Hyena Grin

I am not "model building" any more than someone who makes a log cabin.  The structure I'm building is functional.  The chamber I've mined out is going to be a smithy, it will contain twenty forges and four smelteries plus rooms for storage and whatnot.  I am using bronze tools.  I could be using steel tools but I've an aversion to setting up a makeshift forge/smeltery out doors... I want my first steel making experience to be conducive to focusing solely on the task at hand.  It took a month or two to get to where I am because I'm on my fourth server... the first one closed down, at the second one the owner started just freely spawning whatever he pleased for himself and anyone who was nice to him... the third one had so many technical difficulties that my progress was all eventually erased and I had to start from scratch... further... each time I start over I have to gather all the resources I want to begin with and find an ideal site... which is no mean feat.  All this takes time.

 

Additionally... there were other tunnels dug which I haven't mentioned... some service tunnels... others are mining tunnels from whence I derive my metal.  As I understand it steel isn't much faster than bronze so your argument about substandard tools doesn't seem to carry much weight but instead completely ignores the fact that having to stop mining every twenty blocks and then go to the surface to dump my rocks would exponentially multiply the time it takes to do any mining at all.  Honestly, this argument is more like a dodge and seems to me dishonest.  Did you really need all this explained to you?

 

Let's talk about storage and leave off the ridiculous amount of time you want to add to mining... log piles contain 16 logs... but let's assume you want a rock pile to be able to hold 32 rocks.  I've over twenty five double chests full of rocks from excavating that chamber alone.  Each double chest holds 45 stacks of 64 rocks.  I'm doing all of this without actually referring to the exact number of chests... but let's just say i've got 72,000 rocks.  That's 2,250 piles of rocks.  For a single chamber.

 

Honestly... I don't have the energy to address the rest of what you said.  You built strawman arguments.  "all we're here to do is build model dwarven cities" is not something I said.  You are dishonest in your representation of my position on multiple counts.  Firstly, I didn't say "all we're here to do is" anything at all, I never used that phrase or suggested it.  Secondly, it isn't a "model" and I'm not sure why you'd employ that term unless you're insinuating that I want to build things that look pretty but serve no actual in game purpose, which isn't the case and is presumptuous.I've made some valid points about your suggestion for limited inventory space.  It would definitely eliminate large builds.  But let's set aside large builds.  It would also completely hinder most folks from mining productively at all.  How many miles of tunnels do we all have in our branch mining shafts?  I can't imagine even mining a 2x1 for 800 cubits if I have to go back and dump rocks every time I have twenty.  It'd be faster to nap through them without making anything (another loophole) then eventually be traversing 800 plus cubits to dump and then 800 back to mine for more.  Folks would never get past bronze.

 

It's a bad idea.

By 'model building' I mean 'making large elaborate structures that are inherently time-consuming far beyond their functionality.' That seems to be the purpose of your game, currently. You have a 'model' in mind and you are working tirelessly to bring it to fruition despite the fact that it is not even remotely efficient. Is that not an accurate depiction?I don't have anything against model building. I regularly build large, attractive structures just for the sake of it. But if you enter a game and your first thought is 'I need to get started on my <huge project>' then you are model building as a goal rather than allowing model building to be an interesting side-track. There is nothing wrong with that either, and I never said there was. It's just that if your goal in TFC is to build large elaborate structures then it is an incredibly inefficient and time-consuming mod for that purpose. Every single feature of TFC makes doing this harder. You shouldn't be surprised that along the way it is going to get even harder and more involved, because that is what every feature does already. It is safe to assume future features will continue to make it harder.

I am sorry you feel I am presenting a strawman. I don't think I am, I think you are being overly defensive.

I also think you are ignoring all of the interesting suggestions for inventory management and resource handling. Again you say 'if I had to stop and cart stone to the surface every 20 blocks' as if that is what I was suggesting you do. But either you are willfully ignoring things that have been said or you simply aren't reading them.

Yes, building large structures will be far too time consuming... until you have the tools and infrastructure to support building large projects. Just like building a full set of armor and a weapon is wildly time consuming if you're still running around picking up rocks off the ground hoping for ore. But eventually you develop the tools to mine effectively and suddenly it's not so hard to put together a suit of armor. Mining out a tunnel will also be time consuming until you have developed storage containers, carts, minecarts (I like the idea of wooden minecart/tracks that are not as fast and can't carry as much as metal minecart/tracks), etc. 

If you take the time to build tracks and a cart into your 'dwarven city' and create some storage containers then you could be moving rocks out of your tunnel at pretty huge numbers and it wouldn't slow you down much at all. That's the whole point. Introduce difficulties and give the player tools to overcome them.

I don't think it's a bad idea at all. It would just need the appropriate attention in terms of balance, new content/recipes, and new features. It's not something I'd tack onto the current game by itself.

Well I believe they are looking at adding rudimentary forms of power generation. Mechanical and possibly steam power. So my thinking is that the benefit of reaching higher tiers of metallurgy will be automation and increased efficiency, allowing more materials to be processed in shorter amounts of time.

Which kinda comes back to what I said earlier. It's alright for things to be time-consuming as long as there is something to work toward to make it less time-consuming. You work hard to reach a certain point, and from then on you have the tools to make everything you did up to that point relatively trivial, and you can refocus your time on other goals.

It's a little trickier than vanilla because you can't just pile dirt together to form a crude shelter. But fortunately there are some other materials you can build from, depending on where you start. If there's a lot of grass, use thatch. If there's a lot of trees, use wood. If there's a lot of clay, use clay. There are other options as noted, such as digging under a boulder or using some other natural rock outcropping and just building up sufficient mounds of dirt to protect yourself.

Until you can mine cobblestone and cut logs into planks, construction is extremely primitive, so you gotta make due.

Another workaround is destroying all of the refuse with a cactus or lava.  And again, the only way to prevent this is the removal of sprites entirely.

I dunno about the cactus. But I don't actually have a problem with people using a lava pit to destroy objects. It's pretty hard in TFC to get to a point where you can move lava around, and sites that have accessible lava pits are also very rare. I don't have an issue (personally) with lava blocks providing this unique benefit, given that it will not affect most players during the period where they would be most useful (pre-steel).

I am also not against the removal of sprites for dirt/gravel/stone blocks altogether. Instead of becoming a sprite the block could go straight to the inventory of the last person to strike it.

But what I suggested was that sprites would reform into blocks after a short while. Meaning that if you dug a stone tunnel without picking up the sprites, you'd soon turn around to find that the tunnel behind you has filled up with cobblestone. Not exactly an ideal situation. You would basically have to pick them up or you would end up buried. I am not sure which I like better, removing sprites or reforming sprites into blocks.

There's plenty of interesting directions the game could go. I won't claim to have the right answers for anyone but myself, but the whole 'you people want to force everyone to play your way!!!' argument has never sat well with me. Ultimately suggestions are just suggestions and the devs will make the call about what goes in and what doesn't. Either they want limited inventory or they don't. The suggestions themselves are innocuous, and there's no point in feeling threatened by them. More than that, though, aren't you forcing people to play YOUR way by insisting on sticking with the status quo? The current inventory system and a more limited inventory system are both viable options, but they are also mutually exclusive. In order for you to get what you want, other people can't have what they want. In order for them to get what they want, you can't have what you want. You can't make everyone happy. Don't pretend that people suggesting their preferred changes is somehow less fair than you suggesting things you want.

It seems like folks in your camp (if I may make a generalization) either desire to make TFCraft a mod which insists that the player always be fighting for survival and never thriving... or are at least assuming (if not desiring/insisting) that we're all playing on servers with other folks.

 

Being able to cart forty five stacks of thirty two rocks out of my mine at a time is like not having to read how the hero wiped his butt for the millionth time in a fantasy novel... it's assumed.  It does feel good to overcome tedium... I'd say it also feels good not to have to overcome tedium.  I mean, that's not a real selling point of a game "overcome tedium!"

And not having to store all that rubble in real space also works along the same lines.

 

I'm currently mining/building/excavating/sculpting a dwarven city.  I'm doing it by myself.  Seeing as TFCraft is such a unique mod there are already comparatively few minecrafters who play.  There are even less who would come both with the desire to help me in my task and the willingness to labor to my specifications.  I've spent at least a month on this project and am nearly finished excavating (but not building) the first chamber.  The change you suggest would increase the length of time on my project so exponentially that I would never get it done before the next update when worlds on servers will start being reset.  The type of TFCraft you desire fits an overly specific niche.

 

I'm not lazy and I'm not afraid of tedium.  It's likely that I've more endurance to it than you do (as though that can be boasted about.)  The chamber I've been excavating has taken days of real time.  It's 41x41 with a ceiling about 20 cubits from the floor.  The ceiling had to be carefully constructed out of smoothed stone before I could really begin to mine out the rest.  If I had to cart out 12 rocks at a time... let alone find a place for them all... I think I'd just give up on TFC altogether.

 

Your ideas almost preclude any major builds altogether excepting that you find not one but ten or twenty folks who're willing and able to spend hours a day performing very extremely tedious labor to the exclusion of all else.

 

This discussion honestly reminds me of the coin discussion and the discussion on forced labor roles (id est; you are a wood cutter, you are not allowed to acquire metal, you trade wood to the miner and he gives you metal in return) in that it's an idea that you think is neat which you could practice on your own (you could easily limit how much of anything you carry) but you want to insist that everyone else play that way too.  I don't think the idea adds to the game.

TFC is not the best mod to be used for 'model building.' Pretty much every single task in vanilla Minecraft takes longer and is more involved in TFC. In some cases wildly more involved. However, I've had no trouble building large structures once advanced tools are available. It takes longer, particularly because you need to perform many other tasks during the process of building, but it's never taken me enormous amounts of time to build a reasonably large structure. I can only assume that you're taking on this project at a point in the game where your tools are substandard, if it is taking you that long. And well, that's your decision.

Why not just have one level of tools that work extremely fast? Why force the player to work through tiers of metals in order to work at their maximum potential? Why prolong things at all? If all we're here to do is just build model dwarven cities then maybe we're playing the wrong mod. TFC is very much more about the journey between point A and point B, that's why all of these systems exist, that's why it's 'tedious' to players who are mostly concerned with the end result. TFC forces you to build infrastructure and take extra steps and spend time exploring in ways that vanilla doesn't even come close to. It boggles my mind that someone would use TFC to build a model city and then complain about tedium. TFC is rewarding because it is harder, because it is more of an investment of time and planning. In vanilla minecraft you could bake any metal in an oven. In TFC you have the option of doing it slowly in a campfire or using one of the several installations you can construct in order to do it progressively more efficiently. The fact is that smelting metals over a campfire is tedious. If you think that 'overcoming tedium' isn't a selling point then I don't know what you get out of TFC. I assume it's something, but I don't know what.

The point I was trying to make is that yes, certain tasks are hard and time-consuming until you have the right tools and the creativity to mitigate those things. Which was a point you seem to have utterly missed.

A limited inventory is only time-consuming as long as you i) don't have the right tools to mitigate it, or ii) aren't innovative enough to find solutions.

There are two possibilities for building an underground dwarven city more quickly.

1) Wait until you have the tools and technology to build infrastructure to support its construction. Build minecarts and rails that you can fill up with far more blocks than you could normally carry, push it outside, empty it into a pile, and repeat. Yes, the net result is that it takes longer than it does currently, but it has also given you an excuse to engineer something you wouldn't have otherwise. Frankly, taking the time to engineer the infrastructure required to build something magnificent is almost as satisfying as (and occasionally more than) building the project itself. If you're clever you can make many jobs easier by investing a little time and resources into preparations rather than just running at a wall and swinging your pick blindly until it breaks.2) Pick a site that actually makes sense. You could dig out a whole mountainside or, like peoples in the past have frequently done, settle a site that makes that job easier. Maybe it's a natural cavern you're simply shaping. That reduces your workload by an enormous magnitude. Maybe you've picked a site that has a natural vertical cave drop next to it, so that you can easily dump your excess dirt/stone into it rather than carting it outside. 

Don't be afraid of challenges, find ways to overcome them. That's part of why I like TFC. In vanilla minecraft any location is as good as any other location. It's lego for adults. I like games that force me to find ways to overcome a difficult process. I like games that make me build structures and infrastructure because they provide some tangible benefit, instead of just building them because they look neat. If somewhere along the way I end up with a fortress built of carefully crafted stone, I know that it was because through planning and labor I made it possible. That is rewarding. Chewing through 800 cubic meters of stone, pocketing it, and rapidly constructing a castle, is in my opinion wildly more tedious because it lacks the interim stages that make that process interesting.I don't think that's a niche in TFC players, I think that probably makes up the majority of us. We might all disagree on the finer points of what constitutes tedious, what our limits and preferences are, but I don't think there's many TFC players who want TFC to be more like vanilla. I think most of us want more depth and complexity. But there's no point introducing new tools like handcarts and wagons and functional roads if the player can carry a castle in his pocket. There's already a pretty advanced system for minecarts available and nobody uses those. Because they are absolutely unnecessary. That's my point. By placing limitations on the player you give them the opportunity to find creative and interesting ways to overcome their limitations. You open up myriad possibilities for future content to help mitigate those limitations.

I said 20 blocks of stone off the top of my head. That's not necessarily the number I'd choose. Where it comes to inventory limitations everyone has a different threshold for what is annoying. If you could carry one less block of stone would it bother you? Two less? Ten less? Twenty less? A hundred less? For Mossman his threshold (he thinks) is one. For me I think it's closer to twenty. For someone else it might be one stack of 64. Etc etc. The number isn't important, it's the spirit of it. Limitations lead to innovation.

Although I'm on board for more restrictive inventory systems, I think the one-block idea is excessive and underestimates the sheer amount of objects that the player must move in order to accomplish even very basic things. But limitations in general can only do good things for the game. Tedium and difficulties lead to innovation and innovative gameplay is what drives entertainment in a game/mod such as TFC.

For example, if you could place 'piles' of most/all block types in the way you can place log piles that don't need to be re-mined, you could have people creating piles of resources used in construction. Piles of dirt, piles of cobblestone, piles of lumber, all placed within easy access of a building site so that transportation time is minimal (once the resources have been collected and moved). The footprint of block 'piles' would of course be much smaller than the footprint of the actual mined materials (perhaps 12 blocks per 1x1 'pile'), but some abstraction is necessary in order for things to not get ridiculous.

As a settlement grows more advanced then the task of quarrying might be an involved process; handcarts, horse-drawn carriages moving large amounts of stone and wood from ideal sites and stockpiling them at the settlement, in order to keep the construction machine fed.

The idea of 'ideal sites' is novel as well. By making the task of collecting stone more tedious you also make stone more valuable, and sites with easily accessible stone would be more valuable. You might have an actual rock quarry that has its own structures and infrastructure to support it. Something which is more or less unthinkable in the current game.

Persistence of objects is also important. Because such a vast quantity of objects can be placed into the inventory and into chests, physical objects have a tendency to 'vanish' from the world. Having limited inventory space would mean that these objects would need to go somewhere eventually. In theory, at least. In practice you can simply discard blocks onto the ground in icon-form and wait for them to disappear. Perhaps it could be devised that after a time, instead of a block 'icon' disappearing it would reform in the world as a cube, then this 'persistence' of objects could be stressed. And people would need to think more carefully about how they dig and how they store things.

If you could carry, say, 20 dirt blocks, then you would need to find somewhere to place them. You might create a dirt-stockpile outside of your mine to get rid of it all. There it remains, a big pile of dirt and gravel beside your mine entrance, just a convenient dumping ground for all that refuse.Things like minecarts and handcarts and other tools may actually become important time-saving devices, and represent a layer of challenge to overcome. It might take a lot of work to produce your first tool, but as time goes on and the ability to develop things like infrastructure presents itself, these are new challenges, new goals, new things to build. Not just because they look neat, but because they are practical. Because they reduce tedium. And it feels good to overcome tedium, lemme tell ya.

Awesome news! =D Sometimes everyone needs a break.

This is by far my favorite pack, so I hope it's not dead. =( It's still excellent as it is but the missing fire pit texture etc make me really hope for an update.

You're looking too shortsightedly at this. I don't think Bioxx wants to introduce something that isn't in his plan for the mod. Just because it is possible to do, doesn't mean he should do it - when in the long run it will just be taken out.

I usually try to let devs speak for themselves on what they want. A suggestion is a suggestion at face value. An argument which consists of someone else's opinion - however likely you might believe it to be true - is not an argument. I think it's a perfectly adequate solution to a problem. That doesn't mean that it will be used. I simply think that it is better than nothing. Which is currently where we are with this thread.

Read this thread about the devs feelings on redstone: http://terrafirmacra...it-should-work/

In the first few pages Dunk posts a few times.

Until redstone is removed, or officially announced to be pending removal, this is irrelevant. Bioxx and Dunk have expressed their dislike of Redstone, that's not new and linking to it doesn't change anything. The fact is that they worked Redstone into the mod when they didn't have to. There is nothing about TFC that relies on redstone being available, and yet they went out of their way to put it in anyway. I won't make assumptions about why they did this, or whether anything is going to change. It isn't shortsighted to work with what is there. The fact is that Redstone was deliberately put into the mod when mod's worldgen itself eliminated redstone from naturally occurring. The assumption is that it won't be there later. What is shortsighted, is to dismiss ideas because of things that may or may not change, things which you personally have no control over, and yet posit with an air of preternatural certainty. They don't like redstone. That doesn't mean that it won't stay, it likely means that it won't remain in its current form; it might mean that it might undergo an overhaul to make it more believable. Or they may remove it in favor of a totally different system that provide similar functionality.

Obviously the suggestion is contingent on Redstone remaining. That is fine. I am fine with that contingency. You aren't.

Let the devs decide for themselves what they want to do, it's not your job to speak on their behalf and interpret every fragment of an idea for a grand plan. I've seen plenty of times where people have deigned to speak on Dunk's behalf because of a fragment of a sentence he wrote somewhere, and been told summarily that they were wrong. For example, Dunk has corrected people several times now about making assumptions about the 'technology level' of the mod, and yet people still use that as an argument for why X shouldn't be there. It's a bad argument, and speaking for someone else is bad form.

People do it alllll the time here, it drives me nuts. =P I'm not sure why Dunk doesn't smack people for it.

Regardless, obviously Redstone has been talked to death and beaten afterword, so let's move on as you suggest.

Does anyone know of basic ways to create luminescence? Is there a chemical found in ore, or soil, or whatever else that could be reasonably processed and ignited to create light that would be suitable to supply energy for photosynthesis? That would be a great addition to this suggestion (unlike my rambling and arguments).

I'm still on the track that fungi would be easiest solution to the lack of underground agriculture.

Quicklime is created by smelting calcium rich ore such as limestone. When heated (a lot), quicklime creates a very bright and persistent light that has been used to light theater stages. It is also useful because quicklime has many uses, such as in the creation of cement - something else I would very much like to see implemented in TFC. I like materials with multiple purposes.

Fungus is also fine, I have no issue with that. I think there is room for a variety of solutions.

There's no redstone as of now in TFC. There's cinnabar and cryolite, which, when crushed, produce redstone. Those minerals do not glow by itself, redstone dust don't glow by itself, just torches. Reaction of something with wood, that produces high-intensity light, because of magic.

So when you place redstone on a block of wood, it lights up? (No.)

Redstone has few predefined properties apart from what we can observe. That doesn't have any bearing whatsoever on whether or not it is sensible to use it as a lightsource. It is already a lightsource. Regardless of what it is, where it comes from, how it achieves luminosity: all of these things are irrelevent. Because as of right now, you can make a redstone torch that glows indefinitely. That is all the information we need for this suggestion to be reasonable.

Basically, both facts that redstone still in TFC and comes from TFC ores are plug corks just for now.

TFC does not contain magic, it has place for fantasy, these two aren't the same. We don't need magic in world to call it fantasy world.

I guess skeletons just got up and started walking around through natural processes. nope, no magic required here

What you're talking about is redstone taking on properties that it should believably have. If you ask anyone what redstone is, they tell you it's used for transferring electrical-like currents to power things in Minecraft. They don't say 'put it on a torch and it's a red glowing light.' So yes, if you want to keep redstone for the namesake rather than call it by the real name of the chemical that would be used, then that's different.

Yes, technology does depend on what you can do with natural things around you, but you have to be technologically advanced enough to perform such things. If you were able to find uranium in the soil of your backyard, could you make a bomb out of it? Just because you can find an ore that can be broken down and ignited to burn emitting light doesn't mean it's something you can just do.

I know I've heard people say that Bioxx has stated he will not implement guns for reasons that the mod does not encompass that specific time period. In that sense, even if you could find the things to produce gun powder and a gun, doesn't mean it should definitely be implemented in-game.

Honestly, at this point you are just being difficult. I don't think that a 'stone that glows' which is already in the game is comparable to making nuclear weapons or guns. You're being deliberately obtuse. One requires elaborate processing and technologies that may not already exist. A stone that already glows being used for lighting is not a huge leap of technology or scientific marvel.

Magic is very lazy way to explain things. Why it is lazy? Because magic!

As for chemical lights, they are usually require either electricity or constant flow of reagents. We can make the latter, but it's higher tier technologically wise than we supposed to have in TFC, from what I can tell seeing where all this is going.

First of all, TFC contains magic. Dunk and Bioxx have made it clear on several occasions that magic will always have a part to play in the mod. Zombies and skeletons aren't going anywhere. Redstone might not stick around - it's hard to say. But as long as it is a real substance in the minecraft world, then its properties are a part of the minecraft world. That said, magic isn't necessary; I was simply pointing out that your protest was excessive. In a world with zombies and skeletons running around, a magical light source doesn't seem all that strange.

The first purely chemical light may have been phosphorus(depending on your definition of 'chemical lighting'), which was discovered in 1669 by a German named Hennig Brand. Although it is an inefficient source of light, if it were available in a raw state in nature, in quantities similar to redstone, I have no doubt it would have been discovered even earlier and been used more prolifically for purposes such as lighting.

The most comparable equivalent would likely be lime lights, however, which were discovered in 1820. While that seems late, it's worth noting that lime lighting is simply the super-heating of quicklime - a substance that has been available since ancient times. The stuff predates modern chemistry by two thousand years, at least. We had simply been using it as a weapon rather than as lighting (and in another form as mortar for construction), because heating something to 2400 degrees was simply not feasible if all you wanted to do was create spot lighting.

Redstone is neither of these things, but it is a susbtance in the world and can have whatever properties Dunk and Bioxx decide. If it is a substance that burns brightly when exposed to air and gives off light in a spectrum that is useful in the process of photosynthesis - both qualities that are consistent with the 'lore' of redstone given that it already glows naturally and is reddish in colour - then that is what it does. If there is a substance in the world that has these properties and is easily extracted from readily available sources, I can't think of a single reason why it would be unreasonable to use it in whatever technological era you are in. Technology depends on nature and what nature provides us to work with. Not on some predetermined path set by our ancestors.

I am speaking of intensity. Sun gives off slightly more intensive light than redstone torch.

Sunlamps (or grow lamps) are a real thing. Although you could certainly make the argument that redstone torches aren't very bright, my response would be: who cares. They are basically made of magic, are you serious.

If it bothers you that much, there is no reason why you couldn't simultaneously make redstone torches brighter.

I absolutely hate being forced to wait around. It's not exactly hard to protect yourself at night. You only need a handful of logs and maybe some dirt and you can create a 1x2 space to stand in while you wait for morning.

It's already a pain in the butt to have to do this when you're exploring and don't make it back in time (and forgot a bed). Or if you get lost or whatever. Standing still and waiting for dawn is the least fun part of minecraft period. I am not sure why we would want to make it happen more often.

I am, of course, in favour of more elaborate sleep systems, whether that is in how the game simulates the dangers of night, or whether that is tiers of beds.

Weak light is not enough, there needs to be strong red lamp. Especially for tomatoes. And blue lamp as well, as blue is the second maximum for photosynthesis.

Low energy light waves on the visible spectrum are primarily what (green) plants use to conduct photosynthesis. Red is a low energy light wave. It is also the colour of redstone torches. I'm not sure what your argument is. =P

I'm not claiming to be an expert on photosynthesis here, because I'm not. I'm not sure the point of getting bogged down in terminology; there's no reason redstone torches couldn't provide the kind of light needed to drive photosynthesis.

• Redsone torch can't give off UV, as it is a high-energy component. And UV is bordered with violet, as you can clearly tell, whereas redstone giving off low energy red and infra-red lights. But most plants don't process UV, so this part is actually pretty pointless.

It was a very off the cuff suggestion. Though it's fascinating that you could say that plants don't use UV (which is true), and that redstone doesn't give off UV (which is reasonable), and then say that it's pointless. Since redstone is more likely to give off light in the infra-red spectrum (as you said), and weak visible light, which is what plants use. So in attempting to defeat the suggestion you actually confirmed the suggestion as perfectly plausible, then proceeded to dismiss it anyway. ;P

I still like the redstone torch idea.

If Bioxx doesn't can redstone as a resource, I think it'd make a good solution in lieu of very complex solutions to a mechanic that people seem to hardly use already. I think farming could use a lot of love before we start looking at complex mechanics like greenhouses. Redstone torches are a really, really simple solution and self-balancing. Farming is already very unrewarding in my experience, I can't see myself going through the trouble of large production scenarios just to grow some food in an unusual location.

S'just me though.

The problem really is that Dunk pretty much encourages that kind of behavior and often takes part in it himself.

I've been on tons of forums for games and mods and gaming communities, seen what I think is the best and the worst of communities. And having lurked for a while, this place is kind of toxic. A lot of back-patting bullying going on, and flinging of self-righteous justifications for being nasty. There's so many Me-Too posts and pile-ups by the same group of people every time, it's unfortunate.

Usually small communities are really inclusive and friendly, this place really, really isn't. Which might be by design, I don't know, but it's sad to me. I wish people would lighten up and share some enthusiasm for a great mod, instead of leaping at every chance to show how in the loop they are by putting down the opinions of others. Dunk should really nip this in the bud in my opinion, but it's basically his forum, and he seems cool with it.

Hey if you guys aren't interested in Twilight Forest, I'm fine with that. You're the ones doing all the work!

Honestly, just getting Thaumcraft in there with TFC would be a godsend. If you get around to the other mods you listed it'd really be something else.

Slabs. Use these first, then go into detailed mode.

I admit I didn't think you could even make slabs anymore, let alone detail them. But anyway that doesn't help if you just want to do two, three, or four units depth. Yes it might seem trivial on the surface but if you are trying to do complex detailing over a large project, being able to chisel out two or three units at a time would be a huge time saver and save a lot of lost stone for mistakes.

People here can be very snarky.

Every once in a while you can end up starting in an area that is pretty dry in terms of surface ore. It happens. I've done it, it's annoying but you have options. You can either start a new world or you can travel until you find a decent spot - you shouldn't have to go far. You don't have to stay in your starting location. Kill some sheep, make a bed, bring it with you so you can sleep through the nights and just travel until you find a good location. This is sometimes a good thing to do *anyway* just so you can find a good place to set up. Presence of ore isn't the be-all, end-all. I've set up in an ore-rich place only to discover that there wasn't a lick of clay anywhere for miles. Or that there wasn't copper anywhere for miles. Etc etc.

One of the big mistakes people make, I think, is that they start to set up camp as soon as they spawn for the first time, and they don't realize that they really can leave that camp behind and move elsewhere. You don't have to stay. You can build anywhere. The spawn position is only important if you don't have a bed available. If you're that worried, make a trail of torches and just follow the sunrise for a while. That way if you for some reason end up spawning back at the start you can get your bearings.

Part of the fun of this mod is the fact that it is really hard to find everything you need in one location. You almost always end up having to travel to set up mining operations in other parts of the world. This isn't a bad thing especially if you can play with friends, as you can have people in different locations gathering different resources. Setting up a lumber camp in an old-growth forest can cut your charcoal creation times by a huge margine because you don't have to worry about replanting. Just clearcut and move on. Though it's time consuming in single player to have to travel so much and spend so much time searching, I wouldn't trade it for vanilla where you are more or less guaranteed to find everything you need within the first hour of play.

I like having to explore and travel and take risks to advance. Not all challenge is a bad thing. =)

Not gonna lie, I'm really looking forward to this. I realize some people probably think Thaumcraft isn't a good fit for TFCraft; one is a survival-focused game based on the rigors of metallurgy, while the other is about alchemy and magic. But the quality and attention to detail of both of these mods are really on a similar par. If magic of any kind were ever introduced to TFCraft, I would hope there would be as much detail put into it as Thaumcraft does. I am in favor of any mod that gives you reasons to keep exploring, keep collecting, and keep crafting, but whenever I try to play another mod I miss TFC's features terribly, so I'd love a community compatibility patch to make them work well together.

Maybe consider adding Twilight Forest to the mix, since that's kind of a natural companion mod for Thaumcraft and I think could use some support for both TFC's crafting and Thaumcraft's alchemy.

I haven't played with Redpower, but I understand it is similar in that it adds another tier of complexity to the game. So I'm looking forward to that too.

Sooooo. How about them girders.

It's really just an extension of the existing support mechanics, and making it harder (better) to build complex structures. Or at least, requiring some forethought.

The more I think about it, the more interesting I think the arching effect would be neat. Especially if you needed to support the archway before it was finished (an unfinished archway would crumble), but that sounds tough to program so I'd settle for just making chiselled blocks self-supporting but limited.

This would create (solvable) construction problems, while still allowing for self-supported bridges and ceiling supports using chiselled stone. But of course, iron and steel supports would come in later to allow larger, less complex structures to be built.

The main problem I see is that it might not be particularly intuitive at first, but I think relatively easy to figure out with experimentation.

Due to the lighting engine restrictions in MC, i don't know if you can have two different kinds of light with different effects... ._.

It's not really an effect of the light, that was more just a context rationale. It would just make it so that any tilled soil tile would make two different checks: one for access to the sky (as it does now), and one for a redstone torch nearby. Maybe within six tiles. Could make for some nice little circular farm plots with a redstone torch on a post in the middle.

The word overhaul might be a little excessive, it's not too much of a change. Heh.

This came up when me and a friend I play TFC with were talking about what to do now that we had reached the higher tier metallurgy. We could make better versions of tools and weapons but for the most part we were using them just to find more metal to make more tools/weapons etc.

We talked about starting a large building construction; a bridge that would link two continents over a narrow chunk of ocean. But the more we talked about it the more I realized that the only thing you would need to build a bridge would be chiselled stone. 'Sticky stone.' That would be sufficient to build even the most monstrous of structures.

I think metal beams and less sticky chiselled stones would make for a nice use of all that metal, for building purposes. (I also wanted to post about concrete and metal re-bar, but thought I'd keep it simpler).

Also I think that thing I'm not supposed to mention would be awesome, though I will try not to get my hopes up. =I

Heh. Make redstone torches give off UV light and allow farming underground.