Draco18s

In my current world I've found only a single lump of sphalerite. Found it yesterday after I went Sand Shopping to follow up on a suggestion from a friend. On my way back after collecting some four stacks of sand, I punched small rocks. Don't remember the exact values, but it was close to this: 12 copper 3 gold 1 garnierite 5 cassiterite 3 malachite 1 magnetite 1 sphalerite That isn't the first gold I've punched up, but it is the second area where it's happened in the same world. Third time I've seen magnetite (although the other two lumps I didn't mark in a special way, as I didn't realize I'd popped magnetite; thought it was cassiterite at the time). Not the first instance of garnerite in my world either, although the the other instance is in a sluice some 25 blocks underground.

p-h-y-s-i-c-s </spelling nazi>

It's posts like this that are better used as part of the private message system.

You are one of today's lucky 10,000. Terry Pratchett. Good news/bad news about him. Good news: he was prolific and has 30+ books, one of which was the basis for the cartoon you just watched. Most, if not all of them, are awesome. I advise to start with The Color of Magic, and follow the books chronologically from there. They can stand on their own, but there is some metaplot that idealy should be read in order. Bad news: he has a rare form of Alzheimer's and likely won't be writing any more books.

It all depends on how the force of the impact is distributed. A small point qualifies as "piercing" while a narrow edge that separates materialls is cutting, and the wide-area is blunt force trauma. For the most part, this depends on the armor (or lack thereof) being worn, however some weapons (primarily the crossbow bolt) rarely fall into a second category, as their job is to hit the target, pass through, and keep going (do a google search on the Porcupine Seige Engine;* it was a crossbow that fired a hundred bolts and had to be drawn back by a team of horses. It was not uncommon for a single projectile to pass through four or more people, even through armor). Other weapons are designed to do crushing damage, like the mace. Although flanges and spikes were added to aid in penetrating armor, but it was a weapon designed to crush bones and shatter skulls. *They weren't very common, and still to this day I have trouble locating images.

More of a long running joke >..> I meant things like trees.

True, it is "kind of" magical, but not overly so. I think of it more like an abstraction, same as the fact that there are no round objects in minecraft. Could it use more detail? Maybe. But the mods as-is aren't any more magical than vanilla.

I classify that under "magic" but you are correct. It's like electricity, but when I drew that diagram up, I was thinking more along the lines of how Industrial Craft and Build Craft use EU and Power (engines and redstone pipe), respectively. That is, a resource that Makes Things Do Stuff for automation purposes, rather than computerized logic. Also, I take back not wanting Magic in my Minecraft. I resent some forms of it (particularly where "free infinite resources" are concerned, cough Tekkit*), but there are some changes which I'd be OK with. I make this statement as I have just bumped into Mystcraft which has linking books. Being someone who's always wanted a game where you could write your own linking books, this mod scratches a particular itch that I'm willing to put aside certain objections. Also, the hilariousness of trapping yourself in an alternate age, creating unstable ages and watching them collapse, so on and so forth is just awesome. *IC does have the ability, but automating the process requires at a minimum Build Craft. Red Power may also work, RP + BC make it crazy easy as you can automate the process of opening the scrap boxes and sifting the results. EE also makes the task trivial when combined with IC. This is why if I were to "combine" TFC with IC, I'd be removing several aspects of IC. Namely anything nuclear, as well as the Mass Fabricator, undecided over the recycler (having a use for a chest of cobble = good thing. Allowing free resources by adding a cobble generator = not a good thing).

Yes, there are subversions to both of the generic statements I made, however, generally speaking I was correct. And the reason cloth + chain works against edged impacts is that it converts the tiny impact area into a larger one, so the overall force is spread out (which is blunt, but as an edged weapon uses less total force than a blunt weapon, this is a good thing). Also, War Hammers are piercing weapons.

AUURGGHH! *The sound of a thousand history teachers dying* So, so very wrong! Chain mail is horrible at deflecting blunt blows precisely because it bends so easily! None of the energy is blocked. Against plate mail, the same blow would bounce right off. Meanwhile, the crossbow was invented and perfected primarily for its use in piercing through plate armor. Against chain, however, it's neigh on useless, because the barbbed point gets caught in the links, and it's energy is spread across a wide area. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainmailhttp://en.wikipedia....iki/Plate_armor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossbow

I'd like to see cavins be more directly related to passage/room width than simply breaking a block that is above an air block, as the latter makes digging upward staircases a risky proposition, and doing that should be 100% safe.

So that's what a scythe is for, huh. Completely unrelated to it's use in Real Life (*cough* stretches believability, *cough*) but I do like the niche it fills. Also, I don't think the stick drop rate is 3%/4% (the sentece reads implying that stick and sappling drop rates are identical, and they are not). Anyway, the pages look nice. The only thing I'd change is the bottom line of the axe: "or may also create supports." to "or to create 8 supports." So when removing pictures, the sentence reads, "Using logs in a crafting square with an axe creates either 4 plank or to create 8 supports." Not perfect, gramatically, but the similarity of the two fragments is greater (eg. "either 4 planks or 8 supports"). Or both lines could be altered thus, "Using logs in a crafting square with an axe either creates 4 planks: [images] or 8 supports:"

I'm not so sure about that, honestly. I've got a sluice (that's poorly performing compared to my others*) that if I use a prospecting pick on it (and nearby grass blocks) I'll find traces of gold, hematite, and copper, but the sluice itself is very, very slowly, finding cassiterite lumps. Another sluice running off the same water is also finding cassiterite. Four other sluices (in pairs) are finding silver and bismuthite respectively. Not a one of the 17 sluices I've built in any world (three) has ever plinked out multiple types of ore, but this pair is the only pair that I know for a fact has access to a minimum of three metals, one of which is detectable at "very large" quantity from several locations about 10 blocks down. *Silver pair has found 17 and 3. Bismuth pair has found 12 and 8, IIRC. Cassiterite pair has found...3 and 4. All are the same age and all have had roughly equal amounts of gravel shoved into them. Silver is older by about 1 MC-day, only due to being built before I went rock-hunting, finding the mass-concentration of copper near Pair 3 via rock-pickup, and then building the sluices (Pair 2 was built near where I found some bismuth).

I made this image a few weeks back trying to explain what I, personally, would like to play. It also conveniently shows the timespan that TFC does (or at least plans) to occupy. (Vanilla also extends into the "magic" direction (and Equivalent Exchange shoots off like a rocket down that way) which I don't much care for. I tollerate it, but would rather see the game go in other directions.) </personal opinion>

"How long do you think you can sing about gold?"

Ok

No. 1) There are 16 wool blocks 2) TFC uses 10 new metals, 20 other minerals, 23 kinds of stone, 16 kinds of tree (Vanilla has 3, and that isn't including the variations of fruit tree TFC has), 7 new interactive blocks (that use GUIs), 8 new tools, and 13 different kinds of gem that come in 5 qualities! You're not going to replicate TFC with a bucket plugin.

I am no longer surprised by the things people think about programs, coding, software, mods, and the like. I once had a client ask my company to produce an animated and interactive training program that would "run on both the iPad and in Internet Explorer 6." (And I did it!*) To the original poster: not going to happen, not in a million years. It cannot be done for the same reason that you can't play Team Fortress 2 maps by running Half Life 2 (they use the same engine, afterall!) and it comes down to content. Just because you have one game, doesn't mean you have the content for the other game. And even if you did? The other game has different game logic. *For those who are not aware, IE6 and Mobile Safari have nothing in common, and I accomplished two impossible tasks before being able to satisfy the client that it wasn't going to work out. And by "impossible" I mean literally impossible. I forget what the second thing was, but the first was finding a way to embed a video into HTML that would a) render on both the iPad and IE6, and 2) be able to control the video with Javascript. Go ahead, Google around for a solution to that problem. You won't find one. In fact, you'll find half a dozen blogs and articles saying that it can not ever be done (but I did it).

Just to make sure I understood: Redstone being harder to make and with rarer materials than to make gears, makes gears a T1 or T2 system? That seems backwards.

By the way, does anyone know what the search range is for small rocks?

*cough* you missed an H. orthogonal </spelling nazi>

Just saying, you got to make sure those alternatives are there. The other thing that would be wise is to have things that each teir can do and no other teir can. E.g. gears can't power pistons, steam can't toggle glowstone lights, redstone can't move doors, etc. as an example. As well as providing a transition medium of some sort between them. That keeps redstone relevant, even in "the age of steam" and one of the things that tweaks me the wrong way about vanilla minecraft and TFC, is that their's this teired progression, but that materials become 100% obsolete once you have a higher teir available (except as backup in case of emergencies). Well, other than the fact that (vanilla) even with bountiful iron and a diamond pick, I still make stone shovels and axes. Simply because the speed boost for higher materials is so insignificant, and the durability is so meaningless (I have infinite cobble, I do not have infinite diamonds). (I might also disagree with redstone being the lowest teir, as it is effectively electricity, but that's personal opinion and I realize that).

That analogy only works if there is a T1 and higher. In which case: you have to insure that the first materials the player has access to for these various teirs of "electromechanical" systems is the redstone (or whatever is T0) and that it's easy to actually use (if you're going to impose other limitations) or you'll just insure that no one actually uses it. That is: If redstone is T0, then make T1 better, not T0 worse. If redstone is Tn, and you're adding new T(<n) systems, make those worse. It'd be easier to build a lower teir with new mechanics and leave redstone alone (for instance, if you did gears, gears could never replicate pistons, because the piston block uses redstone in its recipie, which if you have, you're not using gears) and either build up, or build down, or build in both directions. It's a lot harder to gimp the base system and then recode the entire operation as a new system.

Which half, the "combine four elements to make it" or the "burns out in 4.3 days"? The former is sufficient, in my eyes, the latter makes it worthless (as in, hurts the game more than leaving redstone out entirely).

Pretty much. Any system introduced that functions on the same basic principle as redstone is itself redstone, and any design goal of "preventing TFC-computers" isn't successful. You can add all kinds of "ah ha! but it can't do X!" only puts a speed bump in the way of people who were going to do it anyway.