Darmo

Large clay vessels are still useful, for carrying water or especially items on your back.  The early game can involve a lot of wandering and every bit of extra inventory helps.  Also, it's *14* copper ingots for first anvil.

Looking nice!  Does that island use all new tree models?

Up in the northwest corner, there's three lakes close together, and one has a lot of green 'static' in it (also a smaller one on the opposite side of the island).  Is that some kind of new swamp or something, with lots of cattails and/or lilypads?

I'm with LoW.  Skill gain without performing the task doesn't seem like a good idea.  At the same time, I do like the notion of giving the player a bit more control over their character.  So small boosts to damage, speed, carrying capacity, or things like that.  Things that aren't really 'skills', but more abilities.  There would have to be enough of them to give variety though, or I think everyone would just end up the same.

So...ok, not to derail the derailing, but it would definitely be nice to see more uses for jute.  It's kind of hard to imagine good uses for burlap where cloth wouldn't be better, when burlap sacks are taken from the equation. 

I've often wished I could have a rope to climb down from the top of ravines, as I've not found a good way to do it with ladders.  It'd be great if the player would somehow tie off a rope and climb down it, requiring a piece of rope for each meter descended.  It'd be a good use for masses of surplus jute.  And if rope lifts were incorporated in the game (such as for livestock) all the better.

Another use for burlap could be sail repair, if the ferry system were implemented, and the ships had sails, and the sails had a chance to be damaged each trip. 

Or, some kind of pop-up tent item.  Though if mobs are more hostile and can destroy blocks, that might be pointless.

Like CorpseDrop says, ferries and/or portals sound good, but I think it'd still be good to have the vanilla boats available.  Portals for every island crossing seems a bit overkill to me though.  If coastal setpieces are easy to set up,  I'd say use ferries for single-ocean jumps.  Save the portals for longer distances, make them more mystical and important.

As for ferries, I don't think they need to be manned by npcs.  Perhaps the player has to find a 'navigation chart' before they can use any given ferry.  Though the naming of those charts, since they'd be tied to a specific side of a specific island, might be a bit cumbersome (island B6 chart north, island E -8 chart south?)  The player simply slaps the chart on some block in the boat, and it's there permanently, making the boat usable. This also means the player would need a way to determine which island they are on exactly.

Further instruments could even be required - a sextant, compass, telescope.  These could be found on the island in mob treasure chests, or the pc could smith them himself.  The pc could take them along to use on each ship, but will likely want to make a kit for each ship so they don't have to carry around yet more gear.  So possibly 1 of each per island in chests.  The player either carries them around, or makes more themselves, if they want to go multiple directions from 1 island.  These instruments could have durability, used each trip, with copper ones having very extra-low durability.  Also, ferries aren't usable in rain (or just thunderstorms?).  Just to make rain even more annoying!

Portals: There could be one portal per island, in the main keep.  If they actually take you to a nether-like realm, they could simply have a cost of activation every time, so you activate the tier 1 'real world' portal with some item, and then you make the trek to the tier 5 portal in the nether, for instance, and that take a much more expensive item(s) to activate.  You have to pay the item cost every time you go through them.

Depending on if magic is meant to be something every player uses, or just the truly dedicated, might influence how the cost works.  Offhand it sounds like a good way to use up gems, silver, gold, and platinum at the very least.  Either in raw form, or smithed jewelry form.  Maybe that's the 'muggle' way to do it, but true magicians can create magical foci with set numbers of uses, that are on the balance cheaper than using muggle methods. Different tiers of foci could work at their tier or below, and take an appropriate number of charges, so maybe a tier 5 foci has 100 charges, and using a tier 1 gate takes 1 charge, while using a tier 5 gate takes 5.  Or those numbers might need to be scaled up to allow for fractional cost reduction. Perhaps gems are part of the foci, and having certain qualities of gems has benefits, including charges, so a foci that has 2 perfect gems means that foci uses tier 0 portal at no cost, while having 14 perfect gems means tier 6 portals and below are at no cost.  If my gemology suggestion were adopted the carat weight of the gems and number of flaws could play into the charges granted/gates usable.  If jewelry were part of the equation, the skill of the smith might influence the quality of the jewelry.  In this way, 3 different trades could be brought to influence foci - smithing, gemology, and magic.

Perhaps magicians can even improve the portal itself so the cost is reduced for everyone, which would be useful for multiplayer servers.  That should probably be an extremely expensive recipe, again involving multiple trades.

Now if there's no nether, and the portal directly teleports to another portal in the real world, it would be more complicated than just a cost, although I think the cost should remain.  I liked the previous suggestion of it being direction based, so you pick a direction, and then pay a cost depending on how many portals that way you want to go, with the cost increasing, perhaps exponentially, or at least non-linearly, the further you go.  Although if the portals were all in the same room facing different directions, there would need to be a way to incline towards paying that increased cost, rather than just taking a single jump, walking across the room, another single jump, etc.  There could be a 'cool down' time on the portal room perhaps.

I've never pitched it to anyone, but I think a good start might be the very different ore mechanics, and how much more exciting it seems to find a big pocket of rich ore, vs just finding lots of little scattered pockets as in vanilla.  Also the sense of accomplishment in setting up a bloomery or blast furnace, or making a nice big pile of ingots, or smithing tools, weapons, and armor, rather than assembling them from raw ingots.

Because a random member on the forums saw Bioxx's tweets about the island generation, and asked if we could put up a forum for TFC2 discussion and suggestions. That's literally it.

Fair enough, but it was done.  The fact the forums were put up and not whitelisted suggests they were expected to be used by the community.  And Bioxx at least has responded to a couple  posts in a manner suggesting he was interested in input.  Though if the boards are functioning more as a rumor mill and less as a useful arena for discussing ideas, or sucking up too much dev time reading, I can see where regrets may develop. 

My point was, the boards aren't a committee that has to follow an agenda.  I don't think anything *has* to be decided regarding mobs destroying blocks or not, before discussing logical implications of going down a certain road.  In theory, discussing what might happen may help answer the original question in the best manner.

I guess I feel like the game already has a pretty good amount of ore grinding.  So I don't think more of that will really enhance the experience.  Especially since it *seems* like TFC2 is going for a more active and aggressive playstyle.  Also placing metal sheets can be buggy at times in my experience, prone to losing them. 

I think  units as a reference is useful, at least for players who are experienced.  Anyone who's done some back-of-envelope calculations knows it takes roughly 15k units of iron to make a blast furnace, and that all goes into sheets.  So if we're talking about sheeting walls, I think it's a valid metric.  12k is especially relavent as that's the cost of the fire brick block plates themselves.  So it'd be the same amount of work as plating a 5-level blast furnace.  It's a lot of work, which I could deal with, but then you add in the buggy placement, no thanks.  Just let me make iron/steel plated blocks from them.  Much easier, and more scaleable. 

I don't think the possibility of mobs destroying blocks has much to be debated, it will either happen or won't, and it seems like it will - or at least will be tried out - based on what's been said elsewhere.

After that it's about discussion of balance and mechanics.  I assume the devs put up these forums for our input.  If they just wanted to build an entire first version and *then* get our feedback, why put up the forums now?  Yes, it's true, we're supposed to 'forget everything we know about TFC1'.  But we can't ditch *everything* or it's impossible to discuss anything.  I think it's fair to assume that the stack limits and basic mechanics will remain.  Things we don't know are, will fresh islands have wild food?  If not, the player can't forage, so they'll either have to start a farm there or go back to their previous base.  Will there be teleporation, or portals between bases?  If not, the player is going to have to either move their entire camp every couple islands, or they're going to have to make increasingly longer journeys to return after forays. I think it's fair to assume the logistics of inventory limit and travel time won't change a lot (though the former certainly could), so in either case, the time involved is significant.   If moving a base is indeed at least an occasional requirement, I'd much rather not have to move scores of buggy metal sheets.  

I feel like it's useful to discuss various implications of various mechanics, so I'm not saying one way or the other is *better* necessarily, but I'm trying to add to the discussion and say 'here's a couple possible ways things could play out, based on this possible mechanic'.  The devs may already know exactly how they want to do this and be keeping it under wraps - that's fine, I enjoy thought exercises.  But I get the impression that a lot is still up in the air. 

The metal sheets on blocks thing sounds really, really prohibitive.  Just plating the blast furnace is a lot of work, and that's only 60 block faces.  60 sheets (12,000 units of ore) would only cover the outside face of a 2 high 7x7 enclosure,  and allow for a door or two - presumably also made of metal.  That's an interior space of 5x5, which is just a basic house, definitely not enough to enclose livestock and farms.  I think it's pretty unrealistic to expect players to plate an entire curtain wall protecting a settlement with farms and animals inside, unless there is a recipe intermediary - something like combine a double sheet with 8 brick blocks around it, and get a return of 16 "steel plated blocks" or the like.  That'd be 8x the return of actually placing plates on blocks, and also a lot less frustrating in terms of plates magically vanishing.  But it'd still only be a 4-block long section of 3 high wall with a 1 block overhang.  And that doesn't even address if the mobs can tunnel under the wall.  Presumably you'd have to not allow that or it'd be too hard to keep them out, but then you basically force the player to have a walled farm, and then his house underground, to most efficiently use space and resources. 

If the player is building an above ground house, I'd think the bare minimum enclosure to have some farm plots, and a couple types of animals, plus a house, would be something like a 16 square enclosure.  two 4x8 pastures, two 4x8 garden plots, and an 8x16 house.  It's actually be more like a tower, in order to make most efficient use of space.  But so a 16x16 space enclosure at 3-high with a 1-block overhang would require 17 four block long sections.  In my recipe above, that'd require 17 double sheets plus the bricks.  That's 6800 units of ore.  Or roughly a half-chest of normal ore.  Might be better to yield 32 steel blocks per double sheet...all depends on the balance desired I guess.

Regarding mob spawning, it might be interesting to have each island have a chance for 1 'main fortress' and in that fortress is a war banner or something.  The player can use that banner to make their own, and each banner prevents spawns in some radius around it - perhaps a 1 chunk radius around the chunk it sits in.  So as the player conquers more islands and gets more banners, they can make larger and larger permanently safe areas.

Personally I don't use any big addons.  Just simple stuff like Waila - I'm not sure if that's even classified as an addon.  I didn't vote because, to a degree it's true that I don't want to change the developers' vision to something unrecognizable, but I'm not that hardcore about it in principle.  I also just like to avoid version conflicts and bugs, and I figure that minimizing my addons is a good way to do that.  Plus, I'm still new enough to the game that it's pretty fun for me in the basic form still.  Maybe as time goes on I'll tire of the base game and try adding more.  A lot of the stuff, when I look at it, it just seems like it goes way over the top - I'd love for the rail system to be improved, but railcraft just seems like it adds way more complication than is necessary, and really a lot of mods seem that way to me.  I think I'm more likely to add really simple mods, like the waterskin one, than giant packs.

Had another thought on how players interact with the food system.  I think it falls under the category of 'more depth'.  I thought I'd toss it out here, even though I'd said I already thought the system was plenty deep.

The idea is, spices.  Basically, you could take the existing flowers in the world, which have no use I'm aware of, nor even a wiki page as far as I could tell, and make it so the player can grind them up to make spices.  There would need to be at least 10 spices - each spice either raises or lowers one of the taste categories.  That's the TLDR version.  It would allow the players to dial food in a bit closer.  That would make the system easier to manipulate, which in itself might not be desireable, but I think it would also help players feel like they have more influence over it, and make the system a bit less impenetrable.

Complication can be added in several ways to balance:

1. what plants have what flavor effect is randomized per world seed

2. Assuming we get more dishes beyond salads and sandwiches, make it so more advanced dishes can use more spices.  So raw food can't use any spices, nor can tier 0 food (salads currently).  Perhaps tier 1 (sandwiches) can use 1 spice.  The tier 2 food can use 2.  etc. 

3. Different levels of cooking mastery allows different quantities of spice use (I don't really recall all the different levels, so don't quote me on these).   So a novice could only use 1 or 2 pinches of a single spice on a sandwich.  1 or 2 pinches each of two spices on the tier 2 food, etc. And adept get maybe 3-4 pinches each. 

You could also link skill level to number of spices, so a novice can only use 1 spice on any tier of food, even those that can allow multiple.  The further spice slots of higher tier foods are locked to novices.  An adept can use 2 spices, etc.  In this way you have to both cook a higher tier food, AND have higher skill, to use multiple spices. 

You could also make an overall pinch limit per dish.  In this way, there might be levels of spice, so if you need to change a profile a lot, you have ot use a spice that changes it more drastically, because you have an overall pinch limit. 

Basically you could link all three factors (number of spices useable, number of pinches per spice, overall pinch limit) to both food tier, and player skill. 

4. Spices have narrow climate requirements.  So you'll only find blue orchids where avg temp is 30 or higher, others where moisture is below 500, and some might even require certain altitudes. It might require addition of more flowers/spices if we want to stay close to real life counterparts - saffron, pepper, cumin, etc.   Spices might be weighted toward the tropics, to give them a 'special something' besides year-round crops, to help make up for their lack of sheep and cattle.

5. Spices might not be farmable.  This would make them more precious.   Each plant might have to yield a lot of spice though, since they would not be renewable.

Or, the seed giving might be linked to skill, so lower level agriculture skills do not yield seeds.  Maybe only master or higher, but never more than 1 seed per plant.  This is in order to keep them a limited commodity.  They should also have growing requirements similar to their native ranges, and perhaps if you grow them outside that range, they won't yield seeds no matter what.  The idea there is to have them somewhat renewable, but not outside their native climates.

As for the process, I'd say drying them.  Use the current line that's used for smoking, but no fire pits required.  Instead they must be protected from the weather (i.e. no sky access directly above) but yet have chimney-like access to the sky (i.e. one or two offset to the side, like the forge chimney).  This to simulate the air movement needed to dry them.

That's the idea.  I thought it might both improve the cooking system, and give a use to flowers at the same time.  I think it could be worked into a nice gradation, where the only way to affect all five tastes with spices, would be to both use a high tier dish, and be highly skilled at cooking. This allows for the player to dial in the taste profile via foods used and other methods early in their skill, but at high skill it will become easier and more precise, provided they have access to the correct spices.

Ya, definitely would need to be tiered.  Earlier islands, mobs wouldn't use fire.  At some point they get a axe, then a pick, then eventually fire.   Maybe won't attack animals till later game either.  I think they could attack crops by hand early on.  And like you say, start with fewer ladders, then work up to more.  It'd be interesting, seeing how players set up their bases in response to the various threats.  Oh, maybe mobs even get the ability to poison water source blocks!  It'd be interesting if there were several different races of enemies and they each had a unique power or two to hassle the player.

Ya, it seems like an idea consistent with what we've heard of TFC2 so far.  Mobs could also use flaming arrows and torches to set fire to player structures, perhaps.  They could even attack crops and farm animals.  Or have ladders.  Lots of possibilities for mobs to attack more than just the player.

Those are all good points, but weren't the devs basically policing how we use thatch blocks when they made them transparent. We all got though it, we figured out new ways to survive those first nights, and personally I'd say that it made surviving that much more rewarding. It is a survival mod after all.

There's a big difference, imo, between policing what people use as shelter in the early days, vs policing their scaffolding.  Early days shelter has clear game balance implications.  Scaffolding not so much.   If jute can be used to make solid thatch, that's not going to affect the first several days, unless the player gets extremely lucky and runs across like 10+ mature jute plants right at the start, fires up a large vessel, and hangs around for a day while they turn to jute (and that's assuming a bale requires only 1 jute, and the player is ok in a closet at night).  In that time they could easily have 6+ stacks of logs.    If the player is lucky and starts near a bunch of jute, I got nothing against them having a very, very slight advantage in the first few days.  The player can already use gravity defying logs as bridges and climbing scaffolding, so I'm not sure what the problem with bales also being gravity defying would be.  I never tear that stuff down in single player, so there's no disadvantage to the long take-down of logs there.  Multiplayer, maybe you want to, maybe not. I think far, far more common scenario is the player gets seeds, and has to wait a year to have enough jute to make enough bales for a shelter.  But more likely they're doing it for the look.  If it's a big concern, make a bale take 4 straw + 2 jute.  The player will under no circumstance have bales until they have a saw then. 

Now personally, I don't care much one way or another.  But, thatch bales would be kind of nice, for those who do want a thatched look, because right now making a thatch roof is annoying due to having to wade around in thatch, being slowed down.  You can avoid that by good planning, but sometimes you decide to renovate.  Also your roof need to be twice as thick, if you want to walk on top.  It's not a big deal which is why I don't care that much.  But the op's idea seems balanced and reasonable, and with the addition of gravity defying, useful.

I think the reason people used thatch that way was because grass is everywhere so they could just mow some down and use it, wherever they were.  Jute it not everywhere, so the player would have to make the bales at base, and bring it with them. But why not just bring plank blocks?  I think plank blocks, on the balance, are easier to make, especially on expedition.  True, they do take an axe to take down, but I'd say that's not really a huge deal.  If players want to use the bales for scaffolding at base, fine.  I don't think it's productive to try and police what people use as scaffolding really.

Unless there is some way that the additives "respawn" this is a good way or *really*  limiting the amount of stuff one can make - once you've used up your 50 pieces of copper additive, no more copper stuff...

Not the way I would like things to go.

That could easily be done.  Some fortresses perhaps have a process block that allows the player to make the stuff.  They bring back that block, then they can make all they want.  The process block could even use currently 'useless' ores, to help give them a use.  But if you do that, what with islands being planned to have a uniform top layer, there is a somewhat significant risk that the player could not find the correct useless ore in the x:0 realm.  The further east-west they travel though, the more options they could have.  I would think at x:1 or x:-1 they're almost guaranteed to have found a sedimentary top layer.  Or, maybe islands can have more top layers, if ores are not the tech-gate.

But, the quantities found could also be varied.  Just do some stats on what is needed welded at different tiers and provide for that much and more.  It seems like the idea is to encourage armor and weapons at each tier (as opposed to currently, where I think a lot of people skip copper gear, and probably iron too).  So 7 flux to make an anvil, 7 for a breastplate, 3 for a helmet, 4 for leggings, 3 for boots, 1 each for mace and sword.  So 26 total flux to gear up at each tier.  Of course bronze tier needs more for bloomery, iron tier lots more for blast furnace, and of course yet more for the ingot making in tier 5 and up.  But if a fort gave admixtures enough for 64 flux at tiers 1 and 2 for instance, that sounds like it'd be plenty for all you'd need.  The amount given could even be a config setting. I'm not totally clear on if there's 1 fort per island, or multiple, but if multiple, spreading it out amongst forts would give further impetus to go after more forts.  The player could get just enough, and then push on to the next tier of islands, or spend more time and hit most of the forts in their current x postion and have tons and tons of extra.  Or maybe rather than a generator for each level, there's just a couple.  The first one generates tier 1-3 fluxes, and is found in a tier 3 fort, and the other generates tier 4-6, and is found in a tier 6 fort.  So the player deals with a bit of scarcity for awhile, but then gets a process block to generate all they need as a 'big-ticket' reward.   In any case, I think the we can get by fine without special generators.

It's a very easy thing to adapt to player needs, I think.  The whole idea is to allow both the island-hopping playstyle, and a more sedentary TFC1-like playstyle, using the same world gen algorithms. What I got from Bioxx's comment above was that if the ores themselves are the tech-gate, there'd have to be two different world generation algorithms if TFC2 is to also support sedentary TFC1-like play: one that doesn't generate certain ores in certain x positions, and one that generates them anywhere randomly. 

The precise details could be different, but the overall idea is to make the tech gate something other than ores.  Flux seemed the logical choice, since it's still directly required to make all useful metal items.  In theory a player could even make stacks of bronze ingots never leaving x:0 in island-hopping mode, but that's fine because they won't be able to do anything useful with them till they have the flux.

What if...rather than making ores be the tech gates, and so having to limit their spawn, instead something else becomes the tech gate.  For instance perhaps each metal requires it's own special flux.  And the special thing to make the special flux, is only found in the fortresses.  So in fortress treasure chests on the tier 1 islands, you can find 'fairy wings', or whatever, and combine those with normal flux, to make the tier 1 flux to weld copper.  The tier 2 island fortress chests can contain fairy wings, but also 'human bones' or something, which is the tier 2 flux admixture.  Whatever they are, these special admixtures can only be found in fortresses.   Each higher tier of fortress can contain their own tier of admixtures, plus all lower tiers as well, to keep the player supplied. 

It could even be a 2-part thing, so the player needs 2 admixtures.  In the 3x3 crafting grid, the normal flux would be center, then four of one, and four of the other.  One of them could be a quantity limited, and always the same through all tiers.  The other admixture would be what specifies the tier.  So maybe human bones are required through all tiers.  In this way the quantity of human bones ever found would limit the number of times the player could make flux.  The tiered admixture could be given in greater quantity.  This limits the number of welds a player gets, but allows them a lot of leeway in choosing which tier they use it on.  Obviously the first tier recipe would have to involve only 4 squares, so it'd be a bit different.

Different game difficulties could alter not only the mob stats, but also the amount of admixtures that appear.

With this system, I think all ores and stone layers could be allowed to spawn wherever, in a totally random fashion, hopefully obviating the need for a different world-gen algorithm.  In the 'regular' game the player could hoard all ores and make ingots with them any time (well, subject to normal process block limitations i.e. pit kiln, crucible, bloomery, BF), but wouldn't be able to weld ingots to make anything useful until they got the admixtures from the forts.  Blast furnaces could probably be left to use normal flux.  The tiered fluxes could be just required for welding.

BUT, if the player wasn't interested in the progressive-island playstyle, they could just spawn in the admixtures via console, and have an experience more like TFC1.  The forts would still be there, still have admixtures, and still increase in difficulty - world gen doesn't change. But the player is not forced to go to them, except if they just happen to need ores there by chance.  But if the player can find all they want or need on the x-0 islands, they can just stay there.

Or maybe there's a config option that makes a spawn chest near the player that contains a bunch of flux admixtures.  Or a config option that activates new recipes which just require 'useless ore' admixtures rather than fort-only stuff.  Or simply a config option that makes regular flux work for all metals, as it does now.

I think this would allow the world gen to always be the same, and yet allow players to skip the tiered island hopping if they're not into that, all hopefully within the scope of a config option, rather than more complicated stuff.

As a side note, if human bones were one of the admixtures, it would give a good reason to have set piece crypts, with bones inside. It would even give a sort of 'origin story'  - the player(s) is the last of their tribe, who have been killed by the invading mobs (which is why they have the bones) -as opposed to the more typical 'shipwrecked' story.  You could even have the player start in the charred ruins of a village (and if they chose 'easy mode' then there's some human bones laying around)

Another side note, if this admixture thing were implemented, I think Borax should have a special quality where you combine the admixtures with the raw borax ore, and get like, 4-6 of the special flux.  This would make borax 4-6 times (or however many) more efficient with the admixtures as opposed to stone derived flux.  Borax just doesn't get enough love currently, for being found in only one stone type.

Using jute to make the block solid sounds like a good idea.  Give some use for the later-game jute surplus.  I think it would be ok to make it gravity defying and solid.  By that time people are going to be using them for the look anyway, no need to make it harder than necessary.

Is there any chance there will be a more 'traditional' mode, where the minerals or what-have-you will not be X-limited?  One of the things I love about current TFC is that each world is a total unknown - it could be a veritable utopia with all ores close by, graphite within 200 blocks of spawn (happened once in a play test seed) lots of animals and fruit, or it could be a dry climate wasteland of Diorite.  It all has a feel of mystery and wonder, where anything is possible and you just don't know what you're going to get.

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But TFC2 seems like current thinking is it will be very much more structured - patterned island layout, critical tech ores always a minimum of x-thousand blocks away, not being able to place blocks on new islands.  It will make for a more structured combat oriented and exciting game to be sure.  But it sounds like it will feel...artificial, and deaden the mystery a bit

Instead of wondering 'where's copper, where's graphite, they could be anywhere!', it sounds like we'll be saying 'ok, cassiterite is 1 island away, graphite is 3 islands away, I don't want to put serious effort into my base until I'm at least on the iron island.'  There won't be the same thrill of finding exposed graphite, or garnierite nuggets, because we'll already know to expect them on that island (or at least, one of the islands in that x-range) or more precisely, to NOT expect them earlier.  And the islands we know they're *not* on will be kind of ho-hum, looking for the very defined mineral set that we know this x range encompasses.  If x-0 isn't even copper, what will it have, just useless minerals?  And the island after that just copper + useless minerals?  Instead of the fresh-seed excitement, it kind of seems like there will be a get-out-of-jail feeling to the first one or two islands.  And I say that knowing not a lot about what else is in store behind the scenes, I realize.  But...it's just kind of how it seems so far.

It seems like it might be nice to have an option for a play mode where the minerals aren't x limited, but everything else stays, including mob difficulty scaling.  For people that don't want to necessarily make a B-line east or west, but a more natural and random feel.

Thing is, do players *need* to truly live on any island but one?  The first significant base will likely be on whatever island they can get bronze at.  If they invest a lot of time in that base, will they want to move?  Or will further island raids be just for the required tech supplies?  In current TFC, a nomadic player doesn't really need to farm to survive, there's plenty of wild food, so if TFC2 has a similar food mechanic going, a player could probably defeat the island just scavenging as they go.  However the difficulty system works, it has to allow the player to at least be able to travel on the island - how else would they defeat the natives?  But if the player can travel, they can find wild food.  Unless there is none, or very, very little.  It'd be kind of interesting if crops only existed on farms defended by the natives, and the player had to raid those farms to find food.  And only after the natives are beaten do wild plants and animals spawn.  There could be some interesting moral dilemmas if the farms were inhabited by civilians, children and such.  But even then, a player can bring a lot of food with them.  If the tech-gate is just minerals in the ground, the player will probably be able to get them without conquering, much less farming, unless the natives can destroy player structures, and use ladders, etc.

At some point the travel between bronze base and further islands will become onerous though, unless there are indeed portals.  The player would have to choose between re-basing or making huge extended trips (or just staying on the tier they're at).  To me the notion of making a new significant base every other island or so, and abandoning the old one, sounds exhausting (and disassembling the iron sheets on the blast furnace, terrifying).  But then again, if the defeated mobs had a pretty nice fort, I guess you could maybe just move in.  That's not the same as building it from ground up though. 

To me the notion of disallowing placement/destruction of blocks on unconquered islands seems extremely artificial.  I'd very much like that to not be a mechanic of the game.

I think gun control in America is complicated because there is a large portion of the population that believe it is their born right to carry or own a gun...

This *is* the born right of every American citizen - it's in the Constitution.   The belief is a fact in this case.

I'm always curious in 2nd amendment discussion, the people who comment (especially on the control side), have they ever fired a gun?  Do they own a gun?  Have they ever killed an animal with a gun? 

Bioxx said "you'll need to have conquered the current island in order to attain the materials to progress to the next tier of islands."

Does that mean that once you have "conquered" an island it will stay "conquered"?  as is no more hostile mobs spawning?

here is an earlier post on the subject.   The relevant part being "Before an island is pacified, building/living there should be impossible."  This could mean a lot of things.  I'd guess that until the mobs' fortress or whatever is pacified, their spawn numbers are greatly increased.  Possibly they have better equipment as well.  So orcs with bows and steel armor and weapons are a serious threat.  But once you've broken their leader or fortress or whatever, maybe they're back to stone weapons and no (or leather) armor, and spawn less, and are more of a nuisance because they've lost their tech.

However, it seems like mobs will need the power to attack the player's structures, animals, and crops.  Otherwise, I'm not sure how they would make it 'impossible' for the player to build or live there.  Or perhaps more to the point, mine there.  If all the player has to do is toss up a plank hut and mine to the critical minerals, and the mobs can't tear down his hut, then really they'll mostly hinder him finding the materials in the first place, not stop him.  A well supplied player could insulate himself pretty well I think, if the mobs can't bust down his door.  Six vessels of raw food makes a lot of sandwiches, and a few rain barrels strategically positioned can keep a guy in water without leaving the house. 

Might be there are several fortresses on a given island, each affecting a region.  Otherwise it could take a long time, constantly being harassed, to find the one fortress that controls an entire 4000-square-ish island .  Unless it always spawns more or less in the center I guess.  One fortress per 1-2000 square area sounds a lot more manageable in terms of finding it - and you'll need to find them fast it sounds like, or risk being overrun in your inadequate night-hut while searching - I'm not sure how it could be made impossible to establish a base, but not impossible to spend several days and nights exploring, looking for the fort.  But then if you conquer one fortress and happen to find  the ore you need, can you just forget about the other fortresses?  Does or spawn in smaller veins so you need to find more of them? Perhaps there is a master fort, with a lot of outposts - destroying an outpost reduces the spawn in a sub-region, but they still come at you with better gear.  Only by destroying the master fort do you nullify their tech. 

It kind of begs the question, will we get loot in the form of actual tech?  Like, maybe they have a bloomery, or single level blast furnace in the fort?  It kind of seems like that would cheapen the accomplishment of getting a BF especially though. Can you find raw ingots in the fort?  You'd risk the game turning into a loot-based progression, rather than mining-and-smithing.

But tldr, I agree with Shiphty - I'm sure there will always be *some* amount of hostiles spawning.  It sounds like when you've 'conquered' an island, you've got access to enough materials to tech up to the next level and fight the next  island's denizens comfortably. 

Sorry, ya, I knew the north-south wouldn't vary in mob difficulty, that was clear from the earlier post.  I was just pondering about general stone and mineral occurrence between islands, and how that might affect the amount of travel required to 'tech up.'  I was imaging how far one might have to travel, just based on random stone occurrence in large areas, with possibly certain key minerals like graphite being east-west limited.   But it sounds like current thinking is a more structured east-west mineral (or something else) progression than I'd imagined, with maybe even copper and bronze being X-limited.  Which is interesting, and will definitely ramp up difficulty.  So many questions...but I feel like I'm prying too deep here, so I'll shut up.

I'm interested to see how the island thing plays out.  Bioxx said here

"The current intent is to make sure that, at least for the first few islands, there will be some required resources present so that no bottlenecks occur. As for the rock layers, each island is its own single rock layer at this time. Fear not, there are plans for deeper rock layers on each island, but nothing that I want to reveal quite yet.."

Very intriguing.  "First few islands" meaning north-south?  Or east-west as well?   In the current game, traveling 4000 blocks or so, you usually encounter 2 or 3 stone types.  1 top layer in that whole area seems daunting, especially if your second layer is diorite, gabbro, or granite.  But that's TFC1 thinking I guess.  Sounds like deep rock layers will have something new about them...

I'm wondering if the plan is to compel players to venture east and west, for example via graphite layers only being outside of 'X-0', or will the player, on the balance of probability, be able to live out their career, blue steel and all, on the first one or two islands? A single top layer seems like the player will compelled to build their early base out of whatever stone they have, as opposed to the current game, where I think layer changes are more common, and the player has more choice.  Can the players expect to have a more limited stone pallet available for building, for a given amount of travel, I wonder? I feel like currently the player eventually 'settles in', and has a big base they've spent a lot of time on, and don't want to leave.  so in the SP game, it kind of feels like travelling more than 1 island east or west would be daunting, unless the player is willing to start over with their base, or there's teleporation magic, etc. 

In multiplayer, it gets more interesting.  There could be a little crowding in the original 'safe' zone.  As opposed to currently where, on larger servers like Happydiggers, you just wander far enough in whatever direction to get to an area where you have room.  It sounds like in TFC2, large multiplayer servers might require more cooperation, in order to tame violent lands for expansion?  Definitely interested to see where things go.

Ya, I definitely don't see where making construction take time would add anything to the mod.  The time is in getting the materials, that's enough.