gatts205

However input energy directly corresponds to output energy. Animals need to eat a lot for a long amount of time to produce significant amounts of high energy meat. Whereas a annual or perennial plant requires little input over a comparatively short amount of time to produce. Yes, I did make a mistake, but it doesn't change the essence of my argument that much. Namely an increase in the difficulty of raising cattle (i.e. more input) for higher output produce (at the expense of killing off the creature you spent 2+ minecraft years feeding and raising).

The thing that bothers me the most about meat in minecraft is based off of the energy flow diagram seen in most ecology classes. Plants have the highest energy to weight ratio, primary consumers (herbivores)have the second highest, and each tropic level after that has a dwindling energy supply. In minecraft raising cattle for meat is as simple as throwing two together, feeding them once, and forgetting. Now I have not tried to raise cattle in terrafirmacraft yet, but even with longer pregnancy and maturation rates I think a few adjustments should be made. Raising cattle should require daily and constant maintenance. They would need to be protected from predators, given feed daily, and a fresh water supply. Failure to do this would yield only dead animals and no gain. In other words take the passive nature out of cattle raising. The closest to passive food in terrafirmacraft should be plants and agriculture (at least that is what makes sense to me).

Another, although much harder probably, option is to use the substitute function of custom ore generation. I have never tried it before, but with a little tweaking of the xml files you could pick some useless mineral (petrified wood) and substitute it for the needed ore. One must be careful though that all the other functionality of custom ore generation is turned off though. I must reiterate though that I have no idea if this could work. It just seemed a theoretical possibility.

Once again I find myself pointing toward the terrafirmacraft2 section of the forums. Lots of magi...ahem, arcane goodies in there. If anything were to be included in terrafirmacraft it would probably something similar to what was going to be added to the shelved sequel, namely something that has no direct spell casting.

I would be careful throwing around the word magic on this forum. Many people may react violently (in a verbal sense) to it. Still, if it makes you happy, than all power to you . As for me, I never really liked ars magica all that much.

There was a rather extensive talk about tree growth in the terrafirmacraft2 section of the forums. It may be useful to read through it for more ideas. After all even though terrafirmacraft2 is not going to be made many of the suggestions within (although not all) could still apply to the first. The link to that thread is below. http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/3373-trees-roots-and-growth/

Similarity is not necessarily a bad thing. It just means that the explanation will become easier through comparison. Of course I haven't watched the video yet, so I think I will leave it at this.

I had a rather unusual idea for how to approach perishable food last night without flooding the inventory with large numbers of individual items. I truly am not sure how doable it is though. It revolves around food dropping as packages instead of individual items. In other words if you kill an animal instead of a large number of individual slices of meat you get one package of uncooked meat which ages as one. Now crops do not age as quickly as meat and thus their metadata can take days to change. Therefore after harvesting a person has that amount of time to combine these into a package by placing them into the crafting grid. In order to cook these you then place the package onto the crafting grid and separate out the number of whatever you want to cook. This subsequently causes the package to take durability damage. Now cooked food cannot be recombined into packages without further preservation techniques. This will encourage early game players to only harvest/gather as much food as strictly necessary. This leads into the meat of the issue, what are the preservation techniques. Now along with the ideas presented by the author, I would like to propose a somewhat more ambitious idea. To me, early preservation techniques such as salting or smoking should not me the end of advancement. These foods should still age (although slowly enough that they can be recombined into stacks before their metadata changes). I believe the next tier in advancement in food preparation should be canning. Now before I incite a riot, I am not talking about canning with metal cans. I am talking about using jars for canning which I believe is a far older technique (I am not exactly sure about this though). This is first done by making either a glass or clay jar using whatever technique the developers decide to make available for us (I am not going to presume on the developers plans for the ceramic age). Along with this a lid will be made using metal. You then fill the jar using the crafting grid. Each individual food item only takes up part of the room, so a jar can hold a large number of food items (although only of one type). Once the jar is full you then bring a pot of water (already suggested in thread start) to boil. You then place the jar into the pot for a few minutes. If all goes well, when you remove the jar and allow it to cool the pressure differential will create an air tight seal on the lid which will last as long as the jar is not opened. However, there is a small chance that jars will spontaneously fail if their construction was flawed. This means that person with poor ceramics working skill will not be able to use canning without either practice or trading. I believe this can be an additional step to pickling as well along with simple general food storage.

You would have better luck though making a forge instead of dealing with a fire pit. After all a forge can make multiple glass at once and will be useful later in the game as well. Just because you can make glass in a fire pit, doesn't mean it is efficient time wise to do so. Plus a forge is relatively easy to make and maintain, if you keep plenty of bituminous coal/ charcoal around.

Perhaps similar to hinges locking mechanisms can also be made. The most simple would be little more than a latch which only blocks traffic through a door in one direction. This could be made out of either wood or metal. The advantage of metal is that it cannot be broken off by a sufficient force (i.e. zombies or other players pounding on the door). In latter tiers an actual lock and key can be made. Of course multiple amounts of these can come from one ingot similar to the hinges. The only issue with locks and keys would be the amount of fine work needed to be done to even make a simple key. Perhaps if a grinding wheel is ever added to this mod this could be integral in grinding the key. The main advantage to keys would be that only those with a matching key can utilize the door or chest. Of course either locking mechanism is unnecessary for making the item itself, but could prove advantageous in multiplayer for securing a house.

This is rather similar to the thread I made on barrels, although also different in its own right as well. Personally I like the idea of the mortar remaining in the buckets and that being slowly used up with each use. If this were combined with bricks being stackable, a crafting grid may not even be necessary for making a brick wall. Instead, bricks could be placed in world and then the mortar bucket applied to them with a right click. The only concern I have for this sort of system would be determining how many bricks applied in this manner would constitute a brick wall (in other words how big is each individual brick). Even more important would be the balancing of the amount of mortar that one bucket holds. Since I have no working knowledge of construction, I cannot really comment on how much a small bucket would feasibly hold in a real life sort of sense. However being able to make 2 or 3 wall segments seems a reasonable amount to me (this means very little change to the ratio as it stands now). As far as the trowel tool. I hope it doesn't become to much of a hassle to make. After all the same effect could be done with a piece of smoothed out stone or wood (no metal necessary). Even with these simple materials it seems to me that a trowel could be used almost indefinitely as long as one did not allow mortar to harden on it.

I think the multiple harvest are meant to mean you can get multiple batches from each plant per growing season (although I am not sure if it currently works this way). This is actually quite realistic as certain vegetables (broccoli comes to mind) and fruit can produce multiple flowering bodies before beginning to die off. Since in many plants the best part to eat is the result from this flowering body (note: this is essentially what all fruits including bell peppers and tomatoes are), therefore multiple harvest can be both useful and understandable at the same time. One thing that is worth mentioning is that many people seem overly obsessed about mineral fertilizers (I believe I have seen people suggest this multiple times). Fertilizer is not quite that simple. If you include no organic component (rotting detritus) then using minerals will do you no good. In fact many times it ruins the soil by making it too basic/acidic or salty. This is not to say that using minerals are bad it just should be balanced with other aspects. Perhaps each nutrient type corresponds to a different component of the soil. One for the organic part, another for mineral nutrients, and another for pH level (a middle level is best for most plants). This is only a tangentially related subject though, so you need not worry about it too much.

Personally, I don't think that the food stack size need to necessarily be reduced to one. Perhaps instead food simply wouldn't last forever without preservation. Individual food items age rapidly and cannot be stacked. However, if preservation techniques such as salting, canning (using jars not metal though), and pickling are applied, then food in different stages of rotting away can be uniformly combined into one entity. This entity can be used multiple times corresponding roughly to the amount of food put in. Therefore when going on a long journey one can bring a few a packages of salted meat and canned fruit along. Even these preserved items do not last forever though (except for possibly canning as long as the seal remains unbroken). However to balance out the convenience of food prepared in this manner, preserved food restores less hunger when compared to fresh food and tends to reduce the thirst bar significantly.

You need a bellows and a certain type of wood (I can't remember which one). Also I believe you also need to be at higher elevation as well. Frankly you would do better to simply make a bloomery than trying to do it in a firepit.

If we must make knitting needles then the recipe should be two sticks and a knife. Each stick becomes one needle and the knife is used to smooth the edges of the sticks into a fine point (as well a cut off any errant edges). Still, until their is more uses for cloth, such as clothing, there isn't much point in adding a new step to wool processing.