Omicron

I don't see how capitalizing every word makes it harder to read, but I'll give it a go,

The English language carries the following conventions about capitalization:

- The first letter of a new sentence is capitalized, in order to mark the structural break in the flow of text.

- Proper names and titles are capitalized, as a means of emphasis/honorific.

By capitalizing every word, you break these conventions. The first, immediate effect is that anyone used to reading conventional English will immediately notice that something is "not right". It feels instinctively off, because they're used to seeing capitalization used very rarely.

The secondary effect is that you're scrambling the flow of text. The reader can no longer rely on using capitalization to detect where sentences start and end; in effect, he has to invest far more effort into scanning for punctuation than he usually would. Furthermore, the melody of each sentence (what you "hear" in your head when you read something) is lost. But that melody forms an important part of our instinctive understanding of language - for example, we can identify that a sentence is a question even without understanding a word, just by how the pitch changes from start to end. Without a melody, your text comes across as robotic and unnatural, and it requires additional effort to try and figure out what you're actually saying. Similarly, proper names lose their emphasis, which in some cases can lead to ambiguity: the word "earth" describes soil and dirt in general, while the word "Earth" is the proper name of the planet we live on. Depending on how you form a sentence, you might be meaning the latter but people assume that you mean the former because it looks just like every other word in your text that is falsely capitalized.

The tertiary effect, finally, is that people put off by this style of writing will often subconsciously put you into undesirable categories in their head. "He/She's whoring for attention." - "He/She is borderline illiterate." - "He/She must be really annoying to be around." You're basically flubbing your first impression on strangers, and first impressions form a majority of what we base our personal interactions on. It doesn't matter if none of these things are actually true - what matters is that people think they might be true. You're selling yourself short.

I think he means that he has metal in a ceramic mold and wants to use it to cast a tool, but he has waited too long and the metal has cooled so much that it is no longer liquid.

In that case, kaldskryke's answer should be everything he needs to know.

Do you still need ExtraFirma for the leash, or does it work with the "stock TFC" rope now?

I've been thinking that it might make sense for all (herbivorous) animals to eat grass like sheep do

There's an app a mod for that: http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/4976-16407812-rusticam-melius-v120/

You can use it to try out how the concept works in practical application. I have not tried it myself, but plan to do so the next time I start a TFC world.

Umm, excuse me if I am completely confused here, but... don't mob farms kind of require a player to feed the animal in order to cause them to have offspring? And if you have too many, you can just stop feeding them for a while until you have slaughtered enough to make room for more?

This is an honest question, by the way. I have never seen a TFC mob farm that generates animals without player interaction. If there is, please explain.

Terriffic news!

But as long as I don't try to auto-sort my inventory, it should work fine, right? Inventory sort is usually the first thing I disable in Inventory Tweaks anyway, I have my own sense of orderliness and can't stand a mod messing with it I mainly want it to be able to sort chests, and for the item moving improvements (move all of a type at once etc.)

On that note, how's compatibility with NEI looking nowadays? I really, really, really miss the ability to transfer items with the mousewheel whenever I am forced to play without NEI. If I could just have that function and play without crashes, even if the item list was completely broken and there was no recipe guide support, I would be perfectly happy

You can probably get your admins to spawn you some bottles of enchanting to restore your lost XP with, if they agree that it was a genuine bug that caused your death.

You cannot, and this is actually intentional since many of the crafting handlers in the TFC code will only work with the crafting grid in the players inventory. For example, if you cheat in an automatic crafting table, and try to set it up to automatically cut the decay off of your food, you're going to end up with a bunch of completely useless food items that have no weight tags on them and will crash your game.

Sounds like it might be best to just not have that item, then!

...or maybe allow it anyway, and just acknowledge that it won't be able to correctly perform such things as pruning decay, which requires a level of human attention and judgement that machines cannot provide.

It's important to remember that the game starts off on the year 1000 and that was roughly the pinnacle of the middle ages. During that period cotton and wool were already the primary material with which clothing was made. I think it would be far easier to implement just adding cotton as a crop and adding in a cloth weaving system that could be used to make clothes. 

The year in the TFC calendar is arbitrary and does not match up with the christian calendar in any way. TFC begins in the middle stone age (mesolithic), a period characterized by the initial "invention" of domestication, agriculture and sedentary cultures in the much more favorable climate after the end of the last ice age. Depending on where in the world you look, it happened somewhere between 15,000 to 5,000 BC.

The endgame tech level is also usually debated, with examples of hardened steels appearing as early as 2,000 BC (a time when most cultures where still struggling with copper or bronze), but the blast furnace equipped with tuyeres being 14th century AD tech.

In general, it's safe to call it "from stone age through early metalworking up to the middle ages" and not get too attached to christian calendar dates.

Why would you not want the plant to drop its produce if it was broken with leftclick when fully grown? That would go against all precedent in Minecraft and TFC alike, and it'll really chafe with players. Ooops, wrong mouse button, I just lost the entire plant I waited half an ingame year for, and I have nothing to show for it but what I started with! Now what am I going to eat?

Also, I don't think you can justify this distinction from a mechanical standpoint either. Namely, if you break a plant - regardless in which growth stage it is - you get the seed back. This is intentional, to avoid accidentally deleting your only seed of something you needed, and prevent player frustration like described above. Now imagine you have a fully ripe crop, and you have the option to either leftclick punch it to get your seed back, or rightclick to get produce and a stage 1 plant... which you can then leftclick punch to get your seed back anyway. Only the agriculture skill has a really minor effect on that interplay, and it's by far not enough to go for such a counterintuitive setup. The player is basically given a really, really obvious way to go around an intended limitation. You're asking the player not to use an exploit while shoving said exploit in their faces - and no matter what, just knowing that it's there and requires you to actively ignore it will detract from your suspension of disbelief, and thus your immersion in the game. "Don't remind the player he is playing a game" is the number one rule of immersion.

The unification of crop behavior I am suggesting here aims to do just that - allow the player to stop actively thinking about what the game expects of them, and instead just act, consistently and instinctively.

Can you actually build crafting tables in b78? Because as far as I have seen, you now don't get the item, you just get your on-character grid expanded.

I ask because a crafting table is required as an ingredient in the auto crafting table recipe.

Situation:

When creatng a farm, some crops will be harvestable via rightclick once fully grown, and others will not. This can confuse a player if he observes or expects one specific behavior but finds it not apply to other plants for no particular reason. He might never discover that rightclicking works on some plants, simply because he tries it on the wrong ones. Or, conversely, he may think that already fully grown crops aren't fully grown yet, simply because he cannot rightclick them yet. Also, the recent introduction of the agriculture skill, combined with b77's implementation of nutrient levels, has made the rightclicking option extremely unattractive even for those plants that support it. Breaking the plant gives a chance for bonus seeds, allowing you to expand your farm, while rightclicking supposedly gives you the bonus of having the partially reverted plant re-mature to harvestable status more quickly. Due to how nutrients work, however, this rarely works in the player's favor, as even reaching the first maturity consumes nearly all the nutrients of the type the plant needs. Leaving the plant in the same space without having fertilizer available will result in a plant that takes just as long or longer to reach full maturity even from an intermediate stage than it takes a fresh seed planted somewhere else with full nutrients.

Suggestion:

- Unify the harvest behavior of crops by allowing all plants to be harvested by rightclicking their fully grown form for just produce but no seeds.

- Give the agriculture skill a different effect depending on which harvesting method is chosen by the player.

- Optional: add support to the scythe for rightclick area harvesting.

Effect:

- The player is no longer confused and will know how to deal with any kind of crop, even if he hasn't seen it before. He no longer needs to refer to an external resource to determine which crops support a specific behavior. If the player comes from a different agriculture mod, he will feel much more at home, as rightclick harvesting is sort of an unofficial standard in the community which many mods have taken up. The system now also encourages intelligent decisions on which method of harvest to choose.

Detail:

Plants which can be richtclicked to harvest right now are those which do not die seasonally. For instance, a tomato plant stays a tomato plant year after year, and just occasionally produces harvestable tomatoes. Ingame this is represented by the tomato plant reverting to an earlier, intermediate growth stage when rightclicked. In contrast to that, a wheat plant, once harvested, dies and does not regrow; it must be resown. Other plants, like cabbages and potatoes, are even dug out wholly and leave no remains behind at all, not even a dying part. This makes allowing the rightclick harvest option for these crop types unintuitive at first glance.

However, since leftclick breaking the ripe crop always returns a seed along with the produce, and the farmland itself is not negatively affected (it must not be treated with the hoe again or anything of the sort), nothing keeps the player from immediately replanting that seed they just got into the exact same spot they got it from, resulting in a stage 1 plant. It stands to reason, then, that you could just as well rightclick the plant to harvest produce but no seeds, and have the plant revert to a stage 1 plant. Code-wise, if you already specify which stage the plant reverts to when rightclicked, then specifying the very first stage is no different from specifying an intermediate stage.

Now that all plants support rightclick harvesting, the agriculture skill can be modified to benefit it. Right now, when leftclick breaking a plant, the agriculture skill adds a chance for a second seed. Conversely, when rightclick harvesting, it could add a chance for a second produce item, or an increased amount on the produced item (developer's choice). The chance would be comparable to the bonus seed; in other words, only a very experienced farmer with hundreds of points would consistently see a bonus. Obviously, this function is meant to be mutually exclusive: you either get only the seed bonus when leftclick breaking, or only the yield bonus when rightclicking. The player can choose which one he needs, at the expense of the other.

For an experienced farmer who does not have access to fertilizer, this skill bonus offsets the low nutrient levels in the soil that slow down plant growth. When fertilizer is available, this can allow dedicated farming players to eventually manage compact yet high yield farms for an entire community, representing the rise of focused, institutionalized agriculture in human history.

Thoughts? Criticism? Improvements? Feel free to discuss

I've never managed to exhaust a single iron vein... as such, I wouldn't say that that amount is hard to come by. It just takes a bit of time to collect.

Besides, you cannot just roll the cost of the anvil into the cost of the blast furnace. The anvil is an independent piece, and you only ever need one, while you might eventually build multiple blast furnaces. Adding the cost of the furnace and the anvil together is the cost of setting up in the steel age for a newly ascended player, not the cost of a blast furnace in any possible situation.

Well, for me it still contained new information, so thanks! For instance, I learned that smithing skill will not affect action success/ease (like, via an increased target size), and that cooking skill will not affect terrible meals. Sometimes the little details are both important and interesting, and showing that there is little to be said is also a kind of information in itself - it prevents speculation and misunderstandings

In that regard, I assume "harvesting" for agriculture skill purposes refers to left-click breaking a plant, but not right-clicking it? Since I read in the changelog that harvesting plants that support it via right-clicking will not yield any seeds at all. Due to that distinction, it probably should be stated specifically what is meant (especially if there is also a difference between the two in terms of what action will actually raise the skill).

The "Anatomy" page is not up to date regarding the new health and hunger systems. It's probably not worth replicating everything written on the "Food" page, but a quick summary followed by a link sending you there would definitely be useful. Also, it's probably a good idea to describe what actually causes a player to suffer starvation effects/damage/death, as the "Food" page makes no mention of this.

Also worth mentioning on the "Anatomy" page: the repurposing of the hunger bar. This is also something not explicitly mentioned anywhere (not even in the changelogs). As someone who hasn't played b78 yet and is only browsing info on what changed, I would never have guessed something was different if I had not watched one of Dunk's recent Let's Play videos and was detail-obsessed enough to notice that the food bar went down faster than water. The "Food" page mentions a 'stomach level' in passing while trying to explain item weight handling, but that's really hard to catch and not really in any place a player would look for it.

Finally, again as someone coming to browse for info, I'm missing a page on skills There are occasional references to skills existing (such as on the "Agriculture" page), but no page to provide summaries and basic information on that topic in general.

Are you sure? I tried it in my 77.22 world and only wheat worked.

I can try again when I get home this evening...

...It is? Okay, that's really disappointing.

Guess I'll move my lobbying over to Mojang then!

The thing that still irritates me most about animal husbandry is the fact that while all grains work for breeding, the actual luring of wild animals in the first place works only with wheat. It's like, why bother allowing other grains if you can't breed without wheat anyway? And if you do have wheat, again why bother allowing other grains since well, you do have wheat? I've been lobbying for luring to be extended to all grains since build 74... Please Dunk, bestow your grace upon the barley, the oat and the rye!

That's not exactly going to make a useful bonfire though...

Could you please elaborate? Why do you think it wouldn't fit into TFC?

 

Me personally, I see no reason for it not fitting in; if you can get pipes (already announced for b78) and pumps or the like, why couldn't one come up with the idea of hot air being lighter than normal air and would therefore be able to leave the ground? Hell, a blast furnace didn't fall from the sky for use of humanity either, in fact blast furnaces are quite a complicated thing themselves. If the simple princible of a hot air balloon doesn't fit into this mod, then neither do any kind of steam-powered machinery and somesuch, currently discussed in another thread ...

 

Correct, they don't appear to fit either. That's the realm of addons. Just because it's discussed in the suggestion forum doesn't mean it's appropriate - I could suggest a moon rocket if I wanted to

TFC has always been about the stone age and early metalworking. The blast furnace is literally the single most high-tech piece of equipment in the entire mod - and before build 77, which you are playing right now, didn't even exist! It was new in this build (previously we made everything in a bloomery). And despite it's high-tech status, it's actually Older Than You Think, being developed in China more than 2100 years ago, in what we would call the "first century BC". Or well, that's when they were first documented in records surviving today. They may be older, considering the iron age started well before 1200 BC.

So technically, anything developed during times stamped with the "AD" seal of the christian calendar is probably not in the scope of the mod. No known record of hot air balloons appears before 200 AD (handmade floating lanterns in China, again), and the first manned hot air balloon free-flight famously happened in France in 1782 AD. Similarly, steam power goes back to the first century AD in Greece, but no actually working engines were built until the early 1600's.

Of course, take what I say with a grain of salt, because I am not actually a developer - that's why I said "I am not sure if it fits" I've just been hanging around these forums for long enough to have seen spelled out many times in varying grades of precision what exactly is and isn't fitting. The "BC only" rule is one I've made up for myself, but it's been holding up quite well for over a year now.

I'm not sure if flight fits the theme of the mod, but you do have a point in saying that after arriving in the iron age, your progression goals pretty much end. At that point, you're either motivated for creative building (armed with dozens of wood and stone types and a trusty chisel), or you just kind of... stop, unless you already have the ingredients for fire clay by pure luck.

Define "modified".

...and except the fact that no version of Terrafirmacraft runs at all on 1.6.4.

Ah, I stand corrected then. I wasn't aware of forges having that effect. Very interesting to know!