Tathar

Gnomoria would be a nice game too if I could play it, but I can't get used to the isometric graphics.  I've been playing DF for too long.  

Banished is a nice game, but I keep having trouble dealing with villager foot-speed.  When you can't assign workers jobs based on proximity to their houses, it gets really hard to get anything done in the early game.  

Decide before you begin that you'll only play for a certain amount of time, and then set a timer to alert you when that time passes.  

This is a different ghost items bug than the one from 78.4.  It's easily reproducible on my end, and I can provide video if desired.  

The meal interface throwing items bug might actually be related to how my mouse double-clicks sometimes when I try to single-click.  I can't be certain that it's the cause though, since the bug happens much more often than I'd expect my mouse to unintentionally double-click.  If you double-click really fast, does the bug reproduce?

I'll test the desync bugfix soon on 78.6.  I'm in the middle of moving my base, so it may be another day or two before I'm able to confirm the fix.  

Grains being useful only in meals might actually be a good mechanic, but the bug would be that they give no nutritional effect, not that it's possible to add them.

EDIT:

I can confirm that the ghost items bug remains in 78.6 SMP, but only sometimes occurs.  I was able to reproduce by filling in all the slots and then removing them one by one without shift-click.  The top meal ingredient  (a tomato) left a ghost item, but the others did not.  

I'm wildly guessing at this point, but I believe that the throwing items bug happens for certain food items only.  Tomatoes and plums frequently get thrown, while some other food items appear unaffected.  

Desync bugfix is confirmed fixed for 78.6.

EDIT 2: Bowls are especially slippery.  I've had 20 in a row pop out while trying to put them into a meal table, using multiple methods.  

Hotfix #: 78.5

Suggested Name: SMP Meal Ghost Items

Suggested Category: Annoying

Description: When removing items from a meal interface in SMP, the items also remain in the slots as ghost items.  

Have you deleted your config files and are still able to reproduce this bug?: Yes

Pastebin.com link of the Crash Report: N/A

Hotfix #:78.5

Suggested Name: Meal Interface Throws Ingredients

Suggested Category: Annoying

Description: On SMP, when picking up items to place in the meal interface, the items frequently get thrown instead of picked up.  I was able to reproduce this in SSP prior to 78.5, but I haven't tested since.

Have you deleted your config files and are still able to reproduce this bug?: Yes

Pastebin.com link of the Crash Report: N/A

Hotfix #: 78.5

Suggested Name: SMP Meal Bowls Desync

Suggested Category: Minor

Description: Frequently, the bowls in the meal interface lose their quantity information on SMP.  You can still make meals.

Have you deleted your config files and are still able to reproduce this bug?: Yes

Pastebin.com link of the Crash Report: N/A

Hotfix #: 78.5

Suggested Name: Grains In Meals

Suggested Category: Minor

Description: Grain items can be added to meals, but they give no nutritional effect.  Tested in SMP with Cooked Poultry, Garlic, Carrot, Oat Grain.

Have you deleted your config files and are still able to reproduce this bug?: Yes

Pastebin.com link of the Crash Report: N/A

Build 78 doesn't work with MCPC+, to my knowledge.  It crashes on server start.

Keep in mind, the purpose of the original suggestion was to give a purpose to having a varied diet and encourage people to seek out different foods.  I believe that build 78's nutrition system accomplishes this pretty well.  While a nutrient-based system could work to some limited extent, if foods are too interchangeable or replaceable, then we're missing the point of having so many different foods available again.  

Since I wrote the OP before this system existed, let me give my analysis of the gameplay considerations introduced in this version.  The problem with build 77's food options was that late-game, when you have access to lots of different foods, you're still probably only munching down on a single type of fruit because it's the most accessible food available.  It's a waste of the food variety in TFC, and it discourages the use of more involved food-making processes.  Now in build 78, you can't do that without only ending up with 20% of your total health.  It pushes you to explore the other content and try new foods.  This is a good thing, and a nutrient-based system could complicate the relationship between the nutrition system and food-making processes.  

The only thing left I'd still like to see is more differentiation within the food groups, such as some sort of culinary difference between cherries, apples, and bananas.  However, build 78 accomplishes so much in terms of rewarding food variety, and I like the implementation better than my own original suggestion.  

When Dunk had mentioned TFC's poor donations total a few months back, I had no idea.  I wanted to change that, but without a job of my own, I couldn't get too crazy.  I planned on waiting until I had money coming in so I wouldn't risk too much of my savings.  

Today, I donated $100 to TFC.  I still don't have a job, so I didn't make it a recurring amount.  However, once I secure a job of my own, I'll donate another $10 every month.  With build 78 coming out soon, Bioxx and Dunk deserve the show of appreciation.  

They deserve more, though.  I'm asking everyone here to consider donating -- not $100, but whatever you feel makes sense -- and if you have a steady income, please make it a recurring monthly donation.  Then when you're done, reply to this thread with a thank you message for Bioxx and Dunk.  They'll appreciate the gesture, and it'll help motivate them when they feel burnt out.  It's my hope that we can make this more than just a hobby for Bioxx and Dunk, but I'm content with my donation being a simple show of thanks with some income on the side.  

Perhaps weekly wouldn't be the right interval then.  However, if a major update is made up of components A, B, C, and D, would it be feasible to snapshot after each of those components is completed?  Build 78 adds a lot of stuff, but releasing any one of those new features early would give people enough to play with to avoid losing interest.  

I feel that build 78 is more like a "complete overhaul" update than a major update in terms of development time, and previous major updates were both smaller in scope and frequent enough that people didn't lose interest.  For me, the key is to sync development time to the rate of content exhaustion, so that people have something new to play with around the time when they're done with their old world and ready to start over.  

Since my answer depends on it, what constitutes a Major Build?  Clearly what went into Build 78 couldn't be expected from you every month.  

I think a better question would be "How often do you want to download a new TFC update and start a new world?"  This gets to the heart of people's play habits and allows updates to be timed closely to when people are ready to move on to the next world anyway.  The size and scope of updates can then be scaled accordingly.  

Also, it might make sense to offer weekly snapshots of content in development like how Mojang does it.  This would allow those interested to access bleeding edge content and assist in QA efforts while those who prefer more stable builds can stick to the standard releases.  It would also make this poll a moot point, since you could update things as you like and the players could decide for themselves whether they want to try the untested stuff when they're ready for a new world or wait for a more stable version.  

My experience is that MCPC+ sends chunks rather quickly, but that the client can only render a small number of chunks that are nearby.  Minimaps render fine under MCPC+, so it can't be data not getting sent.  

I'm also aware of a bug where leatherworking crafting recipes cause a clientside crash when using MCPC+ on a server.  The other method of leatherworking (using the leather with a knife on hotbar) isn't affected by this.  

How were you able to get TFC and MCPC+ to play well together?  My (limited) experience with MCPC+ has been filled with nothing but roadblocks and pain.  

Warning: Math incoming.

I just checked, and it's possible to eat the same thing up to 44% of the time and still have 100% nutrition, given the specifics in my OP.  It would require more micromanagement than I'd like (understatement) but it's definitely possible to have a staple food and high nutrition at the same time.  

If each set of foods eaten was increased from 25 to 50, then the percentage increases to 72% with the same level of micromanagement.  With significantly less micromanagement, you could probably get away with 40-50% staple food that way.  

Either way, it wouldn't kill someone to have less than 100% nutrition, so what I just said doesn't really mean much.  Do what you like.

Bioxx and I have already stated that we're no longer balancing the game for single player. It's supposed to be played SMP.

This is news to me.  Pleasant news though.  Public or private SMP?  They tend to have very different playstyles.  

Is there a way to make this work without having to add water?  Build 77 sure did change our early-game options by quite a bit.  

Adobe... an update is available.

How does Adobe Reader even need that many updates?  It's not Java or Windows.  

I'm just now realizing how slowly the hunger bar depletes now.  I'm thinking that making the hunger bar deplete faster or making foods restore less of the bar might help complement nutrition.  What does everyone think about that?

My suggestion is the an threshold of how much a kind of food can be consume per day.For example, if a player eat 2 egg perday then he get 100% efficiecy. If he eat the third egg, that one only has 50% its expected affect.So bringing more than 2 different kinds of food in inventory is better than only has the same food all the time. 

Several problems with this.  Under the current hunger rate, you might not even eat two food items per day.  It would be wasted effort to code that feature.

Second, I really don't want to force people to carry several food items with them all the time.  If you get diminishing effects on how much of the hunger bar is restored by a specific food, it could easily result in that situation.  What about the early-game player who doesn't have several different foods to eat?  What about when the player has to venture far from home to collect a resource that isn't nearby?  If maintaining nutrition is required for survival, then players will have a very hard time surviving under these circumstances.

Third, how many different types of food will the player eat under this system?  If a player can achieve full benefits from just alternating between two or three foods, especially if they're collected the same way, then the goal of food variety hasn't been achieved.  

There's a lot of suggestions here, so I'll go through each one separately.  

I love the cloth idea.  Cloth tents and tarps would really help flesh out clothworking and give it more of a purpose.  

I like the idea of windmills acting as a quern replacement, but I would like to avoid automation of other parts of TFC if it could be avoided.  You have to consider whether this would change TFC in fundamental ways.  

I assume you're referring to an Archimedes screw here.  It would definitely fit within the mod's scope, but I'm having a hard time coming up with a good use for it.  

Gates make sense for TFC if they require metal to make.  Drawbridges could also work, but would they be manually lowered and raised, or would they use a windmill or watermill to power them?  I'd prefer the former unless redstone was required in some way.  

I've been wondering what peat was going to be useful for now that firepits aren't used as often.  Fertilizer could work.  

I've always assumed that gypsum, selenite, and satinspar would eventually be used for plaster casts or faster healing.  But yeah, I'd like to see the "useless" minerals find a use pretty soon.  

Why is it that every sandbox game and mod has to add bees?  It's like Forge needs a "bee dictionary" to complement the ore dictionary.  I swear there must be some sort of conspiracy here.  In all seriousness, though, now that we have alcohols, mead does make sense.  

As for your food suggestions in general, I'd hold off on implementing these suggestions.  I think TFC needs to do more to encourage people to try most or all of the foods that already exist.  Wood and stone types may be largely similar, but they do have slightly different properties that give them separate uses. Food is basically interchangeable aside from meals, and meals actually discourage variety once you find that magic combination of foods that get you the effect you want.  Once food variety is encouraged throughout the game's progression, then adding new food types would make sense, but not now.  

Energy is tracked through the hunger bar.  Tracking micronutrients, even silently, would not be suitable for gameplay reasons I've already mentioned.  Even if it would be more realistic to do so, gameplay is an important factor that must also be considered.  Tracking micronutrients as an aggregate just results in a second hunger bar.  That is hardly ideal either.  There really isn't any good alternative to basing nutrition off of food groups that still encourages players to eat a variety of foods that require different gameplay mechanics to obtain.  If you ignore that critical objective, then adding a new self-maintenance meter serves no gameplay purpose.  

As for nuts, I don't know much about them, but if they have their own gameplay mechanic to obtain them, I see no reason not to add it to the available food groups for nutrition.  

You could always use a wooden bucket for the water.  

Just my two cents:

If you're basing this off of digging a foot deep in your backyard, of course you're not going to find anything interesting.  You'd have to dig deeper, and somewhere else.  

That said, given TFC's time period, you're probably the one leaving those artifacts there to begin with.  

Actually, I was describing gameplay reasons for using the suggested features.  I left out the resource costs of building the roads because there are several types of roads mentioned here, and I'm not sure what the cost vs. benefit of each comes out to.  I suspect that the movement speeds overall would need to be greater than the OP mentioned, though.  

Also, trading happens more often than you'd expect on a public server.  With how far apart certain resources can be, it's important to find trading partners in different biomes and climates.  Sure, everyone can get everything themselves, but the time cost of doing so may be more than the cost of trading with someone who already has something you need.  Let's say you specifically need basalt bricks and aspen saplings for a black building, and you don't have those resources nearby.  Are you going to travel a thousand blocks or more (per trip!) to gather those resources, or are you going to trade with someone who already has them in great quantity?  Trading involves travel too, but at least you can optimize your inventory for hauling trade goods instead of having to bring various tools and supplies with you.  

Of course top-layer mining, as is, would make minecarts less necessary.  You would need significant changes to the inventory sizes of stone, dirt, and ore resources for that to be important.  However, deep mining tends to involve more underground mineshafts.  A minecart system would make more sense in that case, assuming that the resource cost didn't outweigh the benefits.  Right now it does, so we would need a cheaper alternative that we can have access to earlier.  It's a bit trickier to balance than roads are though, so I'm admittedly having a hard time coming up with a suitable solution.  

I have to disagree in the strongest terms with what Euphoric is saying.  These features would be a huge improvement for communal and public SMP play.  Instead of roads and carts being used by a single person, you would see several people using the same infrastructure.  Let's lay this out:

Communal SMP

• Everyone is working together in the same town.  Therefore, everyone has the same logistical concerns.
  • The most commonly-traveled paths could be made into roads.
  • Handcarts would help people bring resources from one area of the town to another.
• Resources are community-owned and applied where needed.  Resources could be stockpiled either next to their respective gathering point or in a centralized location.
  • Depending on which stockpiling option is used, roads could be designed as a web or as a hub-and-spoke design.
  • Handcarts make a centralized stockpile more attractive for smaller towns, but larger towns could efficiently use either option.
• A town requires more resources than a single person.  Therefore, resource gathering points, such as farms and lumber yards, are generally in geographically distinct locations.
  • Some resource gathering points are stationary and permanent.  However, many are far away from the town, including deserts, forests, and wild fruit trees.  Roads would greatly improve travel to these isolated locations.
  • Other resource gathering points are non-permanent.  Ore deposits make up the majority of this category.  Minecarts and tracks would make more sense than roads in this case since they could be moved as necessary.  However, TFC currently lacks a feasible way to implement a minecart system, since you need iron to start one, and the materials are costly.  Alternatives such as wooden minecarts and tracks would make this a possibility prior to the Iron Age and feasible after.

Public SMP

• Many players will choose to settle somewhere on their own and trade with other players doing the same.
  • Trading partners would find a connecting road, even if incomplete, to be a huge boon to all parties.
  • Given that the distance between trading partners will often be too far to make multiple trips appropriate, handcarts would help a lot.  However, the increased storage space would have to outweigh the reduced speed for this to make sense, so cutting speed in half may be overkill.
  • A single road connecting several trading partners together would see more use than several roads connecting each pair of trading partners directly.
• Other players will form towns and play cooperatively.
  • For these players, the same points for communal SMP apply here.

maybe use the gems for decoration purposes. like embedding gems into armor pieces or make a crown with the gems in it. or so we can make a keystone out of the gems

I'm working on Techne models for exactly this.  When I'm done, I'll be commissioning an add-on mod that lets you craft jewelry, metalcrafts, and other "valuables" out of precious metals and gems.  They wouldn't do anything other than look pretty, but at least you could place them in the world.  

If anyone is interested in this, I do need some help.  I need someone to make textures for the models.  Turns out I'm terrible at it.  PM me if you're interested.  

EDIT: Someone has volunteered for the textures, and I'm getting in touch with him on Skype.  Thanks, HunterKain!

A well written OP that hits all the points that I would make regarding this topic. I'll be keeping my eye on critiques made here.

Is there anything in particular that you want to see in a suggestion thread?  I'd like to know for my nutrition thread.  

I never could adapt to my turning speed being limited in games, and Minecraft game mechanics require at minimum the means to jump a full block high.  Other than that, those suggestions could work in theory.  However, keep in mind, nutrition would be a mechanic separate from hunger, so it's not really about having enough energy to do stuff.