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DonutGlaze

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Everything posted by DonutGlaze

  1. Cooking with TFC (WIP)

    It sounds like you've already got a lot of it finished by now. I'm not trying to prompt a full rewrite with this post, but these are some things that feel missing from the sort of ancient setting that TFC aims for: Sugar preservation (candied fruits, mincemeat, marmalades/jams with quince pectin) with multiple sugar sources like beets, honey, or agave. Historically, sugar juice would be repeatedly boiled and then dried into jaggery or sugarloaves, which had to be broken up with special pliers called sugar nips (ever got frustrated with a bag of brown sugar? Imagine if that were the default state).Fat/Oil preservation (canning veggies in oil, jugging/confit for meats) with some kind of oil press or fat rending process. Butter/ghee could be included in this category. Could work with other TFC add-ons that provide candles and oil lamps. An oil press would be necessary which might be out of the scope of this mod.Gelatin preservation using boiled bones/hooves or agar algae (which interestingly takes on the flavor of whatever you add to it) as an alternative to fats. Can be used to make aspic for meats or fruit jellies.Salami found its way into several ancient cultures for its longevity. Generally meat and fat are minced (and not ground because meatgrinders are machined, which wasn't available til the 19th century), soaked in wine/spices, stuffed in a casing, cured (a process TFC has down pretty well) and allowed to grow penicillin in a cool dry place. Note that salami without nitrates typically turns brown from oxidation, similar to jerky.Speaking of which, maybe add jerky, pemmican, and/or akutaq as survival foods.Fish eggs/roe as an occasional bonus for catching fish. They sort of taste like salty smoked salmon, even when uncooked.Cheeses with varying hardness, with harder cheese requiring more milk and a more stable environment to properly age. Aged cheeses last significantly longer than soft cheeses. Adding beeswax or growing specific molds on the wheel can add more longevity.I find it odd that grain is hand cut in TFC instead of being threshed. All you really need is a stone floor.Wind/Watermills with grindstones would be nice upgrade from the quern, but possibly out of the scope of this mod.Rice and oats behave differently from other grains and will not form a fluffy air-filled dough without egg, tapioca, and/or gelatin added (even then it will tend to want to be a pudding). Rice more readily forms thin paper or glassy noodles (even where rice is grown, wheat flour is used for steamed buns and breads). Oats tend to form oatcake which is more like a cracker unless added to grains containing more gluten.Maize will not form a fluffy bread without bicarbonate minerals. Even then, eating plain cornmeal will result in malnutrition because the vitamins and amino acids are locked away in the kernel. Native Americans used a process called nixtamalization: soaking dried grains in lime(stone) and ash to bring out the essential nutrients and bleach the kernels white. Once ground, this becomes masa, which behaves similarly to rice flour. You can form tortillas and pupusas (basically tortillas with filling, apparently also made from rice) through frying. It still doesn't readily form bread and tends to be a bit brittle (I always find it difficult to keep them from being crumbly).Pastry dough can be used for pies if you don't want to go through the leavening process. Pies are sometimes considered the "fast food" of the medieval world and could share a construction process with pupusas. Occasionally pastry dough was used to wrap meat so that the fat/juice is held in during cooking.Pasta was originally a luxury item until the difficult kneading process was mechanized in the 18th century. Because it lasts longer than bread and tastes better than hardtack, it became rather popular and was widely manufactured. Early sauces tended to be made with butter, cream, eggs, oil, and seafood before the introduction of tomatoes. It might be helpful to note that forks might have been popularized by pasta eating, showing themselves to be much more convenient than a singular stick.The fact that players can bake leavened bread without a sourdough starter is also an oddity. Long before baker's yeasts were cultivated from beer/wine yeasts, only sourdough starters were available. It's like a pet that you have to feed every day with fresh flour to keep it alive. The bit of old flour from the previous day would then be used as the sponge for baking.Unleavened flatbreads would make simple beginner breads (ex: rotis, thin-crust pizza, pancakes). Yeast-leavened flatbreads (ex: naan/pita, focaccia, frybread) would make a good intermediary to the more complex leavened boules (ohmygodsopretty).Some historic devices: Dutch Ovens and Tajine are reusable pots that can be used to both boil and bake in the coals of a fire. Could be used for stone-age cooking in the fire pit.Often, frying pans meant to be used over fires had legs and were called spider pans (Spider pan...spider pan...does whatever a spider can) so that they didn't sit directly on the coals. Pans without legs usually fit airtight over a stovetop to keep smoke directed toward the chimney at the back. Could be made with clay but metals were preferred.Clay stoves tend to be a simple hole in the earth with afore-mentioned cookware-sized holes over the fire, allowing for higher temperatures and longer lasting fires from branches and twigs.Charcoal stoves which can reach high temperatures with a little fuel due to insulation. Examples: shichirin, hibachi, and tandoor.A hearth, regardless of material, is really just a well-constructed firepit, yet still manages to be extremely inefficient with both energy and space unless completely enclosed or using the Rumford design. They were eventually replaced by the franklin stove (designed by Benjamin Franklin) with later designs being completely closed to keep smoke out. The cast iron stoves we're more familiar with tended to not appear until the 19th century. I always found the firepit texture to be ugly, anyway, so any work there is appreciated.Spoons date back to the bronze age, as do chopsticks (I personally like how they can be used for any dish and can even cut soft meat if you know how to do it). Forks didn't enter the scene until the 12th century in Europe. Generally these were seen as highly personal items kept in travel boxes, and would be used even when eating in someone else's home. Until industry ramped up in the 19th century, most people ate with their fingers to avoid the expense.Glass should probably be difficult/expensive to make in your glassblowing process if it isn't already, as it was considered a luxury item for most of its history. Wood and ceramics were common among the lower classes (unless it was porcelain or lacquer because fanceh). Metal objects tended to depend on the quality of the metal itself.Take these with a grain of salt if they don't align with your design ideals. It's just super long to be informative, so pick up or throw out whatever you want. Hope your mod is popular when you finish it!
  2. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byx0EV07W-L2NzVYTHhRRExkYXM/view?usp=sharing This config file enables the majority of wood blocks to be used in Archimedes' Ships. It's surprisingly robust with TFC and hasn't crashed for me. Containers should keep their items, and rails will continue to work as normal when the ship decompiles. Minecarts, however, will fall through when it compiles so be careful to put them back on land before you shove off. Also, due to the nature of the mod, you can't use wooden docks without disconnecting them from the ship before you compile it. Take care or you'll end up ripping your dock out of the landscape. I personally use stone so there's no issue. Note: You'll need Minetweaker or something similar to get the recipe for the Helm. If there's demand I can work on a standalone file.
  3. An Idea

    Most posts in this thread are a year old and possibly irrelevant now. I necro'd it to try and stay within forum rules. I'm not sure how the game stores "known recipes," but achievements have been suggested as one method. Similarly, I would prefer to keep the current system in place but find some method of decreasing reliance on the wiki and external resources. I already mentioned an NEI-esque system in my post and I'm trying to think on how to get players to tinker with crafting recipes instead of just looking them up. I think using reference is what you should do after you've learned something yourself or interacted with another player in SMP. Problem is that the game doesn't enable that style of play.
  4. An Idea

    I've only played the most recent version. What exactly made it less fun? I feel like it would be the same amount of tedium regardless if you memorize it or if it's presented for you. The presentation just eases your memory. Could it be timed to make it more like a rhythm game, or would that make it worse? Edit: For clarity I never wanted to remove the current system, but add to it. So that at the point when you've memorized how to line up the arrows, you can have the blueprints remember it for you.
  5. Stoning your blade

    Sharpening a blade actually does lower it's durability in the long term (think about it, you're shaving off material. The more you shave off the less knife you have left over). But you're on the mark in saying speed/efficiency is more relevant here than durability.
  6. An Idea

    This post was actually inspired by this thread, but I thought it would better fit here, so I removed my earlier post to better format it. Something I've never liked about Minecraft recipes is that the player is often forced to rely on wikis and external sources to get anything done. The actual act of creation isn't a game mechanic, it's an exercise in reference until people memorize them. The posts above think about knowledge too much as an rpg mechanic without thinking about actual cognition. Animals, particularly primates, use heuristics to organize phenomena, associations, responses, and behavior. So we have a macaque who has never seen sweet potatoes in her life. She sees that her elders are functionally fixed, using their hands to scrape dirt from the potatoes. But her first association with all this dirt is that water cleans. Her mental instruction set automatically associated dirtiness with water, so she takes it to the stream and washes it. A few generations later, you have entire colonies of macaques washing potatoes in the ocean to make them salty like french fries. In anthropology this sort of discovery and spread of behaviors is seen all over the place. Apes have very vivid and complex imaginations. But only a minority will be in the exact right circumstance to perform a new task with existing heuristics (everyone else just follows along making exact copies). In Minecraft we need to take a thousand year long cultural phenomena and have individuals grasp it within a few hours. This is where I was inspired by the Discovery system in Guild Wars 2. When you put an item in the crafting area, the UI greys out basically everything that cannot be used in a recipe with it. Removing unrelated visual data will help the player focus on the available combinations and the task at hand. This is like our little macaque making her cleanliness association in the previous anecdote, but we're forcing it to happen much much faster. This is particularly useful when the game's dictionary contains hundreds of items. Without training, most people are able to keep about seven concepts in working memory. So when a player is confronted with a new task, you will want them to have fewer than seven available options to pursue. Here's a simplified example of what the GW2 discovery mechanic might look like in TFC: Once the player already knows the recipe for an item, they might be able to make a blueprint or add it to a recipe book (others here have suggested tracking with achievements or crafting skill level). As it is, a lot of people use NEI or rely heavily on the wiki anyway, so I see it as less cheaty than external resources. This system just gives hints most of the time, so until you already know the solution and have access to paper, the actual crafting recipe won't become part of the UI (also, as suggested in the Paper thread: give access to parchment or cuneiform tablets if there are no reeds nearby. Originally I wanted this idea to give more uses and complexity to Written Books, and Bookshelves so that they have purpose). This is how I imagine the discovery system might look for knapping (the black dots represent clicks): Blueprints could also be integrated into ceramics and leather working recipes (but not knapping because writing is bronze age+). A new blueprint slot would automatically grey out all unnecessary portions of the grid. A blueprint slot in the anvil: If an empty blueprint is added to the anvil, then any a smithing Technique used afterward will be recorded until an item is produced. Then, when that blueprint is used again, it will display the order of techniques made when it was created (very similar to the current "rules" but they scroll out of view once you complete them. Think of it like Dance Dance Revolution). This way you can practice lining up the arrows, and once you get good enough you can record your perfect technique to blueprints. Now you no longer need to memorize your technique order. As for actual block structures perhaps give tooltips or an error message in chat, like: "The Blast Furnace needs something to draw air upward" and "The Blast Furnace would cause these bricks to crack!" Things like that might give the player a better feel of what to do than just having the block be handed back to them. ==== It's a big read, and I know you guys are restructuring TFC2 right now. But most of this suggestion appears to use resources which are already part of TFC and mostly involves tweaking the interface. Ideally I'd like to see more useful books/paper products as a long-term goal but this feels more important and useful at the moment.
  7. Make Horses less pointless and cooler

    I like to think a less whimsical version of Simply Horses would fit well in the way TFC currently works. It's not overly complex with breeding like Mo Creatures, gives a purpose other than speed, and the taming/equipment balance out the improvements they provide (at least by vanilla standards, the suggested specialized carpentry would fit TFC more). Avi stopped developing several versions ago, so it's probably safe to draw inspiration from it. I haven't seen a decent land-transport mod like it since. The only real issue I see with it is that the horse instantly becomes a breed when attached with its breed equipment. I prefer Dunkle's idea where the stats could trend in one of three directions based on breeding: Workhorse (high strength), Racehorse (high speed), and Warhorse (high health/def) would probably be enough to cover all the bases. Any larger number of breeds would just be fluff. As Allen mentioned: speed, road requirements and animal upkeep would probably keep things in balance. But if larger wagon types feel overpowered, a config option could be added which makes the player more easily overburdened to compensate (an option since many people like having all that space). We have quite a lot of storage options, so I feel that sort of rebalancing would force us to plan out caches, road design, and placement of mansio on travel routes; as well as make minecarts an actual requirement in large-scale mining. I imagine that this would incidentally increase the importance of trade in multiplayer servers, since it would be harder to make/move large amounts of things by yourself. This sort of overlaps with this thread, but the two seem to go together. I sincerely don't know if you can separate more stringent overburdening from large transport without unbalancing the game to be either too hard or too easy. That would obviously be up to your judgement and playtesting whenever you get around to such a feature.
  8. Storage for big blocks

    I like the idea of using livestock-drawn carts and minecarts to move heavy/large numbers of items. If more transportation methods are ever made available, they could make limited player inventories a config option.
  9. Paper

    Something I noticed was never mentioned here: Blueprints are made of paper. And they seem to be very important items to anyone who uses chisels. Edit: I had a much larger post but moved it here to try and stay within forum rules. It does involve paper as a major element and so would give more excuses to improve paper/parchment/clay tablet crafting.