Brodiggan

If it's the middle of the night and you're trying to check your charcoal, you don't have much of a choice. You either look past a torch so that there are lit blocks behind the area you're looking for smoke and risk mistaking the torch smoke for charcoal smoke, or you try and make out the charcoal smoke against the nearly pitch black night (and risk zombies and such spawning in). I suppose option C. is to cheat, put it on peaceful, and turn the brightness all the way up... but if you're doing that you might as well just give yourself the charcoal with NEI. But hey, thanks for the reply... that snark really contributed to the discussion. EDIT: Apologies, I'm just being a grump.

Fair enough. Maybe a reasonable somewhat-realistic-but-not-overly-so solution would be to allow the casting of early tier tools (tin, copper, bronze and the like) but not any of the iron based metals?

If it's the wrong time of day or you have a torch in the wrong spot, it can be very difficult to make out the smoke. That also assumes you're staying near your charcoal pit and checking for smoke every minute or two, which was exactly the sort of tedium I was talking about originally.

Well, the first thing that springs to mind is the hoe. Admittedly, I can't think of too many others. See, this is what I'm talking about. This is true for cast iron for some uses when compared to forged iron, but this definitely does not hold true for all cast metals or even all types of cast iron for all uses. Some metals perform quite well when cast as tools (bronze and brass, for example), and even cast iron performs reasonably for some uses when properly treated.

Cast iron was not great for use in a sword (or any other tool that needed a sharp, flexible edge), but it was perfectly acceptable in a lot of other uses. The point I was trying to make was that the broad assumption that any cast tools would be fragile and inferior to forged tools isn't entirely correct. (So it might be more appropriate, assuming something like this was implemented, to just limit what tools could be cast rather than give all cast tools 1/4 durability or something.) Okay? I'm not sure how the point "cast iron cannons weren't as good as steel cannons" affects the point I was making (which was that cast iron was tough enough it was used in cannons for hundreds of years, and was even the preferred material because it was easier to manufacture). I wasn't trying to say cast iron was some super material, just that people weren't giving it (and other cast metals, like bronze) enough credit in this discussion.

Bronze cannons predated iron, so there were other methods of manufacturing cannons. Cast iron cannons were just easier to manufacture while still being of reasonable quality (although they had definite disadvantages in terms of reliability and weight).

You know, everyone is talking about cast metal being weak, but that's not really always true. Some cast metals are more prone to fracture (cast iron being the big example) because of the larger crystal structure that forms as they cool, but they can still be quite strong under compression. Even high quality cannons were commonly made out of cast iron up into the late 18th century.

From the Change Log for the next patch: Fixed the charcoal process being left on debug settings which caused the entire process to finish too quickly. Looks like I was right about this bit getting fixed pretty quickly. I really hope there is some consideration going on about adding a different, non-time sensitive method of outputting the charcoal (whether or not it's my idea being considered).

As far as I know that part is just a bug. I'd be really, really surprised if charcoal doesn't go back to its original burn time in the next patch or two.

As of the latest build producing charcoal is problematic. Because charcoal is dropped into the world, the moment charcoal production finishes, the player has only five real-time minutes to retrieve the charcoal before it despawns. This forces the player to just sit and monitor the charcoal pit for the duration of its burn or risk losing significant resources. Previously, burning charcoal was something you usually did while engaged in other projects (working at the forge, farming, mining, etc.), but now you can't risk walking away from your pit for more than a minute or two. The option to build larger charcoal pits is nice, but I'm not sure it's worth it if the tradeoff is a huge added timesink. Thankfully, I think there's a fairly easy way of fixing the tedium without altering too many other mechanics. Instead of ejecting the charcoal into the world, how about adding a new "Charcoal stack" block that is functionally similar to the wood stack storage blocks, but holds charcoal? During charcoal production the wood stacks could be removed (as they are now) and simply replaced with the charcoal stacks, which could then be filled with the charcoal from production. I'm not totally sure how the code works that controls what you can and can't store in a container, but it might even be possible to just make charcoal stacks a new data value/texture applied to the current wood stack block. If so, there wouldn't even be any need to remove the wood stacks during charcoal production, just change the data value to get the new texture/behaviour, empty the stacks, and refill them with the right amount of charcoal. EDIT: Item despawn might be 10 minutes, I'm finding conflicting information. Regardless of the time it takes, charcoal despawning is an issue.

I thought the same thing until I realized that river beds are being filled with gravel blocks now... gravel which is (possibly mistakenly) producing flint occasionally, just like it does in vanilla. So oddly enough, you can actually make flint tools again.

I'm not sure if anyone is using the filter script I posted earlier (considering the changes coming in b47 it probably isn't necessary), but I found a bug serious enough I felt like I needed to correct it just in case (I assigned block ID before block Data, but in some cases was checking the Block ID to determine what data value to assign... so Copper and Iron ores weren't being placed properly.) So if you're using the filter (or have some reason to try it out in the future) I've posted a new link above with the bug fixed. (And I suppose I might as well post the link here too so that people don't have to search).

Same. Can't wait to see how things are in b47 though. Oh for the halcyon days of yore, when a miner could strive for those far shores of red and blue steel and find that his reach did not exceed his grasp~!

Maybe at some point; I mostly play single player though, so the process of setting up a SMP server isn't one I'm familiar with. I'd be happy to provide you with the seeds if you wanted though. In other unrelated news, I come bearing gifts (or at least a script). After fooling around with MCEdit for a while (and teaching myself some python), I wrote an MCEdit Filter that I think might be useful for people having issues with worlds they generated in b45/46. The script is pretty simple, it just walks through a MC world and adds small (3-9 block) deposits of the four vital metals for higher tier metalwork (copper, iron, gold, and nickel) in appropriate stone types. The deposits are irregular, but on average you'll find at least a small amount of all four metals within ~128 blocks of wherever you chose to set up a base. This won't give you enough to set up any serious heavy industry, but at least it can give you a place to start. If you're mildly comfortable with python, it's easy enough to edit the average distance between deposits... just change the stepDist variable to whatever you'd like the average to be. I would not suggest setting it too low though, halving the step distance more than doubles the time the filter will take to run (and the amount of ore it would generate could get a bit silly if you went too low). You can download the filter script here EDIT: Here ( http://depositfiles.com/files/gugwv4e67 ) Have fun with it.. but please, back up your worlds first. This worked great for me, but I absolutely cannot promise it won't bork up your save. EDIT: Of course, this may all turn out to have been pointless once the new version comes out... but oh well. EDIT EDIT: Assuming it isn't useless as of b47, I might come back and add user selectable options to this so no one has to edit the script to tweak things. That's all going to depend on whether or not it's worth the time though.

To generate my worlds I'm using single player commands to turn on /noclip (to avoid falling in the next step), then teleporting to y=355... letting all the terrain in my view range spawn in (11 chunks in every direction +1 for the chunk I'm in == a 23 x 23 chunk area), teleporting 320 blocks along X or Z (/tele 320 355 0, /tele 320 355 320, etc.), and repeating. Takes a few minutes, but this way I can be pretty sure that I'm getting exactly the same terrain as I would if I were just exploring normally.