link. http://en.wikipedia...._Pepper#Slogans)

We don't have Dr pepper here, so yeah, a little hard for me to get it :P

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We don't have Dr pepper here, so yeah, a little hard for me to get it :P

I was just saying that so no one would think I was actually saying LSD is great, that is something I don't wanna start here...

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I was just saying that so no one would think I was actually saying LSD is great, that is something I don't wanna start here...

Yeah, that's true... It's one of those things you can have an opinioin about it, but can't express it in the internet, wether is positive or negative or neutral.

Also, i would have liked your post instead of posting, but i reached my positive vote quota again... :

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Dr. Pepper is actually ground up broccoli and steak, obviously.

so what are the other 21 flavors?
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so what are the other 21 flavors?

Cherry, Green soilent, -CENSORED-, Oak's leaves, Panda, Dr pepper, Water, -CENSORED-, Bread 'n' butter, Melted silver, Quick silver , Can, Arabian dreams, -CENSORED-, Smoked cigarrete, Blood, Coca Cola's secret recipe, Alcohol, Hydrochloric acid, Vanilla and -CENSORED-

You have to ask for them in the Dr Pepper company to get them, they are not sold anywhere else.

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Posted Image

"I bought a Dr Pepper"

"What flavor?"

"Dr Pepper flavor"

*A can of Dr Pepper jumps out of the original can of Dr Pepper*

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1.) NEVER use the R-word (realistic, realism, etc.)

2.) TFC is based on believability, not realism

3.) Really?! Why do we need an easier way to get charcoal?! The way we have works fine, and gives it in large amounts if done properly.

4.) Seriously, why would a new mechanic to make something easier, when this mod is supposed to add challenge to the game.

5.) In TFC you need to work for your resources, they are not just handed to you.

6.) Leo has a good point, I challenge you to come up with a better system for charcoal. Not to just ask for one to be created simply because you thought it might be a good idea.

(Did I miss anything?)

1 and 2 are an annoying old argument that should not even be used as talking points any more and just ignored when people bring them up.

What I do want to comment on though are 3 4 5 6 and 7. Everything progresses in the game and its what people strive to do all the time.. Can you eat raw meat? Sure it will keep ya going, but we figure out how to cook it and store it so our effort can have a much longer lasting effect and we do not have to constantly be looking for food all the time. We should be seeing a progression in that same area in everything we try and do so there is a sense of accomplishment.

That would be the reason to have a progression mechanic for charcoal much like there is for everything else that is already in TFC.. You start out with your hand stone tools and progress into longer and longer lasting metals. You start off cooking over a fire or eating raw meat to eventually farming so you dont have to follow the herds and are then able to produce more and more food with less and less effort.

Charcoal currently has no mechanic that moves forward with it. We are never given a way to even do something as simple as reduce the varriance in what is produced say with something like a clay kiln for making the charcoal in.. I think what you missed is that these forums are for fleshing out ideas like this, not making ordered lists that only have 2 entries in them despite the implied numbering and blowing them off.

Just my two cents.

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-snip-

Let me elaborate, I don't think that there shouldn't be some kind of progression or tier system for making charcoal, I am very much in favor of that. What I am not in favor of is making it EASIER as the title of the thread and the OP say, It should be made more efficient and possibly slightly easier, but that should be after you put a little more work in, not just throwing some dirt on top of wood and waiting.

Heres an Idea actually, there could be a gui added to charcoal pits that displays the approximate temperature (using the same scale as everything else, white, orange, yellow, etc.) and this temperature must be kept within a certain range (by adding more logs to log piles as they burnt, would require a few changes to how firepits work :P) or your charcoal pit could go out and you would need to relight it, but with a small loss of what you would have gotten if it had not gone out. As you move up in the tiers (unsure of what would be next) the temperature should be easier to control and there is a SLIGHT boost in efficiency, nothing crazy, because charcoal making is inefficient by nature, your burning wood to make wood that burns better, some of that wood is gonna have to be used for the fire.

So yeah, I'm all for progression and tiers, just not purely for the sake of making things easier. And I took the OP as asking for it to be easier, something that I personally think should be avoided in TFC, because I love the challenge of this game and would hate to see it lessen.

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