Omicron

But once I am  endgame it is annoying to find that bronze again... Just annoying...

Don't you mean to say "midgame"? Because in the endgame you a.) do not use bloomeries, you use blast furnaces; and b.) you need to find copper, zinc and bismuth again anyway because they are a required ingredient for tier 5 and 6 alloys.

I know none. But you could also try a 32x pack. When the Forge people tested performance impacts of various texture resolutions way back when 1.5.x came out with improved texture management, they found that the difference between 16x and 32x was below the 2% margin of error they measured with. Of course exceptionally slow systems like Atom-based netbooks from 2010 might disagree, but it's always worth trying nevertheless.

You should also notice that the bloomery structure itself is in fact made out of stone. Only the central control block (required by the game to have something that instigates the multiblock behavior) is crafted using bronze. That could represent access hatches, reinforcing elements and the like - there's no reason you should have to interpretate it as "where the iron is processed". For all intents and purposes, the iron is processed in the stone column in which you stack charcoal and ore.

Of course, you have a more valid point in stating you are annoyed by having to find bronze when you are higher in the progression already. This can be very easily addressed by adding another alternative bloomery recipe. Right now you can use either bronze or bismuth bronze; adding wrought iron as a third alternative would require little development effort, solve your problem, and not affect the progression in any way.

Maybe it's more like it isn't needed? I certainly play TFC almost exclusively singleplayer, and it works just fine. Making progression faster would just end up making me run out of stuff to do faster (I am not a good creative builder).

I also don't think ore needs to be even more abundant, considering that veins are multiplayer-sized... one single vein of any metal will last you literally forever (until you start a new world). I have never managed to deplete one, even when stockpiling ingots in a storehouse.

And finally, your tone of voice is kind of... how shall I say... not particularly motivating.

You need to hold wheat grains - that is, the processed wheat (craft it together with a knife). Only wheat works for luring, but rye, barley and oat also work for breeding along with wheat.

If the chance was 5% per unit of peat, then you would have to burn an average of 200 blocks of peat in order to make one bar of wrought iron. That means just to make the iron required to craft the anvil - which is needed before you can make any sort of iron tool - you would need to burn an average of 2800 peat. That is a loooot of peat. It's 87 and a half stacks of peat, assuming that peat stacks to 32 like other forms of dirt. More than three full player inventories full of stacks of peat.

Harvesting and burning it (you'd need a hundred firepits to get it done with any sort of speed) would involve a fairly large amount of time and effort spent by the player for the return. Since it does not allow you to bypass any part of the progression, but it does allow you to continue if you absolutely can't find any iron anywhere (been there done that), I wouldn't call it overpowered. I'd call it a useful fallback.

The question is, can it be implemented easily? For example, the firepit would need to be able to deposit the randomly generated nugget in some sort of output slot. And the two regular ones might be occupied already.

I'm actually not that concerned, since the amount of content won't be that different between small, regular releases or large, irregular ones.

I'm generally a player who doesn't start too many new worlds. A new vanilla version and the generally vastly reworked mod landscape it brings with it is the most common reason I start over. As such, coupling save-breaking changes to vanilla version jumps might be worthwhile. For example, now that Forge finally has a stable 1.7 version out, you could port b78 to 1.7 before releasing it and all its save-breaking changes. I know that some are going to say "oh no that will make it take even longer" but this is a poll, and polls ask personal opinions I wouldn't mind waiting for the various improvements this would bring, such as the revamped resource pack system, revamped game options menu, tons of lighting bug fixes, improved fishing, stained glass and a flurry of bugfixes. And if b78 came first and then a 1.7 port followed, that might potentially break saves yet again.

It might not be a bad idea to maybe bundle all non-save-breaking changes into regular minor releases, though. If that brought us things like the sequoia bugfix (I am surrounded by kilometers of sequoia forests in all cardinal directions in my current world), that would be really great.

I suppose it depends on how you balance it. I certainly do want to wear armor at all times. I consider it my "reward" for making it there, as I have every TFC world set to Hardcore difficulty by default. Being armored for me is like saying: I just spent many hours surviving on the permadeath-enabeld highest difficulty setting without any defenses to help me. I have beaten the challenge, and now I can wear armor to become strong myself, so that I can stop fearing for my life (and my savegame) all the time.

Admittedly, I don't need to have the best or heaviest of armors. If your system confines the speed debuff to platemail, for example, and I could use the proposed chain and lamellar variants without a speed debuff (but maybe with other downsides such as food drain), then I don't mind. Just don't make any (metal) armor slow the player down, like MineFantasy does.

You can actually use the thatch blocks for more than just the roof. I tend to build my first house completely out of it - just gotta be really careful with the fireplace.

Closing the suggestions forum would just move the suggestions over here, really People have a need to express their wishes and ideas. It's not a bad thing to have discussion.

Another thing people should keep in mind though is feature backlog. The devs have repeatedly expressed that the mod isn't yet anywhere near basic completion. What this means is: for every feature they implement, they have 10 or more planned features they don't have time to implement right now, which doesn't even begin to include previous player suggestions. As a result, any suggestion made by a player not only has to compete with the current feature progression, but it also has to compete with the entire feature backlog, and the entire player suggestion backlog that comes after that. Even if you were to suggest something that's totally fitting for the game, has never been suggested before and could be implemented with ease, chances are that it's simply going to have to get in line. And that line may be hundreds of items equaling years of development long.

Just because you can see it happen IRL does not make it good and fun gameplay. I tried MineFantasy, which features movement speed and swimming disadvantages to armors of all kind. I tossed the mod out after two days because I couldn't stand it. It was not fun to play.

You spend over 95% of your time playing out of combat - you might even say over 99%. So all this time, you are getting a movement speed debuff that makes the game feel tedious, inefficient and time-consuming, like you're moving through liquid honey. Nobody wants that. You end up making your player keep the armor unequipped almost the entire time, resulting in the player being unarmored for all random encounters despite having put in the effort and resources to craft the armor.

When you design games, you need to contrast the disadvantages of a proposed game system - especially disadvantages in client/server performance and in usability - against the intended advantage conferred by implementing the game system. The advantage you propose is... *looks at your post* ...actually none is given. Let's go out on a limb then and say that there's a potential advantage to be gained in "making combat more varied and interesting", which is a nebulous and subjective concept at best, but let's work with it. Contrasting a serious reduction in usability with this proposed advantage, you must ask: is it worth it? Does it make sense to reduce the gameplay comfort experienced in 95% or more of all situations, against something that may or may not be appreciated in 5% of all cases?

And then, in the unlikely event that you answer this question with "yes", you then must proceed and ask yourself: does it actually work that way? In other words: if you pitch this new game system to your players, are your players going to use it as you intended? Or will you find out that players would now rather fight unarmored, leading to an increase of complaints on the forums about the game being too difficult? Will your system designed to make armors more varied and interesting suddenly turn out to relegate the entire armor system, and the smithing system to craft them, to a niche gimmick that most consider a waste of resources? Which then snowballs into complaints about too little to do with all that ore in the ground, because you inadvertedly lost half the meaningful content of the metal age? Your design goal was promoting meaningful decisions, but the implementation result was the complete removal of all decisions and a compounding negative effect on other game systems.

"Because it's realistic" is never a good game design axiom, nor is it a valid advantage worth sacrificing gameplay flow for. In fact, "because it's realistic" is probably one of the worst game design axioms, because it completely forgets the fact that you are designing a game. In those cases where realistic elements are built into the gameplay, it is never, ever done merely for the sake of realism. This is why TFC is explicitly not aiming for realism - the devs want to deliver a believable experience while at the same time maintaining the artistic license to be unrealistic on purpose, if it enhances the gameplay value. Games need to be fun for the player, first and foremost. And you don't make gameplay fun by slowing down the player.

There is always one thing missing in any given TFC world. For you it is bismuthinite. For me it was fluxstone (took me 7 RL days and one and a quarter ingame years). For the guy who finds both early on, it will be feathers to make the scribing table, or a native igneous layer to make the first anvil, or any form of iron whatsoever (been there done that). For the guy ho has all of that as well, it will be impossible to find garnierite, gold or silver later-on. Heck, I have had a hilarious multiplayer game where it took four people almost an ingame month to find a tree.

There's really nothing much you can do but power through that one thing. Because the chances are high that it really is only one thing, since in the process of finding it you will run across much, if not all of the rest.

Just make sure you are actually looking in the right areas. Not all stone types can contain all ores. Cassiterite is especially difficult to find through surface rocks because only one single rock type (granite) can spawn it as a surface deposit. All other cassiterite is middle or bottom layer, and though surface rocks can sometimes graze the upper edge of the middle layer with their detection range, the chances for that to work out for you are extremely small.

• Wearing armor will increase the rate at which thirst and hunger deplete

I wouldn't want to move slower with armor - it would only motivate me to never wear armor at all, even in combat, because the amount of hate I have for movement slowintg effects borders on the irrational ;P But this here, this is a good idea. Food is much too plentiful in the mid- and lategame in TFC, so extra food sinks that do no affect earlygame players are very much needed.

Yes, but it narrows the possible locations down. In the current game, I could have a sedimentary layer under my house. Or under the biome fifty blocks over yonder. I won't know until I dig down and check. Rinse and repeat in every single new area found. And for digging down, you have two choices: spend enormous amounts of time punching leaves for sticks to make ladders, or spend the same time you save by not punching leaves digging staircases instead, which require at least twice as much mining as a straight shaft down. And chew up your tools.

At least in b78 I have no more need to construct a four-digit amount of ladders. This may not mean much to you, but after spending an entire week doing nothing but making ladders every moment not spent digging shafts, I definitely appreciate it a lot.

(And, yes - the dolomite I finally found is in layer 3. Had I not dug the 13th hundred-block shaft, I would still not have any fluxstone.)

It should be noted that natural coal isn't useless in TFC... it works fine as forge fuel. It just can't be used for the bloomery or blast furnace because it isn't pure enough.

The new terrain generator, specifically the part where sedimentary rock only spawns as surface layers. It should drastically cut down on instances of the game trolling me like this.

I actually found my bismuthinite vein in a gabbro surface layer... within a few minutes of searching.

It's honestly all luck. I mean, in contrast to that I spent (according to the statistics screen) 28 RL hours worth of playtime, spread out over more than one week, just trying to find fluxstone. There are 23 different stones in TFC, and 4 of them are fluxstones. I managed to find 18 out of 19 non-flux stone types before I finally hit dolomite. At that point I had 100 km walked, 20 km by boat, 18,500 leaf blocks broken and 1100 ladders constructed (for digging shafts down to check lower layers).

Without flux, you cannot process hides into leather, and you cannot perform any sort of smithing whatsoever. So I basically spent more than one ingame year walking around with no armor, only using stone and cast metal tools, in a world locked to Hardcore difficulty. Fun for the whole family. Quite a few very close calls, I tell you...

Looking good!

Sure, just let me quickly figure out where I saw it... *noisily rummages around the wiki* Nope... Not here... Not here... Aha!

The "Ores & Minerals" page has the following as its opening paragraph:

"Small ores can be found by breaking the small rocks scattered around on the surface of the ground. Small ores can also be found by using a sluice in an area with ore blocks nearby. These are samples of what ores lie in the first layer underneath the soil, so they're somewhat important."

meals don't chill inside vessels it's the miners lunch box of choice!

they stack up hot if you're lucky enough to have 2 with the exact same heat value:p

Now that's a neat trick to keep in mind! Lunchbox, I like it

I've been using your pack for a few sessions now and enjoy it. One thing I came across though - out of the four grain types that I have, rye and oat and barley are using the new sprite but wheat still uses an old one. I mean the grains you get after refining the harvested produce with a knife.

No, the area's not THAT big. You might dig a fair bit down, but if you were picking the spot carefully enough, you'll end up on top of the vein anyway, it doesn't really matter how deep you were digging at this point. Your exapmle tells just that you weren't thorough enough.

Hmm? I'm not sure what you're referring to. I was citing a practical example for surface rocks detecting a layer 2 vein, not complaining that finding ore is too hard. The only reason it took me so long was the fact that I intentionally didn't dig into layer 2 because the wiki wrongly states that surface rocks only check the first layer, so I stayed in the first layer. If I had dug a few blocks further down, I would have indeed hit it straight on. That's the point I was making.

It's the "keeping hot meals on me" part. They don't stay hot, they cool down fairly rapidly. If you heat up a meal worth 5 stars and then keep it in your inventory, it will be cold long before the food bar has gone down even a fifth of the way necessary to make it useful.

In practical gameplay you keep cold meals in your inventory and then when it's time to eat, you either make a firepit on the spot or go find your forge, leaving whatever else you were doing at the time. That's more invconvenient than just quickly cycling to an item on your hotbar and holding right mouse for 3 seconds.

This aims to propose a minimally invasive solution to address a small issue.

Thesis:

The current implementation of how food works relegates the whole "make meals" game mechanic to a mere gimmick.

Refresher on how food works, for context:

The food bar drains passively at a fixed rate, plus actively on performing certain activities (breaking blocks, recovering health etc). The rate at which the player recovers health increases the fuller the food bar is. You can restore the food bar by eating food; consuming 10 stars worth of food restores 100% of the food bar. Generally, one day of normal activity costs the player around 2-3 stars worth of food.

Refresher on how meals work, for context:

By combining ingredients of at least 4 stars worth of food, a meal will be created which often will perform better than the sum of its parts, or give the player buffs in a way that's very similar to potions. Meal recipes and effects are randomized via the world seed. A meal will only give its full effect if it is warmed in a fireplace/forge; if eaten cold, it will always perform worse than the sum of its parts.

Why these two systems don't play nice together:

Because you need to invest at least 4 stars worth of food, the minimum meal actually worth making for its food value is one that's worth at least 5 stars. This means that at bare minimum, the player's food bar must be down halfway. This not only takes multiple ingame days of playtime, but also is a state that's highly undesirable to maintain. After all, a food bar that's half empty (or more than half empty) represents a serious reduction in the player's health regeneration capabilities (both in how quickly it happens as well as how much can be regenerated in total). The player is therefore encouraged to keep his food bar well up. It feels better and safer to eat one item worth two stars every day, rather than waiting three days until there's room in your belly for the six-star meal that these three ingredients could make. And some meals are so powerful that you can never really use them - if you wait until your food bar runs out all the way, you'll start taking damage and possibly have to play with debuffs for being hungry for a while.

This compounds with the fact that sometimes, you need food now. In combat, you want your health to be regenerating quickly, so you want your food bar to be maxed. And in combat, you can't ask mister skeleton to take a break shooting you while you set up a campfire to warm your meal. It's a much better idea to keep the ingredients with you and eat them individually.

Add to this the fact that getting food is really quite easy. Killing a pig has you set for two ingame weeks, for instance. Making a meal that's worth more than the sum of its parts would let you stretch a scarce food supply to last longer, but food is basically never scarce to begin with. The player consumes only a small part of their food bar each day.

As for buffs, they face the same issue of "can't cook a meal in combat". Setting up for a fight this way would likely be the absolute exception, probably reserved for bossfights like the Wither or the Ender Dragon... neither of which exists in TFC. And buffing yourself with water breathing out of combat is also situational. Therefore the buffs alone can't carry the meal-making system to any kind of relevance.

To sum up: almost any incentive to make a meal is currently marginalized because eating ingredients is simply more useful to the player.

How this can be changed with minimal effort:

The first issue relates to the fact that meals are so large the food bar needs to be nearly empty for them to make sense. As a solution, I propose to simply double the amount of food that is "stored" in the food bar, while leaving all other values the same. As a result, a 10-star meal would fill half the food bar instead of all of it. At the same time, the food bar would take twice as long to drain empty (this does not impair believability; a human can go much longer without food IRL than the 4-5 days the player currently can ingame). This measure handily removes the need to let the food bar drop way low in order to actually make use of a meal; it can be eaten much more regularly. It also motivates players into looking at meals in the first place because the common food items now appear really tiny all of a sudden (although in reality they are still exactly as valuable as they were before).

The second issue relates to how having to heat meals up is unwieldly when you are in a hurry. I propose to leave that as it is, as it's a reasonable tradeoff for the increased value that meals provide. Since the other changes help actually realizing that value, the tradeoff can stay.

The third issue relates to how food is so abundant that making meals to keep yourself fed is entirely unnecessary. I propose that since we now have a doubled food buffer from suggestion 1, there's room to increase food consumption. However, we don't want to make starting a new world too hard by upping the food need to the point where playing hunter/gatherer is no longer sufficient to make it through the stone age. Thus I propose to only up the food drain from active sources that are typical for midgame activities, such as breaking blocks with tools (mining is an absolutely backbreaking labor that burns through calories, after all). That way, a new player punching rocks and leaves is not affected, but a player axing rows upon rows of trees or carving out a vein of ore will be. Combat, too, can be upped a bit, as freshly started players are not equipped for more than small scuffles anyway. For the mentioned actions, I suggest maybe an increase of around 50% over its current values. Passive drain wouldn't need to be modified, but it could probably be given a +10% or +20% if it's desired to make food more valuable in general or counterbalance the increased time a player can go without eating.

Bottomline:

This way, the entire food system can be leaned towards encouraging the making of meals simply by tweaking a small number of global constants; it can probably (I hope) be implemented in a mere fraction of the time that it took me to write up this post. At the same time, it will be a subtle change that doesn't actually make the core gameplay or progression any different, especially not for fresh starts.

The little surface rocks don't only check the surface layer, contrary to popular belief. They check for a set number of blocks down, which can be enough to hit the upper parts of middle layer.

For example, in my current playthrough, the very first tetrahedrite vein I found (and am still using today) showed up in an area with a gneiss surface layer. However, to my great confusion, I was completely unable to find it at first. It can't be that hard, I thought, from the surface samples I found the vein must absolutely gigantic! Yet I still wasted an entire copper pick digging around the gneiss in futility. Only when I made a second pick and a prospector's pick to go along with it was I able to find the vein - in the andesite layer below, about 5-6 blocks deeper than the gneiss went.

So you finding cassiterite in places where there shouldn't be any is probably just that - a vein at the upper edge of the middle layer, high enough for the surface rocks to pick up on it even though the surface layer was of a type that can't naturally contain cassiterite.