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Brass

From Nomad to Settler (and Beyond?)

5 posts in this topic

Hello everyone! I've been playing with this mod for some time now and I think it realy adds a lot to the minecraft experience. 
At this point I have some suggestions I'd like to share with everyone:

I think the game should expand the first stage of the game, splitting it between a nomadic part in which the player would roam the wilderness, and a second part, in which you would settle down, create your base/village.

When you spawn, you are a complete savage in a virgin world where there are no domesticated animals or plants (no pigs or sheeps or cown, and no vegetables). You have a very small invetory so you can only pick up a few tools and other small things, you can't move building blocks or pick them up, so you won't be able to create a shelter. To survive you will have to hunt and gather what nature has to offer, such as edible roots, seeds and fruits. 

Time passes, you get your hands on some simple materials (clay, straw, mud), but you can't build just yet: first you have to create a "settlement block" in the form of a clay idol (this can be changed, but I couldn't think of a better shape: I think that an idol is something basic that every ancient community could have had, and it's a simple enough symbol. Of course it has no magic powers whatsoever). Only a settlement block can be picked up at any time, and once positioned it shouldn't be removable (i.e. breaking it only destroys the block, it doesn't yeld it back), so that you can't just make a new settlement every evening. 
But what does it do? It enables the player to have a much larger inventory when he is in the proximity of the idol (like 30 blocks at first, an maybe it can be expansed further as the player progresses), as well as allowing him to pick up building blocks (that he can now craft with mud bricks o clay bricks) and linking together whatever storage item is present in the area (so when you open the inventory, you can access multiple different inventory). Note that when you leave the settlement area, the items in the idol inventory remain there, and you won't be able to access them until you are back in the settlement area.
Once you have created the core of your settlement you will have begun the second part of stone age: you have a shelter, now you can try to tame some of the wild animals, and you can cultivate some plants. Once you have all the things in check, you can try to exit the stone age and begin creating metal tools, mine et cetera.

Here are some mechanics or items that I think should fit with the two ages (some of these have already been suggested, but I will try to link them with my idea, so that's why I'll repeat them):

NOMADIC AGE

1. STICKS
sticks will come in different kinds, some being more flexibles, some buring better, some having more resistance (which would increase durability). At first the only tools that can be crafted with sticks will be knife, firestarter, javelin and clubs. they will also be used in the interweaving GUI (see below), and can be burned in the firepit. 

2. TREES, FORESTS and BERRIES
trees should have solid branches, that can be used to climb them, can be cut for wood and that can be used to hang things, or set traps. on the forests floor there should be a carpet made of leaves, when broken it yelds leaves that can be used in the interweaving GUI, it can also hid sticks and food (mushrooms maybe).
You can also find berries, but beware, there are different colors of berries and two of them (randomly chosen according to the seed) are poisonous: one will rapidly decrease your thirst bar, the other will actually hurt you. Are you brave enough?

3. INTERWEAVING
since most of the more advanced crafting is precluded at this point, there should be a new kind of crafting to make things interesting: interweaving can be used to create a lot of useful things without being too tecnological. You drop the things you want to weave in a box in the GUI, they appear in a canvas where you can bend them (if you bend some sticks too much they break, thus the importance of flexibility) or interlace them together. Objects craftable this way could be: 
Straw baskets: they only hold one item (so they cannot be used to expand storage space), but can be hanged (out of reach of wild animals). Wild animals are attracted by baskets with food in them, and if they reach them thy can destroy them. I can be used as bait, by the way.
Traps: you can craft many kinds of traps weaving wicker and leaves, or strings.
Camuflage: wearable as an armor, it decreases the distance at which enemies and animals notice you.

4. TRAPS
traps could make hunting much more interesting. here some traps: 
Covered Hole: you can dig a hole and cover it with this trap. animals and enemies won't notice the trap, if someone walks over the cover, they will break it, falling in the hole.
Sharpened sticks: they can be planted on a surface, if you touch it, you get damaged, especially if you fall on it, or if you run into it. However, everytime the hit, there's a chence of them breaking. 
Hidden sharpened sticks: this is a flat stock of sharpened sticks. You lay them flat on the ground, when activated (by right clicking, or with a string) they jump out at 45 degrees. In this position they deal damage to anyone running into them as if they were normal sharpened sticks. you can restore them to their initial position by hand (if not broken).
Snare: made with strings or yarn, you hang this to an high branch of a tree and set the other end on the ground. when someone walks over it, he gets hanged to the tree. However the string can be cut or broken, so this is not 100% accurate for bigger preys.
Net Snare: same as snare, but harder to break. Useful for bigger preys.
Darts: this trap can shoot a dart when activated.
String: useful to activate traps from a distance, or you can stretch it out so that when someone passes over it, he activates the trap. when you get some metal you could also craft some bells that you can attach to a string. When the string is set off the bells will make a noise to allert you (and you will get a message, so you will see that if you were afk).
Camuflage for traps: traps can be camuflaged with leaves and such, to make them harder to see.

5. HUNTING
There should be a variety of wild animals:
Predators: such as wolves and big cats, or bears, they are ferocious and will attack the player if not let alone. They will also become aggressive if the player has too much meat with him. They are scared by the fire, and will linger outside the circle of light if the player has lit a firepit. This deterrent won't last forever, at some point they will start to get closer, especially if you have meat on you. They can be pacified with meat, but if you give them all your meat, you won't last for long.
Big Herbivores: these animals live in herds, they are not usually aggressive, they tend to distrust the player, so approaching them should be somewhat difficult. There are two kinds:
     Aggressive Herbivores: if harrassed they will gang on you, making short work of you. They yeld a lot of meat, so these are what you want to attack, but be careful. These animals should be boars, mammuths, buffalos, gnus.
    "Fast" Herbivores: they are difficult to hunt because of their speed or advantage in certain terrains (goats could jump two blocks, thus becoming really difficult to catch in mountains). If cornered they will also attack you, but they shouldn't gang on you, when one of them is hit, the others will just panick an scatter. I think deer and rock goats and horses could be good examples of this.
Small animals: they are smaller than others, and yeld less meat. They are also simpler to catch using snares and other traps.

Just going around randomly looking for animals is rather boring though, so I thought the following mechanics should be endearing:
Tracking: if you look on the ground you can find some tracks (different kinds of them can be found fo different animals). the first trace spawns randomly, then the next spawns a few chunks away in a random direction when you right click on it. If you follow them, at some point you will get to the animals who have left them (the probability of finding them increases each time you find a new trace), you will get a message like "it's really fresh, they must be around here" and then they spawn some chuncks away from that position.
New traces are more difficult to find in zones where you have been for a long time, so if you want to find game you have better move often; also, trails can lead a very long way form where you find them, so be prepared for long journeys.
Baiting: You can use baits to make the animals approach you, or you can hang a straw basket with their food somewhere near.
Spawn Points: such as lairs deep in the forest, or pounds of fresh water where animals quench their thirst. These points are not marked with a spawn block like in vanilla, but would work the same. Finding one of these it's useful (or deadly, it depends) if you want to find game quickly.

6. CAVEMEN
these would replace (along with predators) the hostile mobs. They are not NPCs, in fact they are hostile mobs that prey on you. They should be more cunning than animals by the way, they can build snares (they randomly spawn on the  territory, if you get caught they will be allerted and spawn a few chuncks away), and will actively hunt you in groups. They should also be able to advance at least to bronze weapons and armor, remaining an actual menace throughout the game. There should also be some villages: caves with firepits and tool racks where many of them live.
There could also be different tribes, each having different attributes, such as using specific kinds of traps or weapons, living in a particular zone et cetera.

7. THE FIREPIT
as a nomad you won't be able to create a safe shelter, you can however lit a fire to fend off the cold of the night and the predators that inhabit it. Waiting all night for the dawn to come is boring, but being able to just skip it shoul be something you have to earn: the firepit lets you skip to the point in which it's almost burnt out (and at first you will only be able to burn sticks) and only if nothing bad has approached you. If you have cooked meat you could get up to see some wolves just outside the circle of light, trying to decide whether to come close or not, and if you were near a cavemen village, then you could also wake up to them getting close.

SETTLERS AGE

1. TAMING ANIMALS 

Taming animals it's quite too easy as it is now, you just go over to them with wheat and lure them to your home. What you should do instead, is tracking down some animals during the right time of the year: at that time the herd will spawn with some youngling, you will have to lure it away (which could prove problematic, as the mother is watching over it) and take it home. Then you will have to feed it. When the right time of the year comes, if you have fed your snatched animals well, they will mate, if you didn't ... well they are wild animals, they will try to break free (and your first constructions could be less than solid). Each generation will loose some of the original animal traits and will become to resemble a proper tamed animal (they won't try to escape anymore from the first litter onward). Tamed animals will yeld more meat/milk/wool, especially if well fed.
note that animals will only try to mate at the right moment of the year, and only if well fed. Animals that are extremely underfed don't die, but won't yeld meat if killed, also you won't be able to use them for work (see below).

2.USES FOR ANIMALS
Animals have different roles, and are quite important: aside from providing food, animals will be of capital importance to make progress. They will be used to carry items you can't carry (as outside the settlement you still have precious little room for materials, and you can't pick blocks), a pack animal will allow you to pick up building blocks as long as it is fewer than ten blocks away from you (also expanding your inventory just as a settlement block). 
Animals will also be used in agricolture to better plow soil (see below).

3.DOMESTICATING AND DIFFERENTIATING PLANTS
When you begin playing you don't find the plants we are used to now: just grass, some roots in the dirt and bushes. The food from these plants is not nearly enough to satiate you and your newly acquired animals, so you've better try to improve them. You can plant these plants on roughly plowed soil (soil plowed with a stone plow), the soil counts the times you harvest a full fledged crop from it, so it will give you slightly more food each time you plant something on it. As you continue to plant in the same place, you will start to harvest a different kind of seed along with the normal crop: the plants are starting to differentiate, each plant differentiate into different new plants according to the higher nutrient of the soil when it's harvested.
Grass: 
nutrient A: Generic Cereal, it can be differentiated into the orhers cereals.
nutrient B: Mais
nutrient C: Dondelion, it can further differentiate into salads, cauliflower, broccoli.
Roots:
nutrient A: Carrots
nutrient B: Potatoes
nutrient C: Bulb, it can further differentiate into onion and garlic.
Berries:
each kind of berry (aside from the venomous ones) differentiates into a different kind of vegetables.

To further differentiate the plants, better plowing and different amounts of water are needed. With an animal plow, you can plow the soil in different ways to make the water flow in different quantities. You can also make a rice field with low water (guess what you get if you plant the generic cereal in a rice field). 

4. HARVEST and BAD THINGS
Crops should all mature at the same time to allow a proper harvest: you can plant whenever you want to, but the crop will only advance to a certain point. Only in the right month the game will check whether a crop is almost mature or not, if it is, then it will mature, if it's not, then it is left alone to grow some more. When the month finishes, crops that didn't make it will have to wait until the next harvest month (there could be more than one harvest a year), while the mature crops that weren't harvested just die. 
Over time crops can experience some dire situations:
Freeze: if the temperature is too low, plants will freeze and die.
Rain, hailstorm, snow: each crop has a chance to die out when there's a rain or a hailstorm (summer only, the chance of a crop dying greatly increases), of course snow kills everything.
Pests: a hidden value of a crop, getting some cats or poisonous baits (done with berries) stops crops from dying.
Too much/too little water: if you irrigate your crops the wrong way they will die out.
Too little nutrients: if there's not enough nutrient the crop will die.

Note that even if all the crops mature at the same time, those that were not properly tended to will yeld less food than the others (or even no food at all, just seeds).
Crops can also be grown in a greenhouse. Maybe there could even be a system to manipulate the harvest time inside of the greenhouse, but that should only be feasible once you have reached iron age.

So, this is it, please leave your feedback :)

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this nomadic age seems very interesting! as long as the gameplay experience remains enjoyable and well balanced, it would be a good complement to terrafirmacraft for the first hours of playing.
 
I definitely imagine myself capturing small animals in the wild, lure them in traps by throwing rocks on the ground. So satisfying!
 
See if Dunk and Bioxx has the patience and interest to code all those great ideas haha.
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I really like these ideas. I would love to see some more time and stuff to do between the stone age and copper age. I feel some of the idea, like the weaving GUI might be a little hard to code, and might be a little bit too complicated, but I think it would be cool if it could be done.I dont like the idea of not being able to pick up blocks though, although it would be more realistic I don't feel it would be fun.

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I like this suggestion mostly the traps. But I wouldn't like random chance to spawn next to cavemen.....

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I like it. You should make it so that traps have a chance to break if the animal that wanders into the trap is too big.

Also, placing javelin heads on planks should make a trap like the sharpened sticks, but a lot sturdier and suited for bigger pray.

 

Crops should die in storm, but not rain. The only way rain can kill crops should be if the rain water overwaters the plants.

 

Animals should be able to eat items off the ground, and break chests and clay vessels as well to eat food.

Herbivores should also eat growing crops if hungry

 

For tracking, I'd like It if a mob/player walking has a chance to leave tracks, depending on the ground.

Stone would have a 0% chance for tracks(obviously)

Grass, 15%, dirt, 20% clay, 30%, peat 40% sand 10%, snow 90% etc

You should also be able to use some straw/dirt/brush(whatever) to wipe away your tracks and stay hidden

 

Animals should avoid you and places you visit/stay frequently, but get attracted to water, leaves/tall grass, etc

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