Khalkists

A simple hanging bowl of oil with a wick was used pretty far back, with the downside of being damn easy to spill.

This is a rather simplistic approach to enhance on the lifetime of bladed weapons. They would require more maintenance, but last longer. If you would like a more detailed and more encompassing idea, click here ->http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/4512-casted-tools-and-sharpening/ A sword or knife would lose its edge more and more after every progressive swing. The natural durability, represented on a bar, would be much lower, but would no longer break at 0, and will be referred to as "sharpness" from now on. All freshly cast weapons start with "0" sharpness. As the weapon's sharpness gets lower, the weapon's damage drops. At 0, its damage rests at a very low level, roughly +25. This can be solved by crafting it with any rock, though harder ones would perform better. Each crafting will utilize the rock, and restore some durability. The closer it is to full, the more durability each rock will restore. At the same time, each and every time you restore some durability with the stone, it will lower a "hidden" durability bar by an random amount. This hidden durability bar, when it reaches 0, will cause the weapon to break in the classic minecraft fashion. The only hint that the hidden bar provides is an adjective about the current condition of the blade. Higher tier blades have a longer lifespan, and can survive longer without sharpening before becoming ineffective. To further streamline the process, the rock could be reusable. Alternatively, we could craft a proper whetstone, which doesn't break on use. More or less, this means that constant, little maintenance towards your swords and knives will keep them lasting much longer. On the other hand, since each stone is less effective at lower "sharpness" levels, Letting your weapon reach "0" can be a very bad move. It would require many more sharpenings, lowering the overall condition of the weapon.

This^ Sharpening your weapon just reduces its max "true" durability. Sharpening really involves removing metal to refine the edge anyways... Sharpening (in this suggestion) only affected their damage. But I could see it being necessary for most tools, with their efficiency/mining level degrading as they get dull. (a dulled pick might not be able to mine ores for example)

The recent changes to Terrafirmacraft have left beds a more advanced item. With planks being inaccessible until you have access to enough metal to craft a saw, we are now forced to huddle in our caves for the dark to pass, never able to sleep. As such, I thought up a few ideas, better suited to the more primitive life style of the neolithic. All of these beds have the advantage of being usable, regardless of the time of day. At the same time, they are less effective for passing the night than a structured bed, and less comfortable, preventing deep sleep. More or less, all of these primitive beds function as a fast-forward button on the day. They have their advantages over a normal bed... NOTE: These beds do not function like the existing bed that we have. They modify the timescale (if possible) or modify the current time in small increments to cause time to pass more rapidly. They are NOT as effective at passing the night as a normal bed, but offer a way to more rapidly pass through the night. This allows the more advanced bed (utilizing fabric and planks) to remain viable for more than aesthetic reasons. Straw Mat Simply two pieces of straw, side by side in the crafting grid. When placed, it would look like a thin layer of the thatch that we currently have. X= Straw O= Empty _______ | O | O | | X | X | The straw mat does little. It modifies the time scale, as to cause night to pass more quickly. During this time, thirst and hunger rates decline slightly. Bed with Hide A warmer, more advanced bed made by combining a raw hide and a straw mat in the crafting grid. It looks like a straw mat, with a hide laying across it. X= Straw O= Empty V= Sheepskin ______ | O | V | | O | X | The skin bed does about the same as the straw mat, but offers protection from the cold (when climate effects are introduced to TFC) and has a slightly larger impact on the timescale. Tree Weave-Admittedly, this one seems unnecessary, as we can dig an adequate hole rapidly, but it could serve a minor purpose. One of the oldest "beds" in the world was simply a thick branch or a tight weave of thinner branches. As we don't have wide, branching trees, our next best option would be the weave. It kept monkeys and early people (who were admittedly, much smaller than we are now) off of the ground, away from the harm at the floor of the forest. A protective place to sleep for the more nomadic people. It offers little protection from the elements, and is uncomfortable, so your thirst and hunger rates don't change, but it has the advantage of almost completely hiding you from mobs. While in it, the timescale is modified, causing night to pass more quickly. To create it, right click on leaves with a knife, while having sticks in your inventory. A number of your sticks will be used, and the leaves will be converted in to a weave.

Aah true. Didn't even think about stacking. Though, I personally wouldn't care if they stacked or not. Maybe just assign a random chance to not return a bowl, and make the wood inferior to ceramic.

I would give wooden bowls durability. A few uses and the wood is shot. Think of it as a tool used in cooking that is just untouchable for a time. The durability could be saved on a random NBT tag/data value, and upon consumption, it spawns a bowl in that condition. (easier said than done) Ceramic... could be unbreaking. Aside from porcelain, ceramics are pretty strong; only really determinate by the quality of the clay; and this clay can handle molten metal so... If you wanted ceramic to break, metal could be the next step (and a good drain on resources)

Hmm... its interesting, but here is another idea. What if monsters AI was changed so they will not actively move into well lit areas, unless there is a player within their aggro radius? Maintaining enough light in a region would be paramount to avoid approaching mobs, and make torch maintenance important.

On this subject, I feel we can slow the rate of progression utilizing something that already exists within the game. The mod has skills which currently don't do too much. For smithing, you should have a minimum skill threshold to properly utilize a metal and a certain category of armor. So, a lowest level smith may only be able to work bronzes properly. They would get normal durability for all bronze level items. This same smith could craft ingots, and work higher level materials for much faster skill progression, but until his smithing is up to snub, the items he makes will have significantly lower durability. They won't be disabled, just probably less useful than bronze for the time being. More or less, this is a sort of artificial slowdown in progression. This would slow progression while expanding the importance of skills.

Randomness could be allowed, if there was a method of seeing through it. Namely, how did tribal people 'commune' with their spirits? Near-death experiences and drugs. Find a plant, consume it, and potentially gain a small vision of an item, but othewise no context. If you burn the item and something good happens, you know the sprit was please. If you feel worse, the spirit was angry. An alternative/earlier method is to just draw steve to the precipice of death. On the subject of actual validity towards this suggestion... I am split. It seems to touch into a deeper aspect of the supernatural than what the developers are willing to accept. If anything, religious practices should give a few more minor benefits, like temporarily gaining skills faster, heightened awareness with the stone hoe (nutrient awareness) and the sort. Also, the benefit should be somewhat random, so we can't condense it down to a formula. The player sees a vision mid-ritual, in which the "god" or "spirit" is telling the player what he should do. Realistically, is this true? Who knows.

Hence why I said they should propagage instead. Only because if it spawned up erraneously on everything, it would be annoying. I personally just find the fields in TFC to be rather flat. Either way, rocks or just tilled soil, I don't care if things improve speed. I just think that when nature crops up rather tall, you should either cut your way or take the slow down to pass through it. Idk, my recent save I ended up between two jungles in a grassy plain. If I want anything beyond some bismuth, I have to go through the jungle.

So, I like this overhaul as a whole (this is how I play TFC, slow but satisfying. Its the process, not the goal) and here is my two cents on roads. First off, tall grass should propagate rather quickly. For functionality sake, it should spread similarly to normal grass. It searches for an adjacent grass block lacking tall grass, and spread to it if possible. This propagation is only to remove some of the tedium in maintaining the land you live on. A simple barrier of some sorts (tilled land, a fence, etc.) would prevent tall grass from invading. Tall grass should give a minor speed debuff, similarly to leaves, animals should be largely unaffected by this though. In early-game, a player could till the ground with a hoe. Re-tilling the ground would turn it back into standard dirt, as added functionality. Tall grass would be unable to spread to the tilled soil, and you would be able to travel easily without a speed penalty., especially if you are living in the plains. (This would all function better with an additional setting on the pickaxe for roads) For more advanced roads, you could take rocks (notice, not cobblestone blocks) and use them directly on this existing tilled soil to place stones on the path. This would give a modest speed bonus, since the road would be as a whole smoother. To make a prettier road... cobblestone could be placed directly, but improved roads don't necessarily require excavation of the soil. Anyways, the more time spent struggling in the primitive years... the more entertaining it seems to be for me. Metal is just such a big difference. I've been on the same save for a while now, and I still live in a small house of logs and thatch, because I focused more on food, animal husbandry, and the sorts before metal. I got an established farm with multiple plots making crop rotation easy. Fenced off a large area for animals I drag back, built a simple barn (I have the localized weather mod installed... tornados can wreck your livestock) and I am just starting to really work on metals now. I didn't really settle in the best location though.

This really is the attitude I appreciate with TFC. Too many mods make their functionality overly dependant on blocks, blocks, and more blocks. They often make things vastly more complicated than need be in the process.

The closes thing to magic that I feel could fit in base TFC is religious icons, and the psychological effects they have on people. Oh, and drugs. Norse berserkers were believed to either take drugs... or just get really pissed off. Either way, has to be frightening to stab someone and have them grin. Problem is, for us, this isn't magic. We understand the concepts behind it now. Throughout history though, they didn't really know what was causing an effect, just that there was an effect.

As a person (see hillbilly) who lives in the boonies and heats their house via fire in the winter; I would say your a bit... reversed. The heartwood seems to ignite more easily than the sapwood, and bark. By experience, cut firewood actually burns much faster and hotter than a large log, which we can leave burning most of the night without concern. And of course, you are dead on with the need for seasoning, though leaving wood out in the rain really doesn't matter much. Unless its submerged for a long period of time, only the surface of stacked logs tends to get wet, and that will dry rather quickly. It can be tossed directly into an active fire with a coating of snow, and it will strip away all moisture rather easily. Though, obviously, you don't use the dampened wood to start the fire (hence the sticks)

This is one of my larger fears... I feel like some of the initial ideas have been overshadowed by other changes. For one, I feel almost no reason to store wood in piles anymore, since the stuff stacks in my inventory to the same level that it sits in a pile... I just get what I need and use it. I loved it at first, when wood only stacked to 4 or so. It didn't make things excessively complicated, it just gave us a reason to stash our wood near our homes (aside from the ease of access benefits)

I said timescale to make the coding a bit easier. Other than that, it would just accelerate the unusable night, imagine it like a fitful sleep. You keep waking up in fear of mobs, or due to weather conditions.

The crossbow wasn't quite so slow as you think. Lighter crossbows could be quickly drawn back with your hand, and could be relatively close to the draw and fire rate of a good bow (mostly because of the rapid aiming) The fact of the matter is though, a crossbow requires on average, 3x the draw weight to have the same power as a bow, and because they utilized heavy bolts in the past, generally had a shorter range. In the end, the most effective crossbows (in action) were usually the lightest ones, that were pulled back by hand, or had a simple lever. People could utilize them quickly without much training or physical strength. They could also be used from horseback. In medieval warfare, the vast majority of the structured archers were novices, with only a handful of well trained ones in the bunch. They were raining arrows down by the hundreds, so you only needed a few skilled people to gauge the distance, and the rest were, more or less, mimics. They obviously took the basic training on how to handle a bow. The archers on the wall though, those were a different breed. Generally more skilled, more practiced, and needed to be able to function on their own.

So my original idea of modifying the timescale while in the bed seemed... impractical? Oh well~ skipping night also seemed like a bad move from my perspective, so I thought doubling the rate that time passed would be enough. Night is quite frightening in TFC after all... not to mention that it isn't a very usable time. You have to sit there and do nothing.

Simple idea to make the game harder... Your have an "aura" that does 0 damage blows (no damage) to nearby animals at an interval. This means that animals in the wild would flee continually from you, just from seeing or "smelling" you. You then need to chase them to kill them, and we know how irritating it can be. This same function could also apply to mobs that are passive-hostile. It would act as invasion of their territory, so as long as you determined the area of the radius, you could know how close you can approach before you cause agro. This would add a bit of a risk/reward possibility for adding drops to bears and wolves. One more way to enhance this is to cause the radius to decrease with your character level. Attribute it to experience in hiding yourself. A second manner of improving this is to add and utilize "fur armor". Furs would have the advantage of hiding your scent, while providing little defense. It would favor the hunter. The appeal of this, it uses vanilla mechanics. Doesn't require a lot of extra script, so it would be extremely low impact. The bigger the radius of the "aura" the more realistic it would seem. To make it more appealing, they could extend the vanilla "run" time. More or less, this would simulate animals "seeing", though hiding behind blocks would become ineffective.

More or less, you hit the nail on the head. The "0" damage thing was just a way to forcefully trigger the behavior without adding new features. I didn't really take too much in to account when I typed this up. I was at the very end of my lunch break, so I was trying to get the idea down while I still had time. It would have been better to save it as a .txt while I had time, but I didn't really think about it.

In nature, animals often mask their own smells by rolling in the dirt, mud, or on other things. Their other method is to stand down-wind, but remember that i'm trying to keep this low impact. (no wind direction) Also remember that humans have a very unique odor. Smoke, sweat, the forge... and steve doesn't exactly bathe often. The smells of a normal predator are common place in nature. Animals keep an eye out, but its not uncommon for something predatory to pass by you without the intent of hunting you. Even then, the most obvious odors are of feces and urine, hence why dogs mark and why elk mark their territory with piles of crap. Those smells are obvious on approach, but an animal skin often doesn't carry far enough. This would also further establish bows are the best hunting weapon, even in their primitive state. Another idea to enhance on this, if one animal dies, anything nearby should probably enter a "flee" state as well, but that might be excessive.

..but this is only me playing around with different things. Don't expect to see this in TFC. I like those ladders... and the fire pit is nice as well.

Currently in TFC, all items have the same base input. All tools require 1 ingot, or 1 stone, so I would say, for a recycling process, all tools give a random quantity of "scrap metal" which can be processed afterwards into a full working ingot. The simplest way to do this would to make the "chunks" renamed small ores. They would looks identical, which might be a bit distracting, but they wouldn't stack with the base small chunks, and would function in an identical manner. It would be a low-impact way to add this.

Its more of a balancing factor than anything. Thats why I suggested this strictly for swords and knives. Other tools need to break, otherwise there would be little reason to gather more than the bare minimum in materials. Another thing that we don't do in TFC is melting down the remains of the metal after it becomes unusable. Of course, both the ease in which they break and the inability to melt it down could be explained by 1- Primitive smelting methods might be leaving the metal brittle. 2- It is easier not to do it, from a play and design standpoint

I find clay in strange places.... when I DO find it. Sometimes, I can go for a week in-game without coming across any at all. Obviously, this makes it hard to progress any further. Those are the worlds I seem to enjoy the most... when I have to fight for my progress. When it all falls in my lap... yeah.