LordOfWolves

Try reading this, it might be useful: http://wiki.terrafirmacraft.com/Performance_Optimization and it also has java arguments.

I saw your shards post a bit ago and that they come in one type veins. So i have a proposal. Magical meteors. They would be small to medium in size and they would generate under ground they would have random types of shards and the most important, balanced shards. It would be the only way to obtain balanced shards or atleast big quantities of it. they would be rare-ish but they mainly generate underground. And rarely generate on the surface 

Ah, thanks for the reply. I had an idea about shards, but I'm not yet completely sure of it being a good idea. I was thinking of shards generating more TFC-like, so when there were shards underground, you would find loose shard fragments on the surface. These fragments alone can't be used for crafting, but they are a useful small source of essentia. They would contain about half or less of the essentia of a normal shard, and they would also tell you where shards can be found, pretty much like loose ores.

Wow, this is just awesome! My two favourite mods working together, I've been waiting a lot for this!

Now I hope I'm not too late to give some help. I'll start by answering to the questions in the OP.

• How strong should the mobs be, especially the bosses? Both in offense and defense. Currently I'm using a 1000hp character in wrought iron armor with a wrought iron weapon vs a vanilla character in iron armor with an iron weapon as the baseline, and basing power levels off that. IE vanilla thaumium tools are identical to iron, except they last twice as long and have special enchanting properties, so I made the ported ones the same as wrought iron with twice the durability and special enchanting options. Good approach or no? 

A thing TFC does is make everything harder, so I was thinking that a 20% more strenght on mobs would be right, 30% for bosses. Due to the fact that TC is a middle game mod that you unlock way later compared to vanilla, it would be good to increase difficulty a bit, as you'll probably have gained more experience (not the exp used for enchanting, but the player's exp, such as knowledge of the game mechanics, predicting how mobs react...) and you'll also be more prepared due to the time you had. Also, let's not forget that if you unlock TC with a lot of exp and full food bars, you have more than the base life, another reason why mobs should be harder.

• I was thinking fire wands do slash damage, lightning does piercing, and ice does blunt. That way you have a reason to craft all three, and a single one doesn't end up replacing all your weapons

Yeah, that's just perfect, I can't come up with anything better. Does this also apply to the bone bow arrows?

• Should gold/silver wand caps be made with gold/silver or rosegold/sterlingsilver, or some other combination? I'm afraid if they're harder to make than thaumium, people won't even consider making them

This right here. I thought about this a bit and realized that back to when I played TC in vanilla, I often remained without gold due to the amulets and caps and the fact that when I died, sometimes I had the bad luck of losing everything and I had to redo everything, so I would propose to go with rosegold and sterling silver, due to them being a bit easier to get. I hate OP things, so I won't try to suggest OP things at all, I just feel like this could be needed. Also, rose gold and sterling silver have a more magical feel.

• Currently thaumium is made from wroughtiron, and all my balance assumptions are based off that. I think that puts thaumcraft in the "extra functionality but not too powerful" tier when it compares to TFC. However I also considered making Thaumium a type of "purple steel", putting it at a higher progression level, but also making it a little overpowered. Suggestions?

Thaumium shouldn't really be overpowered, it should be your first experiment with magical metals, so it should be halfway between iron and steel. You tried to improve iron with magic, and you managed to get something good, but iron can only go so far with its resistance, not even magic can make it good as some of the best steel types. Instead, void metal isn't an experiment made by you, that is pure eldritch stuff, that should deserve to be on the top tier for sure.

• I've been considering golem upgrades that increase their yield from farming/butchery and make them smart enough to only replant seeds on plots that have enough nutrients left. However this could lead to them making player characters obsolete. How smart/powerful should golems get, compared to the player?

This is a really hard question. It's not something to undervalue. Hmm, is there a way to only unlock a certain research when the player has reached a certain level? Such as unlocking a golem upgrade research when a player has reached a certain level in farming, or even better unlock the effect that the upgrade has on the core, that would be to distinguish the various nutrients.

• Should the arcane furnace spit out Weldable ingots, or simply workable? Or maybe just cold ingots?

The arcane furnace directly duplicates ores, and this is a great bonus already, so I'd say that it should spit out cold ingots. Possible explanations? Simple, the arcane furnace is a powerful magical construct that with the help of magic can smelt ores and cool them down to ease the handling of ingots.

A question about the furnace. Can it smelt every ore, or just vessel-smeltable ores? I'd suggest to restrict the use of the furnace to those vessel ores, because otherwise it would risk to completely replace the bloomery and blast furnace.

Also, I know how hard it can be to make these two mods work together, they risk to create something OP, because they have different progressions, anyway the time where thaumcraft is located (magic steampunk) can easily be located right at the end of the TFC ages.

In general, TC would come after TFC, so it's a bit unavoidable to make TC mostly middle to late game. The hard thing is to make the player feel like he/she still needs TFC, even when they've reached the TC age.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I had this question. Do the crystal shards too generate in a TFC style? So veins, loose ores on the surface and so on? 

To be honest I would prefer if it was possible to fix the boats. 

It would feel more natural and immersive. 

I guess that with the magic in TFC2, it will feel immersive, because magic is supposed to exist there. And the portal could even look like natural ruins, nobody said yet that it will look like the nether portal, right?

However you gave me an interesting idea here. What if to travel north/south we didn't have to activate portals everytime but we just had to build a pier/dock that works similar to your description, teleporting the player north but in a more immersive way? Also, from east to west portals would still be required, because difficulty increases, but in north/south direction, docks coul work just fine.

Or, if there are problems detecting if the players built docks right, they could come as pregenerated structures.

All my suggestions aside, IMO burlap sacks should be used not only for storage, but also for transport. Carrying a sack full of grain on your shoulder should be plausible enough, no?

There's a problem here however. Other food types are carried normally, but why should wheat be carried on the back slot? Unless the sack could contain more than 160oz, then there's no real reason to do this. But if the sack can contain way more, and it's the only way of transporting wheat, then that could be done indeed.

Yeah, unless there's a real reason to carry wheat on your shoulders it just feels weird to say beef goes in inventory, bread too, fruit too, even vegetables, wheat no! Why?

Then it should only be carried with a sack and no longer by hand, also, it's quite difficult to carry lots of wheat by hand.

I didn't read the whole topic, so I don't know if this has been suggested, but when I first read this, I imagined a mammoth congealed in a big chunk of ice. That would be a very rare finding, but it would provide the player with meat for some time. Of course, the meat found there would be way less than what a live mammoth would give you and it would also be of lower quality, same for the hide, but the bones should still be usable, so it would be very useful for those who mainly need the bones of the mammoth but don't have the time or equipment to kill one. Again, this would be very rare and it would give the player a small bonus similar to the one you get by finding a dungeon in vanilla MC.

Also, it would be pretty cool honestly to find a congealed mammoth.

Maybe have a keystone type item that can be bound to a certain island's portal, so the player will have to have visited the target island at least once. As well as implementing a range factor that way players aren't traveling ridiculous distances.

But that would force the player to travel by sea over 3000 blocks. That's not a thing I want to do for every new island.

My idea was that since every island could have a fortress you have to conquer, in that fortress there was some sort of map room, or even just a library room where you could get hints for the surrounding islands, and also a bunch of those sequence stones maybe, then after reading the map, or book, or whatever you find there, you know how to place those stones in a certain order in the portal to travel to the new island. Or, in addition to locations of islands, the room could also have possible locations for sequence stones. Yeah, possible, not certain locations, to ensure a player doesn't always find them there an has to look in another location, exploring the entire island as a consequence.

Also, another thing I was thinking, we have an awesome chisel in TFC, why not use it to upgrade the portal of your home island to allow you to travel further.

Sometimes in those libraries/map rooms you could also find blueprints to "enhance" portals, thus allowing you to travel east 2 islands instea of 1. Of course that wouldn't be very cheap. With the blueprint, you also need materials gathered in said island, such as particular metals, that you would later place near the portal and chisel them until the portal was identical to the blueprint. The first idea I had (and I write it here just to give you the same idea, not to actually make the portal so expensive) was of a portal surrounded on the outer edges by gold blocks that have been chiseled to give the portal a better look. Note again: that's only to show you my first thought, I don't really mean to really want a portal that expensive.

Hmm, I don't really think this should be done, for some reasons.

First of all I don't completely think that the vanilla exp system is good enough to be used for the mod. Either you're full of exp or you just died and you have 0 of it. There's nothing in between. Perhaps, if a new TFC exp system was introduced, so that it would fit into the mod without being overpowered or even underpowered, it would feel just right.

Second, as mentioned in the OP, it's indeed not required to practice to get better at something, which could lead to the possibility that players who never forged anything could suddenly become master blacksmiths. Of course that would require lots of exp, but still the point remains.

Personally I would suggest that exp should be harder to get, but when you die you don't lose all of it. As of now, if this is still valid, the max exp you can recover from where you died is 6 levels. That just nullifies any previous efforts done by the player to gather exp and it's not rewarding at all, nor forgiving. Being able to just lose a part of your exp, I think, could make it a valid option for abilities, but still, it shouldn't be used to unlock them directly...perhaps it could act like a boost however. That's something that could be less OP but still useful.

Thanks for the replies now, if you can give me an answer, otherwise it doesn't matter, can you tell so far if TFC2 will be less resource intensive than TFC1, so more optimized, or will it require more to be run? 

This is an aspect I have often to deal with because of this laptop and I have no idea when I'll be able to afford something better.

Some time ago (a lot of time ago) the cubic chunks topic popped up in the IRC if I remember correctly, and after some discussion, the outcome was that it would be really helpful with a mod such as TFC. Today I just revisited the page of cubic chunks and was wondering...does TFC2 still use the old chunk system or is it in the plans to change direction and head for something like cubic chunks?

That would help I think, especially due to the terrain height and the laggy leaves. Also, when you break a block, minecraft doesn't have to re-render the entire chunk.

EDIT: Also, that could increase vertical height, but that's a secondary aspect, at least for me, I never built anything that touched the sky in TFC.

Glad to see that at least the initial reaction is in favor. As to the material requirement, my initial vision for it is to require the player to find the correct sequence stones somewhere on the island and install them on that islands teleportation device to allow porting to the next island.

Oh, is this some sort of minigame, perhaps like the research in thaumcraft? Wonderful! Even if it's not that complex, it could make things even funnier.

Hello Dries, I finally had the chance to try this addon, and I must say that it does its work well. I have a small suggestion: can you add the pickup sound when you pickup food when the autocombination is enabled? This would help when you're picking up some seaweed on the bottom of the sea and often you're not sure if you picked it up, especially when you harvested 3-4 seaweeds at the same time.

EDIT: Apparently the pickup sound can still be heard, but only when you're holding the food you're picking up.

I personally do use addons, but I don't find them essential to play. I just see it as a mean to add content where TFC lacks it, or, due to the limited use of some resources, addons help increase it. That's it. Nothing that radically changes gameplay. Also, addons like waila and minimaps, lately I tend to avoid these to keep the immersion and always wonder "What am I looking at?" without receiving a straight answer.

However, like it's been said above, I tend to avoid addons like railcraft, because the technology is just out of place. Maybe the outcomes of the mod, like the bucket of creosote, are kinda right for the game, but the way the mod is presented, with a huge industrial oven, just doesn't fit. Maybe if the oven model and texture changed and the tank ones too, maybe it would appear different.

LordOfWolves, I believe I have found the problem with the alloy calculator eating your ore. I have fixed it in the new version (0.2.26). Can you please do some checking for me to confirm. Thanks.

Hello Bletch, sorry I've been rather inactive lately, but now I think I'll get back to TFC a bit. I'll let you know if something similar happens again.

Yes I am using the gui interface.

Only sometimes. It can also happen that it adds properly without getting eaten.

Hello Bletch. I just wanted to report a little bug I found using your addon. The alloy calculator often "eats" an ore if I add it to an already placed ore, like I have 3 copper nuggets and I add one with right click and the copper nuggets are still 3. Even after destroying the block you only retrieve 3 nuggets. I only tested this with copper nuggets indeed because it happened in survival and I didn't really want to lose count of the other ores too. 

This bug apart, wonderful mod, as always I imagine

EDIT: Actually, now that I tried it, it also happens with left click.

This happens to me too sometimes but only to barrels so far. I have optifine too.

After reading the reasons why this won't be implemented, I don't think Bioxx will change his mind and I honestly agree with this, I already have some troubles with lag and more models wouldn't help at all.

That's just great. F3 feels like cheating. Now this is something that is way more believable, thank you!

It would be a good idea to change that texture too, but I am not that good qith low res textures, so I guess that this texture would become a grey carpet after the scaling. I'll let you know if I manage to get something good enough

But I really like your second idea, maybe the burned out texture could be kind of an ember texture and the actual burned out texture would be greyer.

Yeah, maybe it could be grey with some black spots because not all the wood really burns completely.

As for the tinder, I think thatch is just fine. There's no need to make the firepit a bigger challenge, because it's a thing you need quickly during the first days, an you'll probably destroy it and rebuild it somewhere else, so as of now it's fine.

I still make salads very often. I choose them when I have to make a long travel. This way the food lasts more. Or I simply use them when I am busy and I have no time for food preparation, so I just make 4 salads that last like 8 sandwiches.

Wow, that firepit looks really good. How did you do that? Anyway I like this idea, maybe you could also place straw in there too, because now paper no longer acts like tinder. Also replacing the sticks everytime the fire dies is a thing I didn't think about, but it's true, even with a tinder, you can't start a fire by putting big logs on it, you still neet sticks first to heat up the fire.

"seaweed is a good source of food early and i use it alot, but i see in some stream that winter freeze the water."

Don't worry for that, ice doesn't damage seaweed. Just break the ice block, and if there was seaweed there, it will reappear.

"is a good ideea to get the wild crops late autum (they grow more meybe and less decay)?"

This is a good idea indeed. Crops don't grow more after a certain point however. When they reach mature state they no longer grow. You can indeed have less decay on the crops because you harvest them later and so the decay triggers later too.

"next spring will spawn random crops if i gather all crops?"

Sure. Wild crops respawn every year, given that they meet the right conditions to spawn, such as temperature.

"if i dig 1 down , put the food vesel down and put a block on top count as a dark space?"

That should count as a dark space because no light goes through the block, however the temperature under the block could still be high enough to cause an increase in decay. Also be sure to use a non gravity affected block such as planks or thatch.

"how often should i trim the decay from food in vesel."

That's a persona choice. Personally I trim it once every 1-2 days during hot seasons and once every 3-4 days on cold seasons. The basic rule is that the more you wait to trim decay, the more quickly it increases. http://wiki.terrafirmacraft.com/Food#Decay

"if i walk far away mobs(neutral) wil despawn and respawn(new ones) when i get back?"

TFC is a bit different from vanilla. I don't know enough about this to answer correctly, this time I can just provide a link to the wiki. It might be outated however. http://wiki.terrafirmacraft.com/Mobs#Passive

What ever food you come across is good for stockpiling, apart fruit maybe, because it has a quick decay. I'd suggest stockpiling vegetables, meat and grain in refined form. Also, you can eat seaweed. To harvest it use a knife on the seaweed block. Alternatively you can break the block by hand but that will consume the block below the seaweed. Dairy I guess isn't a thing you can easily get before the first winter unless you're lucky.

I prefer to store every food piece I have in a vessel in a cold, dark and dry place during the early game, but as time goes on and I am able to craft a chest, I move all the vessels into it. I am not sure however that the chest recognizes if it's in a dark and cold place, or even if the vessels know that the chest is cold and dark inside, so it might be better to store the vessels in a basement or something that resembles it.