LordOfWolves

I am actually trying to get as many ores as I can, to get lots of ingots, then, (I got this idea from the IRC) I'll make my own value storage with those shiny gold ingots in the center, like in some banks' caveau. It must be so satisfying to walk between piles of ingots you made!

2:when an entity is walking

That would require more calculus. Yeah it would be nice, but when you'll have your great meat factory, are you sure that you want this to be calculated for every single cow or pig you possess?

1:the chunk generates for the first time

If there are animals in that area, footprints will generate, even if that's a new chunk. There's no need to generate them without animals. 

3:at a certain time of year/month(like wild crops)

Well, that's a good idea. Rabbits or other animals don't go outside running all the year, and this could be good so that you must pay attention to when you should use traps and take advantage of that time as best as you can.

I think footprints should just let you know what animals was there/is here, and how big it is.

Yeah, I didn't think about this, you could actually know the size of the animal too. Of course you could be wrong the first times you inspect a footprint. You'll learn. Anyway yeah maybe we shouldn't be able to get a range of numbers, but anyway you could understand if there are many animals there. The footprints could even visually change as you get better, so that you can see more footprints in a footprint block, this way you know there are many animals there.

I like that, maybe when you see the tracks you can right click on then and read the information. The higher your hunting skill the more information you have.

Exactly what I mean, anyway maybe we shouldn't get a range of numbers, that's too detailed and no hunter can guess so well. Anyway we could be wrong the first times we inspect footprints, and as we level up, we are always less wrong and more right.

Footprints should disappear after a while.

Sould dissapear after rain too, shouldn't it?

Yes, like CtrlXCtrlV stated, they should disappear in some occasions like during rain, or maybe after some time has passed, like a few days. This way when you'll see a footprint you'll think twice before leaving it here. Either you explore that area or you lose the chance to hunt some animals. And if you start hunting, you better pray it doesn't start raining, or the footprints will be inspectable for a very short time, then they won't be inspectable anymore and after a while they'll disappear.

Yeah sorry, I didn't manage to shear a sheep yet, anyway yes, instead of that ball of fluff you would get shorter strings anyway, because the knife's not so practical like a shear. Anyway I made some metal knives, as weapon against creepers. I also have a copper knife where I store food, so that I don't need to make a new knife everytime I trim the decay. I'll probably ugrade it to bismuth bronze when it will break, so it'll last longer.

You can indeed get vines, tall grass and short grass using shears. The question is though that if we expand on shears and make one for each metal type, whether or not to remove the knife shearing sheep functionality.

I'd remove the ability to shear sheeps with a knife, especially stone. I mean, nobody of us is a professional barber, not even them could be able to shear a sheep with a knife, and if they managed to, I guess you wouldn't get a wool block, but just strings.

2. A long, 10-block-tall and 3-block-thick stone brick wall with several gaps and holes in it. I just think it would be interesting to be trekking through the woods, gathering materials, when suddenly happening upon this enormous wall that spans several feet (er, blocks) in either direction. The wall should be at least 200-300 blocks long, and each side should end with a small structure or some geography. Perhaps guard towers on either end?

The other buildings are kinda ok, the problem is that you can't control where they should spawn exactly, and the terrain is extremely random, so those buildings could be amiss. Of course if Bioxx had more control over the terrain generator, these could even be cool. Anyway for that wall, especially that wall, it wouldn't fit in many locations. IE in my world I live in a peninsula-like place, and if that wall spawned there, both the extremes would end in the water.

 i think they wont implement structures, because in TFC the player is supposed to be the first who builds anything.

And the only one as far as I know.

 We can have "instances" of these animals appear from time to time; maybe you see a rabbit dart behind a tree, but you won't be able to catch it, and as soon as it's out of your field of view, it will despawn.

This is a cool idea. Also I think we should have a way to approximately know how many rabbits are in that area. This could be guessed by the number of rabbit darts you see, or even by inspecting their footsteps.

The footsteps should work this way: it acts like an overlay that spawns in the top of a  block of grass and it would stay there until the number of rabbits is too low, then it would despawn, of course while that chunk is unloaded, so the number of footsteps on a certain area would match the rabbit population. I mean, not exactly match it, like 3 footstep blocks means 3 rabbits, but like 3 footstep blocks means that rabbits are quite common in that area, 2 means they're not common, 1 means rare, 0 means ther aren't rabbits and maybe 4 could mean there are lots of them.

The idea wasnt to make this extreamely complex, but to create a system where you can add other materials to the mix to add effects to the blasts.

 

No need to make it super realistic

Yeah right I should slow down sometimes. So we stop at the custom gunpowder?

Not sure about the random every world thing. I mean, finding something out the first time is fine and all, but having to find something out every time I start a new world can be a bit annoying, especially if it gives nothing new to me.

Hmm, you may be right, it could work more like alloys then, with always the same recipes. Alloys don't seem to be a problem even if they're always the same. They should work kinda like the alloys too about proportions, I mean, you must be in a certain range of proportions to create the right dust, otherwise you end up with the wrong dust.

Anyway I meant instability as a negative effect, to prevent the player from creating the most powerful gunpowder everytime. Also, instability really increases with the increase of the other parameters irl. So it would make sense, this way people would think twice before preparing a too powerful explosive.

However to make custom gunpowder types we should need more than 3 ingredients. Different proportions are ok, but as with alloys, even gunpowder should need more base components. One component could be the potassium sulfate. In it's mineral form it's called Arcanite, and it's quite rare. It can be used as a flash reducer for gunpowder, so less light when the gunpowder explodes. 

Look at smoke coming from the forge.

About this, I wanted to add something. 

As you said, it should act kind of like flux in Thaumcraft, so a liquid that instead of going down goes up, is transparent and spawns smoke particles, right?

I Agree with Kimbblesrath, smoke should be able to disappear by itself by passing through cracks in the walls, but this has to happen very slowly. Otherwise, if you really want to get rid of it quickly, you open a hole in the ceiling and let the smoke go out (and successively build a chimney over the forge). Then if there's open sky above the smoke, it will travel up for 7-8 blocks before disappearing (and every block decreases the smoke particles generated by it), to avoid it going to the build limit and also to make it good looking, because personally I think that a short cloud of smoke coming out of a chimney and then dissipating looks better than a trail of smoke that goes up in the sky and heads to the moon. 

(beakers distillery mortar and pestles ect)

Now that you make me think about it, actually the mortar and pestle could have a great role in this. We should macerate coal in a mortar instead of using the coal piece to make gunpowder. Yeah there's the quern, but it's not supposed to macerate things in a really fine dust (to make gunpowder you need the dust as fine as possible). About saltpeter, it's already in dust form, but it should require some maceration too, to make the granules smaller. Same goes for the sufur. 

We could make that really fine dusts combined together would increase one of the parameters, instead rough dust could decrease it. Also, the proportions are exactly 75%, 15% and 10%, but this is a game, nobody says you can't experiment with your own proportions, maybe you get that combination that you wanted to get, or maybe an unexpected one. However I think the recipes should work kinda like meals, they change in every new world, so that you don't immediately know the exact recipe you need, but you need to experiment instead.

The distillery could be used to dry the gunpowder faster after you hydrated it. But it should be a quite risky process, because the gunpowder is highly reactive to fire, so having a fire below it shouldn't be the safest thing. Also, by succesfully using the distillery you get a different result than leaving the gunpowder on a stone block to get dry. The almost immediate evaporation of the water from the powder should change one of theparameters.

As for beakers, I don't have so many uses in mind right now. Maybe they could be used to take a small portion of the produced gunpowder so that you can analyze it and know its parameters. 

Also I'd like to add another parameter: 

Instability

Actually gunpowder can be really unstable if you manage to create a high level mix. Some types of gunpowder can even be set off by vibrations, without even requiring a flame to ignite it. The higher the parameters will be, the higher will be the instability too. So higher instability could lead to unexpected autoexplosions. I wouldn't try to jump 4 blocks down while carrying this type of powder in my inventory. 

Another thing I should add is that it's better to produce small amounts of gunpowder, nobody should try to produce like 10kg of it at once. And to make this work, we should be able to divide or merge saltpeter, sulfur and gunpowder with a knife, like we do with food, to have the exact quantity of each that we want. And for no reason you should macerate the ingredients together, you should keep them separated until you won't macerae them anymore, otherwise macerating the mix of powders can create a creeper-like reaction.

I think a better way would be to have this happen.

1. Explosives only ignite if the 'ignition point'(for powder kegs, the top, obviously) is ignited, if it gets caught up in another explosion, or if it gets set on fire

To simply put, if you want to blow up a powder keg, you need a fuse on top of the said keg, have something blow up near it, or light it on fire

2. powders cannot connect to other powders above or below it, nor can it connect with powder diagonal from it. Just with powders next to it.

3.Fuses can connect with other fuses above or below it, and with fuses diagonal from it. It can also connect through corners

Well, yes this time I agree with these 3 changes, you could exclude the horizontal barrel (even though it would look really fancy and it would be cool to place a barrel how you want) and add that ability to climb surfaces to the rope fuse. Also, I was thinking, maybe we could involve the jute fiber too in the fuses, after all it's a fiber. I'd suggest it as a replacement for wool yarn, but it should produce more soaked fuses when sealed inside a barrel, because it grows slower than wool.

EDIT: now that I think about it, in salt mines they use explosives a lot, to "loosen" the mineral and make it easily minable. I thought this could be a cool idea to include in TFC. The Minerals inside igneous rocks should take really long to mine, because of the resistance of the rock, unless you detonate an explosive charge near them, to crack the rock a bit and make them easily breakable. Of course you shouldn't use the full explosive keg for this, you should use a keg with just a few powder inside, and you should place it inside a natural crack or a crack that you mined, so that the explosion is absorbed by the surrounding rock. But now that I think about it, different types of gunpowder exist, not only one. The mix is almost the same, but the explosive force, the density and other properties change depending on how you make the gunpowder. So, I was thinking, we could make gunpowder similar to alloys, we could make different combinations of gunpowder for different uses. 

Of course, the basic compounds of gunpowder are 75% saltpeter, 15% charcoal dust and 10% sulfur, but the quantity of water, the times you let it dry and then hydrate again, the type of charcoal you use (aspen and willow should be the best types) and other things change the power, the blast radius, the smoke and fire produced. 

As an example, the gunpowder used to crack the rocks should not produce smoke or fire, but should instead be powerful and have a medium blast radius so that a good portion of the rocks will crack.

EDIT 2: Basically gunpowder should have ingame parameters like:

Smoke generated

Fire generated

Blast radius

Blast power

Heat generated

Noise generated

I think these 6 parameters are enough. If we change the gunpowder instead of the container, we could be able to make any sort of explosive we need. The barrel is a fine container, you're right, no need of having horizontal barrels, just change the content. As you said before, you want to make explosive shells? That's good, what's their purpose? Killing mobs? I'd suggest using a mix that generates a lot of fire. Oh wait, you want to use a metal shell? Then I'd say let's use a mix with great blast power, this way the gunpowder will be able to break the shell, and also a large blast radius, this way the fragments will hit mobs around the explosed shell.

The proper use of support beams has become almost a requirement in B78. Cobble will fall sideways as well as down (like dirt) for better cave-ins, and if you happen to get caught in a collapse, there is a very high probability that it will be instant death. A collapse can also break support beams now if they aren't used properly (e.g. too far apart). Collapses are now also going to take the ore with them, and destroy it. Gone are the days of caving in all of the stone around a vein to better expose it.

Does this mean that mining the ore block itself could cause cave ins too? Because as far as I know cave ins never happened to me while mining ore blocks in the ceiling.

I doubt having a barrel and crafting table upgrade is much of a disadvantage to someone who already has both

 Yep sorry, that's right. I was clearly tired yesterday evening. Anyway it's still more expensive due to the need of using wool yarn. I am in a SSP world and I still have to find sheeps to get some wool, so in my case, it would be out of reach and I should need to use the gunpowder itself.

I doubt we need a crafting recipe for the 'gunpowder pile' just making gunpowder placeable should be fine.

Also about this. I think balance should be considered here. It's right, we could simply place gunpowder, but usually we make long fuses, just to manage to go out of the explosive's range. Also, a smaller quantity of gunpowder reduces the chances of explosion. In this case we need gunpowder to act like a fuse, so a smaller quantity of it would be safer and would allow you to make longer fuses with the same amount of gunpowder.

But I think powders should be able to light 'normal' barrels, as I don't think there is a real reason to place barrels horizontally and give it a disadvantage.

Yep, horizontally placed barrels are a disadvantage when you have a considerable amoutn of resources, but not in the early game. You only have the gunpowder fuse available, and it can only be used on horizontally placed barrels, because it's not really practical, being a fuse made of powder. This would also add a bit of balance in the game, not allowing you to immediately be able to detone completely full kegs, but just partially full kegs that generate a smaller explosion. This way you're not a professional miner at the start of the game. 

Of course I know my suggestions still need some modifications, and I appreciate AllenWL's constructive criticism I tried to explain why I chose to suggest some things here, if you think they're unappropriate, useless or maybe just not right, let's keep the suggestions going

Though, how about this type of fuse?

Made with gunpowder and redstone, when lit/powered, it waits one tick(the gunpowder being lit by redstone), then ignites any explosives rigged up to it, and has no distance limit(other then chunks unloading I guess).

Well, actually that's a great idea, I didn't think about this at first, but we still need a fuse able to work with levers, that's true. So yeah this fuse could be something like an alternative tier 2 fuse. Anyway if we will have this fuse ingame, we shouldn't be able to detonate explosives with simple redstone, we should need to use this fuse instead, or the other 2 ofc. Also, this fuse should have some advantages and disadvantages, so I try to suggest some:Advantages:

No risk of explosions or burnouts. 

Quite cheaper if you find a vein of redstone.

The detonation is almost immediate, being the fuse full of redstone, due to the high conductivity, the flame travels quite faster.

Disadvantages:

Not cheaper if you don't find redstone.

It's powder, it shouldn't be able to pe placed vertically. (This part here still needs some improvements)

You can't turn it off like with the wool yarn fuse if you ever change idea or you notice there's no escape from the explosion.

That's all for now. I really like this topic however, it makes mining more interesting +1 to the original post!

This is a really interesting topic. Exactly today I was wondering how I could use that keg I meant to create, and I had different ideas, but I ended up disappointed when I read the wiki and I saw the limited number of uses and the expensiveness of a single keg. Also gunpowder itself has little to no use.

But anyway, let's come to the suggestions: 

I think that gunpowder could be used as fuse, because it doesn't really have sense to light and detonate an explosive with some shiny red powder. I think we should need gunpowder itself to do this. Basically you craft 4 small piles of gunpowder with a knife and a gunpowder pile, then you can place these in the ground. They're flammable, but not like hay or wood, they don't catch fire showing the big red flame, they simply ignite and consume themselves to transmit the flame to the next adiacent placed gunpowder. Of course, it's a powder, so it can't ignite a normally placed barrel, it can only ignite a barrel placed "orizontally" (Sorry I don't know the exact term for a barrel placed like this) and with the hole, that one that every explosive barrel has, in the bottom. Of course this isn't a really efficient type of fuse because being made of powder it could accidentally explode or burn out instead.

So here it comes, the tier 2 fuse, basically a real fuse this time, made of wool yarn. To craft this one you should need to soak the wool yarn in a sticky type of liquid, I don't know if vinegar could be useful, maybe we could include a new sticky liquid to add to the barrel recipes, something that we get from fish. Anyway, to do this, you can place up to 8 wool yarns in the barrel with that sticky liquid and seal it. It could take some time, Then, when the barrel ends its work, you take the 8 soaked wool yarns and craft them with a single gunpowder to create 8 fuse segments. These act like the previous small piles of gunpowder. You place them in the ground and ignite them. That's all. The advantage is that this type of fuse has a lower chance to burn out and no chance to explode, due to the very small quantity of gunpowder in every fuse segment. Also, this fuse can be used with normally placed barrels, so you can use it with more types of explosives ( if someone of you comes up with a liquid explosive, I guess you can't place that barrel orizontally). The disadvantages of this fuse is that the recipe is more expensive and you also need to have the crafting table upgrade and a barrel ready. 

Oh, also, you can't place orizontally barrels that are more than 20% full of gunpowder, otherwise the gunpowder will come out.

So, I really hope this wasn't already suggested. I didn't have the time to read everything and I hope I wrote everything correctly and gave you some new ideas.

Of course you first need to think about something funny and entertaining to add, then, and only then, think about how to make it difficult to get it.

Also, there are tons of other mods out there, some of which are or can be made to be compatible with TFC.  Starting over would remove all that content.

 

What do you think the advantages of starting from scratch would be?

Well, it's not all that bad, for example they could code a different engine that works better with the stuff that TFC adds. Also, if I'm right, I've heard devs complaining about the minecraft engine, but they said that coding a new one was too expensive and slow.

I'm just here to see the progress of my great great Kreicus! I am still amazed by your choice of making a 3D like texture pack!

*arrives very late to the conversation*

This is the only topic where you can arrive late, after lots of pages of discussions, and you can still win!

Yeah. I miss him and his seemingly infinite head-slposions. 

I'd say that if he doesn't come back...the explosions weren't so infinite, but if he comes back, fine, you are right!

What did I win?

Hmm, this topic seems legit, then...I am back too!

It's been a long time since I last posted here, but all this support is amazing!

EDIT: How can this topic just have 2 pages and be marked as "Hot" ?

Hello everyone, I'm one of the old forum veterans. If you need any help in the Italian translation, feel free to ask to me.