Kazerima

thanks for the info. Do sluice and pan both use the same value, or can you sluice an area you've panned out?

I've seen mentions of the Sluice getting a graphical overhaul in the changelog, does this mean it's been re-enabled for use? or is this more in preparation for the next version to do the code rewrite for it?

Ah, apologies palisight for the misinterpretation. Admittedly, in a game like TFC having a rather poor starting location can be a very difficult thing to deal with since you're required to keep returning there upon every death. The best option at present really is to just gen another world, but I can understand the sentiment of wanting to have some means of making a tiny island spawn lost in the ocean a more playable situation.

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.

Gopher, here's the thing. Right now, the night is not enjoyable because it provides no incentives to continue playing during the night, It's a dead zone in the gameplay where people either stop playing, or use a bed to skip it entirely. It becomes a resource that is not being fully utilized. Not only that, if anything were to be added to the night to make it more enjoyable, having a bed as an option means whatever interesting things happen during the night can just be skipped over entirely. Such is the reason Hardcore Bedding was originally introduced in BTW to begin with. Because beds have been around so long, I understand a large part of the playerbase considers them a core part of the game. However, I do recall the earlier days of the game before beds were an addition. You had to build little depots and secondary bases every so often to hide inside when night came, otherwise you'd be completely obliterated. There was tension in daytime travel from the mobs that had appeared overnight, requiring you to pay close attention to your surroundings and listen for the footsteps of nearby mobs. Anything that enhances a player's engagement in the game is a net positive, whether or not they happen to think it's enjoyable at the time. The best games are the ones you might rage at now and then, but you just keep going back to again and again to throw yourself wholeheartedly into. Reducing the amount of time waiting around doing nothing, and making every part of the gameplay at least slightly dangerous means although the player may not be able to do other things while playing, it means that much more of their focus is actually on the game itself. There's a bit of an issue when it comes to certain tasks as well if they're just busywork. Seeing the sun set and going "oh, better plop my bed down now" has a lot less tension and engagement than "oh shoot! I'd better run to the next safehouse or else I'm going to die again". While most players say they enjoy added convenience, because it allows them to continue the task they were doing without interruption, in reality the scarcity of opportunity to acomplish that task instead adds far more meaning to it, and makes it far more enjoyable as a by-product. Players can look forwards to those activities with anticipation, keeping themselves busy in the meantime. By far one of the most interesting night-based BTW experiences I've had is that I recently spent a day just wandering around hacking down trees and thinking to myself "oh man, I can't wait for night to come so I have an excuse to do some more mining"

I believe the BTW solution to this is: Maximize your daytime hours outside with exploring and resource gathering. Spend your nights crafting and mining to make the most out of those lost or limited hours you aren't able to go outside for. The primary solution then is not to make the night something to walk around in, but rather instead to provide meaning to points in time that you spend inside your base waiting for the sun to rise.

The problem with the term "realism" is it's not the term people should be using, because it's not really what they're asking for. It's not even 'increased believability' either. It's a desire for a very specific type of content to usually be catered for and presented as "because it's more realistic". People should really say what they mean deep down when suggesting things to the devs. "I don't like having to wait until metal to start on making things out of wood" is the reason the wedge mechanic was created for that addon. The reason most people choose TFC over vanilla I believe is not truly "Realism", but rather because it provides something new to a game that's gone stale feeling, and provides a good deal of additional content to play with. It presents intriguing systems that allow for a more balanced mode of play that requires more time to reach endgame than vanilla. The design philosophy behind TFC is, as constantly quoted from kitty's signature, to enhance the balance of the game and provide a slight increase in difficulty over vanilla MC, not to make it more realistic. Because vanilla offers no difficulty in survival at all in its gameplay other than maybe accidentally getting creepered from above or skeletons that do more damage the closer to them you get.

Extra Cedits just did an episode on this a few days ago actually. Accuracy is more in the mechanics than necessarily the details of the thing. Building ough looking houses out of logs chopped down with your stone axe? that's plenty of representation for what you wanted to accomplish. A 'wedge' can be an abstraction of the process of laying the logs down on top of each other and not having the whole structure instantly fall apart in-game, The issue with a mechanical wedge is, it serves no purpose other than to destabilize the balance of the game. The only purpose of planks blocks is to increase your available construction material per log harvested through reducing durablity of a metal tiered item. What would a wedge do? It would either allow the construction of a purely aesthetic alternate plank block that could not be used to make a workbench, but could be used to make other stuff of the same tier maybe. The cost of a stone wedge? next to absolutely nothing, since rocks are incredibly easy to find and obtain, even before making a pickaxe. The only thing in the stone age that actually requires any real effort to get through in the current 78 build is actually getting enough metal for the saw to advance to the next tech gradient. Even then, that's not difficult so much as tediously keeping track of which chunks you've panned in and which you haven't as you grind for 10 copper.

"Realism" is never an end in of itself though. Nobody actually wants more realism. More realism means having to go poo in the woods every few hours, making something to wipe it, and getting poison ivy from it. Realism is a dirty word in gaming because people use it as a smokescreen to disguise their true aims, even to themselves. Reality is tedium, and games are made to get away from it all, to bring what's fun about reality or fantasy into a virtual environment to toy around with. The most common things people mean when they say "Realism" is: 1. Make this part of the game easier because this real world solution is an easier way around this or things aren't exactly perfectly like that in reality. (see Stone Wedge Addon, slower food decay requests, and so on) 2. Want to add more to a part of a game and feel like they're partially responsible for the game, so they reach for the low hanging fruit of obvious ideas. "Make walls out of paper so I can attach my name to this and feel important. Then I can totally tell all my friends it's because of me that TFC now has paper walls" 3. They actually mean to suggest something beneficial to the actual game to improve the feel of it, but they lack the proper terminology for the kinds of things they want to add to the game. Much like "Better Graphics", what's actually desired is a better representation of the kind of environment the game provides.

As much as I would love to have the ages get expanded out with more meaningful goals between each age, you have to remember: "TFC is actually not trying to achieve realism. The goal is believability, while keeping in mind that not only is this a game, but also a mod for Minecraft."

Technically speaking, we already have a "rough lumber". It's called Logs

Oh o.o; my bad then >///<

The general idea is a cooking system involving the Iron Cauldron as a large stationary cooking system in much the same way as a barrel can for water, but positioned over a firepit and/or maybe forge. You fill up the container with an appropriate amount of water, toss in a bone, then add other ingredients to the soup. After stewing for around a day or so, the end resulting soup would contain all the nutritional material of the food used to create it, as long as the ratio of food to water was viable, similar to how bread works I believe but on a larger scale. As this requires a bloomery in order to access the wrought iron or pig iron to acomplish, this would be more of a mid-late game cooking upgrade up from bread's ability to double its weight from its base grain using only stone and wood. However, the soup would have to be scooped up into bowls, which could not have any decay removed from them after. A bowl of soup would only contain 5oz of food, requiring that anyone wanting to gain a large amount of food from soup would have to remain nearby the cauldron enough to keep refilling it. The cauldron was a centerpiece of peasant households during the dark ages, allowing them to cook a variety of foods by boiling them together, and keeping them preserved through an endless cooking process (though the longer food was boiled, the more the nutrients sank into the broth or burned away from heat). The role soup would play is mainly a food to prepare and eat while spending large amounts of time in your base, while saving more travelworthy foods for exploring.

The lilly pad idea is a new one, but not all that useful when you can just fill the water in with a log bridge or just use a boat. As for the stick blocks, using them like thatch is a fairly common thought, if anything for a suggestion I'd say make a "stick pane" block, as we already have plenty of aesthetic solid blocks, but fewer non-full block options. To expand, perhaps allowing it to be like the fence and still allow arrow shots through certain permiable parts of the block.

The main issue is that of the good intentions of the admins against the laziness of the average minecraft player. In general though, the main problem was people's suggestions were wasting his time and interfering with his design process, though a few from people who'd played a lot still got in every now and then. There was also a whole problem with the forum mods who would have helped with that stuff, but some of them backstabbed him and he erased the moderator positions.