mayaknife

I've just now turned off enableBetterGrass and enableInnerGrassFix and those *seem* to help a lot - I'll have to play longer to be sure. But it currently seems that I'm able to go back up to Far Render Distance and the game remains playable although all movement stutters a little bit.

I'm having terrible lag problems as well. I think it's graphics lag because it occurs too frequently to be chunk loading. I'm not using optifine or any other plugins except Forge, Player API and TFC Build 76 HF 11. I have all the correct versions of everything and have gone through a full reinstall. I do get the following on startup, though, so maybe I've done something wrong despite my best efforts:

[sEVERE] [ForgeModLoader] FML appears to be missing any signature data. This is not a good thing

I normally play with Render Distance set to Far but that has become unusable. Turning it down to Normal made TFC playable but still annoying. Turning off sound & music helped a bit, but not much.

I've just now turned off enableBetterGrass and enableInnerGrassFix and those *seem* to help a lot - I'll have to play longer to be sure. But it currently seems that I'm able to go back up to Far Render Distance and the game remains playable although all movement stutters a little bit.

I'm running Fedora 14 Linux, Quadro FX 1800 graphics, dual 2.7GHz Intel Xeon hex core cpu.

I don't have the lag problem in vanilla MC 1.5.1, nor do I have it in TFC build 75.

For me fear, in a game at least, involves an element of the unknown, the unexpected. For example, I'm walking along with my hunger bar empty and down to my last health point. I'm searching desperately for some food but I'm in the middle of a frickin' desert and there's nothing. I can see the time running down. C'mon...c'mon...there's got to be *something*! That's scary. Then the sand suddenly gives way beneath me and I'm falling. That's *really* scary. But it's a long fall and I look down to see that there's no water below me. Now I'm not scared any more because I know that I'm going to die and there's nothing I can do about it, no suspense. My state of mind is more, "Aw crap, I'm gonna have a helluva a time getting back to my equipment before it times out".

So something unexpected, or a dangerous situation where the possibility of death (or other significant loss) is high, but there's still a chance of winning through.

With a little adaption of your playstyle, you can eliminate some of the minuses. For example, there's no reason why you should encounter any mobs while farming even on hard difficulty. All you need to do is find an easily defensible location and light it up with torches all over.

That's part of what I meant by the additional hassle involved. Not really worth it given the limited utility of farming in the game. Now if food were a lot harder to come by than it currently is, then that would make things more interesting. I'd be forced to either farm or spend a lot of time hunting.

I installed a simple 2-high cobblestone wall where the peninsula connects to the mainland, so nothing other than spiders can accidentally wander in.

Make it 3-high with a one block overhang on the outside and even the spiders won't get it.

With a base like that, you can feel completely safe regardless of your game's difficulty setting, and you can engage in any of the activities you enjoy.

Sure, but then why are you playing in Hostile mode? You've basically turned it into a Peaceful game.

Dunk said he will move skeleton, zombies and creeper to the underground and let wild animal attack you on the surface. You will most likely be able to live in a open area without much fear to be attacked.

That would be nice, so long as it doesn't get out of hand. I find the hostile mobs to be a bit of a kludge and would prefer to have something more in keeping with the rest of the game. Wild animal attacks would fit the bill nicely.

I've mentioned a couple of times that I almost always play MC in Peaceful mode. I find that the mobs mostly just get in the way of more interesting activities, such as exploration, mining, construction and climbing the tech tree, and the combat system is not terribly entertaining in its own right. But is the same true for TFC? To find out, I decided to play a game in Hard mode.

In vanilla MC the mobs are at most a problem for my first night. After that I generally have secure shelter and iron armour and weapons which effectively render me invulnerable, so long as I don't do anything stupid. In TFC it took me three game days before I felt reasonably secure. It takes a lot longer to get to iron in TFC so I had to make do with bronze armour and weapons for quite a while, which in turn made me focus more on securing my home.

In Peaceful mode I usually explore fairly widely, digging test shafts whenever the surface rock type changes. In Hostile mode I did very little exploration. Once I got my copper anvil I turned into a mole. I dug a network of tunnels beneath my home and only went out on the surface occasionally, to make charcoal and collect food.

Farming isn't particularly useful in TFC because animals are a much more readily available food source. Still, when playing in Peaceful I usually do plant and harvest crops simply for the fun of it. In Hostile mode it wasn't worth the hassle of dealing with the mobs so the only farming I did was to plant a banana tree and some sugar cane beside my house for easier access.

I thought that the prospect of combat might be sufficient incentive for me to get more heavily into the meal system. However the mobs are so easily dispatched using standard weapons and armour that I never felt the need for any of the buffs that meals might give me and I ended up not touching meals at all.

One place where the presence of mobs did make things more interesting was in mining. My primary garnierite deposit extended into a large cavern and it took me multiple forays to conquer enough of the cavern to allow me to mine the ore. I died four or five times, mostly because I kept forgetting to keep an eye on my health. It's nice that it only takes two swings of a steel sword to kill a creeper. :-)

To summarize, on the plus side Hostile mode made the first three nights more challenging, added a bit of excitement to mining, and made me rethink some of the strategies I'd been employing in Peaceful mode. (It also made me build a home, which I don't normally do in Peaceful, but adding a decent body temperature mechanism to the game would achieve the same thing in a more natural and elegant way.) On the minus side I did almost no exploration and didn't do any farming, both of which are activities which I enjoy. So while it was a nice change of pace, I'll probably continue to play in Peaceful most of the time.

What are you guys going on about? Either stay on topic or don't post something.

But...but...I haven't managed to get the last word in yet!

Yeah I'm aware of the rendering update that's coming and i dread it with every fiber of my being. Having to fix all this crap once is enough. That said, obviously these changes are needed, and in the long term I'm happy to see them.

It'll be nice when (if?) Mojang finishes the API for minecraft. That won't eliminate all of these sorts of update problems, but it should get rid of a lot of them.

I was correcting the grammar.

Since we're into correcting, you were correcting Dunk's word choice, not his grammar. His sentence was grammatically correct, it just conveyed the incorrect meaning.

I don't know why, but i sense some reproof in your reply, if so chill out, we're all here trying to help.. it is not necessary to act like this, if not i can't understand the way you replied like this

And I don't know why you sensed any reproof in halfmaster1's reply. :-)

IIRC, the guy who posted stats on ore distribution did do it by deleting rock blocks in creative, and a good answer to aria230's original question is to use the Too Many Items mod. It seems to me that halfmaster1 was being quite helpful.

Omicron, you literally made me LOL with that image.

I can't imagine playing on peaceful tho, minecraft is easy enough with monsters

To me the mobs in Minecraft are like having someone slap at your hands while playing Jenga. Yes, it makes the game harder, but not more enjoyable, just more annoying.

If I want to kill things there are a raft of games out there with much better combat systems than MC.

In such a case I would probably make an inventory ful of javelins and spend the nights hunting for spiders.

I neglected to mention that I play on Peaceful, so hunting mobs is not an option.

Basalt? I've found nickel but no gold!

Garnierite (nickel ore) doesn't spawn in basalt. It only spawns in gabbro.

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.

According to the wiki gold can be found in andesite, basalt, dacite, diorite, gabbro, granite and rhyolite. I've driven dozens of kilometers of tunnels through gabbro while searching for garnierite and never once encountered any gold. So if there's gold in gabbro either it is exceedingly rare or I am exceedingly unlucky.

I seem to recall finding gold in granite once. All of the rest of my gold finds have been in basalt, and that included a couple of "very large" deposits which provided me with more than enough gold for the entire game. So now, if I'm looking for gold, I go for basalt below 70.

The most likely problem is that your fire simply isn't hot enough. Different kinds of wood burn at different temperatures. What kind of wood are you using in your firepit?

Also, do you have a clay mold in one of the slots beneath the fire? You need one there to catch the tin when it melts.

I record with Dunk semi-regularly, and he is indeed still working on TFC1

Or, alternatively, I'd concentrate on those areas which interested me the most and to hell with everyone else. :-)

Is there a reason why you want to improve the prospecting ability? In my experience, the current pro-pick is already VERY accurate (only 40% false negatives) and dead easy to use. If you're looking to upgrade it, it's far more likely that you are not using it correctly.

Hey guys, as mentioned all over the place TFC2 is not the next version of TFC1 therefore this post which talks about nothing but how to fix the perceived grind in TFC1 has been moved to those forums.

you think its a challenge in the beginning on peaceful? when you are hiding out at night it becomes more intense

You know, you coulda just asked if higher tiers produced better results instead of experimenting.

But since you're in a question answering mood, are there any meals which improve prospecting ability?

I think the only way to really get rid of the grind is for there to be tougher enemies on the way up, so you do not easily overpower them.

I love playing TFC1, up until I get to steel. At that point my love drains away and turns to annoyance, all because of The Grind. You've almost certainly experienced it yourself. To advance to the next tier you need nickel, or gold, or maybe silver, but you haven't found any yet. So you travel around your world, sinking test shafts, digging kilometers-long tunnels, hoping you'll get lucky and find what you need. TFC is supposed to be difficult and challenging, but The Grind is simply tedious and boring. I've found myself dozing off during The Grind too many times to count (though I think it was 5 times tonight...so far).

So what can be done about it?

The first thing is to abandon the link between higher tier ores and depth. There's no reason why a nickel deposit shouldn't occur on or near the surface. Surface deposits might be smaller and rarer than deep deposits, due to weathering, but it should still be possible to find them. Our ancestors did not get out of the Stone Age by digging deep shafts at random until they lucked upon ore. They got out by making use of surface deposits.

The second, more important change, is to add an element of skill to the finding of ores and the specific rock types in which they reside. To do that requires providing clues on the surface which hint at what lies below.

One approach would be to provide stones from the lower rock layers. For example 80% of the stones on the surface might come from the top layer, 15% from the second layer, and 5% from the third. This has the virtue of being simple and easy to implement, but it lacks subtlety and isn't terribly challenging for the player.

A better approach would be to abandon the more-or-less strictly horizontal layering of rock types. Instead, allow for folds and upward bends. For example, a deep layer of gabbro might bend upward and break through the surface as a relatively narrow band of rock. A skilled player could recognize the narrow band as potentially being part of a deeper layer and start mining down through it to see where it goes. It would be particularly cool to link part of the world bulding algorithm with this. For example, where a layer of rock thrusts upward a mountain is more likely to form.

In the real world cliff and ravine faces are rich sources of hints to geologists about the surrounding geology. In TFC1 they tell you very little, primarily because the rock layers are so thick that the entire face is composed of a single rock type. If rock layers varied in their thicknesses, right down to as small as a couple of meters high, then cliff and ravine faces would be capable of exposing multiple layers, again providing a hint to the skillful player as to what might lie below. They would also look a whole lot cooler.

Lots of other hints are possible. Volcanoes and lava pools could be surrounded by small quantities of rocks and minerals brought up from deep below the surface. Specific types of vegetation might be associated with specific minerals. A sudden absence of all but the hardiest of plants might indicate poisoning from the leaching of heavy metals beneath the surface. And so on.

Whatever the methods of hinting, the goal should be provide a way for players to learn things about the world which improve their chances of finding the resources they need, thereby eliminating, or at least greatly reducing, The Grind.

I definitely see what you're saying, it's just frustrating as TFC1 never really came full circle, and now we have to wait as the whole thing is redone from scratch It will also be quite a while before TFC2 is at the same level of development as TFC1 is now.

If it's frustrating for us imagine how frustrating it must be for Bioxx, who has to start from scratch to get it the way he wants it, or Dunk, who's gonna have to learn a new codebase.