Tathar

Abstraction isn't necessarily a bad thing.  TFC does have an abstract "health number" that determines how close you are to death.  That said, whether missing out on certain food groups should give you certain ailments depends on what type of gameplay we're trying to encourage.  I didn't want to force people to eat a variety of foods (especially not early on, when such foods are hard to obtain) by threat of illness or death.  Other people might be more willing to push for a more hardcore version of nutrition.  Maybe Bioxx would be one of them, but I doubt a hardcore version would make it past internal playtesting.  

I really wanted to avoid tracking individual nutrients when I wrote up the OP.  There were several reasons for this decision: one, it would be difficult to understand and act upon; two, RL nutrients aren't well-aligned to individual food-related game mechanics in TFC; three, tracking RL nutrients would be an anachronism in TFC.  

There are a lot of important nutrients in real-life, and there's no simple system to remember which foods are good sources of which nutrients.  If TFC were to track individual RL nutrients, even TFC experts would have to routinely check the wiki to maintain their nutrition levels.  This is hardly desirable.  I expect that most players would give up on trying to maintain good nutrition if the mechanic was that complex.  

Picking on Vitamin C, oranges and other citrus fruits are well known for containing it, but actually all fresh, uncooked food contains Vitamin C, raw meat included.  Other nutrients also have good sources in multiple food groups.  Each of these sources are interchangeable for that nutrient, too.  If your goal is to encourage people to eat a greater variety of foods, tracking RL nutrients won't help at all.  Since TFC food production mechanics are tied closely to different food groups, if you want people to try each of those methods of food production, then you need to encourage people to eat from each food group too.  If you were to track RL nutrients, it doesn't help that you can obtain all required nutrients in a vegan diet, without supplements, as long as it contains soybeans.  

As for the nutrients themselves, you have to consider that TFC is designed with heavy (but not absolute) weight on historical accuracy, and anything from the 1700s or newer is generally considered too modern for inclusion.  RL nutrients don't fit at all into the historical theme.  Nutrition as an area of study in chemistry didn't even exist until the late 1700s.  We didn't even know that scurvy was linked to a Vitamin C deficiency until 1932, after Vitamin C was first isolated.  Even if you didn't know that, a system tracking chemical nutrients wouldn't be believable in a time period lacking sufficient understanding of chemistry in general.  In contrast, accounts of nutritional experiments based on food groups are found as far back as biblical times in the Book of Daniel.  

I don't like mushrooms, but if my character eats them, I don't have to!  That's how it works, right?  

What do people think about adding berries and berry bushes to TFC?  I mentioned it here since it would add another food group to nutrition, but what about berries on their own?

Ah, I see what you're talking about now.  The "detailed" part is just an optional thing that Bioxx and Dunk could add if they felt it was appropriate.  I don't expect that they would, and I'd try nutrition without it at first, personally.  

If something can be done about the spawn bug, where you initially spawn in one place and respawn in another place, and neither of them are the spawn point in level.dat, then I'll have to look into those seeds.  Until then, my SMP world is just going to have to settle for making people type /spawn to move to where I really want them to spawn at.  

With the body, you can still get a rough idea of how healthy you are through several indicators, taken together.  As a HUD element, the closest approximation to this would be a nutrition bar or some other "imprecise" indicator.  TFC already does this for other things.  You can't tell exactly how hungry you are in RL either, but we have a food bar for that.  

As for the file location, from within the mod zip, it's in assetsterrafirmacrafttexturesitemsfoodcheese.png.  Replace cheese.png with Cheese.png.

For all the people "liking" my idea, I'd still like to get more actual feedback.  What do you like about it?  What are you merely OK with?  Do you have any questions about how it works, or why I decided on a particular part of the system?  I appreciate the "likes," but I still want to improve the idea if I can.  

How did you make that?  

Actually, while I don't see coinage in TFC's future, that doesn't mean you can't put TFC and other mods together to implement a working economy based on coins for currency.  I'm planning on using Custom NPCs and a money+wallet mod I commissioned to implement this on a public server.  The only catch is that the mod I commissioned, by design, does not allow players to mint their own coins or melt them down into base metal.  If that's a dealbreaker, you can just use Custom NPCs to add crafting recipes to your liking.  

Or you could just use one of the other money mods out there that do more or less what you're asking for.  There's actually quite a few of them out there -- the only reason why I didn't use one of them was because I wanted a very specific set of features for my server.  

Then why not trade using tool metal ingots?  Or some other commonly-used commodity?  

As for dollar bills, fiat money has no *inherent* value, and what value it does have depends on how useful it is at obtaining other things that do have inherent value.  In other words, just because a government can say RL fiat money has value, that doesn't mean that the average person would be able to replicate that on a whim.  You're basically looking at adding NPC traders (or something of equivalent purpose) who will accept your money for useful items.  

Step 1: Download 7.11

Step 2: Paste it where you have your 7.10 file

Step 3: Delete 7.10

Step 4: ????

Step 5: Profit

If someone were to photoshop another 7 onto the 7-Eleven logo, we could declare this thread complete.  

I'll break up my thoughts on this idea based on each mode of play:

SSP

• We aren't going to see NPCs any time soon, so who would you trade with?  
• Coinage would be completely useless in SSP for lack of value.  

Communal SMP (where everyone works together)

• There are other people, but are you really going to implement an economy for your little village?
• More importantly, currencies only work when they have value.  Your non-tool metal coins are pretty much play money.
• If you use tool metal for coinage, then you can't use that metal for more useful things like tools and armor.  
• You're probably designating all resources as community-owned anyway, so what good is money?

Public SMP

• There are other people out there being hermits, so there's opportunity for trade.  That's a plus.  
• Still, currencies only work when they have value.  Your non-tool metal coins are still pretty much play money.  It doesn't matter how precious the metal is in RL, people won't want it.  
• If you use tool metal for coinage, then you can't use that metal for more useful things like tools and armor.  
• You're probably better off using charcoal as a currency since it has inherent value and tends to be traded for a lot anyway.  

Overall, the main issue with this idea is that coinage doesn't have any inherent value separate from the metal used, and it would not be commonly exchanged.  

I'd leave that up to Bioxx and Dunk to decide among themselves.  I went with 50% starting nutrition here since it keeps the hunger rate and health regeneration at current levels to start with.  Depending on which direction they want to take it, it might make sense to start higher or lower.  I wanted to show that nutrition could be used for both positive and negative changes to hunger rate and health regeneration so they aren't locked into doing it a specific way.  

TL;DR version: Nutrition encourages players to eat multiple types of food from each food group, therefore encouraging players to explore more and grow more crops.  Players also get a compelling reason to try animal husbandry.

I like how TFC spreads out resources and encourages travel and exploration, but that feature could be enhanced by reducing how interchangeable different resources of the same type can be.  After all, if I can survive off of nothing but tomatoes, peppers, and calamari, there should probably be something in TFC to encourage me to balance out my diet.  

I'm not seeing very much point in animal husbandry or ranching yet either.  You need grains to even get started, but if you have grains, why not just eat bread instead?  It seems more like a novelty feature than something genuinely useful.  

I have a solution that solves both issues.  There would need to be some sort of incentive for eating a variety of foods, or some sort of disincentive for eating the same foods continuously.  Meals should count as their respective ingredients, since there's nothing keeping someone from eating meals made from the same recipe continuously -- in fact, meal buffs tend to encourage it once they're discovered.  One possible way to do this would be to add a nutrition bar on the HUD that affects how quickly the food bar falls and how quickly health regenerates over time.  

Let's consider some use cases here:

• Player A eats only calamari.  All other foods are ignored, stored away, or otherwise uneaten.  Needless to say, he doesn't eat very well, but at least it gets him through the first year.  
• Player B eats only renewable foods that aren't fruit.  This includes calamari, tomatoes, red and yellow bell peppers, and maybe green bell peppers if she picks them in time.  Different colored bell peppers aren't much different from each other nutritionally, so we're pretty much looking at three different food sources from two food groups.  It's a little better than eating seafood all the time, but we're going to want more variety than that for the long term.  
• Players C and D teamed up and did some exploring, so now they have a few different types of vegetables, a fruit tree, and calamari.  Player C managed to get some fishing in, and Player D killed a cow.  They still don't have enough metal for a pick or chisel, so they can't mill the wheat and rye yet, but after the first growing season, they should be eating pretty healthy.  Until then, they have more than enough greenbeans and soybeans than they need for farming, so they can eat those now, along with the calamari, fish, and beef they cooked.  The green bell peppers are useless for seeds, so they can eat those too.  For now, they're eating foods from four food groups (based on the food groups below, not RL ones) and multiple foods from two of them.  Pretty good, but if they can get a quern set up, then they'll be able to add multiple grains, a fruit, and some more from both vegetable groups.  
• Player E is well established now, and he has a functional farm and animal pens set up.  He also has a quern and a fishing rod, and plenty of seeds for most types of vegetables and grains.  He got lucky and collected saplings from three types of fruit trees, and his animal pens have cows, pigs, and sheep, including a breeding pair of each.  He also takes care to eat several foods from each food group on a regular basis, so he's as healthy as he can be.

The above cases are sorted by an increasing level of nutrition levels, and they indicate two major factors in determining nutrition levels.  Nutrition would have to account for both the food groups covered and the individual foods eaten within each group.  The weighting for each is pretty much arbitrary, so for ease of illustration, I'll give each factor equal weight.  We need a sufficient history of past foods eaten to determine how well the factors are met, while not having so lengthy a food history that maintaining good nutrition is no longer important.  Although we could simply track the last couple hundred foods eaten from least recent to most and calculate nutrition on the fly, I have an alternative that would be a more prudent use of system resources that I'll outline below.  

• Players start out at 50% nutrition so that the early game isn't too punishing to players who aren't immediately able to eat well.  (Internally, the saved nutrition values are all set to 50%)
• Foods are tracked individually until an arbitrary number of foods are eaten (25, maybe?).
• Once enough foods are eaten, the nutrition value of that set of foods is calculated.  The 10 most recent nutrition values calculated are saved.  
• An average of the saved nutrition values is taken.  This average is the player's current nutrition level.  
• (Optional) A GUI window may be implemented that shows a breakdown of the player's nutrition by food group.  Each food group would have a bar showing how well-represented it has been in the player's diet.  (To avoid specific numbers, a bar graph may be helpful here.)

Nutrition values used to calculate the nutrition level would be calculated as follows:

• Meals count as one of each of the food items used to create that meal.  This means that a meal affects nutrition four times as quickly as individual foods.  (Balancing out meal effects with good nutrition should make for an interesting exercise in dietary management.  I see a future for aspiring cookbook authors on SMP servers.)
• Food groups: One point is earned for each food item eaten, up to a maximum of 3 per food group.  (This number may need to be adjusted depending on the size of each food set.)  Divide by the maximum possible score (15 for now) and multiply by 50.
  • Meat: Cooked beef, mutton, pork, or chicken.  Other land animals can fit here too if they're edible.  (Suddenly, that huge pasture you leveled off is useful for something!)
  • Seafood/Eggs: Cooked calamari and fish.  Since this food group is poorly represented, eggs can go here too.  Cheese could go here too if it is ever added.  (I don't really like the name of this group, but I'd strongly recommend keeping it separate from meats so that animal farms are made more useful.)
  • Fruits: Anything growing on a fruit tree.  This group is well-represented, but the scarcity of wild fruit trees would offset that for most of the game.  (I like the idea of keeping tree fruits separate from other culinary fruits, since it encourages more exploration and foraging.)
  • Berries: If they ever get added to TFC, berries could either be their own group or made part of the fruits group.  Grapes could go here too.  There's a gameplay case for both, so it's Bioxx's call.  (I can picture berry bushes scattered across the world that function like wild tomato and bell pepper plants currently do.  Since wild crops in SMP tend to be harvested as soon as the first person spots them, wild berries could be a respawning alternative for those who are foraging or exploring areas that have already been picked clean of wild crops.)
  • Starches: The food crops that can be ground into flour go here.  Potatoes can also go here since they're mostly starch.  (I'd definitely like to see a reason to plant a large variety of crops. Splitting food crops into multiple categories would help encourage this more than the soil nutrient types ever could.)
  • Vegetables: Any food crop that isn't a starch.  This might work as two separate groups too, since it's very well-represented.  (Should I be able to fully cover this food group with tomatoes and a variety of bell peppers?  I think not.  There's definitely a case to make for splitting this into two groups.)
  • Spices: If herbs and spices ever get added to TFC, they should probably be their own food group.  (I would expect that these foods could only be eaten as part of a meal.  They may not be much in the way of calories, but many spices do contain significant micronutrients, so they should definitely factor into nutrition.)
• Variety: One point is earned for each food type eaten, up to a maximum of 3 per food group.  (If this needs to be adjusted for food set size, take care to account for how small the "seafood" group is too.)  Divide by the maximum possible score (15 for now) and multiply by 50.
  • Foods that are nearly the same can be counted as a single food type.  Alternatively, you could give a half-point for each food in that sub-group after the first.  Specifically, I'm targeting apples and bell peppers.
• Add the two scores together to calculate a nutrition value.  (If Bioxx decides to show a nutrition breakdown by food group, it may make more sense to calculate these scores for each food group separately instead.)

As I mentioned earlier, the last 10 nutrition values calculated would be averaged out to determine the player's current nutrition level.  I'll leave it to Bioxx to determine how much nutrition would affect hunger and health regeneration, but I recommend that current rates compare to a 50% nutrition level.  To prevent a dependence on diet micromanagement, I would encourage Bioxx to leave a healthy number separating the number of foods in each food set from the maximum "food groups" score.  Given current food items available, I wouldn't group the recent foods eaten into sets of less than 25, and I would consider sets of as high as 50.  

If nutrition gets implemented, more types of food should be added to help balance out the mechanic.  I mentioned several new foods above: cheese, berries, grapes, herbs, and spices.  Ideally, every food group should have at least 5 members so that players have to work to achieve 100% nutrition, but don't have to obtain and eat every food type that exists.  There should also be enough food groups to encourage people to try each of the gameplay features associated with food.  Specifically regarding berries and grapes, I believe these could present a good opportunity to bring the SMP game closer to the SSP game.  As an example of the gameplay divide, the wild crops recently added help the SSP game a lot, but have no real benefit in SMP since they don't regrow once harvested and players usually have to generate chunks to find anything.  Berry bushes and grapevines could act as a perennial alternative that regrow and replenish themselves over time, giving SMP foragers better chances of success.  Additionally, they could be limited to existing in the wild or requiring a block of space in between each bush on a farm.  Together, this and nutrition would place a stronger emphasis on long-term foraging and exploration in both SSP and SMP, and this would also give SMP players an opportunity to survive as nomads like SSP players can.  

EDIT: Apparently the forums don't like numbered lists.  Fixing that and adding spoiler tags.  TL;DR version for those who need it.

Oh my freaking god. So many limits now... any block in place of the support beams?

Pretty much anything made out of wood is out...  Maybe just use sticks?

Do we really need supports, though?  What do they even do?  Surely a felled tree of sufficient size isn't going anywhere, right?  

As long as we can make some sort of boat before finding metal, then yeah.  Stone Age enough.

EDIT: Wait, no.  Fence posts require a crafting table, which needs metal now.  

 

Where's the kaolintie? 

I'm not sure how useful a tie would be if it was made out of china clay.  However these polymer clay ties make nice pins for a vest or jacket: http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3459/3990861391_2e575f3af8_z.jpg?zz=1

I'm as surprised as you that such a thing even exists.  But hey, it made the joke work, right?

This reminds me of DF donations.  Toady publishes monthly donation figures, and people flock to donate.  Dunk mentions donation figures once, and the same thing happens.  Mod authors, take note.

Try -47596010187365728. It had a small island and few smaller about a 100 blocks north.

I just tried it in 77.11, and it spawned me at a mountain.  Which build are you on?

As long as there isn't a mainland too close, that's perfectly fine.  Thanks.

I'd rather see a seafaring option for the stone age, actually.  One of the biggest issues for a public TFC server is what to do about getting newbies far enough from spawn to get started on the server.  I've just been giving people a couple boats in a starter kit, but I'd prefer a solution within TFC that doesn't involve people getting free stuff with no effort required.  

Also it would be nice to be able to chip off rocks from one of the boulders found everywhere.  That would solve the other main issue with getting started on a public TFC server.  

How do you even fit 4 stacks of gunpowder into a barrel that size?  

I had to commission a custom mod this month, so I can't donate right now, but donating to TFC has been on my mind ever since Dunk mentioned there not being any donations made in a while.