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Here's a quick video guide to TFC torches. How to make them, re-light them, etc.

...but you can place the thorny bushes where mobs are likely to concentrate if they're trying to get you inside your base and it acts like a bit of an alarm system. The "damage" sounds have saved me many times on my way out the door. Creepers gonna creep.

Does the launcher have the profile set to save to the default .minecraft directory? I usually set my different profiles to save to their own directories so I can keep my worlds separate, but it's easiest to do that first launch to the default directory and to also point the Forge installer there. I think I ran into your problem because I had already set a new directory for the profile and the Forge installer wasn't finding it. EDIT: You posted while I was typing this and it looks like I may be right!

If you really want oak wood, or if you get caught out with no sticks, such as in a mine, desert or anywhere without trees, in a pinch you can craft boats out of any type of wood and crash them. You'll get back oak wood and a couple of sticks.

I think the danger of the new cave-in system is a great improvement, but I would like to see it somewhat more intuitive. I too get frustrated when I'm digging a perfectly secure tunnel and start nearing a cave, only to have the cave completely fall apart before I can reach it. I think the problem lies with the 9x9x5 scan for unsupported blocks (if that's what it is). This strikes me as too broad. It is unintuitive and frustrating to mine a supported block, have a three-meter-thick solid stone wall next to it, and have a cave-in propogate from 4 meters away. I think if the mechanic is going to be improved, this would be the place to start. I'd like to see the check, if it's a 10% chance or more, only check 1 block in every direction. If that's not dangerous enough, maybe it could be increased to something like a 40% chance but still only check one block away (3x3x3). There could also be, let's say, a 1-2% chance of a check of a larger area like 2 blocks up and down and 3-4 blocks horizonally. This seems much more intuitive since you're more likely to cause a cave-in right next to where you're mining than you are farther away. I don't know how hard that would be to code or if it would increase or decrease resource load for that tick. Maybe someone could answer that. I would think that since it's checking fewer blocks most of the time, it wouldn't be that bad. Another more complicated - but more elegant - possibility would be to do the initial check 1 block away, then iterate additional checks. If the first check finds supported blocks all around, it could differentiate between blocks supported by more solid stone, and those simply supported by beams or something less stable (essentially a check for stone vs not-stone to keep it simple). The game would dismiss the stone blocks supported by other stone blocks, but do another check around a stone block supported by only a beam. So, an example case would be that I mine a block in the end of my tunnel, the game checks the blocks around it and finds only supported blocks. The blocks in the wall are all supported by solid stone, so they are ignored but a secondary check is done around the blocks above my tunnel and supported by the beams. Maybe one secondary check is enough and it doesn't have to iterate to tertiary checks. And maybe the game could randomly select only one block to run a secondary check around so it doesn't have to run a whole handful of checks every time I mine a block. Or maybe the game gives the same % chance of a secondary check as it did the first check so all subsequent checks become unlikely. This solution would only propogate the checks into your tunnel and blocks you've already seen and had a chance to support. It wouldn't propogate checks forward through solid rock to an unseen cave - until you're right up to it (or digging right into the ceiling of a cave if you're mining down). But you would stand a chance to trigger a cave-in a few blocks away from where you mined, it would just only occur in "unstable" locations. Again, would this be impractical from a coding and/or resources standpoint? Maybe this is asking too much, but it doesn't seem as bad as what's going on when a cave-in actually is triggered, with blocks turning to cobble, things falling, things breaking all over the place. A few quick checks seems like it would be easier to execute, but maybe not. I do think that from the player's standpoint it would be very valuable, though. It would give a lot more of the responsibility to the player (if a cave-in occurs, it's more likely to be your own fault), which is what we all want, right?

Redemtion for the farm, sheep wrangling, and trying to figure out my taste profile in this latest episode:

I stand corrected! I guess I'm just lucky because I honestly can't remember this happening at all in the past year in vanilla. I thought it had mostly become a non-issue.

The devil's advocate argument might be that there's precedent in the other skill types for proxy skill-improvement - fishing isn't butchering (though I guess you would have to clean the fish) and picking wild plants is hardly agriculture. Further, finding ores in exposed rock faces is prospecting, you're just doing it with your eyes and not the tool. If wacking a squid with a mace is butchering, then spotting ores on a mountainside is prospecting. To then counter my own argument, though, there is game balance to consider. Bioxx might want to allow for the butchering "exception" so that it's not so brutal to gain butchering skill. Players can go a long way without getting meaningful amounts of meat from livestock, what with finding, familiarizing, breeding, etc. The same is not true for the pro-pick.

I haven't seen this bug in vanilla in quite some time. Even with hundreds of animals on multiple servers I don't think I've seen a single animal glitch through a fence in vanilla 1.7. I would venture to say that if it's happening in TFC, that there's probably something going on in TFC that's bringing it back. Clearly the "bug" is with vanilla MC, but it would seem Mojang have found a work-around, maybe with the AI, to keep it from happening or to make it vanishingly rare. Could there be something in the TFC code that negates the work-around?

While it's obviously more important that Kitty and Bioxx like this idea, I just wanted to join in and say that I really like it too. It fits with both common sense, and the other skills. You don't get butchering skill by swinging an axe at nothing or casting a fishing rod into dirt. You don't get smithing skill by just banging on an ingot. You get the skills when you successfully kill something or make something. So it would be nice if you gained prospecting skill when you actually mine some ore.

That doesn't really address the problem that Kitty mentioned, though. We certainly don't want starting a new life (or a new game!) to be a constant grind against rapidly falling nutrition. As the mechanic works now, it sounds like anything short of full nutrition is too painful to start out. If you're at 80% now, it's because you haven't been eating well and thus it's a consequence of how you've been playing. If you were to start out that way, it would be too punishing. That's why I said the dev's might want to consider tweaking how the mechanic works. I think by changing the starting condition to full nutrition, they solved one problem but created a new problem of exploitative game-play. I definitely agree with Kitty that it's better now - we don't want to hurt the game for everybody for the sake of a minority that might exploit it. But maybe adjustments to how quickly nutrition drops would make the 80% starting condition viable again and close the loophole. I don't know how feasible this is - it occurs to me that I don't even know if nutrition drops at a constant rate or if it's exponential or what.

I can see where people want this to be a config option, but to me it just seems like a balancing issue for this game mechanic. The philosophy behind the max HP feature is to make dying a punishment, but if you restore 100% nutrtion, there are a number of gameplay scenarios where that isn't a punishment at all, but can be exploited as a reward. I would think the devs would want to tweak the interplay of HP and nutrition to strike the right balance. You wouldn't want a starvation death-loop, but as someone already said, there could be a middle ground between full nutrition death and keeping whatever nutrition you had upon dying. What we have now is that the main punishment for death is levels (other than your stuff being strewn about the bottom of a ravine) but since levels just mean max HP, for people with poor nutrition, death is almost like gaining instant levels. While probably not many players exploit suicide as a strategy in this way, if presented with a situation where one has very bad nutrition and not much available food, death becomes far more optimal than trying to nourish oneself. Doesn't that seem wrong? I would definitely think it suits the game and fits the overall philosophy of how these game mechanics are meant to work to have a player's new life start with nutrition levels somewhere short of full. I don't know what that number should be, but let's just say it's 75% of fully nourished. Then, you can increase max HP two ways when you're starting a new life: XP, and good nutrition. I really like the mechanic - it's a big part of why I like TFC so much. I do think the starting nutrition levels make it fall a little short of how it was intented to function.

Got another episode for you guys! Catastrophy at the farm, but we install the awesome Lanterns plugin and turn things around.

Exploring with Jake - I'm looking for berry bushes and stuff to decorate with, while he's looking mostly for graphite:

Trying to go from untamed cows to cheese in one episode, plus a design for an open-air storehouse:

Laying down a new farm for the new growing season - with help from Coach:

Here's a guide on how to create and use all the TFC storage options:

Here's another episode and it's probably my favorite so far. Got some more friends to join us and suddenly ... Iron Age! Time to get building:

A sobering reminder of the need for support beams or at least smoothing the stone or something in the latest version of TFC.

I think the white elm planks can be used judiciously with the white cedar planks and the andecite. The problem I have with white elm is that the planks and the bark clash - I feel like you can only use one or the other unless you're really good.

Being reminded to stack food with S in the comment above really pays off in this latest episode because holy crap that's a lot of plums!

Yeah, thanks for the reminder! I keep forgetting about those keys, especially the stack one. I sometimes remember when I'm not recording, because I'm actually thinking about what I'm doing, but when the recording is on I'm usually doing inventory by autopilot. It must be infuriating to see.

Here's episode 3 of this new series. Things get a little ugly on a very pretty beach when I go looking for a block of igneous stone:

Here's a quick video I made as a guide to using support beams in b79. Since cave-ins are much more frequent, I thought it would help to show how they work and how to use them to tunnel and mine fewer blocks.

Wow, dude. Let's start with what I like about this idea. Primarily, since TFC is a lot about exploration, I think it would be great to have in-game maps more a part of the game. I use a minimap mod, but I feel like it's pretty cheaty, so yeah, something interactive and more along the lines of TFC progression than the vanilla maps would be great to have in the game. But, again, wow. That's a lot of complication for just making maps. I think the amount of work to develop that system would be a total waste because the vast majority of players would just say "forget it" and either use a minimap or do what I used to do - draw IRL maps. I really like what you're trying to do with this suggestion, but the mechanic doesn't seem like it would be fun enough to justify the efforts.