varradami

Also, having people who died of hunger respawn in the same condition makes no sense. It just means that someone who died of hunger is basically screwed. Likewise with respawning people in the area they just died. Lets say they were lost in a cave and eventually killed. Now you'll still be lost in a cave but without the equipment you had before - again, you're screwed. Death shouldn't leave a player in a position where they're screwed. Lets not forget the original motivation for this thread: Instead of punishing death, reward survival. When a player dies, they lose the rewards accumulated. Simple and effective. "Starving? Try to find some food - if you don't it's going to take hours of work to recover what you lost!"

This is bad because ... ? First off, even vanilla Minecraft now gives experience for things other than killing (e.g. mining ores and smelting). TFC could do similiar. Heck, you could give the player XP every dawn just for surviving if you want! Secondly, I think some people are envisioning skill trees, but nothing like that is necessary. There doesn't need to be any player choice. Every time you level up, your character gets marginally better at whatever is tied to levels (e.g. health, speed, time for holding breath). The values for the min and max levels can be determined, and each level you get the appropriate fraction. Each individual level might not even be a noticable increase - but over time it will add up. The overall effect would be a subtle but consistent improvement over time as you survive (up to some max).

Whatever a new player(new SSP world / first time on a SMP server) starts with is the baseline. Everything is relative to that baseline. Anything that takes the player below that baseline is a penalty, anything above is a reward. Keep in mind we can assume the game has been balanced to give a new player a reasonable chance of survival. Taking a player below that means they will actually have a harder time suriving than when they first began playing, which will discourage continuing to play. Whereas simply taking away the rewards they had received will encourage working to get those rewards back.

This post became longer than I intended. I put a tl;dr version at the bottom for those who don't want to read my ramblings. GOOD IDEAS Experience Matters In vanilla, experience is just another resource to collect for crafting. But what if leveling up actually improved your character? Increasing their health pool, multiplying the efficiency of tools they use, holding their breath longer underwater, etc.? Death would mean losing these benefits with no easy replacement. Challenging Item Recovery Instead of a dead player's items dropping, put them in a corpse or create a tombstone block or something. Then put a guardian there - could be the revenant or ghost of the player, or could just be some monsters or something attracted to the corpse. Whoever can kill the guardian can get the stuff (not necessarily the dead player). Madman2429 suggested inverting the spawn protection. While this is an interesting idea it could be very problematic on servers where players may be living in villages. How does the spawn protection of multiple players interact? I'm not sure how you can protect against people dumping things into chests (it's common practice for me even in vanilla to try to not be carrying too much of value on my character), but not every death is premeditated. Perhaps chests left outside your spawn protection are unsafe or items might disappear from them over time. Or the chest might be destroyed - imagine the player wandering back and finding a broken chest! Be careful with this - people may be storing stuff temporarily for transport back to their base. Need clearer safe zones! It is very risky to tie mechanics to spawn protection as it currently exists because the player has no way to tell whether their current area is protected, or for how long. Also spawn protection discourages exploration. Some rethinking of this mechanic may be useful (but off-topic for this thread). Remove Ownership Any ownership the player has, whatever form it takes, should be removed. Spawn protection can be reset (assuming this is tracked per-player). In vanilla there are wolves and cats, presumably TFC will allow such companions in the future - they could return to a neutral state, not recognizing the player's new life as their former master. Of course the player should be able to recover ownership, but they'd have to work for it - and another player could come along and take ownership. I would make an exception for beds, or simply have the player respawn within a certain distance of their old bed. Otherwise it will be really annoying (especially for people who don't use Rei's Minimap). BAD IDEAS Permanent Penalties Resetting the player back to square one (or putting them closer to it) is punishment enough. If someone doesn't have anything to take away, they really don't need to be punished! Yes, death should matter more as you have more stuff. Players Can't Play Horrible idea. Giving server operators a hardcore option is fine (SSP already has one) but it should absolutely not be forced. Most people don't like it and I doubt many multiplayer servers would choose to adopt it. Any Other Severe Penalty Some people have abused the low cost of death to take advantage of it. But deaths do happen by accident, even to experienced players. Giving death enough of a bite to prevent deliberate suicides and to encourage people to avoid it is quite sufficient. TL;DR Death should be a reset, taking you back - or partially back - to a new character. It should never punish you beyond that. At worst, death should be the same as starting from scratch and likely doesn't even need to go that far. Feel free to put greater punishment as an option, but remember that while some people do like hardcore mode, most people do not.

I recently started playing as well. I'm pretty sure your sluice doesn't need to be on a river - mine was on an ocean shore. Although it was slow going, I did get ore from my sluices. It took awhile, but I eventually got enough sphalerite to forge some tools. It's odd that you got eight gems without any ore, but I suppose you might just have had bad luck.

This all seems cool, but please don't be too ambitious! Break down the feature list into pieces that can be developed iteratively, so if you run short on time there's a better chance of getting something fully working. I recommend starting with animal breeding, because without that nothing else is all that valuable. Having some way to gather animals that doesn't require food (e.g. a leash) would be very useful too, since it is difficult right now to actually grow crops. A full system for domesticating animals would be awesome, but I think much lower priority.

Thank you! Maybe I can find some time to add this to the wiki - I doubt it will be fixed any time soon.

Is there a list anywhere of which trees can be used to make wooden slabs and stairs? I couldn't find it on the wiki.

Vanilla biomes may still affect some things, but as of build 49 it won't affect what trees are spawning. From the change-log: Rock layers are no longer linear and confined to a strict set of biomes. They also overlap in different ways, meaning that the edge of one rock layer does not mean that you are at the edge of another layer beneath it.Similarly the tree layers are defined in an overlapping fashion.Take a look at the changelog for more details.

It has 6 GB of RAM ("6GB Memory"). Which is probably sufficient for your needs. I'm not too knowledgeable on pricing, but this seems like a good deal to me! Do not get less than 4 GB of RAM! No, that is no longer a lot. RAM is cheap and is a great upgrade because running short on available memory will kill your computer's performance (because data is constantly swapped out to the HDD). 6 or 8 GB is even better. You want your computer to be useful for at least a couple of years. :-) I have 4 GB in my laptop which isn't really enough for me (since I like to have a couple of dozen tabs open in Firefox) but I have a SSD which mitigates the problem. I may upgrade this year but I plan to get a new laptop next year anyway. My work laptop has 16 GB of RAM. :-) Discrete graphics is likely to make a big difference, but I'm not sure you can expect to get that in a $500 laptop. You have a budget, so just do some comparison shopping and see what gets you the most for your money. Maybe you can find some deals (too bad back-to-school is over) or you could consider buying something used.

It seems to me there are two problems here: In SMP world time passes when you're not playing, so the game state will advance a lot more than your actual play time.There's a lot to do and in SSP only one person to do it all.I wouldn't worry about #2 for now - I don't expect that makes SSP unplayable and I think this could be addressed in the future through NPCs.For #1, have you considered automatically advancing the game state by the amount of real-world time which has passed when the game starts up? It might be tricky, but it would make SSP work just like SMP in this regard and probably solve a whole bunch of issues in the long term. Other possibilities include adjusting the hunger rate so food lasts much longer and making hunting+gathering a viable survival strategy (need wild plants and naturally respawning animals). These might muck with SMP balance, but I do think the latter would be very cool in its own right. I haven't actually played TFC though, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. I've been watching lots of Crysyn's and Mead's videos, but the SSP issues definitely give me pause (since that's what I'd be using).