stringburka

If I understood the whole idea was to mimic the old 5 food group as it was developed many years ago. Although outdated it helped many people to get a varied nutrition. I think is better to stay with the 5 food group idea then to go into modern concepts wher is almost impossible to get 2 nutritionist 2 agree, one will say eggs are poison and the other will tell you that recent researches show it is actually good for you. The amount of controversy would be enough to fill another forum. Not long ago margarine was believed to be a healthier option to butter.

Disclaimer: I'm not a professional or formally educated in nutrition, but it's kind of a big hobby and as someone with mostly vegan diet, I've been forced to learn a lot about it So I have a better grasp than the average person, but not as good as a professional dietician or similar.

The disagreements usually* stem from whether something has unhealthy components, not whether they have healthy components. Eggs and margarine are both prime examples of this; Eggs no doubt contain a decent amount of complete proteins, loads of calcium, some B12 and minerals (among other things), and the disagreement is on how large amount of eggs you have to eat for the quite high amount of cholesterol in eggs to be an issue. Margarine contains lot of solid fats and is in general about equal to butter in most regards; they can manage to have a lower amount of saturated fats and higher amount of unsaturated fats than butter, but not all do. The main disagreements are 1. on the various additives that are sometimes used in specific brands of margarine and 2. whether trace amounts of chemicals used in processing basically all margarine can be dangerous.

There is quite general agreement (from a scientific viewpoint, rather than from a corporate viewpoint) on the benefits of various kinds of food, as we know what nutrients we need and it's easy to see what nutrients something contains; the disputes are generally on the bad parts and how relevant they are.

That's why a good baseline is to have a varied diet; that way it's unlikely to get enough of the "bad stuff" to really affect anything.

Though everyone should stay away from monosodium glutamate. That shit is nasty.

*there are exceptions, such as those stating that the human body can't effectively process dairy proteins and vitamins, but they have very little research to back them up and usually claim it for political reasons (ideological veganism gone wrong; they are fringe even in the vegan community).

There's already a config option to let crops die of old age. It's just off by default because it makes the game too hard by default.

 

As for the "main gameplay issue - the long-term loss of seeds." I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. How are you losing your seeds? When a crop dies, whether of old age or cold, or whatnot, the seeds become a block on the ground just like the sticks/rocks/ore that you find, and it cannot despawn.

I know about that config option, I was talking about crops dying of cold.

Oh, sorry, haven't had my first winter since starting to play again; I remembered them as dropping as item entities that can despawn, and that's what the OP also hinted at (having to import new cabbage seeds). Then there's no main gameplay issue

Want to throw in my support for the "dead crop" stage of growth, yielding the seeds, and in some cases (potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, rutabaga and perhaps soy beans) the crop.

Seeds buried below snow will not become moldy or soggy and generally seeds can survive quite harsh conditions. Of course you shouldn't be able to harvest edible bell peppers from under a cubic metre of snow, but the seeds should still be there.

That would solve the main gameplay issue - the long-term loss of seeds.

EDIT: As someone who has done a little bit of year around gardening and a whole lot of dumpster diving, in my experience vegetables are quite tough in regards to temperatures, at least the more "hard" ones like root vegetables. But even tomatoes and bell pepper, while they become dull and not a pleasure to eat, are still edible.

Perhaps dead crops could yield the seeds, and the crop with a random amount of spoilage? (5-25% for the roots and allium, 10-50% for the beans, squash and cabbage, 20-100% for the tomatoes and peppers)

Of course, one could also ask what it is in diary products that make them so nutritiously (is that a word?) different from other food groups. Protein is an important nutrient of it own, vegetables are are generally shock full of vitamins and minerals, fruit is the main natural source of sugar (as well as certain vitamins) and grain is the main source of slower carbs (and a secondary source of protein). So it makes a lot of sense to separate those. Dairy, to me, feels a bit off in that it's so very very specific.

The things that comes to mind that dairy products produce notably more than other things would be a select few vitamins (B12 and folic acid) and calcium, both of which are also common in eggs.

So theoretically, at least to me it wouldn't feel that off to change "dairy" to "dairy and eggs".

The biggest influence on overcast skies is warm (relative) water ie Gulf Stream and mountains. Cold does not necessarily mean overcast.

That would explain Gothenburg perfectly.

Well back to illness itself, wouldn't diseases from pets or plants carry on to other pets, animals, food, and, eventually, the Player?

Possible, but from a game perspective I imagine it would be a lot more taxing on the system and a lot more complex to understand for the player. It can also be hard to make something common enough that it's relevant but still rare enough that it doesn't shape the entire game play.

Awww now I feel bad Either way it could be something. Give zombies a new sense of danger?

No worries! spoiler that you already know but others might not:

I already knew it was some kind of illness that everyone has and thus is probably airborne or waterborne, since I'm at season 3 or 4 (don't remember), but did not know it was rabies-related

While zombies are no doubt the easiest mobs at this point, they have gotten far better senses in minecraft since just a few patches back. I mean, they're easy, but they also tend to come in far greater numbers than others.

What would help zombies become real threats again would be a limited ability to climb, and/or increasing the rate at which they can break doors, and/or even other blocks.

Though we're getting a bit off-topic now. Though of course, zombies could simply spread diseases in general, doesn't have to be zombification diseases!What if zombies afflicted you on a hit, and in addition any open water storage within a 1 block radius would be spoiled?

Have you ever actualy tried to milk a sheep?

I haven't, but sheep cheese is quite common in my country. And both feta and halloumi are sheep cheeses.

I guess it would depend a lot on breeding, too. Perhaps if each female sheep had a "milking" stat, and the lower the milking stat the longer it takes to milk as well as the longer you have to wait between milking periods. So with a wild sheep you might have to half a minute IRL and once per minecraft month, but with sufficient breeding, you can get it down to 5 secs once per week.

I mean, it might not be as easy as milking a cow, but neither is coal mining and steve & alex do a lot of that

How is this different to the butchering skill? Also, that's not very believable - fishing skill is a knowledge thing - where to fish, at what time...

 

Whoa new idea: a daily repeating catchrate map for the world, looking from the top - if you know where the good fishing is, at what time, you get more/bigger fish!

That sounds really cool, and would probably also be very feasible. Simply use sections of about 5x5 chunks, and at first spawn they are given a time frame in daily hours, where they give the bonus. Preferably it wouldn't be like "each section has 2 hours when it's better", but rather "for each hour per section, there is a 5% chance that that it gets the bonus" (determined at first spawn). So some sections would never have the bonus, but if you find a really good section it can work for almost half the day.

If there was a fishing skill, it would unlock an additional mode on the fishing rod at expert, allowing you to "see" the bonus the same way you see hydration on crop fields at any given time.

Small sidetrack on how skills could be separated:

Honestly, I think there could be three food-related skills instead of the two currently existing:

Food Preparation - Would give a general bonus on the amounts of food gathered by butchery, fishing and agriculture, as well as reduce the amount of weight loss from cutting away decay (because you know exactly how much you need to cut away and don't need to cut extra just to be sure)

Animal Husbandry - Would give a small bonus on butchered mammal and bird meat as well as more side products (bones and skin etc). Would also increase the amount of trust gained by an animal for feeding it.

Fishing - Would give a bonus to food from cleaning fish as well as unlock seeing if a section is in "bonus mode" or not.

Agriculture - Would give a bonus on seeds as wel as unlock seeing nutrients.

 

This way it would work a lot like how the smithing skills work, and being a fisher would be a legitimate focus on a multiplayer server.

 

 And yes I will likely only ever play the newest version of this mod, so if he needs cauldron and you invalidate cauldron and he has to stick with a previous version I will leave. It isn't personal, but I will. Even if it is just to play SP.

I don't get this... Like, at all. I you're happy playing 79.15 now, and think that's better than not playing, why would you stop playing 79.15 if a new non-compatible version was released?It's kinda like, I love playing diablo 2, and my computer can't handle diablo 3... But when diablo 3 was released, I didn't stop playng diablo 2 just because there existed a newer game.

Reporting in from Gothenburg, Sweden. It's always overcast here. Season doesn't matter.

Lol not really that bad, but yeah, during winters we have overcast at least 3/4 of days. Not on the very coldest days generally, but otherwise, yes.

I assume the frequency of overcast weather is directly related to how close to the coast a region is.

I don't know if I can help you, but I have specifically made 200 units of bismuth bronze from small ores in a vessel recently, and for me it worked fine (build 79.15 and java 7, though). Note though that the "middle" distribution for bismuth bronze is 15% bismuth, 60% copper, and 25% zinc.

Your original ratio is 10/80/10, followed by 10/75/15. This means you had too little zinc and to much copper for it to be possible, even in the second setup. For 200 units, you can have 2-4 bismuth, 10-14 copper, and 4-6 zinc, and they need to add up to 20.

Try again with the "middle" distribution of 3 bismuth, 12 copper, and 5 zinc.

One huge thing that I've pointed out before in other threads complaining about the length of the stone age: We're not forcing you to rush for copper. It is the player's decision to go for copper tools ASAP, and no matter what bottlenecks we put in place, players are still going race for that first pickaxe. If you want a longer stone age, then stop making a copper pickaxe as soon as you possibly can and just linger in the stone age for a while.

While I agree to a large extent (we are nearing the first winter on our new server and the only metal we've used so far is a single saw), I do think that game design affects how people will play and appreciate a game. I mean, in vanilla minecraft you can say that it's believable too, it might not have gravity but if you don't break dirt you'll never notice

I realize that's not to the extent you mean here, and as said I agree that you can affect it quite a lot deliberately, but mechanics inform play.

I mean, we're four people nearing the first winter, we've deliberately chosen a seed that has a lack of metal, we've gone around quite far in search of crops etc and built up three decently sized buildings, collected fruit trees, herded pigs etc. We've really really tried to make the stone age last, and in addition all the other players are completely new to TFC so they have had to learn everything from scratch. But despite that, there just isn't much to do anymore besides advancing. The amount of things one can build from gravel and logs is limited, after all.

The reason why people rush to the first copper is because it's generally really really easy to get, and it generally opens up an enormous amount of new options. You don't see people rushing from copper/bronze to steel to nearly the same extent, because it's more work and doesn't expand one's options as much (main difference would be movement of water).

I do think there are a few simple (from a gameplay and design perspective; I have no idea about the coding) ways that could change how people feel about the stone age, and that would allow one to do a lot more while still encouraging progress, for example:

- Splitting logs into 1/4th pieces (8x8x16 pixels) with axe+hammer would allow for stairs and basic furniture (right now the only way not to jump everywhere is using half-made pit kilns or piles of charcoal, which is... weird)

- Being able to put down tools on the ground, or some other way of storing tools before the tool rack

- Making support beams with the axe

- Occacional (quite rare) boulders that are basically a standard stone block lying around on dirt (and thus you're able to take it with you)- Some way to fish proper fish during the stone age

- Simple skin "drapery" or whatchamacallit that can be used as a door, that does not block movement but mobs won't pathfind through it (similar to how adjacent fences work.

- Stone age access to ropeOn the long term there are several other things I'd love to see for the stone age:- Bone crafting, either similar to knapping or a new system

- Sewing, using bone needles and string or jute

- A travois to allow one to carry more stuff by dragging it after oneself.

Being able to milk sheep would be kinda cool, though perhaps much less frequent like once per week instead of once per day.

Is it feasable to calculate how "big" the lake is?

Devs can probably give a more exact answer, but afaik it isn't really feasible. It would probably be quite easy to determine wether it's an ocean, a river or a lake (due to salt/fresh water and due to ocean and river being biomes) but not the exact size.

Honestly, I find the difficulty of enemies is the reverse from vanilla; in stone age, I've found that zombies are pretty easy, even larger groups. They're easy to outmaneuver and run past they're easy to tower away from and they're easy to push into holes. I just use stone daggers or axes depending on what I have ready; five swings with an axe takes down a zombie, and it lasts for about seven or eight swings. Daggers last for more zombies, but you have to hit them like 8 or 9 times which makes daggers useless against groups.

Skeletons are annoying, but can usually be either outrun or lured into a tree; running into a big tree also gives me enough time to knapp a hammer to kill them with.

Creepers do huge damage if you're close, but usually are alone so it's quite easy to make sure they just blow up far enough away that you take tops 100 damage or so.

Spiders are honestly the hardest IMO, and no other mob kills me as much. Can't outrun them very well (well, I have smart moving on hard so I guess I run a bit worse than in vanilla or regular TFC), can't climb out of their reach, they can survive a lot of damage from axes and knives, and they're just generally annoying. Though granted, if I'm at my base they're the easiest since I can just go in and they can't follow me

In vanilla I consider the mobs difficulties reversed; Zombies>skeletons>creepers>spiders. Wither skeletons I've never engaged during the stone age except for when already dying, and then I've always died.EDIT; Though I should probably shut up, since a creeper just managed to kill _every single one of my pigs_. Well, it'll have to be potatoes and seaweed all winter then..

The player spawns in an open field surrounded by hills and broken here and there by small groves of sycamores and sequoia. The peninsula is incredibly rich in food, featuring plenty of wild onions and wheat, with some potatoes, cranberries, bell pepper and even plum trees in full bloom. Plenty of wild animals roam this area, including pigs, pheasants and more. There's a freshwater lake, and the field opens up to the ocean to the north and west, while to the east an unexplored island is connected by a shallow bank.

To the south of the peninsula lies a great forest of proud douglas firs and elms and even more of nature's sweetness; tomatoes, sugar canes and even soy. Here whole herds of deer roam, but also monsters - both wolves and bears have been sighted. But what would life be without some risk, eh?

Seed: 2

(Yes it's that simple)
Note that this area seems to be utterly lacking in exposed ores, though small bits of cassiterite and sphalarite can be found in some places, as well as less-useful galena and native gold. So you're going to be at the stone age for a long time, but it'll be glorious.

So, this is a seed that ought to be nice for people who want a really royal stone age, though advancing beyond that point might take a bit of work. I just found this while looking for interesting seeds and am going to start playing some single player on it right away. Thought I'd share.

1: The field in all it's glory, and the border to the forest. 2: The coastline with cranberries, onions and a freshwater pond. 3: The unexplored island is just beyond this bank, which also serves to provide seaweed for that salt in your salad.

@Bunsan, the reason why I think a set limit of lives is a worse alternative for "hardcore light" is because this proposed change works well with multiplayer, while a limited number of lives do not.  With this proposed change, the "unplayable world" situation would affect everyone in a given group about equally, assuming it's a cooperative server, so everyone can partake in playing and trying to find a solution to the problem until everyone is starving and decide to quit. A limited set of lives however, means often the clumsier players will die off early, and the ones who are left have to decide whether to continue playing without them or leave a setup that might be working fine in all other ways.

I also like the focus on non-combat difficulty then, while a limited number of lives mainly affect combat scenarios.

So the Walking Dead in TFC? I'd rather leave the vectors of illnesses to be animals and dangerous creatures

Hey now you spoiled me I haven't gotten that far yet very well...

But yeah I wasn't serious anyway, just think it's interesting how many typical zombie tropes also fits rabies.

Dying in the early-game is expected. Mobs are hard, and weapons are crap. The penalty for dying at the start of the game is not harsh and may even be a little bit helpful (more HP from reset nutrition) because we expect you to die. If we further penalize players for dying at the beginning, there's going to be even more players who ragequit because the game is "too hard" or "too grindy". The penalty for death comes into play when you've actually been playing for a while, have established yourself, and have gotten a fair amount of XP. Dying at the start doesn't matter because you have very little to lose, dying in mid-game is much worse, which is also why you have better armor and weapons to better protect yourself, and prevent death from happening.

I guess different people have different expectations then. I'm an old-time roguelike fan, and so are most people I play with, so my general expectation is "if you screw up, you're dead. If you're unlucky, you better be goddamn good or you'll be dead too. Death is permanent or at least debilitating.". That works for single player (hardcore mode) but in multiplayer a set in stone hardcore mode takes away from the fun (because if one person dies they can't play anymore), so retaining nutrition would be like a multiplayer-functional "hardcore light", where continuous screwing up can lead to the whole group failing, but in general one person won't be out until everyone is nearly out.

I'm probably in the minority on this, but I'm hardly the only one seeing as at least 17 people have said they would use the option if it existed. So we're a minority, but not a tiny part of the player base (of course I'm not saying "YOU NEED TO DO THIS!!!" or anything, just that _if_ you felt like doing it, we would be a bunch of people who would use and appreciate it).

The point that I'm trying to make that you seem to be missing, is that the "minimum threshold" in order to prevent players having starvation death loops is not at 10% or 30%. It's at like 50% or even 80% if you don't use sandwiches/salads.

 

Gaining nutrition is easy if you have sandwiches or salads, and it's hard if you don't. This is intentional to add incentive for players to actually use the new taste system and make sandwiches and salads.

How so? I thought death only happened at 0% in each? So if you have any single kind of food source, you should be almost stable, especially if as you say you get more when you are malnourished.

And if the system is set up so that you starve if you don't jump off a cliff, isn't the bigger issue with the system then?

Or am I misunderstanding something? Perhaps if I make an example scenario you could answer because I think I'm missing something now...

Say two people are on a server. They've eaten the same things, and are at 80% in each of the nutrients.

Zombies attack. Player one survives, player two dies. No relevant items are lost.

1. Right now, is the player one (who survives) likely to starve, even if they dedicate to finding food?2. If player two respawns with the same amount as before, are they more likely to starve than the other player?The thing is I feel that if there's no mechanic that makes player two starve faster than player one, then I don't see the issue with retaining starvation level. If player one IS likely to starve, then there's a bigger issue with the food mechanic, wherein players are almost forced to off themselves to regain nutrition. Or what have I misunderstood?

PS: Just to clarify, because English isn't my native language, I'm not out to be rethorical with my questions or anything, and I'm not out to be abrasive. Please tell me if I come across as "aggressive", it is the last thing I want, I just have a hard time with nuance in English.

It is an intentional feature to only be able to store 80 oz in one slot in small vessels. You can store the full 160 in a single slot in a large vessel though.

Optimally, you can store 320 oz in a single small vessel, and nine small vessels in a large vessel.

I don't know the exact maths, but some trees giving less saplings (or no saplings) is an intended feature. IIRC, Bioxx (the original developer) stated that they want to represent how deforestation is a real issue in real life too, and that not all resources last forever.

However, if I remember correctly, you get the most saplings by removing the leaves by knife, and the least by removing them with a scythe. Removing by hand is either as good as knife or between knife and scythe, I can't remember.In my experience, most tree types tends to give around 1 sapling per tree average if cleaned completely, but 10 trees is a very small sample size and you might just have been unlucky.

Good points.

For a bit of reference, players actually used to start with only 80% nutrition, but we had to change it to 100% because players were becoming malnutritioned too quickly and they could never really get it up to 100% without a lot of work. So in essence, the "starvation death loop" that I'm talking about can happen even if we decrease nutrition to be as low as 80% on death. The nutrition system was designed in such a way that it is much much easier to maintain your current nutrition, than it is to actually increase any of the values.

There is an important difference though, between when you're completely new on a map and when you already have gathered food. If I've just spawned, I have no idea where food is or if there's even any non-seaweed food within 10 km from my starting position. If I'm three IRL days in and malnourished and die, I'll still have whatever food I've gathered there which, while it may not prevent all kinds of malnourishment, will keep me from starving for quite a while.

And the idea isn't really to lower the nutrition you have when you die, but rather not inrease it. So if you have, say, 95%/0%/70%/40%/95% when you die, you'd have 95%/0%/70%/40%/95% (or 95%/10%/70%/40%/95% if one wants to keep death loops away) when you respawn.

So dieing wouldn't make your nutrition worse, apart from the time and food you might have lost by dying, but rather not filling your nutrition state fully.

That doesn't really address the problem that Kitty mentioned, though. We certainly don't want starting a new life (or a new game!) to be a constant grind against rapidly falling nutrition. As the mechanic works now, it sounds like anything short of full nutrition is too painful to start out. If you're at 80% now, it's because you haven't been eating well and thus it's a consequence of how you've been playing. If you were to start out that way, it would be too punishing.

 

That's why I said the dev's might want to consider tweaking how the mechanic works. I think by changing the starting condition to full nutrition, they solved one problem but created a new problem of exploitative game-play. I definitely agree with Kitty that it's better now - we don't want to hurt the game for everybody for the sake of a minority that might exploit it. But maybe adjustments to how quickly nutrition drops would make the 80% starting condition viable again and close the loophole. I don't know how feasible this is - it occurs to me that I don't even know if nutrition drops at a constant rate or if it's exponential or what.

No-one's saying starting a new game or new life should be a constant grind, if you die you should be in the same situation afterwards (except for what items you might have lost), and this change would not affect a new game one iota.

If you're having a hard time getting nutrition after you die, it's because you had a hard time getting nutrition before you died. Dying just doesn't help you with nutrittion anymore (unless you where below a certain threshold, whether 10% or 30% or what have you).

Without getting too deep into the details of exactly how the system works, in essence nutrition drops at a constant rate, but it does not increase at a constant rate. Unless you are eating salads and sandwiches, you're going to have a difficult time just maintaining your current nutrition.

 

The rate at which nutrition decreases is in essence tied to the rate at which food decreases, so doing actions that decrease food, such as breaking blocks, or using tools like the gold pan will decrease your nutrition and food levels even faster than the base rate. There is also the fact that when your food is empty, nutrition depletes at 3 times the standard rate.

 

Increasing nutrition is based pretty much entirely on your current satisfaction/saturation levels that you get from eating tasty salads and sandwiches. However, the more malnourished that a player is, the more nutrition they will get from eating satisfying food. Eating individual ingredients does help increase nutrition, but it only does it for that individual food group, and it will rarely if ever actually result in a net gain of nutrition.

Thanks for the info on how it works. I suspected it was something to that effect but it's good to have it black on white.

Though personally, I think the fact that nutrititon is really hard to increase except through dying is even more of a reason to remove that benefit of dying.

Configs like this are set by the server though, not the client. So everybody on the server would have to agree to having it changed, and you would have to convince the server admin to change the config files on the server.

Yes, well, I am the server admin