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TonyLiberatto

Make Stone Age Longer.

93 posts in this topic

I like the idea a lot. I also think TFC could get a little into the 'Middle Ages', too, but that's a completely different thing. All in all, I think TFC would be even great with a little bit extended early gameplay.

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Myself, I find that I actually rather enjoy what we have in the early game the most, and that it's actually the section that requires the least work so far. Beyond acquiring copper equipment, my primary motivation for climbing the tech tree is simply to minimize the actual time I have to spend panning for copper (one of the more time consuming and tedius parts of the game). Not to say that doesn't provide some incentive, but I would like to see more mid and late gameplay that requires higher tiered materials to create more than tools, weapons, and armor.

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I just pick the copper nuggets up off the ground. In fact, I usually skip copper age altogether. I can often find enough to cast my first metal tools out of bismuth bronze.

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If they really wanted to make the stone age longer they should change how thatch works. (SAY WHAT!!) Just hear me out.

 

There are a lot of good ideas in here about things that could enhance the stone age experience, but it is not an issue of having more things to do in the stone age, it is an issue of having a reason to do them. Why would anyone want to go through all the work of hammer and wedge planks when I can probably gather enough surface copper and clay in the first two TFC days to have a saw. 

 

In TFC there are a handful of very critical bottleneck resources that hold back tech tree development. Flux and nickel come to mind. Flux is the reason we spend so much time working with tier 2 metals, because you need flux to make anvils to move on and its not always easy to find. Nickel does the same thing to move past regular steel. We've all spent hours of hours and hours of real life time searching for these resources. If they want to make the stone age longer they need some kind of bottleneck resource to get to the copper age. Right now the resources you need to get to the copper age are all pretty common in most seeds.

 

I would like to have a limitation on the metals based on agriculture. Somehow it would be impossible for you to smelt metals until you have a base with animals, a full farm and orchard.

The idea is to have a lot more to do in Stone Age, and then go into setting a place to live and agriculture. Only after that we would go into Pottery and all the metals.

 

I like the idea of using agriculture as the bottleneck resource, but the way Djakuta describes it seem a little forced and not really believable. Food doesn't make sense as a bottleneck resource for metals. In TFC they've already made agriculture significantly harder than vanilla by making irrigation, seed gathering and animal breeding more difficult. At the end of the day though, as it is now, even as a hunter gatherer you can have a steady enough food supply to start up a copper mine. 

 

That is why I say the best bottleneck resource would be thatch. Imagine if you could only get thatch from grains and not from cutting down grass with a knife. Right off the start you might have to spend a few TFC days or even weeks searching for enough wild grains to make your first pit kiln. During that time you would be stuck with stone tools, struggling to staying close enough to fresh water to not die of thirst, your food would be spoiling without vessels, and you would have to think long and hard about what to sacrifice in your inventory every time you found something new. You wouldn't even really be able to think about settling anywhere until you had a healthy supply of thatch and grain seeds. That turning would be an Agricultural Revolution. Even once you did settle it would take months to replenish your thatch and you would have to really watch your crops to try and get multiple harvests. In the mean time you'd still be stuck with stone tools for the most part and maybe not even be able to build a thatch hut. Even once you got to the copper age you will still be super dependent on agriculture to keep a healthy supply of thatch for all those pit kilns. It would be a complete game changer. A nomadic stone age life style would be almost inevitable as emergent gameplay at the startSuddenly having a lot more cool stuff to do during the stone age wouldn't sound like such a bad idea. Once you got far enough along the tech tree your reliance on grain harvest would dwindle because you don't need so many pit kilns with the higher tier metals.

 

It would also make glass blowing a more viable alternative to pottery since it wouldn't require growing a field of wheat to make a bottle. (Hint Hint)

 

To play devil's advocate to my own idea (as I like to do so much) it would make TerrafirmaCrack REALLY hard. They'd be murdering each other over wheat and clay jugs. After two weeks there is a good chance they'd be facing off with javelins. That actually might be kind of entertaining now that I think about it. :)

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Imagine if you could only get thatch from grains and not from cutting down grass with a knife.

That would mean at least an in-game season of doing pretty much nothing but farming plants. More if you didn't manage to get any grain seeds by the end of your first spring. 

Farming animals would mosly be out of the question since you have nothing to take them closer to your home. As is building quality of life improvements. Drinking would be just plain annoying for how much time it would take every morning. And you'd HAVE to settle as soon as possinble, because the earlier you plant seeds, the better your chances of surviving the winter.

I might take this thing out on a date in my next attempt, but I'm in an extreme doubt this will be the one. There's just too much factors that can completely ruin the run, so I don't really see this as a base game feature, but rather as a configurable thing for "veretans" and the like.

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Well I did some calculations. You spend the Northern hemisphere summer looking for wild crops. During autumn you travel to the southern hemisphere to plant your crops, and harvest them in the southern hemisphere autumn

 

96 day year length

 

You will get your first crops after ~26 hours and 40 minutes of real life time

 

360 year length

 

You will get your first crops after 100 hours of real life time

 

That would be a really long stone age....

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I based my idea on the concept that people did not started working on metals until they had actual cities and were settle with agriculture and  animal husbandry.

The forge is a permanent construction and nomadic people would not build one.

Right now we do have a artificial bottleneck with the crafting grid so we need to prove that we are able to make 4 wood blocks to unlock the full crafting grid.

My idea is to have some kind of mechanic in the game that we need to prove that we are established with a farm and animals before we unlock metal work.

I have no idea what would be The best way to implement this.

When playing minecraft you suddenly appear in a strange world with nothing, just like a shipwreck survival.  As much as having metal will help you,metal is down low on the priorities for survival.

If you ever get stranded your priorities are in order:

  • Shelter (you need a safe place for the night, with protection from cold, Hypothermia or dangerous animals)
  • water ( you can survive for  2 days without water thats why shelter comes first.)
  • food  ( once you have shelter and water is time to look for food) 

So it makes no sense for someone who does not have a  secure food source to go looking for metal. 

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I think the reduction in the availability of thatch could be an interesting mechanic, but reducing it to only coming from grain is a little unrealistic, because anything dry could work for kilns.  Perhaps to slow down the progression you would just get grass when using a knife on tall grass.  You'd need to build a drying rack, in full sun to process the grass into thatch.  More stone age building options (like adobe or skin tents) would allow quality of living to be improved while still reducing the speed with which you could get into working metal.  If grain did take on more significance it would be good to have more reasons (medicinal, livestock, etc.) to grow the other crops to rotate with grain.

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I just want to say that I am loving this discussion.

 

I don't see why you have to have quality of living in the stone age. If the idea is believability then stone-age semi-nomadic hunter gathers shouldn't have the best quality of life. 

 

transcengopher: You could most definitely have a terrible first run where you don't find enough grain and can't settle before winter. You might even have to start over and go through the stone age twice. I could also imagine a seed where you find enough grains in the first day or two to run two pit kilns. I've had plenty of wild crop harvesting runs where I came home with more than 16 grains. You could end up with clay jugs, vessels and early copper tools pretty quickly. It's not out of the question in ideal circumstances. Obviously in less than ideal circumstances it would be tougher and you would have to move around more gathering enough food to get through the winter if you couldn't manage to settle by then. As far as the annoying water thing, that would get pretty old. As the game is now you can still make glass bottles last time I checked. Not to mention all the suggestions for gourd and leather vessels I've seen.

 

Palisight: I hadn't run the numbers on it as thoroughly as you did and that is kind of eye opening. My idea was to make the stone age last as long as the later ages. There are plenty of people that play in a "race to blue steel" mindset and go through the early ages in a matter of days, but I don't think it is unrealistic or boring to stay in copper and bronze for a whole year. Why not stay in stone for a whole year? Especially if the majority of the ideas in this thread are about things that would only make sense to do in the stone age. 

 

Djakuta: I'm totally on board with you on the idea that food, shelter, and water should be the top priorities. They still would be top priorities, the biggest difference is that you would have to work harder to get them. Getting bronze and steel can take up hours of your time (and it's kinda what makes TFC fun), but in the early game you can have a thatch hut, a couple of water jugs and a small farm in no time. Food, shelter and water don't take a whole lot of effort. That is why copper becomes a priority so early (too early in my opinion) because it is simply the next step in the game. Making thatch a limited resource makes securing water and shelter more difficult, but no less of a priority (more of a priority if anything). As far as food is concerned, it has always been possible to hunt and gather as you travel, it is just not common to see that because most players settle very early in game. And I can almost promise that nobody will be thinking about setting up a forge for a long time. All in all, making thatch a scare resource make settlement a priority that you would have to meet before you even think about seriously working with metals. I might not be the huge farm with animals and houses that you are talking, but you'd have to establish a farm for grains and you'd have to establish farms for food at the same time since you couldn't rely on gathering anymore once you settle down. In a way what I am talking about goes pretty hand in hand with your vision. I'm just looking for a more organic mechanism.

 

Atharsea: I had thought about something like that too. Seeing peoples reactions I could see that the grain-only thatch may be too extreme. The main idea is to limit thatch to the point where it is a bottleneck resource. I think it would be awesome the way I described it, but in the interest of balance in the game I could see just having it more scarce. Maybe making it a rare drop from grass, or like you said only from tall grass. I thought about the drying of grass too. Maybe even have a block made from cut grass that could still be used for shelter, but not for pit kilns. And like you said if you leave that cut grass block in sunlight for a few days it dries into thatch. (Just for fun the cut grass block can wash away in rain).

 

Like I said in my original post about this, there are only a handful of readily available resources (thatch, clay, logs, copper) that are needed to get out of the stone age and start working metals. Food, water and shelter are a breeze so we just move right on to copper (even while living a hunter gather lifestyle) because we already have everything we need to get it. If you limit just one of those resource for copper it changes everything. A lot of Terrafirmacraft is about making you work for things. If the game made you work to get started on something as simple as a pit kiln, you'd have to rethink your strategy and might just want to wait a while before you moved on to metals. Right now thatch provides us with shelter and indirectly provides us with water and copper. If the early game priorities are food, water and shelter and now you work to get water and shelter, then copper is no longer an early priority and the stone age is real. 

 

One of the biggest reasons I suggested grain-only thatch is that grains were VERY significant crops in the real Agricultural Revolution that brought us out of the stone age. This would simulate that very well and make it important to take farming seriously until you get very well established and no longer need to rely on thatch. Once you got set up with an anvil grain would just be for food and livestock again since you aren't making pit kilns for molds anymore. Before that grains are practically your life blood, because everything you do depends on them.

 

I look forward to reading more responses.

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Rowist I agree with much of what you say.

I guess the problem is how to implement a knowledge aspect of humanity.

Is like people bypassing copper because everyone knows that combination of ores to make bronze.

What I wanted is for TFC to mimic either the technological progression that humanity had from prehistoric times, or the problems that someone stranded on an unknown world would have to survive.

I don't think we should be too realistic, this is a game after all, but we need a equilibrium between believable and game-play.

To be capable to smelt copper or bronze before you have secured a base with farms and animal husbandry is totally unbelievable.

Life in stone age was very hard but if you read this tread you will find that they had a lot more then people think.

There was actually houses made of wood planks, and boats capable of navigating big rivers fishing or trading, and even wells.

Technology did not evolve until men was established with strong agriculture. Once we had fields producing a surplus of food we finally could dedicate to other aspects of civilization.

Suppose you are the only survival of a shipwreck, smelting copper will take a long time.

I don't know how to prevent people from going straight to copper and bronze age without some artificial blockage like the saw for the crafting grid.

One of the problems is that having food is not the same as having a secure source of food.

I think we should stay one year minimum on the stone age, or at least until l the first harvest.

Food is too easy and is illogical that you can survive just on one food group. I loved that to max your  health you have to eat from all food groups. Maybe you should have an extra penalty if you eat just one food group for too long.

Having a metal tool gives so many advantages that everyone just go for it as soon as possible. Is like we just bypass the stone age.

Just making food or survival in general harder will not solve the problem. It will actually give extra incentive to move even faster to copper age.

So far I could only think of some kind of artificial lock that would prevent players from smelting metals until they can prove they have all 5 food groups. Yes I said 5, people had cheese before they had metal.

Maybe you have to construct a device and fill with one stack of each food group to unlock the capability of smelting ores.

Does it make sense? as much as arranging 4 wood blocks to unlock the crafting grid. 

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I see what you are going for better now. Thanks.

Crafting tables make sense because it creates the effect of one technology opening doors to more technologies. In this case a copper saw opens the door to all of the 3x3 recipes. It is a bit of a stretch for realism, but it kinda works. It'd be nice to see something similar for the copper age transition.

I was trying to imagine some device tied to nutrition and agriculture skill that would open up the ability to smelt, but nothing feels natural.

Acedemia likes to draw a line in history between stone and copper, but it is not like someone just woke up one day and decided to smelt copper on a large scale, it was more likely a transitional process. Think about Ötzi who's body was found with a bunch of stone tools and a copper axe. He was probably living in a transitional period where copper was known, but not the main technology.

If you tweak the mechanics for pit kiln smelting and mining you can get that transitional effect. I've even got an idea for tying it to nutrition. How about vessels have a chance of breaking when you smelt. Maybe they are single use or maybe you lose entire batches. That way smelting is not a sure thing and casting isn't very reliable. Combine that with scarce thatch and you've got yourself a real struggle to get copper tools. A transitional copper age where stone might just be the easier choice.

For nutrition you make a mining fatigue effect associated with nutrition. It's not too far fetched to say someone with a protien or vitamin deficiency wouldn't be a good miner. If you dont have a good diet a pick is useless and you are stuck with native nuggets. Cooper becomes scarce and the only way to get around that is to farm on a pretty large scale. In the mean time you can have your copper axe and saw so you can build with wood and live like a late stone age society.

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If you tweak the mechanics for pit kiln smelting and mining you can get that transitional effect. I've even got an idea for tying it to nutrition. How about vessels have a chance of breaking when you smelt. Maybe they are single use or maybe you lose entire batches. That way smelting is not a sure thing and casting isn't very reliable. Combine that with scarce thatch and you've got yourself a real struggle to get copper tools. A transitional copper age where stone might just be the easier choice.For nutrition you make a mining fatigue effect associated with nutrition. It's not too far fetched to say someone with a protien or vitamin defiency wouldn't be a good miner. If you dont have a good diet a pick is useless and you are stuck with native nuggets. Cooper becomes scarce and the only way to get around that is to farm on a pretty large scale. In the mean time you can have your copper axe and saw so you can build with wood and live like a late stone age society.

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There is no reason why a nuitrition effect should affect only mining.

 

If you want to suggest fatigue penalties for poor nuitrition, its should also affect combat damage, digging, tree chopping etc. Possibly also movement speed

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There is no reason why a nuitrition effect should affect only mining.

 

If you want to suggest fatigue penalties for poor nuitrition, its should also affect combat damage, digging, tree chopping etc. Possibly also movement speed

You right. But that ruins the whole idea.

Now we need to think of something else.

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I like the ideas of both Rowist and Djakuta.

Not sure about the nutrition thing though ...

But I think, the problem with limiting thatch is, that it's a very (the most??) important early game building block, which saves the lives of many Steves early on. Also, it's required for the whole pottery mechanism, which I wouldn't love to see gone until the bronze age; that should be there way before smelting metals!

Sure, that would be the simplest and supposedly easiest to code solution to make the stone age much longer. A very small step that would make a whole new gameplay experience.

But what if make the solution a bit more complicated and just seperate smelting from pottery?

As it stands, smelting copper, even bronze, is no more complicated than fire a clay jug!

Why not make early smelting require more than just filling a vessel with some ores and fire it like all your pottery?

You could tie such a bottleneck requirement to a whole new early smelting mechanism, that doesn't necessaily have to be hard to implement?

Thoughts on that?

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But I think, the problem with limiting thatch is, that it's a very (the most??) important early game building block, which saves the lives of many Steves early on. Also, it's required for the whole pottery mechanism, which I wouldn't love to see gone until the bronze age; that should be there way before smelting metals!Sure, that would be the simplest and supposedly easiest to code solution to make the stone age much longer. A very small step that would make a whole new gameplay experience.

That's exactly why I think it should be limited. Maybe not as harshly as I first suggested. Even though is so important, it is so abundant that we take for granted. Making it scarce makes it that much more important and valuable. As it is now you know that no matter what type of seed you start in you can build a basic thatch hut and fire up a pit kiln in no time. You never wonder across a continent hoping to find thatch, or offering up your first born in a trade for it. You don't spend a bunch of time thinking about what you REALLY need to make in your next pit kiln and what can wait until you can make another. Those are things we do with other "important" resources in the game and that is what gives them value.  I personally don't think it should be that easy.

 

Unfortunately limiting thatch as I first suggested has an adverse side effect that makes primitive shelters a lot harder to come by. I mentioned that in a little discussion with Atharsea a while ago. I like the idea of grass dropping something like Cut Grass that can be crafted into blocks to make a primitive shelter, but can't be used to fuel a kiln. (I also think that a shelter made from grass or thatch should deteriorate in rain, but that's for another thread.) I'm not trying to take away Steve's standard first-night survival house. Although when you think about it that is exactly what TFC did initially when they made dirt and cobble into gravity blocks. Vanilla Steve would have panicked and tried to bury himself in a hole, but TFC Steve is resourceful enough to find a way with what he has available! :)

 

The main goal of limiting thatch is to slow down the pottery and smelting process until you are reasonably established. Djakuta talks about TFC like Steve is stranded on an island having to set up primitive technology. If I was stranded on an island I think it would take a little longer than a day to figure out how to make pottery. Maybe even a month. By limiting the availability of your main fuel for kilns it might take you a little while to get pottery going. You are going to have to work for it instead of it just falling into your lap the first time you find those yellow flowers. Once you have enough thatch, you will have to put some thought into what is most important, knowing how much you'll have to work for the next pit kiln. The same way you think about what you are going to make with your first 10 copper nuggets. Down the road, to do large scale pottery or kiln smelting you'll need to have a settlement with a grain farm and/or some kind of setup for drying your Cut Grass into thatch. That makes sense to me.

 

 

There is no reason why a nuitrition effect should affect only mining.

 

If you want to suggest fatigue penalties for poor nuitrition, its should also affect combat damage, digging, tree chopping etc. Possibly also movement speed

That seems reasonable as long as it isn't overdone. Maybe not make them all straight-up fatigues, but just debuffs (like thirst causing slowness) so you work slower on a bad diet. I still think straight-up mining fatigue makes sense just to create a barrier for large scale metal work until you are established like Djakuta has been talking about. I think it is reasonable to say that digging out a 500 block copper mine is significantly more labor intensive than cutting down a tree, so you'd have to be in "better shape". Mining fatigue would also "keep you honest" later in the game once you are deep into iron and steel. You'd still have to maintain your farms and watch your diet. No more of the pork chop diet. It would also create a major incentive to work with all of the cooking mechanics to keep your diet balanced more easily (Hint Hint). I honestly wouldn't be surprised if something like this was already in the works as much as Bioxx has been working on nutrition and meals lately.

 

Excellent use of "affect" and "effect" btw. :)

 

 

But what if make the solution a bit more complicated and just seperate smelting from pottery?As it stands, smelting copper, even bronze, is no more complicated than fire a clay jug!Why not make early smelting require more than just filling a vessel with some ores and fire it like all your pottery?

That is kinda what I was going for when I was talking with Djakuta about making smelting metals in pottery less reliable. I was trying to create an incentive for Steve to stick with stone tools longer while still dabbling with copper a little bit. Something along the lines of smelting vessels breaking down, batches getting lost, molds failing, etc.

 

I like the idea of separating the processes for pottery and smelting even more than what I was talking about. What if you had to make a kiln with charcoal instead of thatch in order to melt metals? It kinda makes sense because it would be hotter and it would create a scenario where you have to have a charcoal pit in order to smelt. One more reason to be settled first. (It would also free up some of that scarce thatch I keep blabbering about :P

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TFC is supposed to be "survival as it should have been". And when players learn to protect themselves from danger.....they use straw.

 

In real life if you were going to build a house to protect yourself from bears, zombies, (or whatever), would you really build a shelter out of grass or straw????

 

Currently you do not need straw to build a roof. Wood blocks work. If wood blocks are planned to be made impossible to be used as a roof, then clay blocks still work.

 

The 1st real need of straw in TFC is for pit kilns, not survival. You just WANT straw for survival shelters because......I have no idea why

 

Its of course up to the devs if they think restricting player access to pit kilns until after the 1st harvest is reasonable

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Another partial solution could be reducing the copper spawning rate, as IRL it is not that common and making gold panning only possible in chunks that actually have gold/copper veins.

 

 

TFC is supposed to be "survival as it should have been".

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I haven't really read what came down here, so my only input for now would be:

No, you can't, in fact, make glass bottles in stone age. For one, I'm not sure firepit can support the temperature required, but even if it can, bottle is crafted in 3x3 grid, which requires metal.

 

All my other concerns I expressed initially.

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I haven't really read what came down here, so my only input for now would be:

No, you can't, in fact, make glass bottles in stone age. For one, I'm not sure firepit can support the temperature required, but even if it can, bottle is crafted in 3x3 grid, which requires metal.

 

All my other concerns I expressed initially.

 

Since the heating rewrite somewhere in the 78 hotfixes, firepits easily get hot enough to make glass.

 

Anyways, the fact that you can't make glass bottles in the stone age doesn't really change anything in the argument, because you can't make a leather waterskin in the stone age either. You need a barrel to process the leather, which requires a saw and the 3x3 grid as well.

 

*This might possibly change in 79 with the addition of the large vessel, but it's likely that leather production using it will be far from reliable.

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I haven't really read what came down here, so my only input for now would be:No, you can't, in fact, make glass bottles in stone age. For one, I'm not sure firepit can support the temperature required, but even if it can, bottle is crafted in 3x3 grid, which requires metal.All my other concerns I expressed initially.

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TFC is supposed to be "survival as it should have been". And when players learn to protect themselves from danger.....they use straw.

 

In real life if you were going to build a house to protect yourself from bears, zombies, (or whatever), would you really build a shelter out of grass or straw????

 

Currently you do not need straw to build a roof. Wood blocks work. If wood blocks are planned to be made impossible to be used as a roof, then clay blocks still work.

 

The 1st real need of straw in TFC is for pit kilns, not survival. You just WANT straw for survival shelters because......I have no idea why

 

Its of course up to the devs if they think restricting player access to pit kilns until after the 1st harvest is reasonable

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the "weak against mobs" idea sounds good, but technically it's a bit of a problem and would require some serious changes to the mobs AI. For pathfinding purposes, they'd have to treat every thatch block the way they treat doors, but more so since they'd have to understand to break two thatch blocks to make an opening they could fit through. I'd call this extremely unlikely to happen. I'd prefer, as discussed somewhere at some point, if thatch just had a chance to rot on a random tick, becoming first a kind of rotting thatch, which wouldn't drop anything when broken, and then disappearing entirely. Using only random tick events it shouldn't be too much overhead, and a check of it's neighbors so it's more likely to start to rot if it's touching another rotting thatch block would make it less completely random and more of a process that starts slowly but then accelerates over time, like grass spreading.

 

:edit: alternately, relatively small chance on random tick of a normal thatch block decaying to a rotted thatch block, and an equal or even lesser chance of those rotted thatch blocks decaying to nothing, rotted blocks random ticks could spread to nearby thatch more closely to the way grass spreads. This would avoid the bit of counting the neighboring blocks, instead you could just pick a random neighbor, check if it's a valid candidate (fresh thatch), and if so, make it decaying thatch. The spreading would be more frequent, having higher odds of happening each random tick, than the initial rotting. Main downside is that unloaded thatch blocks would be in stasis... meh. I dunno. There are no perfect solutions to anything.

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The idea of thatch rotting is something that could be considered. But I don't think it should be fast, Thatch roofs last for a long time.

The point for me is if you make a house with thatch walls the bears and lions will just break through.

As far as coding we could maybe have thatch blocks behave like leaves. They would block light and rain but would be invisible and non-tangible for animals.

This change will make more sense once we move fantastical mobs to underground.

I have seen people building thatch roofs in real life and a fresh thatch roof is actually green, it will dry up in place. They do such a great job that it is totally impervious to rain.

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My point was that the amount of AI changes required to make mobs break through thatch, or anything, are non-trivial and seem unlikely to happen. Also, the three little pigs give people the wrong idea about straw houses. They're not actually that fragile, and while they certainly wouldn't keep out a determined bear, a bear wouldn't just charge straight through it like it wasn't there, either.

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