Andeerz

Another necro... but this is also something that has bothered me. And I think I have a solution that will satisfy everyone and make the balance in the game more nuanced. The drawback to my suggestion is that it would require mechanisms as suggested in this thread (which would be awesome!!!). But first, I'd like to clarify some things which are relevant to the design of my suggestion which will be spoilered for the sake of keeping things sane... First off, let's understand something about some of the advantages bronze has over iron IRL. Bronze's constituents require a MUCH lower melting temperature and can be isolated from slag much easier than iron can from their respective ores. Bronze could be easily cast into stong, durable tools, which facilitated quicker and (less relevant to the game) larger scale production. Iron required a lot more work (and in some aspects, more resources) to be made into a useful tool for the most part. It is NOT necessarily true that bronze was superior to wrought iron, especially in cases where steel or case-hardened iron things were made as part of the forging of the wrought iron into things. There is good evidence to suggest that ancient and medieval peoples in Western Europe were well aware that iron could be melted in the bloomery, but the issue is that if you do this you get pig iron. Pig iron is MUCH inferior to bronze as a tool metal and in many cases is comparatively useless (and is sure as hell useless for weapons). The Chinese smelted iron into pig iron using blast furnaces to melt iron very long ago and used it at the same time they used bronze. And they did indeed make pig iron implements, presumably where the inferior quality of pig iron over other metals may have not been an issue. Pig iron was used to get wrought iron or similar through separate processes of decarburization. There were at least two methods, with one yielding malleable forms of cast iron that could be re-melted and cast, or forged. This was basically cooking whatever cast pig iron (including cast tool heads or whatever) under oxidizing conditions (i.e. exposed to air) for a long time (several days) until it wasn't brittle anymore. There were differences in length of time of heating and cooling and stuff... but that is beyond the scope of this post. The other involved re-smelting the pig iron and working it with a hammer to yield wrought iron, which would then need to be carburized through forging OR could be melted together with pig iron at a kind of blast furnace to get liquid steel which could be cast at least into ingots. So, why even bother with pig iron? One big one is if you don't have as cheap of access to bronze. That was mentioned in a previous post. ALSO, from my understanding, another reason to bother is if you are getting a LOT of iron ore (which required the kind of political cohesion and economic infrastructure you saw in China at the time... which is part of the reason why they bothered with blast furnaces). With the blast furnace it can be economically advantageous to make large amounts of pig iron instead of having to rely on comparatively small-batch bloomery processes to get workable wrought iron. Just take this pig iron from this large-scale production and decarburize it. Plus, you can cast pig iron much like you cast bronze. ALSO, you can re-meilt the pig iron alongside wrought iron and, if you are able to keep the temperature high enough for long enough, you can actually get steel from this, which can be cast at least into ingots if not implements. Also, it is worth noting some cultures may have skipped the use of bronze altogether, independently discovering the use of iron and inventing bloomery processes without ever making bronze (as far as we can tell). ANYWAY, on to the suggestion!!! If you look at the designs of blast furnaces and bloomeries (and cupola furnaces which I will consider just another blast furnace), they are essentially the same darned thing. Both require tuyeres for air to be forced in (though for bloomeries, it didn't have to be at the bottom... but some did), both ideally use charcoal as their fuel and carbon source (if we are talking about period furnaces), and both have collection of something molten at the bottom. The biggest difference between the two is temperature. I suggest the following: Do away with the distinction between bloomery and blast furnace blocks. Just have one block called a furnace block. Do away with the metal requirements altogether for this furnace block. Replace with fire clay bricks or appropriate stone as an alternative. Incorporate the tuyere in the recipe. Do away with the metal requirements for the tuyere. It should be able to be made at least out of fire clay, if not also stone. Do away with the restriction of metals that can be smelted within the furnace. Furnaces could also be used as higher-capacity kilns for making bronze and copper alloys... and perhaps casting things into larger molds in the future of the game's development? Replace the pig iron ingot -> high-carbon steel ingot anvil working recipe with pig iron ingot -> wrought iron ingot Have a new kind of iron called "cast iron"... how to make this will be detailed below... The bloomery would essentially be built just like the blast furnace including bellows, but can have the crucible omitted from the bottom. In fact, there would be no distinction between a bloomery and a blast furnace for the purposes of coding. The only thing that will determine whether a blast furnace operates either as a bona fide blast furnace or a bloomery (with respect to iron) would be the temperature achieved during operation. With normal operation (single person powering the bellows intermittently), the blast furnace operates as a bloomery (with respect to iron), achieving bloomery temperatures. And it can make wrought iron as normal... but any crucible below the furnace block would collect slag (which could be a new thing in the game!) or nothing at all... To function as a blast furnace, the bellows should operate faster and for greater duration. In order to do so, the bellows should be linked to a mechanism of some sort that transfers power from something like a waterwheel or even a windmill. Alternatively, perhaps animal power or human power could be used attached to these mechanisms, but that is contingent on how mechanisms work. This makes sense since to get the temperature necessary for melting iron in a blast furnace, it requires a continuous and powerful blast of air. This would allow for:making and cast pig iron into ingots, toolheads, etc. which would be collected in the crucible or whatever receptacle below the furnace blockeither decarburizing pig iron toolheads, etc. to make them into useable (i.e. not breaking after few uses) cast iron toolheads etc.this would require heating the cast pig iron objects up at low heat (above 700 degrees C) for several days exposed to oxidizing conditions (basically having airflow over the heated item)this would yield items that are made of "cast iron"Re-smelting the pig iron and repeatedy hammering and heating the pig iron into wrought ironthis would be an alternate way to get wrought iron other than from an iron bloom...this would require hammering a pig iron ingot in the presence of a forge on an anvil to make a wrought-iron ingot... so, in other words, we would be doing away with the pig iron ingot -> high-carbon steel ingot recipe and replacing it with thisRe-melting the pig iron in the presence of wrought iron in the furnace would produce high-carbon steel which could be collected in the crucible and then later forged into whatever you wantthis would require heating the pig iron and wrought iron up at high heat for several days!!! This would require bellows to be powered continuously!!!The resulting steel could be cast into ingots OR into molds for tool heads and the like. Forging of steel ingots would be required for certain things, notably armour and swords which should not be able to be castMaking higher-tier metals using the same recipes as normal... but perhaps they could use longer times in the furnaceSo, here is how my suggestion would play out. With the exception of requiring bronze for furnace construction, things would be pretty much just the same up until you get to the point where you can make wrought iron. The time, effort, and huge amounts of fuel needed to make a "blast furnace" that operates like a bloomery and the requirement of forging to make anything out of wrought iron should be enough of a resource burden to make bronze preferable as a material to make stuff out of before using wrought iron. In fact, really, the game is already like that. The requirement of bronze to make a bloomery block as things are now is really not at all needed (realism aside). I can understand why it is like that, but I think it is superfluous (not to mention, the entire idea of progressing out of a "Casting Age" is absolutely ridiculous... Forging is always less desirable than casting if it can be avoided both in real life and in this game, especially if you could re-use the molds). Regardless of the requirement of bronze for a furnace block, I will preferably use bronze to make stuff most of the time since it takes a lot less work (provided I can easily enough get tin and copper) and fuel to cast stuff than forging. This is already a believable balance. The push for wrought iron and the use of a bloomery would come from warfare (or possibly resource availability...). Having a bloomery (blast furnace without mechanized bellows) is fine until you want higher tier alloys or want to make cast iron things instead of spending time forging. Progressing to anything past wrought iron would require either getting enough people and/or animals to continuously operate bellows for several hours or days at a time, or getting stuff set up for exploiting water or wind power to do the same. Not to mention, you would need to have a lot more charcoal and other resources to accomplish this. In this way I feel things would be more believable and would still maintain gameplay balance.

Regardless, with cubic chunks, it wouldn't be much of an issue to make height of super chunks configurable. :3 And, like what Balthazarlucien said, this thread is about how to improve the overall process of generating terrain.

Hmmm something is still off about the maximum height you claim one can survive. At least in that article, a height of 4,572 meters is the maximum altitude from sea level an average person can be at without passing out due to lack of atmospheric oxygen, with an absolute maximum of 7925 meters as the height anyone would die from suffocation. Would that not translate to 4,572 blocks and 7925 blocks respectively? That said, for what it is worth, I am a wimp and am at a town not too far above sea level, and I have been up to around 3000 meters above sea level without supplemental oxygen. I could DEFINITELY feel the lower concentration of oxygen and was fatigued as hell by the time I reached the peak of the mountain I was on, but I think anyone with decent physical fitness could exist nicely at 3072 meters (the maximum height you mentioned).Maximum depth... your calculation seems ok, but I wonder... Think about caves near the earth's surface; at least in the limestone caves I have been in, they are considerably cooler than room temperature if you go a little bit in them. even at the peak of summertime the temperature at the entrance can be around 15 to 16 degrees C. That could bump up the maximum depth, no?So I would change the calculation for a super chunk to at least 200 x 200 x 348 to account for at least the increased maximum height.

You mentioned cubic cunks. I imagine this would be compatible with your method terrain generation, which could allow for much greater altitudes than the pathetic max height of 256 blocks, no? It would be nice to have mountains even a tenth of the scale of real ones in this game...In any case, this is flippin' awesome and educational!

And here's to hoping it will be somehow compatible with TFC someday!

I would fit both pieces by adding additional slots for each body part. These slots can have any armour (flexible or rigid) of the appropriate body part placed in them. The only limitation is that you cannot have two "rigid" armours on the same body part. Chainmaille ought to be made out of bronze (EDIT: brass, NOT BRONZE) as well, as it was made of such material IRL. As for what it should be mounted on... I think that could be abstracted out. I am on the fence about this. In reality, if maille was used as the outermost protective garment without supplementary plates, there would be some thick cloth (normally not leather as far as I have read) garment underneath. By thick, I mean something like 7 layers of heavy weight linen or some other bast fiber fabric (stuffing doesn't help as much as additional layers when it comes to protecting against piercing!). Though, a thick garment wasn't necessarily used all the time, the protection offered by the combination of fabric and maille was synergistic, with modern destructive tests showing that they work much better together than alone... which is why I am on the fence. With plates put over chainmaille, the fabric garment underneath is often thinner, though over vital areas it still would have a few extra layers of fabric, or at least that is what I remember from my research a while back. Oh, there are also several extant written accounts of what has been interpreted as people wearing two layers of chainmaille as well, for what it is worth... which makes the idea of layering two maille items over the same body part in the game seem more believable. As for scale armour... this is tricky to justify as a separate armour in my opinion. Plus it depends what you mean by scale armour. There are quite a few period illustrations and at least one period monument depicting scale armour apparently serving the same role as chainmaille with what would have to be scale armour with small scales (as in, each scale roughly a cm wide or so). I guess it could be more protective, but I am not aware of anyone who has properly tested that. Two things are for sure: it wasn't used as much, and, since there are no extant examples of this kind of armour (as far as I am aware), we have little idea how it was constructed. So, how would we model this thing in the game? Perhaps we could justify it as an alternative to chainmaille by having it be a bit heavier and require more metal? And in order to make it, one would have to punch out scales from sheets and then sew them onto a cloth backing (unlike the piece you show above... which was put together with jump-rings which makes it ridiculously heavy for what it should be)? If you are talking about scale armour with scales any larger than the scales in the picture posted above, I would say that ought to function as a rigid piece. Ain't no way you are going to have any other armour sit over that practically.

This modpack is fantastic. <3 Thank you so much for doing this. This and TFC have given me a reason to play and enjoy Minecraft again!Also, I hope that one day implementation of cubic chunks (Tall Worlds Mod... once it becomes actually stable) becomes possible. Any idea as to if it ever will?

I have a suggestion that perhaps might fit better in another thread altogether, but I think it would represent adequately the reasons chainmaille was used as it was IRL, actually give chainmaille a believable reason to exist in this game, and enrich gameplay. This would require a bit of a rewrite of how armour works in general. And before any claims that this is off-topic, this has a LOT to do with chainmaille, though it applies equally to (soft) leather and cloth based armours should they ever make it in the game. I propose that each armour slot except for the feet (and hands if that ever becomes a thing) have two layers. I also propose that armour be categorized as either flexible or rigid. Either one armour slot can be occupied by a piece of armour, both occupied with one piece each of flexible armour, or one slot with a flexible piece and the other with a rigid piece. In addition, I sugges that rigid pieces not be able to prevent 100% of critical hits. This critical hit chance would reflect the inability of rigid pieces (generally) not being able to cover flexible areas. Flexible armour can be placed under or over rigid pieces to cover the places they (almost) never could effectively (i.e. the groin, inside of the elbows, back of the knee). As such, they would reduce this critical hit chance or eliminate it altogether if that is deemed appropriate for balancing reasons. Chainmaille would be the most protective variant of these flexible armours. Cloth (if that ever makes it in) and (soft) leather would also be considered flexible. The effects of armour would be additive (or maybe additive up to a point... or something else). Of course this would require some re-balancing. So, here we have what I think is a system that will give a believable reason to have chainmaille (along with other flexible armours). What do you think? Oh! And also, I suggest chainmaille be available as bronze (EDIT: brass) and wrought iron at the very least. Those two materials were definitely used for chainmaille. Perhaps they should have the following armour values if we are going with the current system: Bronze: piercing=400 slashing=600 crushing=200 Wrought iron: piercing=500 slasing=700 crushing=200 I am not entirely sure if IRL they actually had much of a difference in performance, but I think this ought to be cool for gameplay's sake. Additionally, if weight of the armour factors into anything ever with any sort of rewrite of how armour works... it would give an excuse for making maille voiders instead of full shirts/hauberks, chausses, etc. (which would be lighter, though less protective) for use with higher tier armours.

Of course! :)I just figured that it wouldn't hurt to point out how a more "realistic" portrayal of maille construction might look in the game. Though I think with chainmaille it likely won't ever be the case regardless of its implementation, having an idea of how to model stuff realistically can provide additional ways to balance something in believable, relatively non-arbitrary ways if it ever becomes needed. That seems to be how TFC does so with just about every facet of gameplay, no?

NECRO TIME!!!Just in case... you guys aware of Tall Worlds Mod? It has picked up where CC has left off, and it just recently released a (buggy as hell) beta version. :3

Overall, I love this suggestion, and I find that as it stands it is an adequate abstraction of what was likely done historically. Frikkin' A+! But, I have a few suggestions for the OP if there is any desire to get more realistic. Wire for maille was not generally made just by hammering stuff out. It was done using a drawplate. In short, from my understanding (and this is true for at least a few specimens of maille), the metal was made into a long sheet of about the right thickness, thin slices of the sheet were cut out, and these thin slices were then drawn through holes of the draw plate to get the metal to form wire of reasonably circular cross section and consistent guague. So, perhaps a drawplate might be something to add if we wish to go for realism. Then again, would this really add to gameplay? I think it could if there were more uses for wire. Also, if we want to REALLY get into realism, perhaps we ought to include rivets for riveting the maille rings shut, a drift (as one of the tool requirements) to make the slit the rivets go through in the rings, and the use of swaging tongs to set and squish the rivets during construction of the final piece. I think this would just add tedium, though... And... I think for gameplay reasons this is cool, but at least historically chainmaille would not have necessarily been cheaper than producing, say, plate armor. The amount of metal needed would have been easily as much as plates covering the same areas. Also, chainmaille is absolutely fantastic at defending against stabs and does pretty well defending against crushing blows, and it was made for deterring damage from those kinds of attacks as well! That said, yeah, plate maille does end up being better against stabs and crushing (and anything, really) if we hold weight equal for the given area protected and assume decent quality, case-hardened iron. But in Western Europe at least, plate was made to supplement maille rather than replace it (not that anyone here said otherwise). With better quality steel, plate did eventually replace maille for everything except for covering joints and other flexible areas... Also, like Xenolith166 says, the armour should have its own pro's and cons. Ideally, balance would be struck just by virtue of its real-life pros and cons, but even this detailed of a mod doesn't have the features necessary for this, I don't think... Sorry for the excessive information... this got me excited. EDIT: Chainmaille is not really all that protective against blunt force, at least not if it is sitting directly against something.