Omicron

Exciting update! Some changelog comments/questions though:

"Instead of being tamed with a bone, wolves will only follow players"
 - ...follow players what? Always follow players? Only follow players if leashed? Follow players that hold a bone?

"Added command to transfer ownership of an animal to another player. (...)"
 - I think you typoed one instance of the command in the explanation as a different word here.

"Thatch blocks are no longer a solid block. (...)"
 - Could you clarify this? 'not a solid block' could mean that they function like glass blocks, but then that would make them useless for roofing (their intended purpose). So there must be a different, new mechanic here... or am I misunderstanding things completely?

"All beaches are now relatively flat and only 1-3 blocks above sea level. (...)"
 - Shouldn't this be a tweak, not a bugfix?

Your recommendation on having some areas being better at replenishing certain nutrients isn't a bad one and is something that I'll certainly think about.

I always felt like the nutrient system was just begging for some sort of expansion that did more with the different levels.

If the flavours were averaged, there'd be no impetus to grow anything good; you could just grow two awful tomatoes and mix them together.

Well, averaging implies that no value actually improves. If you mix two awful tomatoes together, you would still have an awful tomato stack because the average of awful and awful is awful

However, if you mixed an awful tomato with a great one, you would get an okay one.

Of course, what exactly constitutes good and bad fruit might depend on the individual player anyway, if the taste profile is different for each game. Maybe the soil makes the tomatoes horribly sour, but the player actually enjoys sour tastes in food? Like the well-known asian sweet-sour style. Then the horribly sour tomato would actually be great.

Wow, that's shaping up to be a big ol' update for B79!

Regarding the content - I think the whole flavor profile thing is really interesting and adds a lot of depth to cooking. Now dedicated cooks can go the extra mile to cater to everyone's indidual tastes. However, the soil ph/drainage thing influencing taste profiles of crops? I'm not sure if that isn't overdoing things needlessly. The feature seems to have a lot of effort put into it, with all the new mappings, but I'm not immediately seeing the added gameplay value. As a player, the fact that my tomatoes might be a bit more sour than those of the guy living over yonder elicits mostly a shrug of ambivalence. It certainly won't make me change my farming behavior very much, especially if it's not the end of he world if my resulting meal is a few percent off the ideal taste.

What would however engage me a whole lot - and, in fact, is what I was initially expecting you to get at when you started talking about soil quality - would be using the soil ph/drainage maps to affect something completely different. Namley, available farming nutrients. The exact quality of the soil could decide both the maximum values of each individual nutrient and the speed at which they regenerate. Maybe high ph values could lower nutrient A a lot, lower B a little and raise nutrient C, while low ph values would lower nutrient C a lot, lower B a little and raise nutrient A. Neutral ph could raise B slightly. Drainage in return could mean high drainage favors nutrient A, medium drainage favors nutrient B, and low drainage favors nutrient C. There could even be additional factors, such as each specific biome giving one specific nutrient a bonus after everything else is calculated. The result of doing this would result in location becoming very important for farming, with farmers actively prospecting the soil for good nutrient combinations for the plants they want - or, on the flipside, choosing what to plant depending on the quality of the soil. Choosing a good spot would be especially important for the grains, which have such long growth periods that they currently run out of nutrient before even completing one single growth cycle. A location that boosts nutrient A so that a full cycle can be completed and the nutrient regenerates faster would be a very valuable find to a farmer.

When looking at the five different meal types, I am immediately wondering how this affects the current mechanic of heating the meal in order to get a bonus. Clearly three of those five would realistically require cooking, while one of them (the casserole) already outright states it needs to be baked in an oven. Sandwiches though, and especially salads, are probably best eaten cold. What I am wondering is, are you planning to keep the simple "heat any meal up before eating for a bonus" scheme, or are you planning to differentiate per meal type whether they gain anything from heating up? Or does the mechanic as a whole maybe exit stage left? Obviously this depends a lot on how the new cooking mechanic is implemented; the list already suggests that cooking/heating may already be a central process in creating the meal in the first place.

Another question I have is in regards to skill development. From reading, I understood that my cooking skill level will determine how much I will be able to judge how well the meal fits my own taste profile. But can I also figure out other players' taste profiles? I mean, if I give them a meal, and they have no cooking skill, they might not be able to tell me if it suits their tastes in any detail, because their nonexistant skill level doesn't allow this. And if they had cooking skill, they wouoldn't need me to cook for them. As a cook, I need that information if I want to cater to everyone's needs, so I wonder how much feedback unskilled players will be able to give?

Thank you team TFC for all your hard work!