dunkleosteus

Good ideas! A little complicated yes, but I like the approach you're taking. Currently, animals do store values representing different attributes.

public float size_mod;			//How large the animal ispublic float strength_mod;		//how strong the animal ispublic float aggression_mod = 1;//How aggressive / obstinate the animal ispublic float obedience_mod = 1;	//How well the animal responds to commands.public float colour_mod = 1;	//what the animal looks likepublic float climate_mod = 1;	//climate adaptabilitypublic float hard_mod = 1;		//hardiness

From the deer class. All our animals have these values, and they control how the animal may behave to certain degrees. Values for the numbers are generated from an RNG with a bias towards 1. The basic idea is that "1" represents the average value for a species. The exception is that when a female animal generates a size_mod, she multiplies it by 0.9 (for example, it actually varies between animals) meaning she is 90% the size of a male. size_mod renders visually to players by slightly altering the animal's size. The other values are a bit harder to figure out, and some are currently unused. Combinations of these attributes contribute to the way the animal can interact with the world and players. When wolves or bears attack, the damage inflicted is based on these values:

int var2 = (int)(TFC_MobData.WolfDamage * getStrength() * getAggression() * (getSize()/2 + 0.5F));

and when you're taming the animals, it will have an impact as well:

float familiarityChange = (6 * obedience_mod / aggression_mod);

When an animal is bred, its values are generated based on an RNG and its parents. While wild animals generate values biased towards 1, offspring generate values biased towards the average of their parents' values, adjusted for sex. So if the mother and father of your baby animal both have obediences of 1.1, any babies would have an average obedience of 1.1, but the most obedient of them might be more obedient than any animal that could be produced in the wild and the least obedient would still be more obedient than the least obedient one in the wild.

https://youtu.be/oe5vMqbjeAE

Shellfish would be like the protein equivalent of seaweed?

Have you read my post about a plan for body temperature being added in the future?

I actually asked Kitty that on Reddit she responded with

So (with my additional testing) I've found horses, cows and bear all can drop large hides depending on their size when fully grown. I'm assuming that pigs, sheep, wolves, deer, and poultry cannot drop large hides (deer are the ones I am most unsure about).

you are correct, cows, horses and bears are the only animals that can be large enough to drop large hides. The other animals will always drop either a small or medium hide.

Thanks a lot everyone

I have been contacted, fear not 

I'll see if I can get you a mapping soon

Ceramic pots were for this originally I believe

necrooo

What I was trying to rectify was when you throw your line a couple of blocks in front of you and get fish really fast, compared to throwing it out far. There should be a reward for fishing in deeper water.

yeah, I know. Fishing isn't always like that though. Far doesn't always mean good, there are a few factors. It'd probably be a combination of minimum distance from any player, water depth and how much aquatic vegetation was in the area. If you get the right mix, you can catch bass. 

not explicitly. It's affected by the rainfall value though. Jump into a creative world and just add time until it's mid january, then fly around until it's above freezing. Trial and error is an easy solution for most cases.

Fishing is kind of a pain to work with. I may take another look at it in the future. What I'll probably do is force the player to keep the line under tension. If the player tries to walk towards the fish, it'll create slack and the fish will get away. The UI will probably end up changing as well. Fishing will probably end up a lot like fishing in fable (the original, if anyone's played that) except you'll be able to walk around while doing it (although walking anywhere but away from the fish probably wouldn't work too well)

We could probably fudge an inventory timer into it to allow it to solidify in a player's inventory. Would probably end up functioning a lot like waiting for ingots to cool.

The framework for individual abilities within animals is all there, and for the most part is already implemented. Animals have their own stats relating to size, strength, endurance, aggressiveness etc. At the moment, it's mostly randomized, with a bias towards the average, but you can always find the odd weak or strong animal if you look. Speciation wouldn't be too difficult- if I skewed the "normal" values for certain types of animals, it would probably behave like different breeds of horses existed. It's perfectly possible to breed your own species for whatever purpose you want, (well you could if there was anything those stats would actually do aside from sit there), but I do think there is an appeal to having certain abilities crop up geographically rather than completely at random as it is now. Either way, I don't know if I like bringing real breeds of horses into TFC. I'm not an expert on horses and I feel that it just limits us too much. I'd rather have a "work horse" breed or a "race horse" breed- if you want to call it a clydesdale in your head, I have no problem with that, but I'd prefer to keep things general.

Adding uses for animals is always something to be looked at. I can't guarantee when or how it would happen, but it's definitely on the to-do list for some point. Thanks for posting.

Bioxx has looked into rivers before and never been happy with any attempts to slope them. The rivers there are very angular and shallow, and look pretty unnatural. We did explore having real waterfalls but it degenerates into a lag-ridden mess of flowing water block floods pretty quickly. 

I did come across a few natural waterfalls in TFC while we were testing b79, so they do exist

Name:Dunk

ign:nikstick22

Age:20

Why you want to join: my brother asked me if I wanted to, and it sounds like fun

Skills: I am a developer

How often would you play: probably a bit every day

Skype: I don't give it out publicly

As far as moose go, maybe. There are a number of factors here... I have a huge backlog of stuff I need to get done, so they'd have to go to the back of the queue. Assuming all that got out of the way, it's still a grey area. What I can say is that I approve of moose. My approval and the likelihood that they'll ever find their way into TFC are only distantly related though.

Last time I spoke with Bioxx about mudbricks, the consensus was we liked the idea of them but didn't know if people would actually use them... there's a lot of effort needed to make enough bricks to build any sort of shelter. That effort takes a lot of resources and time, so by the time anyone could build with them, they'd be obsolete. Historically, mudbricks were dried in the sun, but that's a little more difficult to model with TFC. You can understand why using a kiln (4 bricks at a time) to bake them would be kind of silly- you burn 8 logs for every 4 bricks. You may as well just build a log house.

finally

I'm going to be at Pax East on Friday, March 6 and Sunday, March 8, 2015! If you're going to be there, it would be great to meet up with you guys

I think it's important to note that when you read "far outweighs the main lead ore in revenue", the value of silver (per kg) is $513.45 USD at the time I write this, whereas solid lead scrap (for which I was able to find a price) is just $1.87 USD. That means silver is 275 times more valuable than lead, so outweighing the value of lead really doesn't say much. Galena is typically about 86% lead by weight, and the argentiferous galena is on average about 1% silver by weight. I'll also note that the wikipedia article on galena states that galena is mined as a silver ore only within the united states, while it occurs without silver inclusions all over the world- silver isn't exactly common. Anyway, if we scaled the silver production accordingly, each regular galena ore (ie not rich or poor) would contain 0.29 units of silver (proportional to 25 units of lead). This would mean you'd need 344 pieces of ore to make one silver ingot. That silver ingot would be worth 275 lead ingots in our IRL economy (compared to the 86 lead ingots you'd be able to make with those 344 ore pieces), but that really doesn't mean much in TFC.

Basically, the amount of silver in SOME galena deposits is negligible in-game.

sources:

http://geology.com/minerals/galena.shtml

http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/lead/

http://www.24hgold.com/english/gold_silver_prices_charts.aspx?money=USD

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galena