mayaknife

While I will fully grant that I end a lot of my sentences with "eh", I completely reject any notion that I say "aboot". I say "about", where the "bou" portion sounds like "bao", but shorter. I do notice that I clip the 't' at the end of "about" quite a bit such that it is almost completely lost, but that still doesn't give a "boo" sound.

Such a shame that Cuba Gooding's last name isn't Cubason.

There was no country named "Israel" when he was born. And The State of Israel takes its name, indirectly, from a nickname given to Jacob, whose descendants were subsequently known as "the children of Israel". So it was used as a person's name long before it became the name of a country. I particularly enjoyed "You, your girl, and your Johnson" at the end. Indeed.

I play on peaceful most of the time, only switching over to hostile if I'm starting to get bored. Haven't gotten bored in TFC yet. Charcoal collection was starting to get a bit tedious until someone told me about willows. Now if only I could figure out the recipe for the prospector's pick with the 50 block radius, then I'd be able to eliminate the tedium of branch mining as well. Hardship? TFC is a cakewalk. In TFC my house doesn't melt every time I jog up the thermostat!

"Millions of Swedes mourned the tragic ending of their beloved Vasaloppet and the name of 'Mora' has come to be seen as a byword for infamy and duplicity second only to that of Sture Bergwall."

When the full moon casts its light across a dew covered field, making it sparkle in the night like a wonderland, "Oh my god" would be an understandable reaction. When a plane crashes into a mountainside, killing all on board, "Oh my god" would be an understandable reaction. But for poor spelling in a forum post? Really?

That was unnecessary.

I can see that I've been playing this game all wrong. I'm not branch mining, I'm creating the Earth's vascular network, laying the foundations for a vast underground transportation grid which some future race of dwarves will marvel at and pay homage to the unknown deity who left it for them. I just hope they like olivine.

I found some kimberlite for the first time. The wiki shows it as dropping a mineral block, with a chance of diamond, but I've mined about ten blocks of the stuff now and gotten nothing at all: no minerals, no diamonds. Is it a bug?

I'm boring. Knap an axe, chop down some trees, build a hovel out of single-log logpiles. Or maybe dig a pit in the ground and cover it over with logpiles. Depends on the situation. Leave the game running through the night while I do something else, then gather up my logs the next morning and start heading home.

You should be able to do a pretty good simulation of convection using the same techniques as for global illumination.

If you're talking about the total amount of nickel to get to a blue steel tool, it's more than that. You need 14 black steel to create a black steel anvil. You need 4 more black steel to create 16 weak blue steel alloys (14 for the anvil, 2 for tools). Then you need another 15 black steel to weld with the weak blue steel to make 14 blue steel for the anvil and 1 for a tool. That's a total of 33 black steel. Each nickel gets you 4 black steel so you need a minimum of 9 nickel to get your first blue steel tool.I'd already found a small garnierite deposit which gave me 5 nickel (5.9 actually ), so I've got four more to go. I've resorted to branch mining any suitably deep gabbro deposits that I come across. So far this has turned up such valuable commodities as saltpeter, kimberlite and olivine, but alas no garnierite.

Right now I'd rather find some garnierite. I'm four ingots of nickel short of being able to create a blue steel forge. :-(

What kind of numbers are you talking about? Seeds?

I'm still on my first game of TFC (build 52e). In it I've had no trouble finding massive quantities of most ores quite close to my spawn point and I'm wondering if that was normal or if I've just gotten unusually lucky. For example, about 50m from my spawn point there is a hole in the ground which goes down to a huge cave system around level 90 which has a large vein of copper. Digging down from there I hit another large cavern system around level 40 which has a massive coal seam containing maybe 3,000 units of coal, plus a second, smaller seam of lignite which I haven't bothered to assay yet. That's basically all the coal I'll ever need in the game, right there. That same cavern system also has more cinnabar than I'll ever need, a nice vein with several hundred hematite, a small copper vein, and a fair bit of sphalerite. The caves back up on level 90 also connect to a ravine which takes me down to another set of caves on level 70 which have very large tetrahedrite, bismuthinite and cassiterite deposits, plus more copper. Back at my spawn point I dug straight down and hit a cavern system on level 75 with more copper and tetrahedrite, a small amount of galena, and a staggeringly huge deposit of many thousands of sphalerite ore. Actually, I seem to hit sphalerite everywhere I go. I have no idea what to do with it all. I now make all of my shovels and prospector picks out of zinc just to use some of it up. Digging further down from there I found another large deposit of bismuthinite, more galena, a tiny amount of gold and, naturally, more sphalerite. My hope for TFC had been that the hunt for minerals would force me to do a wider exploration of the world than is normally the case in Minecraft, however it seems that without straying more than a couple of hundreds of meters from my spawn point I've been able to find pretty much everything I could possibly need. I still haven't found any nickel or platinum, but the only thing holding me back from getting up to tier 6 is a bit more gold. Have I just been unusually lucky or is it usually this easy to find all the different ore types fairly close by?

I'm not much interested in fighting mobs, so I generally play on Peaceful. Unfortunately that means that I also don't get hungry which renders a big chunk of the game (agriculture, animals, etc) irrelevant. It would be great if there was an option to enable hunger in Peaceful mode. The ability to disable hostile mobs in non-Peaceful would also work, but IMO would make less sense.

Thanks for the tip. I now have maps!

It's -8775600805690909155. Have fun!

If there's to be permadeath it should be a configurable option. Not everyone who plays TFC also wants to play hardcore. And if someone is playing in single-player mode, who cares if they suicide to avoid hunger? They're only cheating themselves. I would like to see hunger have greater consequences than it currently does, though Losing all of your items when you die would be good. It might annoy the other players in a multiplayer world but screw them: TFC is meant to be more difficult than vanilla. Respawning at a new random point in the world would be pretty harsh, but interesting. A less brutal penalty would be to respawn somewhere within, say, 5000 blocks of your old spawn point. That would also reward players who had done enough exploration that they might recognize their new spawn point and know how to get home from there. I like anything which encourages more exploration. I also like the idea of making hunger itself sufficiently annoying that players will want to eat long before they get to the point of dying. Let's say that once you get down to half your hunger bars there's a tiny percentage chanceeach minute of passing out for a couple of seconds. The hungrier you get, the higher the chance of passing out. If you keep passing out while trying to mine blocks, that would be a pretty good motivation to go find some food.

Now I feel a bit silly for not thinking of using willows. I don't have any near where I've set up base, but I have come across a couple during my wanderings and they would indeed fit the bill.Thanx for the reminder!

Once you've figured out how to do it, charcoal making isn't challenging, it's merely tedious. A challenge presupposes that there is some skill to be mastered or some difficulty to be overcome. There's no skill or difficulty involved in walking from tree to tree and hacking it down, except perhaps the difficulty of not falling asleep while you do it.In a well wooded area with no sequoia and no attempt made to collect saplings or replant, it takes me 11 minutes of real time to collect the 29 log piles needed to build a charcoal pit which will yield about 150 charcoal. If I want to avoid raping the landscape then I need to collect and replant saplings which pushes the time needed up to about 25 minutes, even if I use a scythe. While that may be realistic/believable, it makes for poor game play. It's simply too much time of the player's time which has to be spent on an unchallenging, repetitive task. We need to get that down to just 3 or 4 minutes. So what can be done about it? Increasing the amount of charcoal you get from each log pile wouldn't change the amount of time required to collect the wood, but it would reduce the frequency with which you need to create charcoal pits. That would help a tiny bit, but not enough to be worth it.Reducing the amount of charcoal needed by the bloomery would have a similar effect. Again, the improvement would be small and not worth losing the beautiful symmetry and historical accuracy of the 1:1 ratio of charcoal to wood.Doubling the rate at which scythes give saplings could significantly reduce the time for replanting since you'd only have to scythe about a third of the trees before having enough saplings to replant them all. Again, that won't help with the time it takes to collect the wood, but it would improve gameplay for those of us who like to maintain healthy forests near our home bases.Assuming that each tree gives you, on average, 8 logs, that means you have to cut down 58 trees for a 29 pile charcoal pit. It takes about 4 seconds to fell a hickory tree with a bronze axe so just under 4 of the 11 minutes is spent chopping down the trees, with the remaining 7 being devoted to picking up the logs and walking between trees. If we were to double the speed of the axe that would shave two minutes off of wood collection. That's a good step in the right direction, but still not enough.We could introduce a new tool which fells a tree with a single blow, much as a scythe can shave off half of a tree's branches with a single blow. That could cut wood collection time down to 7 minutes. Again, good but not good enough. We need to somehow reduce the time spent picking up the logs and/or moving between trees.What about a tool which cuts down all the trees within a 10 block radius? That would probably do the trick, but you can kiss believability goodbye.What if trees gave more logs? A good example of this is the sequoia. I haven't found any sequoia in my game, so I can't go and measure it, but from watching someone else play it looks like you get around 8 times as much wood as from the average tree. That wouldn't exactly cut the collection time to 1/8th since you still have to pick up the logs, but it would probably cut it to around 1/6th meaning less than two minutes for wood collection. Now that's what I'm talking about! Unfortunately, sequoia do not give saplings and therefore cannot be replanted, so we would either have to enable saplings on sequoia or come up with a different tree which gives, say, 4 times as much wood as the average tree *and* provides saplings. That would bring the wood collection time down to 4 minutes, which is acceptable.What about a replacement for charcoal? Charcoal is used because the reduction of iron requires a very pure source of carbon, which most grades of coal cannot meet. However, if you convert the coal to coke, then you could use it in a bloomery. That would require a coking oven. Historically, coking ovens weren't developed until the 17th century, but the technology isn't terribly advanced and the coking of coal could have been done in a modified charcoal pit. It's much faster to mine coal than it is to chop down trees, so that would eliminate the bulk of the tedium associated with making fuel for bloomeries.Of those, my favourite is #7. Either have sequoias drop saplings at a sufficient rate for sustainable harvesting, or else add a type of tree which provides four times as much wood as the average hickory and drops saplings. Not only would it make charcoal production less tedious, but it would give yet another reason to go out and explore the world, looking for that magical tree.

There's another thread on here somewhere which discusses compasses. I think the simplest and most, dare I say it, *realistic* approach would be to do something with a piece of magnetite. Shouldn't require redstone at all. Maybe magnetite and a bucket of water.

The other thing I was wondering about was whether it's ever possible to find exposed veins of ore on the surface. I've found several in caverns and underground ravines, but so far I haven't seen any at all above ground. Does it never happen or is it just rare?

That will work! Any idea on when that change is coming?