Darmo

I guess my limited SMP background is that animals are communal town property, and its highly unlikely to have another town within sight of your own. The magic solution is definitely better. And if anyone can do anything then that's probably good enough. I was approaching it from the perspective of not everyone being a magic user.

It could actually be very worth the cost, depending on how hard it is to transport animals between islands. I think Stroam was also perhaps suggesting this in response to some server issues we were discussing in another thread, that being to in effect 'store' your animals if you're going to be gone a long time on an SMP server, to protect them from potential starvation or disease. I could also see freezing them in crystal, or dressing them up in fancy enchanted headdresses to ward off disease as lower tier methods perhaps (lower tier since they lack the carrying convenience).

I was thinking either filtering the sand (filters made of wool and/or burlap) or baking it in an oven. Borax perhaps grinding then baking, assuming it's higher tier than sand. Toss in acid washing etc as you go up in tiers. Nothing too complicated for low tier stuff. But the higher the tier, the more complicated, or rarer the constituent parts. I'm also a fan of having two ways to do things, with one being the standard hard way, and the other the easy but rare way. So for sand, maybe the standard way for all sands is to filter them in a time consuming process that uses up wool and jute. But if the player is lucky enough to find a quartzite island (if quartzite is still a stone type in TFC2), quartzite sand could just be instantly washed with a bucket of water, or mass-washed in a short time in a barrel to produce the flux, because quartz sand is extra-pure already. This provides a small sense of having 'gotten lucky' if you happen upon the special stuff.

They wouldn't count against a specific player. I'm suggesting that they be totaled over a large area, not just one chunk. If it was just a per-chunk check, then ya, it'd be really easy to game the system. Given that sluices scan a 201x201 area, I can't help but think it'd be possible for a disease check to scan a similar area. If the player wants to pen their animals hundreds of blocks apart to avoid it, fine, they're going to waste a ton of time running around between animals anyway. As for a floor, I was thinking it would work something like this: DISEASE SPREAD WITH A 'SAFE FLOOR' Now what I don't know, is how burdensome this becomes on a processor, each animal checking such a large area. Perhaps it would lessen the load if the mobs only actually perform this check every 6 game hours? Or what if the check resides on the player themselves, so the processing doesn't ramp up drastically with animal numbers? I don't know these things, but that basic framework was my general notion. And sure, maybe when magic comes into play, there's magical ways for players to safe-guard their animals. And in a server context people can purchase that safeguard from mages. It's certainly a possibility.

I certainly have. They would be a perfect example of what I would call a localized deposit, along the lines of what I'm suggesting. Take a look around those salt flats, and you know what you'll find? non-salt stone. My main point for both salt and flux is that biome-scale stone types that provide those things provide a very binary mechanic, and the game would be improved if rather than this binary all-or-nothing scenario, the supplies were more limited and the player maybe actually has to consider the best use of their supplies of each. If the supplies were more limited they could exist in grades like ore (poor, normal, rich) but could also just be a mineral with no grades. I think part of the thrill of the game is finding rich deposits. I makes one feel lucky, like they've found a treasure. Even ungraded, it is more rewarding, imo, than finding an entire region of the stuff and knowing you'll never have to look for it again. I'd be all for tiered fluxes (and suggested as much in the Alchemy thread). But I'd still suggest having some kind of processing involved, even for low tier flux.

Not necessarily. But that's a topic for another thread I suppose. Chicken coop? Both Etho's LPs, plus at least a couple others I've watched. Almost every LP I've watched they've made barns. I'm not saying it's not believable. But if all the player has to do is slap a few logs up to block the sky, what's the point? By the time the player wants a really huge herd they'll have plank blocks and good axes. The blocks never wear out, and they're not costly to make. So the mechanic wouldn't add anything to the animal care routine or tech ladder. Now if thatch became placeable in layers, and in the cold animals would seek out such 'bedding', and the bedding wears out, then that adds to the animal maintenance routine. And you could say the bedding wears out faster if exposed to the sky and much faster if rained/snowed on (so at the same time you're encouraging a structure to be built over the bedding). Then you're adding something that wears out over time, so the player has to check it every so often, because if they forget it, then in cold weather the animals' health will suffer. That adds to the routine. It would also add another use for thatch, which currently you get huge surpluses of. I think the thatch would operate fine with random update ticks, so no extra server load. Salt licks could be as simple as a 3x3 crafting grid of salt = block, or it could involve grinding up minerals and boiling them together with salt in a cauldron, in a sort of crucible-like mechanic. But even with a 3x3 grid, it's a limited resource. Not really very effectively limited in TFC1 (you either have none, or all you'll ever need), but at least you have to find it first. Illness and age makes sense. It would definitely be nice to have one variable control as much as possible, for server purposes. At least, I'd imagine. I think some death with illness would be good, in large herds. But I do think it'd be good to at least have a config option for there to be a floor, so that your herd doesn't die off entirely. Again, for SMP. I know, not the mod author's responsibility. But it helps the community out if it's baked in rather than requiring yet another mod that must stay up to date with the game. If you come back from long absence and find your animals all at 0 health and requiring a minimum of two months of constant care just to get back to neutral health, that's enough of a penalty. Or even if they're just at neutral (access to grass and water), so all the work the player maybe put in to get them to max health is gone, and you've got to wait awhile between products, that's probably an ok penalty too, imo.

As far as the grief factor, I did also mention that it can happen accidentally, just from tourists visiting the town. The grief thing is probably specific to only the very large servers, but if the mechanic can be arranged so that it works well for single player and large SMP, I figure it's worthwhile to at least consider. The devs will have the final say on how much consideration they want to give to these kinds of servers. I'm not so much 'expecting', but I am 'hoping', that the player will be able to tame bears, tigers, and other carnivores in a way that makes them more than a sideshow. And beyond that, with enough skill, fantasy beasts as well, such as pegasi, griffins, maybe even manticores, as flying mounts. I totally glossed over them in my skill spoiler. Maybe there needs to be a Grandmaster level for fantasy beasts. I'd like just about everything of animal-ish intelligence to be tameable, really. That's my hope. Irl, mineral blocks are commonly placed in fields where animals graze. This is as opposed to more tightly confined animals which are fed mixed foods. A wild animal would normally wander far, and find places to supplement it's diet with salt and minerals. When you confine animals in pens and don't let them wander, they still need those things (especially salt). In a modern feedlot, animals are fed carefully mixed feed that includes those minerals in it already, right in the trough. Field-grazed animals on the other hand, as in the old days, weren't able to wander far enough afield to find the minerals in many cases. So the rancher would put out mineral blocks, or 'salt licks', so that pastured animals would get the minerals. Still a very common practice for pasture raised animals. The blocks are mostly salt, since that's mostly what the animals need. The rest is basically trace amounts. Though for game purposes they could require more significant amounts of minerals. They could be depleted by rain, if not covered, which would sort of bring in the cover thing a little bit? I guess for me, the thing about shelter is, you're not really adding much to the animal care routine. It doesn't take any special tech, and once you've built it, it's there forever. So why have the requirement if it's extremely simple to meet? Players like to build barns anyway, I'd just let them do their thing. I'd differ on disease, in that I'd have it afflict even lone animals or small herds. I do agree the chance should increase with large tightly spaced herds. But in order to make sure the player sees benefit from a high animal husbandry skill, I'd have their animals get sick once in awhile. And if the animals are not native to the climate, or are packed tightly, then they get sick more often. Ya, the watering trough was just an attempt to respond to weather other than rain. It'd probably only be important in desert climates, if it were refilled by rain. I definitely don't see it as a necessary part of the animal care scheme. I could see mortal diseases coming into play for large herds, sure. As long as the player isn't completely wiped out and demoralized, I think it'd work. ANIMAL HEALTH

Well, it'd at least be a legit use for alcoholic drinks. I'm kind of for it just so there's not such a huge amount of content whose only real use is making vinegar. So like, maybe the player has a 1% or .05% chance per jug of regular water to contract a disease of some kind. Some could detract from mining speed, or increase hunger or thirst depletion, or maybe deduct form the top end of your hitpoints (until cured). Filtration would need to be a separate, higher tech though, so the player maybe would use alcohol for a time. Distillation of water should be very very slow to do in quantity. Otherwise people would just use the water. Problem is it'd kind of require a new type of water - 'pure' water. That, or the only way to get these pure waters is to take it directly from the distiller in glass bottles. So rather than a new water type, it'd be an item. Pouring the pure water into anything else would turn it to normal water. Alcohol lamps would of course be good too. Or if first aid kits were a thing, then rubbing alcohol. Stuff like that.

Huh, you're right, I don't see it in the butchering thread... Either I'm totally mis-remembering which thread that was in, or the butchering thread got messed up during the forum transfer somehow...perhaps due to cjhc12's thread getting spliced in? That or I hallucinated it. But I'm pretty certain I remember being disappointed to be told it wasn't possible (or was a huge effort) to vary drops depending on tool used to break. Might have to re-add that part of the discussion to the butchering thread I guess. If it is possible, a good candidate for seed harvest might be a grass seed scoop, used to strip seed from long stem grasses.

Re: Alpha Those numbers I was tossing around on food decay and drops were just off the cuff stuff. I was just trying to get across the idea. I'm open for whatever on minigames. Just tossing out ideas. Good point on the seeds from produce + genetics problem. Stroam, how would one give the option of harvesting the same block for seed *or* food? As I understand it (from what I was told in response to my butchering thread ideas) blocks either drop a thing or don't, you can't make it dependent on tools, unless it's a right click function? What if crops have a mature form, where they give produce, but then later an overripe form, where they drop only seed? Then the same mechanic and tool could be used on both. I guess it would be tricky though with plants where the seed IS the food, like all the grains. Hoes for aeration sounds like a bit much to me. I think between tilling farm plots, and hoeing weeds, they should have plenty of uses. We've had a couple ideas for weeds. One being a texture overlay of some kind, that gets more filled in as the weediness of the block progresses. The player uses the hoe against them in a hide-scraping-like minigame. I've afraid the overlay might be rather ugly though. I was hoping to have a weed plant graphic in the same block with the crop, offset 45 degrees. And then the player uses the hoe to 'mine' it, which would take time depending on tool tier. But I fear that would probably be way to block id intensive, as you'd either have to make a version of every stage of every crop with weed superimposition, or you could limit it to just mature crop blocks to reduce the number of block ids required. Never mind having multiple weed stages per individual crop stage, if the crop is growing slow. I do feel like a weed graphic would probably be best for fallow ground weeds. Very interesting on the vanilla mc crop mechanic being similar. I think we could keep the same nutrient mechanic, maybe have weeds drain all 3 at the same time, as well as reduce crop health (need to do a separate post on crop health - maybe tomorrow). By adding ailments in there, I think you'd provide a fairly strong incentive for row crops vs masses.

He appears to have arranged it as a step-by-step tech tree, in the vein of Thaumcraft. As opposed to an organic tech ladder, as TFC1 is. So the player is presumably prevented by code from building a jug, until they've built one each of all 3 spears. After the player builds the jug, they then are allowed to build the barbed arrow, pole poking (?), eel trap, and hand trawl. etc. So it straight-up prevents you from skipping tiers. I'm not a huge fan of that (although it does simplify things), and it seems like the devs so far have opted for a more organic tech ladder. By organic I mean that it flows naturally, and sometimes you can skip a rung. For instance you can totally skip copper tools in TFC1. Though you'll still need tons of copper ore. And the products of one tier lead to the next, organically. Use bronze ingots to make bronze anvil to make bronze sheets to make bloomery (which is a tech gate) to make iron ingots to make iron anvil to make iron sheets to make blast furnace (next tech gate). I prefer this format personally. It has it's own internal logic. The tech tree format, there's no logical reason I should have to make spears before jugs, jugs before, arrows, and eel traps before fish traps. They're all primitive technology and none produce a product that logically would be required for the next. So that's the problem I have there. The system I proposed earlier did not have a natural product flow either. But it was weakly tiered simply by the fact that the 'upper tiers' required string, which in TFC1 anyway is not simple to get. It had some loose progression in that clams and barnacles could be used to chum for spear fishing, and those small fish could be used as fishing bait, or net bait perhaps. But you could entirely skip the digging and spear fishing if you wanted and go straight to the upper stuff. It was a logical system, I felt in line with the precedent we have so far from TFC1, and the fact that we've not really heard devs favor tech trees for TFC2, to the best of my knowledge/memory. Aside from having special high value catches for trade or magic, I don't think fishing fits well as an elaborately tiered trade. I think all it really needs is a primitive tier, and an advanced tier. The primitive part of the game can focus more on food I think, with 3 tracks: Fisher, hunter, or gatherer. The goal of all 3 is to get more stable. So from fisher you proceed to...well, more advanced fisherman. Hunter proceeds to rancher, and gatherer proceeds to farmer. In all 3 cases, once you've got your more secure food supply, then you perhaps start working in a more focused manner on other trades/professions like smithing or magic. If you get into magic you revisit some even more advanced fishing tech to farm pearls, or catch extremely rare fish for components. Likewise, you can raise rarer animals, or crops. Basically, you kind of set up a primitive-->advanced progression, and anyone can be expected to do this, and it's for the early game. Anything higher is for special cooking or magic recipes, and these can be made very high-skill portions of the tree, because they're not required for survival or progression.

Seems kind of complex in structure, but whatever the devs are up for coding I guess. Unknown, I would imagine there being a natural terracotta color, and then several glazes matching the dyes available in game. TFC1 has glazes for pots already, although for some inexplicable reason they don't fully cover the pots. Hopefully for architectural stuff you'd get full coverage.

Not a fan of the OP idea. I think there's plenty of other ways to bring balance to the food equation, that give the player more choice and control. If crop diseases increase the more crops you have, that alone should be a natural brake on farming. Not to mention the notions of animals using food, or trading food with npcs.

Good ideas. I do think it'd be especially good to have considerations for SMP gameplay. Especially in the form of animals perhaps being able to starve to death in single player, while in SMP they won't starve to death, but only perform more poorly. Because in SMP you sometimes have to leave for extended periods, and it's not going to encourage people to stick around if an extended absence results in all their animals dieing. But even in single player, I'd suggest that your grazers should be able to survive on grass. But quite simply, if your cow is only surviving on grass, it only produces milk every 10 days. Whereas if you've been feeding it grains and vegetables for a time, if produces every day. Sheep the same. And all animals, if slaughtered, give much less meat if not kept well fed. Disease likelihood would also increase with hunger. They could also have a reduced chance of becoming pregnant if not well fed. Your pack animals will carry less, move slower, and not jump as high. Additionally, they become more aggressive to each other if not well fed, and predators especially, even if tamed, could attack other tame animals. So this way if you're on SMP, and know you'll be gone for awhile, you can know that you need to separate your animals and leave them with good access to grass. Meat eating animals either simply don't starve to death, or perhaps as long as they are within 10 blocks of small animals like rabbits or something, it can be assumed they catch a stray every so often. The reasoning here is that in SMP, even though the owner of a town may be gone, you can have other players wander in and load the chunks (accidentally, or as a form of griefing). If meat eaters starved without stockpiled meat or bones, a player could troll absent town owners by hanging around till their animals starve. Similarly, it's probably not a good idea to have disease outright kill animals. Or at least have that option. For the same reason. Salt blocks also could be another health improving factor, btw, and provide another use for salt. For gathering animals, I'd guess that the player-pulled cart would be able to carry medium animals in a cage, such as sheep or pigs. Mayyybe cows, but I'd agitate for not. Cows would be minecart-able though. Anything larger than cows I'm fine with the player having an incredibly hard time transporting them. I think it'd be good if players had to deal more with what they're given on an island, rather than trying to gather every single crop and animal in existence to their island (at least, if they're not willing to put in the effort). This would aid replay-ability in single player, and give distinct character to towns in SMP. Sickness should definitely be a thing. It could be a skill tie-in, similar to the agriculture thread. And also a climate-limiting factor. I would suggest that animals have a significant increase in disease chance when not in their preferred climate. The farther removed from their native climate, the greater the increase in disease. Furthermore they could also have higher disease if the temperature, moisture, and maybe even terrain are not their preferred, though these should perhaps have less of an affect than climate. None of these factors would be 1-per-animal. Some animals would be more adaptable. So pigs would be fine anywhere from tropical to sub-arctic, perhaps, and similarly cover a host of the other conditions. They might suffer in mountains or swamps, or at 8k+ rainfall. But otherwise be fine. Alligators on the other hand might suffer in sub-arctic or arctic islands, at rainfall of less than 1000, temperature below 20c, and any terrain *other than* swamp. It might be better to leave out temperature, if possible, since it can swing quite a bit with seasons, and most animals native to a climate have adaptations for seasonal extremes (hibernation, brumation), plus, the island climate already deals a lot with temperature I think. By making these factors cause disease, you allow the player to mitigate it with effort. So a player with really good animal husbandry could in fact create a zoo with exotic animals. They'd have to spend a lot of time treating them for diseases, but that's the price they pay for having an amazing menagerie. On the other hand, a player that just wants to have some basic animal supplies could get by easier by only having animals native to their climate. The shelter idea as given doesn't seem like much of a logistical hurdle, unless the requirements are more than just a few covered squares. I mean, you can do that with a stone axe and some logs, so that would not be a meaningful requirement I'd say. And honestly most wild animals can deal with some rain. Cold and lack of water are the real enemies, so I'd say some sort of water trough would be most appropriate. This could actually be depleted slowly over time, and not risk griefing too much, if TFC2 rains with a frequency similar to that of TFC1. The rain would refill the trough, and the griefer would be foiled. Perhaps in extremely dry climates it might become a factor, and there could be a special craftable well or windmill to provide for trough filling. The old age config I'd see as being mostly for single player. Even with the wrap-around age, there's that chance of griefers or tourists loading the chunk long enough to kill an animal. However, what if instead animals aged based on the number of times they'd had resources removed? So a cow (after becoming an adult) would not have a numeric age, but simply a descriptor, such as young, mature, old, and wizened. Or for more energy-based descriptors; spry, energetic, strong, plodding, and decrepit. They move through these categories based on how many times the player milks them. In that way, for SMP servers with town protection, the animal ages as town residents use the animal. Tourists and griefers can do nothing to advance the age, because they cannot use the animal as long as it's in town borders. That of course does not address animals that do not provide a product. Mounts and pack animals could age whenever the player gets on them. Other animals become more problematic. Breeding could also increase the age, and provide a little bit of a brake on populations. Another suggestion would be the ability to neuter animals. This would be purely to aid server economies, so maybe better as a mod, but the idea would be that specialist animal handlers who manage to breed some really good animals, could protect their market by ensuring customers can't just buy one or two excellent animals, and then start breeding their own. ANIMAL HANDLING SKILL In the end, I think it would be great if a player who wants to focus on other stuff can still have some animals, and still get some stuff out of them. Just at a slower rate than someone who is focusing on taking care of their animals.

I'm with Will, I think that in terms of game mechanic incentives, the top end incentives are the way to go. And by that I mean, like Will said, making it so the best stuff is only attainable via cooperation. I think that's preferable to bottom end incentives, by which I mean making menial tasks so tortuous that no one person wants to do them all, and so people depend on each other for basic functionality. Sort of carrot vs stick, I'd say. I would say that anyone should be able to *get by* and progress through the islands on their own. It'll just take longer and be harder, and they may top out at lower tier islands than a band of allies would. But as long as they can do 95% of the stuff in the game, that should be sufficient I think. The best food, best weapons, best armor, and best magic may only be attainable (and sustainable?) through teamwork, and I think that would be a strong driver for SMP crowds. I add sustainable in there, because if top tier tools not only require cooperation to make, but to keep going, that will go a little further in encouraging people to stick together. Like in Fallout 4, sure, you've got your power armor. But you still need those fusion cores to use it.

Gravel and sand aren't edible though. So their loss isn't really a strategic choice. "Requiring" two people to run a net would be bad for single player you probably meant just giving bonuses to having two people in the boat, ya? Ya, the Japanese ate all their eels, so now they import them at great expense. The Japanese seem to not give a damn. The more poisonous the fish the better. Cooking destroys the poisonous protein though, ya? I don't think it's as big a deal as fugu.

Absolutely.

Mechanical planter would be fun. It'd be cool if it wouldn't fit in containers so you had to just place it as a block. Fun scenery, and useful too! What tier were you thinking for this mechanical seeder? Steel? I feel like it needs to be spaced a ways down the line, so that players truly appreciate it when they get it. Some thoughts on pests, diseases, and fungus. To bring these into the system, I would think it would be a good idea to link the identification of them to player skill. So they mostly center around the player identifying them and applying the right treatment. Here's a way it might work: Players have 4 skill levels: Novice, Adept, Expert, and Master (could be more for TFC2). Let us say that a full treatment for a specific ailment depends on exactly identifying the ailment. The ailment will involve four characteristics that tell the player how to treat it. The first characteristic is the simplest: it's either a insect, mold, or disease. The player knows only this at the novice level. At Adept they know the next level of detail. So instead of "insect" they see beetle, moth, worm, or aphid (molds: mildew, mold, smut, and rust. Diseases: blight, wilt, canker, rot). The next level (expert) is to know a descriptor, of which there are four of each type. So this might read to the player as "striped beetle" or "spotted moth". And finally at master, they get an entire name. This could replace just the descriptor (Troll Beetle instead of striped beetle) or it could replace possibly both. So what was a "smooth worm" might become a "leaf miner" at Master. They're all listed on the wiki only by their true name, but they each have a short description. So at Expert you have to look at the wiki, and find out which four beetles are spotted or which four worms are smooth. Then you get the third ingredient from their recipes (which will all have the same first three ingredients). But at master you're straight-up given the name. And maybe WAILA even shows the treatment recipe after the name in-game. This would be a list-heavy page, with 64 insects, 64 molds, and 64 diseases. So at novice, the player knows from the wiki that all insects must have, say, saltwater as a basic treatment measure. They can apply just plain saltwater to any insect infestation, and know that it will help a little. Not nearly as much as a full treatment. Diseases might be treated with mineral water, and fungi with alcohol. Alcohol is obviously a lot harder to get than the other two, but this is just an example for now. And maybe fungi are more deadly by nature. But anyway, once the player knows the species of the ailment, they know the next ingredient. So adding bone meal to your saltwater will treat moths better. Again, this would be on the wiki. There will be four adept-level additives, and so it's not terribly hard for the player to just experiment at novice to make their treatment slightly better. It's only four tries to cover the saltwater plus the four possible second level additives. But it is more work, and will waste some materials, and even after you get the first two right, it's still only half the full treatment. There could also be a percent chance the treatment will take to make it a little bit harder if needed. The final two descriptors could also be known from the wiki, or could be randomized from a small or large subset. A large subset would make experimenting for the last two descriptors almost impossible at novice. But even if fixed, with a 4/4/4 pattern, a novice might have to try 64 recipes to happen on the total correct one. And that's probably enough. If it was arranged so you could only treat a plant once per day, 64 would definitely be enough to mostly confound novices from experimenting. Expert treatment level might involve flowers ground in a mortar, and Master level might involve minerals also ground up (these grindings can also be used in alchemy). So a treatment will have metadata showing the ingredients, like sandwiches. If a novice tries to guess full recipes, they'll use up a lot of minerals in the process. There could be a consequence to random experimentation, in the form of genetic weaknesses. So you might have a corn variety that, if given a treatment with bismuth powder in it, will greatly harm or even kill it. That might be minor if bismuth is a last tier ingredient and so used on few thing. But if the plant is weak to second or third tier ingredients, there may be a lot of ailments whose treatments would harm the plant. So if genetics came in, the player might not only be trying to gain beneficial traits, but get rid of weaknesses to treatment ingredients. I hope that all came across clear.

I like both the weed proposals - the one where weeds grow on fallow blocks, and also the one of pixels above. The pixels above isn't all that great visually - it'll end up looking like some weird floating layer of slime. But I suppose it may be logistically easier than having a weed graphic superimposed over the crop at a 45 degree offset, much less a multi-stage weed graphic that must coexist with various crop stages. It'd sure look better that way though. The thing I like about fallow block weeds, is that it would provide another use for the plow. By planting in long parallel rows, the player could use the plow to plow up weeds in long stretches between the rows. Then a hoe for weeds on the crop blocks. You'd need to encourage this kind of planting though. So in terms of discouraging mass-planting, maybe say that any crop block with more than two adjacent crop blocks is more prone to disease. At the same time, say that plants that don't have adjacent farm land on all 4 sides grows slower. This discourages the player from just having single rows of plowed ground with grass between in order to avoid fallow ground weeds. It does beg the question of whether water should be ok as one of the four sides, but if that's allowed then people will probably dig big water-filled trenches between their crops to stop the weeds. So I'd go with only farm ground counts. Irl, too much water is as bad if not worse for crops than too little. I also agree that it'd probably be good if freshly plowed/hoed ground did not have a full nutrient stack, in order to encourage fertilizing. I kind of like the idea of seeds coming from produce, to force that choice, at least in the early game. maybe at high skill levels the player gets seeds just from harvesting as well. The hoe speed by tier could be somewhat approximated by having an animation similar to a firestarter, ya? And it only has a percent chance to work? And the chance is higher per tier of the hoe? That way on average it could take more time using lower tier hoes. Between that and weeding, I think you'd definitely have plenty of durability use for hoes. For animals and plows, even if they can't be hooked directly, maybe using the plow checks to make sure there is a draft animal (with yolk and harness?) of some kind within a certain radius of the player? Then they at least need to have one nearby. So the player would probably at least want to keep it on a lead so it doesn't wander out of radius. At the same time, farm animals should eat crops above a certain maturity if they get the chance. Just so the player doesn't permanently leave cows in their fields so as not to worry about moving them during planting time. For a plow minigame (if it uses one) you could have a vertical scrolling graphic maybe, and it has dirt tiles (in plow mode) or weed pixels (in weed mode) all over. As it scrolls down the player clicks as many pixels/tiles as possible before they scroll off the bottom. Depending on the percent they get, this is the pecent of tiles tilled/weed destroyed in the line. Plow tier, player skill, and draft animals strength might all slow down the scroll speed, making it easier to get everything (but give the player speed up option if it's going too slow for them). And/or, they might increase the target area of the click, making it easier to hit the moving targets. Non-stacking seeds would be kind of drastic. But I guess maybe that might be a good use for burlap - a seed sack. So you keep the seeds in a seed sack, and when you're planting you hold the seed sack, right click the sack on the ground, and it just plants the next seed in line? Seems doable. Before seed sack tech, you're stuck with manually removing them from jars and putting them on the hotbar. And yes, I think that high player skill would be the good easy way to tell what seeds have special traits. You could maybe deduce it earlier if you carefully observed that some plants have less disease, or grew better in drought. I do see a possible gameplay disadvantage to this; For me, my early game is basically me traveling a long ways until I find that perfect spot. Along the way I gather various seeds, bushes, and fruit trees. The result being I usually am well stocked in growables by the time I find my home. I definitely believe that fruit producers should not be easy to mass-collect, given that they're kind of a later tier food item. But crop seeds, by making them not stack, the player will not be able to collect many in early wanderings. Now I'm all for it, as it would either make the player settle earlier, or take more risks on transient food sources until they find their ideal spot. Then range from that spot in seed collecting trips. I just hope that wouldn't turn off too many people. The harder it is overall, the smaller the audience will be. On the other hand, it would probably help encourage towning, to avoid that hard early game. If we had more uses for crops, it would help in terms of keeping farming useful in the later game. One way to do this might be to allow the player to feed crops to animals, and this is much better for the animals than just grass. Also, if villagers make it in, and you can trade with them, produce items might be a trade currency.

Traps might be a bit like sluices in that they only return minor results. But you don't have to bait a sluice. So if the trap require 1 piece of food to bait and you get max 4 or 5 pieces back, that's probably not too unbalancing. Especially if a trap stores a skill variable when set, and so in early game it's more prone to 2-3 piece return. Plus if it wears out over time. Also if the trap only catches 1 fish at a time, that balances it better. Plus reeds might not be renewable, so there might be a diminishing resources factor. Or if the traps require string, there's that. I think they could be well balanced. I'm guessing the plan is for undead to be much less common, not the ubiquitous threat they currently are. protecting a chunk secret with traps would be hard, since the evidence would be there for anyone to see. But if you could get the same special prey via fishing or spear fishing with special bait, that would make traps a sort of exploratory tool, and then once you find special stuff, you catch it with spear, line, or net, if you don't want to leave evidence for others to find.

The thing is, how does it fit into progression? Are eels that much better food? Are they a special component of something else? If so, how is their trap harder to make? Are they harder to find? Are they chunk specific? If the difference is just cosmetic, is it really worth the extra item ids and dev time? It may be - that's up to the devs - but that's why I did not suggest they be separate. I was going for a basic setup. Similarly with the fish spears, I think the general idea comes across with javelins. Three types of spears seems way overkill to me. I'd much rather have the player's fishing skill govern how well the fish are caught. And I didn't see how it would be all that practical to have a pause between spearing the fish and having it in inventory - a time period where the fish could escape. So without catch and escape variables built in the spear, you just have meat percent. Which would mean not offsetting one good feature with a bad one. Maybe the devs like the complex system, but again, I was going for simpler. Krill and shrimp are well and good. But ultimately a bit redundant with regular fish I think, unless the cooking system needs them. But again, I'd be suggesting they use the same trap. Unless they are a high tier ingredient, then maybe they require a trap of rarer components, like silk. If it's just a matter of sticks vs reeds, or 4 sticks vs 9 sticks, that's not really a significant difference. I was kind of envisioning the player placing these traps, and seeing what they caught. Fish can be caught in every chunk. But some chunks might have special catchables. The player can only find out by placing traps and seeing what they get. Then once they find a special catch chunk, they can try to protect that secret. The process of discovering a secret like that is a fun thing, and it makes that resource more rare, and hence valuable, assuming it has a valuable use. On the other hand, if all I have to do to catch an eel is place an eel specific trap in fresh water, well, that's...not exciting. On the other other hand, if they are chunk specific AND I have to use a specific trap, that might be expecting a bit too much of players. You've got basic ideas, but they need to be worked into the overall game scheme. Just listing stuff is the easy part. How would you envision these things fitting into the game overall, and also functioning amongst themselves?

I like it. He may be the cutest of them all!

Some good ideas, some seem a bit redundant. I do think it'd be nice for the game to have some viable fisherman life going on. In the course of our discussions in the agriculture thread, on how to make agriculture harder and more tiered, it was pointed out that if agriculture is too hard, there needs to be other ways for people to survive while they get their agriculture skill up. Aquaculture might be such a way. Well, I mean not aquaculture per se maybe, but living off the water, I guess. That and foraging, and hunting animals. CLAM DIGGING BARNACLES & OTHER STATIONARY LIFE SPEAR FISHING So those are very basic things - dig for clams/crayfish, scavenge barnacles (neither skill affected), or spearfish. All require only the most basic materials. Beyond that, things might require more resources. FISHING RODS of course require string. Not necessarily easy to get. Heavily dependent on player skill. Only way to get the biggest fish. Fishing could be expanded quite a bit more. I'll leave that for now though. TRAPS NETS So now we have a loosely tiered system of three easier methods - digging in sand, gathering from specific chunks, or spear fishing. All three minimally skill dependent - and three methods that require varying amounts of string and attention, and all benefiting heavily from more skill. The idea sort of being that you have three methods useful very early on when just trying to survive (maybe while you try to improve your agriculture skill) and three more advanced methods which perhaps if you choose to style yourself a fisherman, you focus on those things. You'll probably still dig clams and gather barnacles for bait, but your major food earners will be the pole/trap/net combo. Beyond survival, if a nature magic system was in the game, certain rare sea life could be components in certain magics. So maybe higher skill in fishing gives greater chance to catch/trap these animals. Perhaps if you find a pearl oyster chunk, you can construct special oyster habitat blocks that expand them beyond the chunk limit. Depending on how the food system works, rare fish/mollusks could be ingredients in extra-special dishes. So that's my take on how this stuff could be organized into a useful system.

Definitely looks better from the front. I could go with 2x3, especially in the back. Front legs do look slightly thinner in side view. Maybe 2.5x2 for front legs?

So I've never played ark, but I've watched several LPs. I think the basic idea would be, for instance you butcher an animal. Instead of 160 oz of meat, you'd get maybe 32 or 64 pieces. To my mind, since in current TFC the player eats 5oz at a time, it would be logical that 1 piece approximates 5oz in TFC1. 160/5=32. So it would seem logical to guess that food pieces will stack to 32. So you have your stack of 32, or whatever, food. There's timer counting down always on that stack of food. In ark it's circular, but in TFC it might be that line. But it goes down kind of fast. For meat maybe fully depletes the timer in 2 minutes. At the end of that 2 minutes, 1 piece of meat is subtracted from the stack. The timer starts over. In another 2 minutes another piece goes. So you're losing discreet pieces of meat. In 64 rl minutes, that whole stack is gone. But, you do things to preserve it. So maybe you salt the meat immediately. That doubles the timer to 4 minutes. So, it kind of seems more urgent, because you're actually watching pieces of food decay. But you have to assume that there will be sufficient preservation methods to extend the timer quite a bit. Bioxx explains some of the advantages of this system in the post I linked. Another advantage is that salt could be required for each piece, rather than 1 piece of salt doing an entire huge lot of food. So grinding salt may be a thing. But in TFC2, what this will probably mean is a very healthy crop might drop 12 pieces of food, while a sickly one drops 2. Or whatever. But it will be in pieces, not oz. There has been discussion of making prepared food give more fulfillment, and/or other bonuses. But that's kind of another topic. Basically raw foods would be bottom tier. You're definitely right that it needs to be not too cumbersome Alpha. It'll be a balancing act and probably take a lot of >Alpha< testing. *rimshot* I like the tiered farmland/plows idea. That's definitely a good way to work in more tiered metal. My straw mulch suggestion was intended as another form of farmland, but I definitely like your idea of plowing in nutrients for more extended fertilizing, and reducing weed chance. Maybe for weeds it doesn't need to be another 'tier' per se, but the block gets a negative modifier to the chance to develop weeds. The higher player skill the more negative the modifier. I wonder if hoes and plows could be used in a block breaking fashion, to bring speed into the equation? Like, you break a dirt block with a hoe or plow, and instead of dropping the dirt, it immediately places the hoed/plowed version there? It just seems a shame that there's so little point to making higher tier hoes. If that's not mechanically possible, maybe some kind of mini game to take the time? Something like the hide scraping, except tier zero (stone) lets yo do 1 pixel at a time, tier two 2 pixels, tier three (bronze) 4 pixels, tier four 8 pixels, and tier five (steel) does the entire tile at once, basically how it is now in TFC1. It'd make the player value their plowed ground more in the early game. It'd be really cool if plows could be hooked to an animal. Not entirely sure how the moving/interfacing would work. It'd be pretty amazing if you had a switch and actually had to guide the animal to position the plow correctly. But as far as using it, maybe you right click on the dirt tile, it gives you the same minigame as the hoe, but the result is you get multiple tilled tiles in a line (so you have to pay attention to what way you/the ox is facing). So 2 tiles at tier 0 (if there even is a tier 0 plow), Maybe 7 tiles at tier 5 (tier+2)? This could continue on up the tiers. So in that case you'd not only make the minigame easier, you'd multiply the results. If there's an animal husbandry skill, that could play into the number of tiles that get plowed as well. Now if you use the plow and right click on farmland, and you have fertilizer in your inventory, then you get another minigame to distribute that along the tiles in the same way, and depending on your agriculture skill, you might get bonus 'satiation' of fertilizer. There definitely could be more tools for harvesting. Just depends on if the devs want to spend the item ids. You could get really specific and have potato forks if you wanted to, specifically for potatoes. I was just trying to stick with tools we already have. When I have more time, I'll post something about plant health. I just discovered Bilbobuddy made a post awhile back that had a lot of these ideas. He makes the interesting proposition that maybe hoes can only turn dirt into farmland, but it takes a plow to turn grass into farmland. It's a cool idea, makes the player spend a little bit more time digging up the dirt first in early days. Though that would directly conflict with TFC1 behavior where hoeing dirt results in farmland with no nutrients. Could be changed though.