puxapuak

That is definitely true of systems that a person or persons are trying to make that is aimed at making something easier. It cannot at all be said about something where the designers are trying to implement something that needs to be learned and that is not at all inherently obvious at first glance. If the long term plan is to make TFC a believable and rewarding mod where people specialise at tasks by learning them, then this proposal is consistent with that goal. Put another way... we're trying to create problems worth solving, not solve problems for people. If you do not enjoy activities that have a learning curve, then I don't think you're going to particularly like the direction of TFC. Because it is definitely the direction every system in the game is moving towards. (Consider agriculture, meals, etc.)

I don't understand why people dislike walls of text. A small bit of text might contain something interesting but not contain any detail to explain it and will often lead to confusion and misunderstanding. A lot of text can take something seemingly insignificant and turn it into something extraordinary and revolutionary. There is not an interesting game on this planet that can be explained in a single paragraph of prose. If you can read, walls of text should not be daunting. None of you are so important that you can't spend twenty minutes reading something truly interesting and creative and reflect thereupon. Novels are very large walls of text folded up into several lengthy pieces. Have you never read a book? I don't think that it is productive that our global society is increasingly against reading something the length of a children's novel in order to get a grasp of what's going on in their community. How sad a species we are becoming. /rant. ** Editing this to avoid confusion. This rant isn't particularly aimed at this forum, it is aimed at the whole of Internet culture, which is why I stuck it in this section. It is not a critique of the TFC community. There is a general and widespread attitude online that anything longer than a couple of sentences is not worth reading (tl;dr). Worse, this attitude (I would call it a cultural value) is spreading IRL as well. This is what I am ranting about. ** Adding this link. It talks about some interesting aspects of literacy. I particularly like how it points out that measures of literacy that simply say "literate" or "illiterate" are not very useful. "High level" is actually secondary-school level or so. It is what is commonly called functional; only "high" because as the stats show, very few people read and write at a functional level in their native tongue. http://www.conferenc...igh-skills.aspx http://www.conferenc...low-skills.aspx

As a side benefit, this could give some value to finding that pool of lava you accidentally tunnelled straight down into that one time... garbage chute!

A condensed reply to a few things... I agree with renadi on this. It sounds like you're describing what is largely already in place, with the exception of depth. But the thing is that loose nuggets are not at all believable at depths. Most such loose nuggets are caused because of surface erosion (atmospheric effects). Erosive processes can occur at depth, but it's pretty rare and doesn't really result in small nuggets anyway. But also as JAG later points out, it's not really necessary anyway because if you want to find some -equivalent-of-nuggets- at depths, you just use your prospectors pick on the nearest rock. When you pick a rock, you will always get some shards. They might not be the shards you're interested int, but they are definitely giving you information about the geology of the local area. So there's really no need for anything else. Finding the rich veins that currently exist would be more difficult, yes, but as JAG points out, you're not completely out of luck using my proposal either. In all rock, you've got the chance to find tiny shards of ore of the type you're seeking if it has a chance of spawning in that rock family. You won't find much, and it will take hella lotta pro-picking to do it, but you'll eventually collect enough ore shards to make an ingot. (If it's a rare ore you're after though... I reeaallly mean a lot of propicking.) I think he meant keeping track of what shards correspond to what ores in what conditions. You could maintain that on a spreadsheet... but I don't think it would be the best way to learn how to mine effectively using this proposed change. This is actually the kind of thing our brain already does quite well, but we have to give it a lot of information. In other words, experience is going to be much better than bogging yourself down in the numbers game.

It doesn't say that explicitly. A 'test cave' can be built in any world, and certainly does not require anything special. I understood your words differently than you meant them. It is my mistake and the suggestion was unnecessary. Now that's just being trollish. I misunderstood his post and offered a suggestion that didn't apply. It happens. Get over it and move on with your life. It doesn't even remotely impact you. If you want to be a troll, go hang out on 4chan or something.

Creepers don't disappear just because it's day though (unless they're pig-creepers). I doubt they're spawning in the day, they're just wandering around since the previous night and finally found you. Remember to light your roof up if you're not. If your smithy is open air but near something with an unlit roof, that might be your problem.

Mention of the temperature from the calendar page has now been removed to avoid confusion. I updated the image too but for some reason it is not displaying on viewing the page, even though it seems to know its dimensions and if you click on the broken link icon, it displays the image just fine. Now idea what's up with that... bizarre. But at least the page is updated.

Java is really unlikely to cause a bsod... but MC makes heavy use of RAM. I would bet you're right (or m/b ). But if they're upgrading their system, maybe not so much an issue for long.

Actually this might be the invisible coal bug from earlier. How big was your fire pit? We've noted it occurring sometimes when the logs are only piled one block high.

This is a known bug. It has been discussed. It's incrementing the bit instead of the number, so it doubles each time more ore arrives.

Just a suggestion though... if you go gifting yourself the best tools in the game, you're going to miss out on a lot of what this mod has to offer. You might as well be playing vanilla at that point. It's sort of missing the point of the mod completely.

I am blown away by the support for this idea. I'm really glad to see so many people like it. Every time I log on the number of people liking the OP seems to rise... 19 people so far. Amazing. It doesn't have to be nuggets per se... you can call it just plain "ore". The point is that we are presently distinguishing between the two, but there isn't really something underlying this linguistic distinction. The difference between a nugget and ore is only size, and we can account for size in better ways.

Ug I think I was still unclear about the ore. Let me try that again. I think it was my talk of purity that threw the wrench in things? Purity would just be something about the block containing the ore. It determines the quantity of ore that would drop, so maybe you'd normally get 1 ore item, but weak veins (like surface stuff) would only contain a nugget instead because they have experienced more weathering and grinding. Particularly high purity veins might very from 1 ore to an ore + a nugget, or even more. Alternatively, you get rid of the ore vs nugget distinction and have everything be a nugget, and then it's even easier because you just have everything drop varying numbers of nuggets.

Oh I think I wasn't clear there. I didn't actually mean the ore itself (item) would be changed at all. It would be pretty much identical to what it is now.

Yeah I've had some huge jungles too. Just wanted to make sure the poster didn't think it was a guarantee. I haven't spawned in very many jungles overall though... seems to like to throw me into the subarctic. (I'm pretty sure it's detecting where I live IRL lol) omg... is that really the max size? I never really looked into it but always just built five by five by 1-3. Takes long enough to gather that amount of wood... you'd need a whole team of lumberjacks to cap one out o.O

It's not a guarantee though. I had a world where there was a huge northern continent and a small continent at about 9000 but nothing but ocean for the entire tropics.

I can only think of one reason a blue condom would be that afraid of whatever is about to happen. ...and it ain't pretty....

Great to see the positive support for this idea so far :)/> Yeah I think this would have a good effect with this different mechanic and presentation of information when gathering samples. Shards can only be chipped from natural stone, and all natural stone types are always producing shards of some range depending on the environment their in each strike of a pro-pick. That is, the proximity to an actual vein is already not the information you are accessing with the pro pick - you're always getting false positives for everything that could possibly spawn in the that rock and that environment. I think having veins be thinner and not immediately visible and with varying textures of each rock type helps obfuscate that in a more fluid way too. That is, the underlying mechanic of the pro pick would still be an area scan, but it's not actually scanning for ore blocks at all! - ore blocks really are just another of the varieties of that rock type. Ug I fear I am not making sense so I will make a diagram to explain this. *takes to GIMP for a bit....* So this is pretty hastily done, but say you're in an environment with two families of rock. Two families, but a variety of different visible versions of them - three basalts and two limestones. Each type has some particular ores and minerals that it is theoretically possible to find in them. It doesn't mean you *will* find them, but it's at least possible. So when you take your pro pick and start hitting some of these rocks, you'll gather a collection of a lot of different shards / properties (would be more than what I've listed, I stripped it down for simplicity). The shards themselves would normally have the texture of the particular rock family and subtype they were chipped from, but not always (especially with conglomerates). Now unbeknownst to you, the only vein in the area is actually Ore 2, and it occurs in a thin layer threading through an area where Basalts B and C are interspersed with each other. Even when you stumble across this though, you might not know it because all you see is a bunch of Basalt B and C rocks, and you're only getting the small number of shards at once. You'd have to pick around a bit even to notice that almost every sample is of the one shard type that corresponds to Ore 2 in Basalts. This is further complicated by the fact that Mineral B also appears in both basalts, so you will find plenty of those shards too even though there is no vein of it. But the key is that the mechanic of the propick doesn't actually know the vein's location either. So let's say you smack a Basalt C. You will randomly obtain any of the shards listed under Basalt C, but the scan has a look around and also sees the other 5 rocks in the area. It makes a quick calculation, and shards that appear more frequently in the TOTAL list of all possible shards will be a little more likely to show up. This is a SUBTLE weighting though. (See what I did there?) So the system actually already accounts for what you're talking about then (though I didn't really clarify it in the OP). It never actually considers whether an ore vein is nearby, it only has to look at what rocks and possible shards are around. Once the ore vein is mined out, all of the other rocks that weren't removed still provide the exact same profile overall. All of this without actually encoding any more into block meta data or coming up with some kludge to force minecraft to store information that it doesn't like to store. What it's really doing is designing veins at creation time as emergent properties of the rocks, rather than explicit rocks.

I dunno Dunk... I agree; I dislike the idea too but only in that it seems a bit unnecessary to me personally, not really offering much (except a chance to survive when you happen to spawn in the middle of a giant desert). But like it or not, you and Bioxx have not created a mod that is believable in the context of being a caveman. We could role play ourselves as cave people to dumb our knowledge down... but that would be highly artificial and this isn't supposed to be an RPG either, right? So either we are a contemporary human with contemporary basic knowledge of geology, metallurgy, and agriculture enough to identify rocks and metal ores and know how to build a house in a matter of a few months but resource strapped without civilisation, or we're a pre-civ and we shouldn't know how to do any of that stuff (which could be easily coded in to maintain the believability of a pre-civ player). It would be equally fun with either design style... but that choice appears to have already been made - and not by us. I understand... it's about balance of fun and believability, but the mod as you both have presented it to us is just as fun and even more believable when you imagine yourself to be crash-landed on a remote planet or some such thing. *edit* I wrote a huge long post with a cool-seeming idea that is a direct result of what I've said here, but I have reluctantly removed it because I realised I was hijacking ECC's thread with a completely different idea. I'm presently moving it to a new thread and will link to that thread here when done cleaning it up. Please don't reply to this post without having read the other idea, because I feel what I've said here will not be understood the same without knowing where the rest of the thought went. *a while later...* Here's the post that continues the thought.

Grick... erkk... arak.... argh.... Stop it... must... write... thesis....

I have a pretty fast computer (i5 2500K) and still get it on occasion. It is pretty rare now though.

*regular sugar noodles.

...No, Vlad, you're getting it wrong. Again. The words do not mean what you think they mean. "Maize" "Maise" and "Corn" are all plural. Please stop assuming that everyone around you is wrong. Assume you are wrong first. Question your assumption. Verify it using other sources. THEN if you find a problem.. bring it up. Otherwise, stop cluttering the forum with pointless semantics. *edit* Looking back, I see that this is actually the problem too. You do not understand the singular and plural state of these words. You said 'carrot' when you should have said 'carrots' and 'maize' thinking it was singular. Again, from our PM talk, remember that this isn't your first language and that English has some really inconsistent (and occasionally stupid) grammar quirks. That makes it even more important for you to assume you are wrong first. If you are unsure, ask the question. Do not simply state it is a bug or mistake. That's generally considered rude. And just makes you look a bit foolish when you have made an incorrect assumption about basic grammar.

Imma try out the seed tonight. See if I can reproduce this too... more machines the better. Slooooow is good! Makes you think about your plan.

Yeah... I dunno. The more I dig into their code, the more I think every serious mod group should be considering a full stop on following the official MC lineage and just freejacking the code from a most usable point - or develop their own using some other o/s voxel system. Mojang just seems to be making things worse and worse as time goes by.