puxapuak

Tried it too and I couldn't get it to work either :/

Right but this is what I'm confused about, actually. All types of shards do not have high importance, all types of shards have low importance. If it takes 64 shards of something to make an ingot, then the value of one shard is extremely low. If you've melted a few down and discovered that they are metallic, then the value of those particular shards has increased, but it is still no different of a situation than now, as one stack of ore nuggets currently also corresponds (roughly) to one unshaped ingot. One stack of a specific ore shard would also (roughly) correspond to one unshaped ingot. So again, I am really not clear why some people think there is clutter. There is no more clutter than there is now. In terms of inventory space, it is absolutely identical. I've yet to know: will shards' properties like "smooth blue crystalline" and "big dark red grains" have their meaning dependant on seed? Sorry, I thought you meant earlier that you had found this answer. No, this aspect would not be tied to seed. It would be something else.

Shards are not equal to nuggets. Their equivalence is more with respect to the information content / their role in the process of mining. Please read through the thread if you want more of an explanation, because all of this has been covered.If latter, how do you deal with clutter of this size? There are lots of different kinds of shards. Tons, really. Most of them are not metal at all, just slivers of whatever rock zone you're in. But some will contain trace amounts of metals and minerals, which you can quickly learn to tease out of the descriptive elements displayed with each shard. The clutter thing... I have no idea why people are perceiving this. There is no clutter. If you want to throw something out, then throw it out. How do you melt metal ore shard? Heat works well. I don't really know how else to answer that. How much does it yield - more than nugget currently or not? If latter, how do you identify this drop of metal with retaining believability? Again, this has all been covered. Please read through the thread. One or two questions is fine, but I'm not going to repeat the whole thing just because you don't feel like reading the thread. But will name of the shard be on server side or on client side? If former, how do you explain that newcomer knows what kind of shard he got? I think it should only be the client side. People can come up with their own names for things, and if they want to talk to someone else about it then they're going to have to describe it to them just like anything else. This makes it a whole lot more believable and easier to code. It also makes it a fun puzzle for groups of miners to work together to find the more rare ores.

That's not what would be randomized. In a given game world, writing things down to keep track of them might make sense, but it would not be guaranteed across worlds. The attributes are not randomized per se. I'm not going to say more on that though because if the idea is implemented, I do not want to ruin the underlying mechanic for people. Suffice it to say that the believability will not be impacted.

I agree when it comes to the actual ores themselves too. The only naming I would consider is for shards so a user can keep track of them in a way more sensible to them. The description (original 'name') would still be present though... so the user-given-name might just appear under that or something. Or.... hmm... this makes me reconsider. Ok, like how current items have the size indicators, that's where the shard's descriptive words could go. The default name could be "unknown shard" - which you could rename for now. You try melting it down and it turns into some kind of metal. The name of that particular shard then changes to "unknown metal shard". But it doesn't end there... instead, when you have gathered enough of your first shards of the substance to melt into an unshaped ingot, the true name of the metal is revealed "unshaped zinc ingot". In an achievement-like way, all of the "unknown metal shards" that are zinc will change to "Zinc ore shard". What do you think? This might alleviate some of your earlier-noted concerns as well. This is in the thread, yes. But there is a LOT in this thread now... you're forgiven Shards stack like anything else. There is no difference. They stack big though because they are very small. (64, 64 also being what's needed for an ingot, give or take - ore itself is unchanged unless we move to an all-nugget size). Yield is not dependent on seed, randomization of what appears on a given strike is.

Well I was only talking about naming particular shards within a single person's game so that they can spot them in the future more easily. Because shards would be pretty small icons, there's not really a lot of room for subtle variance outside the description-name each has by default. In some sense this would just be mimicking what our brain/eyes do when we start to recognise a pattern. With respect to the wiki, I would purposefully implement this such that it is obfuscated enough that the wiki could not help. They are not difficult puzzles. If the wiki had a detailed catalogue of all shards, where they came from, and which ones indicated what ore or mineral, then it would completely defeat the purpose of the addition. But at the design level the usefulness of a shard library is removed anyway because there's an aspect of it tied to the seed that I haven't told about. It is more like recipes.

That's a big wood building. Really? I don't really find I've ever had a problem... a couple 5x5x3s and by that point you're at steel. Seems to be the way of things anyway.

Well, actually your efficiency ratio seems to top out on bronze. You have to take into account some averages - especially tree size - but if you have a decent supply of copper and tin you are way better off making a few bronze saws. Even with smelting time, it's an order of magnitude more efficient. Stone is way down there unless you're short on metal. The time it takes to smelt metals is outweighed considerably. Of course all of this depends heavily on how efficient you are at finding metal, but I have to say that for myself I can usually find and mine entire ore veins out before gathering enough wood to make a single 5x5x3 charcoal pit with a stone axe. Maybe I just suck at knapping though? I don't suck at napping though... But I think the real question is... what are people using all that wood for? o.O

Thanks. I don't really so much see it as a matter of selfishness or not though, I must admit. I kind of think of it this way: Good ideas make everyone's lives better. People do not come up with good ideas just because they sometimes get money - in fact most of the best ideas were never even worth much money, and we don't pay our big-thinkers much money to do all that big thinking anyway. So I don't see the point of an economic system that specifically enforces silly rules that restrict the deployment of good ideas under the guise that people need an incentive other than the contribution to society itself. Iow, market capitalism worked for a while, but now it just plain sucks and its killing innovation and holding us back. But I'll stop there. We should move it to Off-Topic if it needs to continue lol

I have been labouring over that particular issue. The thing is... I don't know if I'll have the kind of time it needs to develop anyway, so if someone else takes it and makes a great game out of it, I'm kind of happy with that too. I don't really care about money, I just think that good ideas should have something happen with them.

Well I don't know why it would happen on only one world and not others you've made, but I wouldn't be surprised if MultiMine was causing it somehow. Try uninstalling it and see if it makes a difference (you may need a new pit in the same world, because it may have corrupted the coal).

Okay... do you have any other mods installed? Forge and player version and such? We have to start with the assumption it's a problem on your end if nobody else is able to reproduce it here, so we need a bit more info on what you have running.

On your point 1, yeah, I think that kind of got lost in the thread somewhere. The whole thing is really just a response to the idea that we are supposed to be stone-age people instead of stranded space-age people. If the former is the intention, then yeah... this was just intended as a completion of the existing system of mining. I totally agree with the naming. I decided to not mention it in the other posts for various reasons, but that has definitely been on my mind as well. By naming some type of shard, then that name would always show up when you find that shard. I'm not sure how that would be programmed into it either, but I'm reasonably certain that it can be done. Multiplayer poses more of a problem there though.

Can you tell us a bit about your install? Other mods, forge versions, etc.

Also is this a world made in B69 or earlier? Because there were changes to bloomeries and you have to destroy them all and remake them if it's an earlier world.

Not sure much grain you've processed in your life spuksas, but knives work very well at removing the grain seeds from the stalk. Add the quern in there and all of that is already implemented and working fine. I agree about the chisel for the wall too. Please use the search function before you do. Poke around the forums a little and see what other people have already written. You are not going to get a good reaction if you post a ton of ideas in one thread - especially if most have already been suggested.

Yeah... well a 'biome' does include the animals too, but MC just sort of ignored animals so that part of the definition got lost a bit in MC discussions. But yes, the idea I originally had concerned plants in the first post but rapidly grew to include animals too. So it did actually suggest adaptive biomes by the end of that night.I was just reading through the game you linked, and it's pretty well thought out idea, the kind of game i have been looking for since i started playing games years ago, the kind i wanted to develop back in my younger years but have since lost the ambition. Thanks - still a lot of ideas in my head that aren't down in that wiki yet too. I feel kind of the same - on both accounts really. I have always loved sim games, but simearth was weak and when spore was announced I was really looking forward to it but the final product was a real let down. I would very much like to develop R-Evo, but I don't know that I really have time any more, being very much caught up with a whole lot of other things in life. If I'd had the idea a few years back after the big crash (I was a trader before the stock market crashed... i stopped then) when I had more time, it would be done by now. But I digress... back to the topic at hand... Agreed. I still think it's worth discussing of course anyway. Even if the devs don't want further additions. Most of our suggestions on the board are more like thought-explorations anyway.

Do you have them turned off? I have clouds...

Right... but that is exactly what I proposed in the post that I linked to. A completely adaptive ecosystem, where plants and animals are constantly adapting to the local conditions and to each other. It was agreed the idea was more fitting for its own game, so I've been writing about the concept over here, however I do still intend to come up with a simplified version of it for TFC. I have been advised that it is very unlikely to be implemented though because most of this is already set.

Pretty sure this has been suggested plenty of times. Maybe not always in its own thread, but the idea has come up before. The big problem though for proposing this sort of thing, as has been pointed out many times, is that most of it is already decided upon. Tweaking terrain generation is one thing, but re-introducing hard-coded biomes is quite another. Ecosystem / biome... yes there are technical differences, but not necessarily differences that fit the model TFC has to work with. I'm not sure that this is different than asking for more biomes? If this is not the case though, I will happily rescind the comment. I still suspect we'll end up where this thread did after I railroaded it at 106.

Good to hear. I like the notification it provides, but that's it. I realise I may have worded that poorly though. I suppose a more clear way to say that would have been "I hope I am not the only one..."

See definitions 1 and 2. Complex != complicated. Things that are complex can be complicated, but they don't need to be. More often than not, we complicate them ourselves through our lack of understanding. It is only after we understand the complex that we realise that the complicatedness was an illusion, and at the heart is a very simple process iterated multiply. This is the entire motivation behind a lot of science of course too... 'the simplest solution is usually the correct one.' It may be complex to try to understand all highways at once, but it is not that complicated to follow one from one location to another. I definitely wouldnt give up refining it. Bioxx may wanna impliment it. You never know. ;)/> I'm hoping so. And if not, well maybe I will use it in R-Evo. (Total side note... am I the only one who finds the quote function in this forum software cumbersome and space-hungry? I find colours and italics so much cleaner...)

I think the tale end of this post might interest you more, but you ask a lot of things in there (some of it I suspect may have been rhetorical) and I wanted to respond to a lot of it because it might not be at all what you expect the answers to be. In TFC? I don't think I know even a quarter of them. I really have no idea how many there are. But it doesn't honestly matter to me much. I throw whatever food I have available together in a bowl and eat it. Sometimes I get a small boost that usually decays before I can make use of it, and most of the time I don't. If I could reliably buy food of some type I find useful from a player by trading some currency or useful item, I would. How long do you think it will take an individual, considering your implimentation of mining, to find his first metal vein? Depends what you mean by 'find'. They would be stumbling over them all the time without realising it. They could easily be chipping rocks on their first vein within minutes of spawning. How long before they realised it was a true vein? First, remember that there would be a lot more veins, but they would be smaller. It would be very circumstantial though - more so than it is now (since you can usually find your first vein within a game day of spawning right now - I don't think I've ever spent longer than two game days before finding a vein, and normally I have the locations of a half dozen before I have my first house done). I would rather say it this way. If I were designing it, I would bear in mind that Dunk and Bioxx are of the opinion that people should be spending a whole lot longer in the stone and pre-bronze ages. If a player was solely dedicated to getting to metal as fast as they could, then with no prior knowledge they should be able to solve their first ore puzzle and obtain a pick from shards within one to two game months or so of their spawn (based on a 96-day year, about 10-15 days). If on the other hand the player was more interested in varying their activities and building something more than a bare-bones hut with no farm, then perhaps it would take them a half a game year to a year. So it's more about style of play than anything else. What about the next one? Well, in most cases you would have built up some measure of a library of information about your local geology. If you've found one mine, you've probably got all the information you already need to piece together the location of a few others. So it wouldn't really take much longer to find other surface mines. Maybe ten minutes of thinking it through and another ten minutes looking around. If you change geology though, you're going to have to learn the new conditions. Once done with that, how long will it take to master agriculture and Animal husbandry when that is in full swing? Probably a lot longer. Actually... almost definitely a lot longer considering birth rate. Learning to mine isn't time dependent like agriculture and husbandry. If dedicated to the task, you would be able to become a master miner a lot quicker than a master farmer. Once tailoring, ... Is implemented, do you think that one person on his own will be able to accomplish all of this to the utmost, while still trying to build a civilization, fend off hostile mobs, and explore a world that is one big mystery? Nope. But again, if that's what you're looking for, I don't think you're going to be happy with where TFC is headed. over time, 80% of the server just MIGHT be able to do everything themselves regardless. Yep. That's the problem with a lot of economic-based game systems. But the more complex (not complicated) then the more you can hold on to a functional economy that's based on it. Also the more complex the tasks become, the less interested people will be in becoming experts in everything. People play games for different reasons. But whether or not this game is designed focusing on multiplayer, there will always be single players in their own world. (...) But the casual gamer like myself, wont be too happy. I mostly agree, but Bioxx and Dunk have stated a number of times that this isn't the focus of TFC, so our opinions matter little on this one, I think. Again. Cool idea. Thanks. I think a lot of ideas like this need a secondary "softcore - hardcore" difficulty mode switch. With a system like I'm proposing, it would be very easy to make it simpler. I won't get into the math that drives the mechanic, but you only have to change a couple of parameters and it can easily scale the whole thing to be more or less easy to solve. I don't know to what degree Bioxx is interested in having a difficulty setting. *edit* I should add that those parameters can be set - using the same system - to almost identically mimic what we presently have. The puzzle would (just like it is now) simply be a matter of turning over the right rock. At the other end, they can produce such variance in the shards that it is very difficult indeed to solve the puzzles.

Lots of stuff in there, Menoch, I will try to address it. But first I will comment on your final question there. I don't think it does run fine. That is, stemming from the conversation in the other thread that I referenced at the outset, the current system of mining / propick mechanism violates the believability+fun principle that TFC is trying to follow. Further, it doesn't really require any skill at all. Once you read the forums and realise the principle it operates on, you're pretty much instantly a master miner. Since TFC is also trying to move towards a multiplayer 'specialist' model, the current simplicity of the propick is an impediment to the stated goals of TFC. In short, this isn't a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Because it is broken. I don't enjoy mining in TFC particularly... it feels to me to be a bit of an irritant because there's just no complexity to it. Every effort to find a mine is exactly the same puzzle, over and over, because you have a space-aged piece of ore-detection equipment even though we're in the pre-bronze era. What about them? If you don't think they're useful, do with them whatever you want. If you think they might be useful, make a mental note of where you found them. What do you do with copper nuggets you find when scavenging rocks after you've got a full suit of steel and several boxes of limonite? The value of the shards is not the shards themselves except when you're really resource strapped. The value is the information provided by their context and number. The point is that you don't know what is useful and what isn't until you learn the trade. Remember, we're trying to create a puzzle to be solved. The shards are not the resource, they're the roadmap. Just like nuggets are now, but not as super-obvious. The first time, for your first pickaxe, yes. Just as right now you have to scavenge around for a pile of ore to melt or sluice for a few game weeks. If you're already beyond the stone age, this is just information telling you more about your geology. It's not really any different except that more shards are required for both the sake of believability and because shards can be more easy to come by than nuggets (though this is geologically dependent to some extent). Well, again, I think this is an advantage of this proposed system over the current. At present, the system is easy enough that there is nothing there to master. You just simply can't have a 'specialist' system when 80% of the population of a server can do it at the top tier of effectiveness. It just doesn't work. Now for those of us who don't tend to play multiplayer (myself included), this doesn't matter, but then it's more a matter of what kind of game you enjoy. If you enjoy figuring stuff out and working through a puzzle, then this will be right up your alley. If you don't, and you just want to be guided and directed through puzzles, well then this wouldn't be as interesting. But the advantage there then is that... mining is hard, you will value your equipment and tools more if it is even harder for you, and it's not like you don't have options here because if you don't want to figure your way through the puzzle, then you can still grind through rocks to find what you're looking for. Survival is supposed to be hard, so if a person doesn't want to learn the ways to make it easier on themself, then they have to accept that they are playing a survival game without any interest in the premise of survival.

Splatman, I can see why you feel the way you do if this is how you understood my proposal, but renadi is correct again, I'm not proposing anything particularly different fundamentally than what is already in place, and it certainly doesn't require anything but a bit of experience to get good at. So it appears that you and Menoch may have both misunderstood something. With respect to the emphasised portions in your posts, this is not at all what I am proposing. If you are confused on this, please re-read my posts. If you still have questions or if it still sounds like this is what I am proposing to you, then let me know what is giving you that idea so that I can clarify it for you and for any others who may be carrying the same false impression. My goal here is for people to understand the idea. If you still disagree even after you understand, that's fine too, I'm cool with that. But I want to make sure that you are at least disagreeing with something I've said.