mayaknife

Took me a while, but *snrk*.

Line of sight to what? A standing tree of that type?

Hoe all the ground or replace it with stone, sand, gravel, planks, etc. I'm not sure, but it may be that saplings will only appear on grass blocks. If that's the case then you can replace all of the grass blocks with dirt and ring the area with a grass-proof border (hoed ground, stone, etc).

It means that you may find a deposit of serpentine inside a larger deposit of olivine.

Yes and no. I want to be able to edit the source code (e.g. to add some debugging lines) and rebuild the mod from source. I don't need to decompile TFC, though, because I already have the source files from github. A couple of people have given me some pointers which I need to try out. If that doesn't work for me then I may message you for more help. Thanks.

Thanks. I always forget about the IRC channel. I'm still working with build 76 so I'll try giving the playerAPI approach a shot. If that doesn't work then I'll ask on IRC.

The source code is hosted on a publicly readable repository on github, so I don't think Bioxx has a problem with people looking at the code. The prohibition against posting code to the forums is more a matter of not spoiling the mod for others by revealing details that should discover for themselves.

It seems to be around 3kg per unit of ore or charcoal. I have a bloomery 5 layers high (i.e. initial 3 layers + 2 extensions). The wiki says that the base capacity is 40.5kg and each extension adds about 35kg. So a 5 layer bloomery should hold around 110.5kg. I can put 16 ore and 18 charcoal in mine. Assuming that a unit of charcoal weighs the same as unit of ore, that comes out to 3.25kg per unit.

I don't think that there are any seasonal dependencies per se, but temperature does affect crop growth. If you're near the equator where it stays warm during winter then your crops will grow all year round. If you're further north, the crops will pop out of the ground once it gets cold enough. Ingots can be stored in stacks in the same way as wood. However, since the stack only keeps track internally of the type and number of each ingot, the ingot cannot be unique in any way. That means that you cannot stack an ingot while it is hot or if it has been worked. There is a limit to the total amount of ore + charcoal that a bloomery can hold. The limit depends upon how tall the bloomery is. So if you put in too much ore there won't be enough room for the charcoal. In addition, there is a limit on the maximum amount of ore that a bloomery can hold, regardless of size, and the maximum amount of charcoal. You can find all the relevant details on the wiki page for the bloomery.

Note that copper only occurs in andesite, basalt, dacite and rhyolite. So if you pick up a rock and it's not one of those types then there's no need in checking out that area any further, just move on until you get to a new rock type. You'll also find that each type of rock is associated with its own type of dirt. In particular, the dirt sitting on top of a basalt layer is very dark, as is basalt itself. This means that you can often look around at the distant mountains to see if any of them look much darker than the others. If so then there's a good chance that they contain basalt rock so head in that direction.

Wait until you hit your first "very large" coal deposit. Those things can be friggin' huge!

Right, but keep in mind that that only applies to animals which are kept in pens, in which case the farmer is responsible for providing all of their feed. If animals are allowed to graze freely they feed themselves, which dramatically changes the equation.

I find that food is too easily acquired in TFC. All I have to do is kill a cow and fry up the steaks and I'm good for a couple of weeks. The net result is that there's never been a compelling reason for me to grow crops or create meals. To make the food situation a bit dicier I decided to try playing a new seed without ever eating meat. I would still need to kill animals for hide, wool, feathers and ink, but the meat would be tossed. Halfway through my first day I had collected half a dozen edible vegetables and over a dozen eggs. Clearly the eggs were going to make things too easy, so I decided to do without them as well. That made it a lot more interesting. Over the first week or so I didn't find a lot of seeds, but I did find enough to get a small farm going: three wheat, three maize, four barley, one oat, two garlic, etc. My biggest crop was ten red and yellow bell pepper plants, which was handy since they mature relatively quickly. I also made an awesome find of five mature yellow bell pepper plants growing wild about 100 meters from my spawn point. I'd never found more than three wild fruiting plants together before.They and two mature red bell pepper plants closer to my spawn point were the gift that kept on giving while I waited for my crops to grow. One interesting aspect of the game was deciding whether to keep foraged grains and vegetables to eat or convert them to seed for planting. I generally opted for a 50/50 split, but that did lead to a couple of emergency foraging expeditions when food stocks got dangerously low. While some crops, such as peppers, can be harvested while leaving the plant intact, most cannot. That meant that in order to keep my food supply up I had to continually increase the range of my foraging. I decided to experiment with meals and quickly found one which, when heated, gave me about three times the food value of its constituent parts. That helped to reduce my foraging needs significantly. Since I was finding a fair bit of ripe grain during my foraging, I also, for the first time, built a quern, ground up the grain and made bread. That further reduced my foraging needs. By late summer the farm was producing enough that I no longer needed to forage at all. I'm now in the process of setting up a four-field crop rotation system (red, dark orange, pale orange, fallow) to ensure that nutrients don't get depleted. My initial experiments seem to indicate that hoed ground which is left fallow does not recover any of its nutrients, but I haven't yet given it enough time to be sure. If that turns out to be the case then I'll switch to a three-field rotation. So far I've only found one fruit tree, which failed to drop any saplings after I lopped off all of its branches. My orchard will have to wait. With my food supply now secure, it's back to regular TFC of course, but it greatly expanded the amount of good game play I got out of the mod before hitting the gold/garnierite wall, so I think this is an approach I'll adopt for future seeds.

I assume that you're talking about the ratio of total input energy to weight. The ratio of output energy - i.e. what you get out of eating it - goes the other way around, with plants being the worst performers.

Cows are big so it makes sense that if you kill one you'll be sitting pretty until the meat starts to rot. What doesn't make sense is that the cows just let you walk up and kill them. They should move away as soon as they see you or catch your scent. And if you do manage to get that first javelin into them they should head for the hills like a bat out of hell. None of this running around in circles for five seconds. If we had to actually hunt animals to kill them, not only would that make growing crops a more attractive proposition, it would also make for a cool game mechanic in its own right.

I'm curious as to why you chose the letter 'F' to represent the water block in the middle of the field. EDIT: And note that water will hydrate soil up to 4 blocks away, so you can put a 9x9 field around each water block.

Since making the original post I've played two seeds in hostile (Hard) mode, to see what it would be like. The first time I found that I needed to mine a lot more ore than usual, to have enough for armour and weapons, which make things more interesting. But the second time I mostly slept the nights away so my only encounters with mobs were in underground caverns, which were easy to avoid. Having mobs around also forced me to build shelter. In Peaceful I'm often lazy and don't bother to build one since there's no reason to. So the presence of mobs did force me to up my game a bit in that regard, but I'm hoping that the body temperature mechanics that Bioxx and Dunk have talked about will do the same thing without the need for mobs.

While building a transoceanic causeway I happened upon an archiplego of six small islands, ranging in size between 100 and 1,000 square meters, and situated well out of site of any other land. I wondered what it would be like to spawn in such a place, whether survival would even be possible. So I topped up my food bar to simulate a fresh spawn, threw everything I'd brought with me into a chest, and proceded to give it a go. My first task was to harvest all of the stones and long grass on the islands. The stones netted me zero nuggets of ore: not a good sign for the success of my endeavour. The grass haul turned out much better. I got seeds for beans and maize and, even better, 3 ripe green peppers, 2 unripe green peppers and 3 ripe wheat. I left the unripe peppers in place to ripen. Without metal I would not be able to create a chisel, which meant no smooth stone blocks, which meant no quern base, which meant no flour. So instead I created a stone knife, converted the ripe wheat into wheat grain, and then ate it. It only boosted my hunger bar by a couple of pixels. :-( Nowhere on any of the islands did I see any animals, which pretty much doomed my chances of survival. Nonetheless, I planted the seeds that I'd found and then waited, mostly trying to conserve my energy but occasionally doing the rounds of the six islands to harvest any new long grass which had sprouted. The three ripe peppers I'd found kept me alive long enough for the remaining two to ripen, and those kept me alive long enough to see some of my crops get to their second stage of growth, but without animals I never stood a chance. I don't know how big a land mass has to be for there to be a chance of animals spawning on it, but clearly 1,0000 square meters is not big enough. So what changes to TFC would be required to make island survival possible? My biggest problem was the lack of quickly harvestable food. You could fix that by increasing the odds of animals spawning on small areas of land, but it actually makes sense that they don't, and in any case that would then make survival too easy. Some better ideas that I came up with were: There were plenty of squid in the surrounding ocean. If squid dropped fish when killed that would do the trick.Sugar cane was available on a couple of the islands. Sugar cane grows fast enough that if sugar was edible then you should be able to plant and harvest enough to keep you alive.Sugar cane is very fibrous, so another possibility would be to have a way of making string from it. That would let you make a fishing rod and then fish for your food supply.My second problem was the lack of surface ore. However, in terms of pure survival I don't think that's too important. It's not impossible to mine rock with your bare hands, it just takes a really long time. More importantly, once your food supply is secure, you can swim to the horizon looking for larger land masses. So one way or another you can eventually get metal, you just have to be patient.

I was watching a TFC video recently and saw someone harvest bell peppers with a right-click, which left the plant intact and capable of producing more. I didn't know you could do that! Had I known during my island experiment I might have been able to harvest more peppers than I did. I doubt that it would have changed the end result, but I might have at least lived a bit longer.

It looks like there have been no new approvals since November. I'm guessing that means that the admins have been busy with other stuff. Or perhaps the rest of us have simply been deemed unworthy. :-O

That's a misquote of James Nicholl, if I'm not mistaken.

That's just so wrong. No language should be allowed to that. All the other languages should refuse to talk to English until it cleans up its act.

I think it would be cool if the wiki wasn't needed at all. That would require that everything be discoverable through some combination of exploration, reasoning and (not too much) luck. Unfortunately, that would be a ton of work, so instead we end up with a large set of things which are difficult-to-impossible to discover for yourself (e.g. that you need plans in order to smith metal tools) and which must therefore be documented in the wiki.

I've played TFC with about 8 different seeds now and my most recent one is the first where I couldn't find enough tier 1 surface ore near my spawn point to build a pickaxe and propick. I found lots of copper, but only 3 sphalerite and 5 cassiterite. I explored the rest of the small continent that I was on but didn't improve much on my tally of ore. Eventually I found richer pickings a couple of kilometers to the east and set up my base there. It wasn't until just this evening that it occurred to me that I could have used sluices to get the rest of the ore that I needed. I've never had to use sluices before since surface ore has always been plentiful. So I decided to go back to my spawn point and see how sluicing would have worked out for me. Using four sluices and feeding them nothing but gravel it took three game days to gather up the 30 small sphalerite I needed for a pickaxe and propick. That's a bit faster than the five days it took me to find to find enough ore through exploration. Mind you, the place I did eventually find had clay and willows nearby, which my spawn point did not, and during my exploration I found a massive peat deposit, which always comes in handy at the start, so I think I'm better off for having gone off adventuring. Still, I'll have to keep sluices in mind the next time I'm having trouble finding enough surface ore for my first pick.

If I haven't found gabbro by the time I've hit steel, then I often don't bother to go any further and just start a new seed. Happens maybe a quarter of the time.