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TonyLiberatto

Make Stone Age Longer.

93 posts in this topic

 Make Stone Age Longer.

 
How to eat Ice Cream? Take your time, in small spoons and really enjoy, or eat all at once and have brain freeze. Some People play Terrafirmacraft Like is a Race, Going from new spawn to Iron Age in 3 days. If they are luck in finding all the metals they can even get to red steel in a week. But after Red steel you are basically playing creative on hard. There are no more challenges to the game.
I like to take things slow and really enjoy the mod. I wish there was more content to the mod. But not just in the sense of adding things to do in the game. I want to have more to do in each age of the mod.
Some limitations on the game are purely for game balance. Like the crafting grid. You need a saw and 4 wood blocks to unlock the crafting grid. So you only have access to a lot of things after you have a metal saw. 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 have heard a few times that one or other idea would not be implemented because stone age is too short. So why not make it longer?
I listed some of the ideas bellow. Have in mind that what I wish to discuss in this tread is the concept of making the mod longer. The merit of each individual thing is not the issue here. I also understand that this would require a lot of work so I don’t really think it will happen.
 
 
v First stage: Nomadic exploration

Ø 

This is the first part of the Stone Age. Here our hero will collect the seeds that he will need to establish himself. We need to be able to survive in the wild on this stage. Not comfortable but survive nonetheless. We need the full crafting grid early on to implement all this.


Ø 

Straw work:


§ 

Straw hat to protect from the hot sun


§ 

 Straw basket (it will only carry seeds, nuts, cones, pods whatever you want to call then). All trees produce seeds of one kind or another, eating the fruit gives you the seed) just have to right click the leaves on the right season to get seeds.


Ø 

Stone Age tools:


§ 

shovel, axe, and Hammer, Knife, Hoe, Javelin, Bow, Mace, Wedge (new tool).


Ø 

Leather work:


§ 

 basic clothing for cold weather.


§ 

 Leather strips,


§ 

Tent


§ 

 Leather Water sac (a full water sac can refill your thirst bar for two days in very cold weather and 1 day on very hot weather).


Ø 

Wood work:


§ 

 Using an axe on two logs we can craft a canoe.


§ 

Using a wedge and hammer we can make planks.


§ 

Planks can be used to make walls and even a door. Using Leather strips to tie the planks together.


§ 

Planks cannot be used to make wood blocks. (You will need nails for that).


Ø 

We need the ability to dry meat and fruits so they last to a minimum and maximum of 1 year. Also raw grains should last without any preserving method. Steve needs to survive the first winter without a House.


Ø 

The camp consists of the tent, the campfire, and simple makeshift fence made of sticks. They are really ugly and not durable but will protect against night animals. Maybe another idea is to have 4 campfires together to create a bonfire that will keep animals away. Straw bed or a bedroll will set spawn.


Ø 

We need changes on animal behavior. Animals should have two commands: follow (just like a dog does) and don’t follow, this would not be like the sit, they would be free and need confinement then. (For balancing we can have a limit on how many animals you can have following you, like 10)


Ø 

Ancient nomadic civilizations would travel for thousands of miles with all sort of animals and they were not wearing a leach.


Ø 

Hunting big game is a very dangerous activity especially if you are alone. An injured animal may attack back.
 
v Second Stage setting a house:

 


Ø 

Clay work:


§ 

Adobe is the first durable material to construct walls. Is not gravity free but it can be stacked to make walls ( The roof would be made of straw or thatch)


§ 

All clay jugs, pans, pots and molds are breakable 


§ 

On This stage we can also have the clay oven.


§ 

Is time to start planting all those seeds, but you going to need to make saplings first by planting then on clay pots, only when the saplings are the right size you can plant then directly to the soil!


§ 

Clay is heavy and it breaks easy, it was not heavily used until people settle in farms. (nomads would not use many clay utensils) It was firing clay that people start to notice the metals and had a way to melt then. No Clay no Metal.


§ 

Once you settle you can start tanning leather. You should not need metals for Leather. Leather armor will make hunting a little easier, but not enough for the monsters underground.
v Third stage: Copper


Ø 

With metal tools we can start mining and finally make gravity free blocks, You need metals to do Stone work 


Ø 

Stone work will require a trowel and Mortar.


Ø 

Wood blocks will require nails and a hammer.


Ø 

The stone oven and stove.


Ø 

Roads.


Ø 

 Metal armors will give a better chance against the underground monsters.

Edited by TonyLiberatto
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I've always loved games that have really slow starts, and by that  I mean, they don't give you the laser rifle, if ever. The more primitive gameplay, the better. It's also much more rewarding for the later stages, you feel as if you've really earned it, piece by piece. I'd rather take a hell of a long primitive stage, and a shortish advanced stage, than anything else, even quizznos subs. But like the one with bacon.. others can be cool too...

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really like this idea, it also partially includes my idea here:http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/6243-updated-earlygame-grass-straw-thatch-sticks-changes-and-adobe

 

but still it can go well with it be sure to add stuff in if you like it

 

and what i would like is a way to saw wood in stone age because then the first shelter could be atreehouse with all that high tech ladders and planks

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also the point of settleing down to make metals could be even more enforced by you could make roads with cobblestone could give you a speed buff

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I like this idea. Also we should need plant fibers to tie the tool heads to the handle. Cattails would work for that.

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It's a great idea though I think they should focus on the material already present but incomplete like the burden system as well as all these ores and gems which are useless and giving us a reason to reach this mythic red/blue steel (except for the bucket). Maybe adding a way to tweak the hunger/thirst through  the config would be nice as it would spice up the game for those who are more "hardcore".

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I agree exept for having to plant saplings in pots before planting them in the soil, because wild trees did not have pots to grow in. Just saying!

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I agree exept for having to plant saplings in pots before planting them in the soil, because wild trees did not have pots to grow in. Just saying!

That's true. But anyone trying to make a tree farm in real life will use pots or planters to plant the seed and turn into a small sapling before planting in the actual farm.

Of all the thousands of nut, pods or cones a tree produces only very few survive in the wild. So to be believable means either that if you just plant a seed direct to the soil you will have a chance in a thousand that it will grow into a tree or you plant in a pot and only when it is strong enough to survive you plant in the actual farm.

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wild plants also have staggeringly high failure rates for seeds, only a tiny fraction of seeds produced in a plant's lifetime will manage to grow into a new plant naturally.

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That's why we need to tile the soil before planting vegetables and grains.

If you think about fruit trees should work the same way. You eat the fruit and save the seeds. Plant in a pot until they are big enough for the soil.

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wild plants also have staggeringly high failure rates for seeds, only a tiny fraction of seeds produced in a plant's lifetime will manage to grow into a new plant naturally.

The reason for that is not that seeds themselves are as weak as you are making them out to be - it's because they have to compete for space with all the seeds that happen to fall in that particular place at that time, as well as they have to survive all them birds and animals that will happen to want to eat it. None of it can be emulated in TFC, by the way.

Other than that, I have seen plenty of tree seeds that happen to feel just fine growing in tiny cracks in the asphalt road. And I've seen how many saplings can sprout in a relatively small area around a single oak tree (in short, you can't place a foot out there without stepping on three or four of them, and I'm not even a Bigfoot).

 

As I stand, I don't see the reason to add more steps to planting a tree. And for them requiring to be fertilized is even more so. The reason they fertilize soil in pots on tree farms is really because those pots more often than not contain severely overused, dry soil with next to no nutrients.

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I see the merits of your argument. I live in Florida and I have 3 oak trees in my house. The little saplings keep sprouting everywhere.

That said There is orange farms all around and no farmer here is going to plant orange seeds straight to the farm soil.

The same applies to any other fruit tree and even Christmas trees. They all go to a planter first and only after a while get to the  definitive place.

That's the way people have been  doing it for thousands of years.

I have a small vegetable garden in my backyard and the bell pepper seeds first go in a pot. Once they sprout and are of good size I replant then in the garden.(Not proposing changes to vegetable or grains)

In my post I said nothing about fertilizing.

Great advantage of Right clicking to get nuts and fruits. No need to break the leaves. Balance is only works on the right season.

Just how believable is that you can go around in the middle of the winter breaking oak leaves and it will drop saplings?

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Great advantage of Right clicking to get nuts and fruits. No need to break the leaves. Balance is only works on the right season.

Just how believable is that you can go around in the middle of the winter breaking oak leaves and it will drop saplings?

Well, about that. It's true that you get a huge amount of seeds when you do that. But then once you plant the seed, it will grow a lot (and I do mean a lot) longer than even normal tree sapling in TFC does, let alone the vanilla tree. We are talking months here, not days.

I don't even have a problem with planted seed to die off with some chance while it's still deemed to be weak enough to do such a thing. That way planter and/or fertilizer can be used to lessen this chance, but requiring it? No and no. I have enough beef with most mods for their "I'm gonna give you a way to do this and you either are gonna love it or you gonna not do this at all" to be backing up similar approaches to TFC designs.

Reason I'm so vocal in this regard is I do have a fleshed out design for nature overhaul addon that includes most of the things we are talked in this thread.

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Well, about that. It's true that you get a huge amount of seeds when you do that. But then once you plant the seed, it will grow a lot (and I do mean a lot) longer than even normal tree sapling in TFC does, let alone the vanilla tree. We are talking months here, not days.

I don't even have a problem with planted seed to die off with some chance while it's still deemed to be weak enough to do such a thing. That way planter and/or fertilizer can be used to lessen this chance, but requiring it? No and no. I have enough beef with most mods for their "I'm gonna give you a way to do this and you either are gonna love it or you gonna not do this at all" to be backing up similar approaches to TFC designs.

Reason I'm so vocal in this regard is I do have a fleshed out design for nature overhaul addon that includes most of the things we are talked in this thread.

What about a compromise?

The most important aspect for me is to get seeds by eating the fruit and get fruits and nuts by right clicking the leaves, not breaking them.

How we plant those seeds could be optional.

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So, I like this overhaul as a whole (this is how I play TFC, slow but satisfying. Its the process, not the goal) and here is my two cents on roads.

 

 

First off, tall grass should propagate rather quickly. For functionality sake, it should spread similarly to normal grass. It searches for an adjacent grass block lacking tall grass, and spread to it if possible.

This propagation is only to remove some of the tedium in maintaining the land you live on. A simple barrier of some sorts (tilled land, a fence, etc.) would prevent tall grass from invading.

 

Tall grass should give a minor speed debuff, similarly to leaves, animals should be largely unaffected by this though.

 

In early-game, a player could till the ground with a hoe. Re-tilling the ground would turn it back into standard dirt, as added functionality.

Tall grass would be unable to spread to the tilled soil, and you would be able to travel easily without a speed penalty., especially if you are living in the plains. (This would all function better with an additional setting on the pickaxe for roads)

 

For more advanced roads, you could take rocks (notice, not cobblestone blocks) and use them directly on this existing tilled soil to place stones on the path. This would give a modest speed bonus, since the road would be as a whole smoother. To make a prettier road... cobblestone could be placed directly, but improved roads don't necessarily require excavation of the soil.

 

 

 

Anyways, the more time spent struggling in the primitive years... the more entertaining it seems to be for me. Metal is just such a big difference. I've been on the same save for a while now, and I still live in a small house of logs and thatch, because I focused more on food, animal husbandry, and the sorts before metal.

I got an established farm with multiple plots making crop rotation easy.

Fenced off a large area for animals I drag back, built a simple barn (I have the localized weather mod installed... tornados can wreck your livestock) and I am just starting to really work on metals now. I didn't really settle in the best location though.

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First off, tall grass should propagate rather quickly. For functionality sake, it should spread similarly to normal grass. It searches for an adjacent grass block lacking tall grass, and spread to it if possible.

This propagation is only to remove some of the tedium in maintaining the land you live on. A simple barrier of some sorts (tilled land, a fence, etc.) would prevent tall grass from invading.

 

For more advanced roads, you could take rocks (notice, not cobblestone blocks) and use them directly on this existing tilled soil to place stones on the path. This would give a modest speed bonus, since the road would be as a whole smoother. To make a prettier road... cobblestone could be placed directly, but improved roads don't necessarily require excavation of the soil.

 

Tall grass already regrows in TFC. You don't need existing tall grass to spread, actual grass blocks can spawn tall grass on top of them as long as the climate is fitting and the light levels are high enough.

 

Roads have already been discussed to death, and the general reply from the devs is that roads will only ever be added as an aesthetic thing. You won't ever get a buff from making and using a road.

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In regards to tall grass, I'd like to see grass that can grow even taller, maybe even 3 or 4 blocks high, so you come up to an overgrown field that you have to walk through and be careful because the grass could be hiding holes, traps, animals, predators, etc. 

 

I'd also really like it if the tall grass in the game grew at a faster rate in undeveloped areas, to make collecting large amounts of thatch a little less difficult. Maybe grass could have 3 stages of growth, with each stage netting you an equivalent amount of straw. To balance it out so that thatch isn't totally overpowered early in the game, have grass broken by a knife only break one section of the grass at a time, or have it break the whole 3-block-high grass but take 3 times the durability hit doing so. To harvest the high grass properly would require a scythe that could cut swaths of grass at once, taking normal durability per grass block broken. 

 

Tools like the scythe that require a much longer handle should do exactly that: a single stick in the recipe seems a little silly. There should be a way of crafting or whittling longer handles, either by combining multiple sticks and some kind of binding material, or making one (or more) out of two logs. I don't know if Dunk and Bioxx plan to ever change anything in regards to tool implementation, but I'd like to see the different metals have slightly more differing properties, such as higher metal tools having a small chance of getting better/more ore out of a particular block, or having handles made out of different materials that combine with the tool head material for combination effects. 

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Love the idea of really tall grass. Don't know if it should be everywhere, but it would be cool in a like jungle biome. We could add a machete toll and we would need to open a track in the field.

As far as different metals for tools, The thing I miss more is speed. TFC adds a lot of durability as you go up on the tiers, but I think it should add more speed.

For the amount of work and material used in high tier tolls I think it should give more speed.

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I think tall grass that overtakes plains biomes or definitely jungle would be fantastic. A machete instead of the scythe makes sense. 

 

Tool speed should definitely be buffed for higher-tier metals. They should also offer some other kind of benefit like potentially giving a better ore drop (poor might drop normal, normal might drop rich).

 

I really just want to see tall grass so you can watch the velociraptors hunting people from overhead.

 

Posted Image

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I love the early stages of the game, and I like having a number of ways to approach progression.  I'd be a fan of fruit seeds, baskets, hats and water skins.  A couple comments:

  • I don't think you should be able to get planks with an axe or wedge and hammer, or they should need to be worked further before they can be used for finer carpentry.  Wedges seem best for nicely sized firewood or fence posts.  I like having to struggle for metals before I can make a crafting bench.  Items like doors require a decent amount of skill to make functional, and I don't think they should be easily obtainable in the early game.  If the 3x3 crafting grid is desirable so early in the game I'd prefer to have a larger (1x2) workbench to make items like doors (and for ambiance!)
  • You talk about using cured leather in the nomadic phase, and then you say that you can begin tanning leather in the house phase.  Clothing would use tanned leather, but it would be easier to do so efficiently once you have a base
  • Pottery was used extensively American Southwest to transport water and other items.  I do not think it should be made non-potable
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I loved to see other players like minded.

 

 

I love the early stages of the game, and I like having a number of ways to approach progression.  I'd be a fan of fruit seeds, baskets, hats and water skins.  A couple comments:

  • I don't think you should be able to get planks with an axe or wedge and hammer, or they should need to be worked further before they can be used for finer carpentry.  Wedges seem best for nicely sized firewood or fence posts.  I like having to struggle for metals before I can make a crafting bench.  Items like doors require a decent amount of skill to make functional, and I don't think they should be easily obtainable in the early game.  If the 3x3 crafting grid is desirable so early in the game I'd prefer to have a larger (1x2) workbench to make items like doors (and for ambiance!)
  • You talk about using cured leather in the nomadic phase, and then you say that you can begin tanning leather in the house phase.  Clothing would use tanned leather, but it would be easier to do so efficiently once you have a base
  • Pottery was used extensively American Southwest to transport water and other items.  I do not think it should be made non-potable

 

Let me address each point:

  • About wood, the crafting grid would not give you access to high tier wood constructions since they would need nails (metals)
  • Native Americans had a process for curing leather using the brains of the animal. Is not the same as tanning but they were able to make clothes and get protection from the environment.
  • The issue with pottery for me is that it makes no sense to go around caring a  water jug. Yes on those ancient civilizations woman would go to the river with pots to carry water back to the house. It's not the same as water jug. The jug would be filled with water and be left under a wind shade place to cool the water inside. (As the water sip through the clay it evaporates and actually cools down the water inside.) The first water caring utensil was the water leather sac, made from the stomach of big animals and protected with leather.  
  • Edited the post, removed the non portable for clay.
  • Have in mind that what I wish to discuss in this tread is the concept of making the mod longer. The merit of each individual thing is not the issue here.
  • I like the idea of taking longer to get to top tier metals, but I don't like grinding stuff. I get bored easily so once I achieve a technology I want to move on. 
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About wood, the crafting grid would not give you access to high tier wood constructions since they would need nails (metals)

There's plenty of ways to create complicated wood constructs without metal nails at all or with wooden substitudes for them, don't overvalue metal, please.

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There's plenty of ways to create complicated wood constructs without metal nails at all or with wooden substitudes for them, don't overvalue metal, please.

Totally agree with you. I just wish some of the devs would consider this overhaul. In my mind metal tools just make the job easier and faster.

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Tall grass already regrows in TFC. You don't need existing tall grass to spread, actual grass blocks can spawn tall grass on top of them as long as the climate is fitting and the light levels are high enough.

 

Roads have already been discussed to death, and the general reply from the devs is that roads will only ever be added as an aesthetic thing. You won't ever get a buff from making and using a road.

Hence why I said they should propagage instead. Only because if it spawned up erraneously on everything, it would be annoying.

 

I personally just find the fields in TFC to be rather flat. Either way, rocks or just tilled soil, I don't care if things improve speed. I just think that when nature crops up rather tall, you should either cut your way or take the slow down to pass through it. Idk, my recent save I ended up between two jungles in a grassy plain. If I want anything beyond some bismuth, I have to go through the jungle.

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Hence why I said they should propagage instead. Only because if it spawned up erraneously on everything, it would be annoying.

 

Yes having to periodically mow your front lawn can be annoying, which is why the rate at which the grass grows isn't very high, and why the grass blocks actually require certain conditions in order to grow tall grass on top of them (High enough light level, warm enough temperature, etc.)

 

The key reason as to why tall grass spawns up on grass blocks is that this way an area can still regrow tall grass even if the player completely cleared out the area. On servers especially, areas can get cleaned out of tall grass extremely quickly, so allowing it to regrow after all of the tall grass has been removed allows for newer players joining the server to still have access to straw for pit kilns and thatch buildings without having to travel thousands of blocks outside of the server spawn for an area that hasn't been previously cleared.

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