Darmo

I'dI don't ever pan or sluice, so I don't know how often those might return lead, but aside from those and lead nuggets on the surface, the only way to get lead is with a pick.  But if you have a pick you already have a more durable metal.  A better use of that pick would be to get more copper.  Now there may be a narrow use window, where the player has collected some copper nuggets, but not enough to make a weapon yet, but they have come across a lot of lead nuggets (or panned or sluiced for them?) and could use those to make a weapon, saving some of their vital copper.  It's a pretty limited use scenario though, I think.  Once you've got a pick, and found copper, your best move is to find a copper deposit.

I don't know the master plan for TFC2, but I'm guessing plastic is a no-go. 

Honestly, it may be best to re-think the early combo-food.  I think everyone prefers sandwiches right now, as the thing they require - the bread - is also food, and is relatively quick to prepare.  You have to have a quorn, so there's a tech gate, but once you're got that it's fairly trivial to make bread. Salad bowls take a bunch of time EVERY time, and are for a lower-tier food, compared to bread which cooks in under a minute I think.   Maybe the lowest tier food needs to be made to 'kebabs'.  So the player uses a stick, skewers some stuff on it, and cooks it for a minute.  Early game, sticks are somewhat valuable, so that's a cost.  And then the cooking on the campfire takes a little time (raw kebab gives no satiation). Then sandwich is the next tier, and then, bowls can be used for a higher tier item - stew.  If they're better than sandwiches, people will (hopefully) use them - as opposed to skipping salads entirely, which I think is what a lot of people (especially experienced people) do right now - and it will help keep clay as useful in the later game. 

This kind of seems like it would be better in the TFC2 forums, relating to magic. Do you have a notion of how this would 'work' in game?  A little more idea of the process?  I'm assuming the player would have to do some work to get these things...

It's really no trouble to make an extremely heavy iron weapon.  Either way you can quickly make a weapon that is too heavy to be used effectively.  There's nothing magical about lead. It is mostly useful when you need more weight in a small and aerodynamic package - fishing weights, lead shot.  I won't claim to be a medieval historian by any means, but I've never heard of lead being used in a melee weapon historically.  As much as it'd be nice to see a use for lead, it just doesn't really make sense to use it in weapons.

Wasn't there hints at some point, of a new preservation system of some kind in the future?  Personally I've found that keeping food on me in vessels, and being pretty scrupulous about trimming it, it lasts a long time.  Grains almost forever really.  As long as I'm careful not to log in like, 7 hours after the last time, and get hit with a huge amount of decay.  I always have at least two vessels of raw foodstuffs on me.  Is that too burdensome for some?

 

I wouldn't do that if I were you.

Woops, sorry, my terminology mistake there.  Whatever the things are you get after you split the bloom are called, that's what I meant.  I forgot the thing between those and raw blooms is what's called a 'refined' bloom. 

Still, with crucible it's only two smithing operations (refine and spilt) to get a lot of useable wrought iron ingots.  The BF, every single pig iron ingot has to be smithed twice to get a steel ingot.  That's a lot of smithing! 

You don't have to watch bloomeries but you have to work the results on the forge quite a bit.

Ya, I guess I should have qualified that statement - if you have a crucible, bloomeries are nice.  Then you just split the bloom, and melt the refined blooms in the crucible, rather than having to smith each one.

I like bloomeries - you don't have to watch them.  I made two for a rail project.  I found that to be plenty - between miscellaneous other tasks and smithing, I couldn't keep up with those two.   And laying rail lines is great fun.  Any idea how much many meters of rail you'll be putting down?

Did you know you can cool metal by dipping it in a barrel of water?

Ya, the cooling chest is for when I'm further processing the ingots.  So I pour my ingots, let them cool down to just below liquid, pop them out, and they're still hot enough I can weld them and work the double ingot further.  Especially fun when I'm making my copper and bronze anvils.  I don't even need a forge to do it, I just pit-kiln the metal and weld it while it's still hot.

  Also you eventually run out of water.  I'd rather have the water around so I don't need to go find some when I get thirsty during long blacksmithing stints. 

Aren't gems found on shallower depth always have worst quality? The deeper you are, the better the chance to get a great gem. If you haven't found the gem yet, work harder. That's why I tied the max grades of conjured gem with the quality of the natural gem. It is tied with your progression on the tech tree & mine depth.

Not sure on quality vs depth.  I've never seen any statement to that effect myself.  I have always kind of wondered if the type of gem depends on the rock type you're mining.  Never paid enough attention, since gems don't matter currently.   If the player works the gems, then depth could be tied to carat size and number of flaws, rather than quality.

Also added v1.15 awhile ago. Help me fill out the '??'!

Well, within the scope of my crystal system, I'd suggest that gems and crystals be different categories, with their own metadata.  I'd suggest crystals include: tourmaline, beryl, selenite, quartz, and calcite at least.  Selenite and calcite form irl huge crystals.  Quartz makes big ones too, though not on the order of meters, I think.

In categorizing crystals, I looked for minerals that irl for long crystal structures visible to the naked eye, at least.  Malachite doesn't do that really. And obsidian irl is actually the opposite of a crystal.  I further tried to limit it by basic mineral - that is, quartz, amethyst, and citrine, for instance, those are all just quartz crystals.  Amethyst and citrine have impurities that give them color - so they might be better as gems, while the pure form - quartz - is a crystal.  So I was looking for fundamentally different crystals, vs different colors of the same mineral.  IRL, there are seven 'crystal systems'.  It's an interesting read.  Some of them - garnet, spinel, fluorite - form cubic crystals.  The hexagonal forms seem to be the ones that make long crystals.  But some of the TFC lower-tier crystals could be from the cubic family, but they only ever are 1 meter in size.

As for effects, you're pretty combat-heavy in your list.  I'd suggest thinking of things not necessarily combat related - water breathing, spider climbing, fire resistance, cold resistance, teleportation, block duplication, summoning, plant growth, ore detection, raw stone disintegration (for mining), holding (enchanted barrel holds twice as much water or items), putting animals to sleep for transport,  Shrinking animals for transport, etc etc.  The list of beneficial stuff is virtually endless.  It doesn't have to be all combat-centric.

Ya, you can partially fill ingot molds.  It doesn't fix the overall issue of having odd amount of of ore left.  But you can partially fill an ingot mold (or any tool mold for that matter, assuming the metal is bronze or copper), and then later if you do another melt of the same metal, complete that partially filled mold.  It's very common I think to have a partially filled ingot mold of pretty much every metal.  I just keep them all in a chest near the forge, usually this is also my cooling chest.

I think a magic system that involves gems/crystals might be good - it'd fit the basic theme of MC and TFC - mining and minerals.  I did start another thread to discuss improvement of the system of making gems.  A gem based system could work a lot of different ways, and could bring variety to play-throughs, for instance by tying the type of gem to the type of magic it could be used for.  Maybe rubies do fire magic.  You don't find rubies, you don't get fire magic.  If the gems have durability, the player would experience many varieties perhaps, and have to adapt their strategies to the gems available to them by random chance.

I think that something TFC is currently kind of missing, that MC has, is the need to 'go deeper', for resources.  I know Bioxx mentioned this in another thread, that he has some secret plans for that.  But, there could be a further compulsion to go deeper if, for instance, Crystal clusters grew deeper.  These wouldn't be random gems popping out of the rock, they'd be physically visible crystals, that only appear at certain depths - the deeper the bigger.  And perhaps only in certain rock types, and/or near hot springs and lava.  There could even be beautiful crystal caverns, like so.

Those are real-life crystals several meters in length!  I think having some of those in the larger TFC2 caverns would be pretty epic,    If magic were derived from these kinds of cave crystals, then you have a reason to go deeper.  The deeper you go, the bigger and more powerful the crystals.  Then, further imagine that the largest, most powerful crystals cannot be carried by the player - they do not fit on the back, and yet overburden the player.  The only way to get them to the surface (aside from tediously placing, moving to the other side, picking up, placing, etc) where they can be used somehow, is in a mine cart or on a donkey.  I'd kind of prefer mine carts, because then suddenly minecarts have a purpose beyond being rollercoasters.  It'd be interesting though, if some kind of hoist was added to the game.  Maybe a shaft could be sunk down into the crystal cave, so that the player doesn't have to lay an insane number of tracks.  edit: Depending on how the lift works, it could take 2 pieces of jute per meter if it's a counterweight system, or one piece of jute per meter if it's a cranked spool.  Either way, the amount of jute required would be a stumbling block to going super-deep.  Also the lift mechanism for crystals could be a burlap sling, requiring even more jute.

Now at the same time as I think gems and crystals would be a good basis for the system, I think it would also be good if books were important somehow, since right now paper seems to lack importance.  Reeds are one of the few reasons to visit the tropics, but one trip and you've got about all you'll ever need.  Perhaps the wizard has to bring up crystals and set them up, so they'll be physically present.  They have to have access to the sun or moon - that's where they get their power, and why they don't work underground.  The wizard has to make a book for each spell, and the book is linked to the crystal by inscribing a rune on the side of the crystal.  In this way larger cystals can hold (power) more spells.  Basically each block of the crystal can power 4 spells, 1 on each side. But the crystal provides power based on size as well.  And the power is divided by the runes - so if you only use 1 rune on a 1 section crystal, that spell will be 4x more powerful vs having a rune on all four sides.  And if you get a 4 meter tall crystal, and only put 1 rune on the whole thing, well, that's a very powerful spell indeed!  Crystals cannot be combined.  They would have specific sizes and when placed would immediately be that size, similar to support posts.  Maybe allow 1-section crystals to be carried on the back, 2-section can be carried by donkey, but anything larger requires a mine cart and/or hoist.

The books, the player carries with them, and is what is used to activate the spell.  Maybe one use, maybe multiple, but limited, to keep a continual need for paper.  Maybe the player crafts a specific book of a specific rune type, and it can be used as many times as that same type of rune is inscribed on a crystal in their base.  Provided crystals are rare enough, they don't get used up.  But each spell use removes a rune, making subsequent spells from that crystal more powerful, since the crystals has fewer runes now.  edit: Problem with that idea is that the book is on the player, and the crystal at home, so it probably gets unloaded at some point.  So how to link the two.  I suppose the data is stored on the player's book, and simply updates the crystals when their chunk reloads.

In keeping with the highly geographical nature of the game, it would also be interesting if ley lines were a thing.  These would be invisible to the naked eye, required special equipment and/or magic to see them.  Placing a crystal (or several depending on how big ley lines are) one the intersection, powers them up even more.  If done right it could be a critical point in the wizard's career - he'll already have a decent base before he gets th magic to detect ley lines, so once he finds an intersection, does he just keep going where he is, or does he move to the intersection?  Hexagonal generation I would think would allow both 2-way and 3-way intersections.

There's also the good 'ole notion of dark magic, in the forms of 'soul gems'.  Trapping the souls of living creatures in gems or whatever, to power fell magics. It'd be kind of interesting if there were sort of several 'paths' of magic to go down, rather than one.

These would be fun, but I think they should be very, very rare in general.  Honestly I think if we're being realistic, probably just ask for a rock cone with a lava pool at the top.  Even in the current game, once in awhile I come across an overflowing lava pool, sometimes from an overhang, and they're always impressive and exciting for their unusual nature.

If volcanoes are dangerous, why should anyone settle near them or go near them?  People spend tons of time building their settlements, I don't know why they'd settle near a volcanoes and risk all that work being destroyed. The only use for gravel currently is to get flint and for panning. Both uses are pretty minor, and gravel is already plenty abundant for them.  In the current game, bonuses to agriculture aren't that meaningful, it's already pretty easy to get a huge surplus of food. 

One of the only possible compelling reasons I see is if new minerals or something are added, that are found only in volcanoes.  But they cannot be game-crucial minerals, or volcanoes will have to be common enough that people can find them.  So they either need to be 'easter egg' minerals, or perhaps minerals that are rare everywhere else, but abundant around volcanoes. Even then, if the eruptions happen infrequently, all the player has to do is pop in, grab them, and leave. 

Or, if some sort of thermal generation makes an appearance, and the miscellaneous lava that appears all over currently goes away, then the vicinity of volcanoes might become attractive for power generation.

As scenery, they'd be great.  But if they're to actually contribute to gameplay, I think TFC2 is going to have to have stuff added that plays off them.  Because I don't see anything in the current game that would.

Interesting idea - I like it.Not entirely sure about the initial experiments resulting in "useles goo" [my words] - I think this would be *very*  frustrating unless you got a lot of powder from little resource, which would mean that late game you'd be churning out stuff like there's no tomorrow.I think maybe that there should be a *chance*  of "useless goo", but otherwise simply nothing happens - rather like the wrong metals in a clay pot at the beginning of TFC1...

Diferent apparatus sounds interesting, too, but no time to go in depth now.

The idea behind the useless goo was mainly a feedback mechanism.  I thought if the player tried a solvent, and got nothing, it could be confusing - they might think it's a bug.  I figured there needed to be something to concretely tell them that that was not the correct solvent. I was not intending that it ruin the vial or anything, it'd just be thrown away.

RAMBLINGS

You're correct that there would be wastage of minerals in what I described.  And further correct that irl, if you used the wrong solvent, the more likely result is probably nothing much happens, you still have the mineral.   The way I described it initially, the player might waste up to 300 units of  a given mineral, before they hit the fourth correct one (and that's assuming there's four solvents, there could be more or less). But I also intended that as part of the barrier to entry into the chemistry field - the notion you may have to waste some minerals.  It also reinforces the notion that chemistry is about experimentation and - yes - failure.  There would be the thrill of luck when you get the correct solvent the first time. 

 

If nothing happens with the wrong solvent, then the first stage is really just about mass-producing solvents, and whether the player has just one distillation flask, and so has to spread the experiments out over time, or they have four flasks and can do all four at once, and so get all four results in 1/4 the time of one flask.  Which is valid, it's a time sink, so a barrier. 

I'd originally considered another twist on the first stage of production - all minerals would be placed in a camp fire or forge, and be cooked until they were reduced to [mineral] char (it may be that the char disappears if heated beyond a certain temperature, so the player must watch it rather than just let it cook at max heat).  Then the char is ground up in the mortar and pestle. The twist there was going to be that a campfire or forge reduced the units gained.  Campfire perhaps you get only 25%, forge 50%.  And then there were going to be one or two higher tier tools that would return more (reduction furnace 75%, calcinator 100%) The idea behind this was, in the early stages the player was struggling to get enough material to experiment with.  Mass production would be out of the question.  But higher tiers would allow more efficient reduction.  In that scenario maybe they do not lose the mineral they put in the distillation flask.  Because they're going to have to lose 3 ingots worth of material getting enough to put in the flask in the first place.  In this scenario the player would still lose material, but it would be known from the start, rather than random.  I wonder if that would be less frustrating?  A forge is pretty easy to get, so losing one ingot to get 1 ingot isn't terrible, I'd say.  But even a 3:1 loss ratio (3 lost, 1 gained) doesn't seem terrible to me.  Most mineral pockets have far, far more than 4 ingots of ore, and this wastage only happens once at this stage, as long as the player takes notes on which solvents go with which minerals.

MACRO THOUGHTS

I think really maybe the first decision to be made by the devs, aside from if they even want to consider this general idea of experimental chemistry, is how hard to make it, and hence perhaps the target 'audience'.  It could be made to take enough materials and time, and require some irl deduction, that not everyone will do it, at all.  Or a middle ground where everyone will at least dabble, or make it pretty easy and every home will have a chemistry lab next door to the blast furnace.  I can totally see the attraction in wanting to have everyone at least dabble - it's a lot of coding effort, and perhaps best if everyone uses it at least a bit. But there's also the notion of exclusivity and secret knowledge.  The notion that not everyone should be good at everything. The "wow!" factor of knowing a good chemist.  I'd originally envisioned it, before the TFC2 forums, as a replacement for magic, more or less.  So I thought it would be worth the effort, even if not everyone did it.  With magic in the mix, well, there's the possibility of magic eclipsing chemistry, or maybe they just don't bother with chemistry, idk.  That's up to the devs.

 

The metals system as it exists is mostly grinding.  Every step and recipe is known and straightforward, tiered and well documented.  The hammering target is the only random.  I personally dropped my single player game after making a bloomery and laying a bunch of rails - I love rails.  I was not particularly interested in grinding high tier metals.  Higher speed picks was the main attraction.  That and buckets.  Not much need in TFC1 single player for high tier armor.  MP can be another story, and of course TFC2 is probably an entirely other story. It sounds like in TFC2, with graduated difficulty, there may be more compulsion to get really good armor and weapons. 

 

Propicking and mining have a certain art to them as well, but everything else besides those and the metal tech tree in the current game is dead simple really.  chemistry *could* be just another tiered system, with well defined recipes and progression, nothing wasted but time, just like metal tech (unless you put the wrong ingot in your crucible). 

 

I was trying to bring to it a different feel.  Randomness, experimentation, lost material, catastrophic failure. 

Like the idea of requiring more from the player to get beyond 1000 hp.  In the "more accurate food tastes thread" I suggested a slight alteration of your system, using abstracted vitamins, rather than food variety.  Probably would have fit here better, but the conversation there kind of led into it.

It's a little hard for me to make suggestions because, as mentioned, it's not a system I tend to pay a lot of attention to.  Also, I've only really played two games long-term enough to improve my cooking skill noticeably.  I think the satiation could be more compelling if food were not as abundant. But that's a tightrope to walk, between making the game annoyingly difficult at the start.  In the end I'd guess we'll always have more food than we really need.  And for some people, they don't want the game to be about that, they want to build cool stuff.  They'll tolerate a certain amount of early game overcome-the-environment game mechanic, but they do want to be able to build without much annoyance eventually. 

In terms of making the system more attractive to master, you either have to decrease the amount of food available, or increase the benefits of cooking.  I'm honestly pretty happy with the system.  I don't try to to figure out the drainage or wood influence, and I don't think I have any way at all to determine PH even if I wanted to.  But I feel like cooking is useful enough that I do use it.   Those esoteric factors do kind of serve as a bit of a randomizing factor, which isn't a bad thing.

COMPELLING REWARDS

A revised nutrition system that better rewards well cooked food would probably be the most direct way to encourage mastery of cooking through better rewards.  But there's the balance of making cooking not required, vs. basically required.  Tony's idea of having better nutrition required for >200 hp amounts is pretty good I think.  It maintains the optional nature of the early game cooking, since you can maintain 1000hp by just getting your food groups, raw or cooked.  But if you are higher level and want to actually have those high level hp, you need eat good food.  In TFC1 it probably would still not be super-compelling for me personally, as I don't do tons of fighting really. 

But if TFC2 has greater challenges, presumably requiring more hp, that would probably be a good way to bring some urgency to cooking.  But to really emphasize cooking it would probably need to be based large off the dialing-in of the food, as opposed to just having more variety of vegetables, etc.   Because again, getting food, even a variety of food within groups, is currently fairly easy.  Truly dialing in your cooking skill though, is not.  If the first 200 hp were based on food groups, but beyond that was based on...'vitamins' - sorry Tony, I know you didn't want to call them that ;-) - or whatever, and cooking was the only (or primary) way of getting the 'vitamins' required for high level hp, I think that may be a compelling reason for players to seek out good cooked food.  You could just name them vitamin12345, which is just an abstraction like soil nutrients (we avoid letters to avoid the association with RL vitamins) and each is associated with a specific food group.  You could have some cooked foods focus more on certain vitamins - a steak dinner is more about meat and vegetables and gets you those vitamins.   A strawberry pie is more about grains and fruit vitamins.  A ham and cheese casserole is dairy and meat.  Etc. These would be the next 'tier' of cooking, above sandwiches, which would not provide vitamins.  These tier 2 recipes might still provide satiation, but they're more about the vitamins, and they provide more vitamins - perhaps very significantly more - if they're more dialed in to the player's tastes.  That isn't really 'realistic', per se - irl you get vitamins whether you like the food or not - but in terms of a mechanic to encourage cooking, I think it would work.  Maybe there's a better name than vitamins?  Whether these tier2 recipes involve new cooking utensils, or just different disposables, I don't know.

FOOD SCARCITY

With regards to food scarcity, there might be a couple things we can do.  One would be to make it so that immature plants do not drop seeds (which is logical).  That would make it harder to just mass-gather seeds at the start and have a gigantic garden right off the bat.  The player might have to actually leave plants in place till they mature, come back, and get the seeds. 

Second, if a plant is mature, and then force-drops it's seeds, either through overshadowing, or cold, the seed that becomes a tile entity cannot be harvested.  It sprouts again in the same spot, the next time the temperature reaches a certain point.  It will sprout with less nutrients since it was already previously growing in the same spot, so second time around it will be slower growing. Nothing new can be planted on that spot with a seed tile entity.  This is representing the fact that many plant seeds, once dropped on the ground, would be almost impossible to distinguish from the dirt and pick up.  Many will germinate very rapidly.  You could differentiate by type - corn and potatoes for instance are pretty easy to salvage, but for balance sake maybe treat them all the same.  If the seeds are popped off by a tree, they could germinate as soon as they have more light and high enough temperature, but may well not have enough time to mature to produce seeds.  Or if there's a warm spell in the middle of winter.

I think the overall effect of making seeds a little harder to get, might be to reduce food availability a little bit.  But probably a lot more in the early game, so there needs to be consideration if that's desired.

In a related way, crops could become 'over-ripe'.  Currently in my tropic base, I just leave my food in ground forever.  Who needs a sky freezer when the crops are just there forever?  It might be a good idea if crops reach a point where they mature, die, and drop a seed, in the forced replanting described above.  This would require a bit more garden care and overall, reduce the ease with which one can accumulate food, I think.  Irl, most plants, once they've born fruit or seeds, they either naturally disperse those seeds, or the fruit becomes so ripe it drops.  In either case, the food value is often lost. 

 

Second, weather effects - drought, hail, floods, blight.  My impression is that right now, rain is just rain.  But there could perhaps be varying levels, and the highest levels might raise the level of freshwater rivers and lakes by 1 meter?  This would flood all adjacent low-lying farmland, and wash away the crops, seeds and all.  There'd be no way to prevent natural disasters though, so they'd need to be kind of rare. For flooding to make sense, it might need to perform a broad check to make sure it happens in a basin - for instance around a land-locked pond.  Otherwise things might get out of hand? Reeds and sugar cane may be unaffected by flooding.   Special coding might be in order in some cases.  Hail damage may pop off seeds and food, but the food is just loose.  So if the player isn't there to get it, it vanishes (rots).

 

 

Third, perhaps make there be 'crop-hasslers'.  These could be wild animals - birds, raccoons, squirrels, deer - or, depending on the plans for TFC2, actual hostile mobs - orcs or other mobs raiding your place, burning/trampling your crops.  The advantage to this mechanic is that it could scale with the player.  Player has more crops?  This attracts more pests, especially if close together.  IRL, deer will run wild in corn fields.  More buildings/wealth/food might attract hostile raiding mobs.  Oh, and locusts, which would be a mix of natural disaster and crop hassler, in that the player could not fight them, but they would be more likely to attack if the player has giant fields.  There could even be crop-specific insect swarms.

 

Fourth, blights.  Maybe specific diseases for each crop, maybe a general blight for all crops.  The more crops in close proximity, the more you lose when it happens.  This would encourage crop diversity, if each plant has it's own disease, or spreading out of crops, if it's one general disease.  A contagion radius of 4 blocks would require the player to either use half (or less depending on layout) of their farmland to avoid blight.  As an aside, the preventatives or antidotes for such blights might be a good use of chemistry, if a chemistry system comes about.

 

Now, if crop diversity becomes beneficial, it might make sense to limit natural crop spawns a bit more.  I haven't performed any detailed examination, but right now it seems like about any crop can naturally spawn almost anywhere, aside from reeds.  I could be very wrong about that though. Rice and sugar cane for instance, should probably only spawn in tropics.  Same for banana trees. Olive sort of Mediterranean.  While it's true that most crops *can* grow in about any climate with human help, they all had a natural origin.  Tomatoes in South America for instance.  Limiting the natural crop variety would encourage exploration a bit more, if food variety is desirable.

 

The net effect of the above would be to make food more uncertain.  This would encourage more preserving possibly.  It might also have the knock-on effect of making the cooking system more worthwhile to master in order to get the most food value from your food, but I would not bet on that, especially in the later stages.

I think the only 'problem' with the current system is that the effort required to fully take advantage of it doesn't really seem worth it.  It's nice to craft a better meal when possible, but overall, food is so plentiful that being full longer isn't worth me digging up all my gardens to change the gravel depth, or even for me to pay much attention to what wood I'm cooking with.  I've never even attempted to figure those out. 

The main reason to use sandwiches imo is to take advantage of the slight nutrition help it gives to everything.  Despite food's abundance, I think people tend to value it's preservation over taste, so even though salting and picking meat shoots the salt level of anything made with it through the roof, it's just not important vs keeping that meat around longer. There is something nice about knowing you've got some pickled stuff in reserve, and maybe you can skip gardening for a year.  The system is plenty deep.  It's just that the benefits are not really compelling enough to make me want to master it via changing some of the more esoteric factors.

I've been for some time thinking about how a real chemistry profession could look in TFC, before there were TFC2 forums.  I was going to wait until I had a more fleshed out system, but now with magic entering the discussion, I feel like I should present this idea, because originally I'd envisioned it as a more 'believable' version of magic.  This will be a long post, but I'll spoiler it to break it up.

INITIAL THOUGHTS

I've seen some posts by Bioxx that suggest it should not be the goal for any one person to be good at everything, and furthermore that the game is meant to cater to multiplayer, as opposed to single player.  In that vein, I think that chemistry could be made into a technology tree somewhat like the metal tech tree we have.  I think it could facilitate a great many effects, which would be *like* magic, without being magic, for those who want a less fantasy experience.  I think this system should be on par with the smithing system in terms of complexity and time investement. 

As part of my initial thoughts, I considered, what is it that makes the smithing system so great?  The blacksmithing system in TFC is pretty genius really.  I think chemistry has to have a similarly complicated system, with an associated skill, in order to justify the great results that can be produced.   If we examine the blacksmithing system, it has a few salient characteristics that make it what it is:

- large investment in materials and time

- randomness which requires player to re-learn the actual smithing part every game

- a benefit for increased game-skill (higher durability)

- several things to keep track of including:

-the status of your 'production center' (pit kiln vessel, bloomery, or blast furnace)

-the heat of the item in the forge (don't let them melt)

  -the amount of flux in the anvil

-the durability of the hammer in the anvil

 

  -the 'staging' of the items heating (i.e. if you're going for a helmet you'll be more efficient if you can always have the
  next thing require being heated up, whether that be ingots, another sheet to weld to the one you just made, etc.
  It gets important on items like a breastplate composed of 8 ingots, which cannot all heat at once)

In my opinion it's that last thing that separates a great smith from an average one.  Most people can learn the 'recipe' for a given item after a little time, but being able to effectively manage all the different tasks and factors to keep a smooth work flow is what really makes it a profession I think.

All that said, I don't think it's a good idea to make chemistry like blacksmithing, to use the same GUI and tasks.  Chemistry as a profession should have it's own 'flavor' about it, not be a smithing gui with different labels. 

 

So what is it that sets chemistry apart?  The smithing system as it is, is a lot of materials grinding, and a lot of banging on anvils, with a little randomness thrown in to spice it up. 

 

I think what would set chemistry apart is to embrace the experimental nature of it.  Make it a system with tiers and material grinding, but more randomness.  I think the essence is to force the player to experiment, to advance their trade.

The TLDR

In light of the thought process above, I think that chemistry should depart from the MC and TFC norm, and embrace some degree of randomness as integral to the process.  The game minerals will have random 'profiles' assigned to them, and this will change with each world seed.  The player will have to experiment to figure out which minerals have been assigned which profiles in every world.  This will require a suspension of disbelief, as there will be recipes which make no irl sense.

The result of this will be especially evident in a multiplayer environment.  I think that if done right, chemists would be a breed apart from other players, requiring not only a lot of time invested just to produce, but even to gain the knowledge in the first place.  Players will not be able to just look up the recipe for a given concoction on wikipedia and grind some bellows.  They'll actually have to put in the experiment time.  The result being that chemists could have actual knowledge, gained in game, that they could either share, or keep to themselves, thereby protecting their professional value.  Blacksmithing has some random knowledge, but it's not entirely vital to the system - you bang away long enough you'll get there.  most of the barrier to entry in blacksmithing is the material production grind time on higher level metals.

However, if the system is to be complex, there must be useful results, or it will be wasted dev time and player time.

THE USES AND EFFECTS

The previous posts I could find on chemistry/alchemy were mostly herbalism, or things that really wouldn't affect gameplay much imo.  But if chemistry is to be a full on tech tree like metals, it needs to have concrete benefits that people will want, and will be willing to put time into.  I'll leave herbalism out of it, as it's been suggested in the TFC1 forums, and could be related to chemistry, but would be sort of a side-branch.  I'll separate the uses into 'effects' and 'products'.  

EFFECTS

These would basically be modifiers to existing TFC items.  They might have an associated product that is crafted with the item to get the effect, but the effect is what you're after.  These might be:

- Increased durability for tools and weapons (I suggested this in the TFC1 forum under "Case Hardening")

- Increase damage for weapons (I suggested this in the TFC1 forum under "Pattern Welding")

- Increased speed for tools  (Possibly related to the above)

- Increased Torch light radius (various tiers)

 

- Increase Torch Intensity (originally intended to affect zombies as daylight.  Maybe obsolete in TFC2)

- Increased Torch duration (various tiers)
 

- Permanent 1m radius low light torch effect upon burning out (basically for finding them again in the dark after they 'go out')

 

- Illuminating arrow effect (basically a torch you can shoot, perhaps of reduced duration, possibly modifiable as above)

- Coal/Charcoal enhancment to make each individual fuel piece last longer

 

- Coal/Charcoal accelerant for forge (applied to fuel, the item above a specific fuel slot heats faster)

These could be cumulative (a brighter, longer lasting, permanent glow effect torch) or not.  It could get progressively harder to add additional effects to the same item.

PRODUCTS

These would be something that does not already exist in the game.  I'm kind of violating the one-idea rule, but I'll just touch on them, to try to keep within the scope of this thread:

 

- brazing material for repair of armor and weapons

 

- Flammable oil/phosphorus grenades

 

- poison gas grenades

 

- Slippery oil grenades (mobs in affected space cannot move out of it)

- Lantern fuels (coal oil, ethanol or alcohol for burning - these could have enhancements similar to torch above)

- Lead/silver solder (if pipes ever become a thing)

- gas fuel (for gas lamps)

- Paint (a use for lead)

- fertilizer

- 'synthetic' flux

 

-'tiered' flux (special fluxes to weld high level metals)

- glue (make cobble not fall, keep natural stone in place?)

- dynamite

 

- sleep darts (would allow chickens to be put in inventory, a pig or sheep to be carried on back, put bears to sleep, etc)

So those are some of the ideas I've had so far.  I didn't include the stuff that would be internally used in chemistry itself.   If natural cavern cave-ins are ever fixed, I feel like the torch stuff alone would be pretty attractive.  If chemistry is to be a trade in its own, it has to have an extensive list of beneficial products, or nobody will bother.  These ideas were written before magic was back on the table, so they don't even touch on how chemistry could tie in with magic.  I felt I needed to establish that there *could* be a lot of benefits to chemistry, which is why I made the list.  Discussions on specific products should probably be kept to a different thread, so this one is just about the chemistry process overall.

THE PROCESS

This is super-long, so buckle up.

Presumably chemistry would have 'tiers', similar to the metal system, but different.  The tiers would be based somewhat on the tool, like anvils, but also would require more complex concoctions, with more conditions, as you move upward.  I'm going to present my initial thoughts on *a* way.  I'm no chemist though, there's probably a lot I'm missing and mixing up.

 

TIER 1

The player starts by crafting a mortar and pestle.  They use this to make [mineral] dust.  I think the mortar and pestle should require the player to actually move the handle around in a circle.  So players can't set up a multi-pestle station like they can with quorns. The results will be X units of powder.  This player then must craft some glassware (I'll have a separate post regarding glassworking).  The first three will be a boiling flask, a condenser, and a vial.  How they fit together - whether each takes an entire block or what - is for another discussion.

 

Each mineral will have assigned to it based on world seed, a 'solvent' and a 'solution profile'.  The solvent will be randomly selected.  Example solvents are distilled water, citrus juice, alcohol, and turpentine.  Each solvent will have it's own process to obtain of course (alcohol solvent would require distilling existing alcohols into a pure form).  The player places their mineral dust in the boiling flask, with some solvent, and boils it for X amount of time.  If the player used the correct solvent, The result will be solution in the vial.  If they used the incorrect solvent, there will be a generic 'sludge' left in the boiling flask, which is useless, like unknown ingots.  By process of elimination, they'll arrive at the correct solvent.

 

An optional idea, glassware could have durability.  each time the player uses a set of glassware, it loses durability.  This represents the accumulation of deposits.  The player can wash their glassware in a barrel, to regain most (but not all) of what was lost each use.  This comes from chemical majors I knew in college who basically said half the job is washing glassware.  It's not necessary, but it opens up opportunities for better qualities of glass, or self-cleaning class, later in the tech tree, and also provides some churn of glassware, to help justify a glassblowing trade.   Also, if each piece of glassware retains knowledge of it's most recent 'residue' this can be used later to cause unintended effects, such as explosions.

 

So now the player has vials of solution (or mixture, or suspension, or whatever). These vials no longer have any data link to the mineral they were made from.  These are the "solutions" the player has for the next tier.  The wiki will have profiles of each solution, to help the player identify them.  But the vials themselves will have only colors.  The rest of the into will be in metadata, obtained by further experimentation, OR, if the player has a high enough chemistry skill, they can see these characteristics by holding shift, like with food taste.

 

As an example, each solution could have four characteristics: color (obvious), taste, ph, and a flame color.   With four characteristics, and four options in each characteristic, you can cover 32 different minerals, and no two will have the same combination. I had a picture of how this chart works out, but for the size limit is super-low for this post, so maybe later.

 

The color is easy to tell, the taste simply by right clicking with vial in hand (this uses up the vial).  The PH via..some method (requires production of litmus paper, but does not use the vial).  And the flame color by right clicking on a fireplace with the vial (uses up the vial).  So, in the course of identifying which solution a given mineral prodcues, the player will be required to A) grind up, B ) distill it which will take time, and C) distill and use 3 vials to be absolutely sure which solution it is.  They will need at least 25 units of solution to successfully test it.  They will need a seperatory funnel or graduated cylinder to split it up, if they have more than 35 units and don't want to waste it. As the player gets better, their chemistry skill will allow them to identify these characteristics simply by shifting.  Color requires no skill.  taste requires some, ph more, flame color even more. 

 

If the player does this for each mineral, they will be able to cross-reference the results with the wiki solution profiles, to determine which solution is produced by which mineral.   At this point the player can use these solutions to make things.  These can involve multiple solutions, or solutions plus other things.  These recipes will be defined - we cannot expect players to willy-nilly randonly combine solutions and other stuff.   If desired, some may be used to produce certain specific named chemicals, this would allow the derivation of chemicals that, if we were staying 'realistic' would require a bunch of other minerals and elements with no in-game use.   The experimentation comes with the determining which minerals produce which solutions, but the use of the solutions to produce final products needs to be defined for players in the wiki, because random combinations of 29 solutions to produce a product is probably way too much randomness.
 

At very high skill levels, the player will be shown the name of the mineral the solution was derived from via shift key info (remember, the mineral derivation will be random each seed).  So in the early skill, the player will need to carefully organize their vials, with signs.  Because the items themselves will not make it totally obvious.  I'm hoping storing this info in the shift-info spots makes the idea more feasible, as there's a only a few colored vial items, rather than one for each mineral.

 

Now, it's worth pointing out, the assignment of solution profiles to minerals may need to be defined slightly, and maybe not use every mineral.  If it's totally random, you could end up with graphite being the solution used in tons of chemistry recipes, making graphite doubly scarce.  So certain extremely rare mineral may need to be excluded from tier 1 distillation.  Of the ones left, it may be good to has an 'abundant' subset, such as bronze materials, a useless subset, and a rare subset, and the abundant and useless get used a lot, which the rare are used in recipes which require less raw material.

 

TIER 2 and above

 

In tier 2, the player uses more advanced processes.  Solutions are further refined combined produce reagents (so there will only be half as many reagents as solutions), which are the next level of production chemicals.   Reagents are not necessarily liquid.  They can be gases. I haven't fully explored this, as things get complicated.  So I'll just give general thoughts:

 

Ways to make it more complicated, are to require liquids be distilled at a very specific temperature (falling out of range ruins the batch - solution is a bunsen-burner like item where the temperature is more easily controlled) or in the presence of certain gases. Some combinations may produce gasses, which require the player to seal the joints with clay.  At least until they have the proper material to produce glassware with lapped joints.  Some things may be required to be distilled from metallic containers - gold or platinum.  More glassware will be brought in - filters, Y joints to allow dual-distillation, or fractional addition.  The player may have to carefully watch the PH of solutions, and add buffering agents to keep it in spec.  Or ad them to get it to a certain point, similar to the blacksmithing interface.  The possibilities are almost endless.  Additionally, there could be better glass types (borosilicate for instance) with more durability.  There can be larger glass vessels for doing mass distillation of bulk chemicals.

 

In order to incentivize actually experimenting to determine correct solutions, certain combinations of solutions will produce bad affects, such as explosions, fire, poision gas, etc. Some recipes will produce specific acids (nitric, sulfuric, hydrochloric, hydrofluoric, etc) these acids require a specific container at the output or else they destroy the incorrect one, and the blocks below.  And if it goes really wrong, acid explosion!

 

It could get very complex and interesting.  The key will be making sure the system is determinate enough that the player can reasonably determine what is what.  The very top tier might have totally random recipes for incredible effects, perhaps 1 ingredient from each 'tier' (solution, reagent, colloid etc)  As you go up in tiers the number of options is reduced by half each time because each successive tier requires two products form the previous to make.  But even then a random selection each from 28 choices, 14 choices, and 7 choices, would be almost impossible, even if no special conditions of combination were required.  Almost certainly not worth the time.  So it would be best if there were somehow other limits. To make the uber potion requires 1 acid, 1 product used to improve torches somehow, 1 that heals, etc.  Each would be randomly selected from a sub-set, so the pure weight of combinations would be less.

The system could also be simpler, obviously, and an actual chemist could probably contribute a lot.  But again, I think it could be a very fun and useful addition to the game, could play in with magic well, and should be significantly randomized to make experimentation the key feature.  This randomized use of generic solutions, reagents, etc, allows an extensive system without people getting up-tight about having to include some essoteric materials that will have no other in-game purpose, just because irl those essorteric materials are used to make a thing.  Thanks for reading my gigantic idea, I hope you've enjoyed it, and please do comment.

It's unclear to me what size does - does it vary the meat yield and/or hide size?  If so does that stack with production?  I would think you might not want production to affect meat yield or hide size. 

It'd be a fun system of course, though a lot of that stuff seems to me marginally useful.  To me Size, Color, Temperament, Strength, and Production sound like the most useful ones.  Speed and jumping height also, though they're not in your list, probably because they're only really relevant to horses.  Well, color isn't really 'useful' per se, but I think it'd still be nice to have.  I like the large variety of horse colors that currently exist, and wish they didn't just always inherit the mother's color.

Aggression could definitely be a balancing factor in the beginning.  I'm not entirely sure how you'd gather the animals in the first place if they're too aggressive though.  Camp out by them until you have them familiarized enough to bring them home?  That basically would make the aggression trait just an initial stumbling block, as every subsequent generation is likely to be domesticated enough.  Pigs are well known for reverting to boars pretty fast when they escape to the wild though.  It would be pretty interesting if their skins was initially boar-like, and only changed to the pink pig over time.

The new animal types...I'm not sure what they're bringing to the game. (definitely would be nice if they were spoilered)  They seem kind of like existing animals with different models, with some pack carrying capability for the ibex.  I thought they were tropical versions at first, then noticed you gave both climates as temperate.  I don't know what the intent in TFC2 is, but currently temperate climates already have all the animals, it's the topics (and poles) that are extremely lacking (a balance choice for the tropics, from what I understand).  I'd definitely love to see new animals, don't get me wrong.  But I'm hoping the tropics can get some variety.  TFC2 will have umbrella acacia, so that opens up the field for a variety of savannah animals I'd think.

Seeing talk of gems with relation to magic in another thread, I thought I might make this suggestion, which has actually been on my mind since I started playing, but was a suggestion without a purpose. In making this suggestion, the dev effort only really makes sense if gems have a use of some kind - possibly in a magic system.  If there's no use for gems, it's not worthwhile.  That said:

Players should not find gems the way they are now - faceted and beautiful.  They should be 'in the rough'.  It should be up to the player to make make them flawed, normal, flawless, or exquisite.  I think gems of a given type - ruby, amethyst, whatever - found in mining should all have the same graphic, and rather than a descriptor or quality, they get a carat weight, similar to how food has a weight. They could also have perhaps subtle hidden flaws, which, if gemology makes it into the game, could only be detected by a skilled gemologist, similar to how the as you get better at cooking you can better tell how good your sandwich is.  There could also be within each gem type different colors - also known only to a trained gemologist (albeit at lower levels than flaw detection).  irl, certain colors of a given type of gem are more valuable than others.  I think that gem value irl mostly depends on weight, flaws, color, and quality of faceting. 

This would of course require some new tools, mainly a "flat lap" - the tool used to facet gems.  This could be as simple as coating a quorn wheel with diamonds (use for kimberlite!) putting it in the quorn with the gem, hitting the wheel, and hoping something good comes out.  It would of course be awesome if it had it's own "professional" gui like metal smithing does. In any case, the finished gem will have a new lower carat weight (the better the gemologist, the less weight is lost), varying quality of cut, and if the gemologist has a high enough skill, maybe some of the original flaws are removed.

Now given that we don't even know what shape magic might take in TFC2, and I can't think of any other use for gems, I may be premature with this suggestion.  But I wanted to put it out there.  Nice finished gems *could* be made harder to get, if that served the purpose of game progression and/or multiplayer.

With 4 out of 21 rock types being flux, you've got like a 20% chance of getting it any time you change top rock layer (assuming all have equal chance to occur as top layer, which I don't know for sure).  Toss in a chance at Borax in rock salt and it's higher yet. How common is it right now to have flux problems?  I wonder how many different top rock layers one can expect in the new TFC2 'islands', which are apparently around 4k square in area. I guess everyone has different tolerances for how long they want to roam before they settle down, but if the oceans between the islands are quite large, and the rock changes on any given island low-ish, I could definitely see it being somewhat problematic. 

3x3 tree trunks makes me wish there was a way to hollow out the center of the tree so I could put a ladder up the middle, and made a tree-house up top, Swiss family Robinson style!

Woop, missed the part of the op where temperature was mentioned when skimming over it in the re-read.  My bad - it was in discussion from start.

The limiting factor in the current system, is the crafting grid, I think.  I'm pretty sure you can actually successfully tan hides in a large clay vessel.  So if there were a way to use tanned furs as clothing without using a 3x3 crafting grid, that would allow stone-age winter survival. So maybe the tanned fur itself can be worn in a clothing slot, but wears out over time due to not being properly fitted?  If tanned furs did not convert to leather, but just remained a tanned small/med/large hide, you could require a large hide for a cape, medium for torso and legs, and small for head and feet. Then it would require no crafting, just the tanning. Possibly allow a large fur to be 'crafted' with a knife to get 1 medium and 1 small fur, and medium fur to be reduced to two small furs.

It would definitely be interesting to see someone with stone age tech trying to kill a bear for the coveted super-warm bear hide.

From the northernmost island to the southernmost at any given X coordinate, there will only be 9 islands which are laid out on a grid that is 4096 x 4096 blocks in size.

Will there still be a degree of configurability?  I know the multiplayer server I'm on right now has their Y coordinates up to 30k in both directions from the equator (though granted about half of that is virtually continual winter).  Does this mean the max you will be able to go from the equator in TFC2 will be approx 18k, no option for more?  Will this change the approximate temperature ranges from what they are now?  It seems like right now approx 10-12k is preferred by many people for having a decent growing season, but also snow. Jungle appears around I think 5 or 6k.  Will those ranges change much?

Huh, I would have sworn I've had new pigs and horses spawn near my base in areas already thoroughly explored.