cevkiv

3.4mya is the stone age. The Paleolithic, to be precise (old stone age). It lasted a very, very, very long time, and then came the mesolithic, which also lasted a long, long, long time, and then we got the neolithic, which started around 12kya with the start of the current interglacial and agriculture.

The first house I build is always the same: 1. Get an axe 2. Get a shovel. Then another. And probably a third one, just to be sure. 3. Demolish a hill. 4. Chop down a tree 5. Use wood to make 8 horizontal supports and 8 vertical supports. 6. Place three vertical supports. 7. Place two horizontal supports on each side of the highest vertical support 8. Make a box out of dirt 9 Bam! It's like you're a real homesteader.

This includes friends who love Dwarf Fortress.

I have tried to get every single god damned friend I have who plays Minecraft to play Terrafirmacraft with me. EVERY single response has been some variation of, "That sounds neat, but it sound tedious to the point of being unenjoyable."

Is there a thread in the suggestion forum about it? 'cause I could just go read that.

Also, it just doesn't make much sense in Minecraft. What's the point of making a giant ass castle if a) you don't have enough people to protect it, and it doesn't do jack because any old asshole with a pickax can go right through the walls, or just pile up some dirt underneath himself and go over them? The best defensive "structures" you can get in Minecraft are TNT boobytraps that blow someone up if they go in the wrong way, and even those have to be set up very carefully, and aren't always going to work. And then, if you fix the fact that it's far too easy to demolish the walls of a castle with a pickaxe, say, by making some sort of reinforced masonry bricks that you can make out of regular bricks, that take 4 or 5 times as long to mine through, you make it too imbalanced on the side of defense, because in real warface, people didn't just run up to a castle's walls and hit it with pickaxes. They lobbed heavy ass stones at the wall for weeks on end, tunneled underneath the walls to start fires, or did what almost always worked: Guy: Sir, we're being sieged! Castellan: Shit, how much food and water do we have? Guy: Six months! Meanwhile, outside Guy: Sir, we have them completely cut off! Captain: Excellent. Catapult some plague victims over the walls, and then we'll have dinner after raping the more attractive villagers. When they're so weak from hunger and disease they'll just give up. That's basically how medieval warfare went.

The problem with sieges and raids is ensuring that there are actually people around to defend their homes.

What if I don't want to play with people? What if I don't want to get my building griefed, or my now (even more precious and hard to find) metals stolen? Until there is some sort of locking safe that only you can open, why play SMP with random strangers?

I hope to god it is. More config options is always a better thing.

I don't go to parties. They're too much fun.

You know what? I'm done arguing with you people. You obviously just don't get it. It's like talking to a freshman who thinks Ron Paul's gonna solve every single problem.

The fact that gold was missing from two of the three worlds you generated would seem to be a large problem to me.

That still doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Not trying to be snarky. That sounds neat. Just... maybe you're over-complicating matters.

Ever heard of the old engineering maxim "KISS"?

I have nothing but praise for your efforts, for you have brought the cold, harsh light of evidence to us.

I've only ever done blacksmithing, and I didn't do that in a great deal of depth or for very long (I did make a shit ton of shitty nails), but for some things, like copper, you don't even really need to heat them. If I recall correctly from what I have read (I might go dig up my book on smithing later) copper can be worked cold. Like, I could literally walk downstairs, get my chunk of native copper, get a hammer, go outside on the back porch, use the concrete as an anvil, and shape a blade. No heat required.

No, "playing Minecraft" is going out, finding ores, retrieving ores, melting said ores down, making shit out of the ores to get tools, going out to find better ores, etc, etc. Building a place to store things is part of the game, too. When you arbitrarily decide to make part of the game take three times as much time for no good reason, that's busy work.

In all honesty? Nothing. But if you could use a forge to get iron, there wouldn't be as much of a need for a bloomery.

And they keep on talking about, or at least people keep on saying that, this is supposed to be a SMP focused mod. Well guess what: Any group of people on a server creates a warehouse. Every server I have ever played on, modded or not, once you get a group of people together building a town, one of the first things that happens is this: "Hey, where are we gonna put all this shit?" "Yeah, I'm running out of space in my house." "Let's make a warehouse!" Seriously. That's what happens. This change does absolutely nothing other than make people waste time.

The point is that I spent roughly a year of my own time, several hours a day, designing a MUD. This included designing how everything in the game worked, from the lowest levels where I tried (poorly) to optimize my program in assembly, to the high-level stuff of skills and magic and attributes of items. I have a good grasp of what constitutes "good game design" because I stumbled through making one myself and found out on the way exactly what sort of things are bad ideas from first hand experience. Anything that increases the tedium of a game for no point other than an arbitrary increase in difficulty -- that is, any change in the design of a game that makes it harder for a player to get from point A to point B that does so by simply increasing the amount of "busy work" the player is forced to do instead of requiring more skill on the part of the player is a bad design. Reducing the size of chest storage makes the game arbitrarily more tedious, because it forces me, for the same amount of storage space, to devote more than three times the amount of volume to a storage area, and approximately three times the amount of time to building said storage area. It does not in any way stop me from storing the same amount of materials as before. It just makes me waste time to do so. That makes it a bad design choice. A better way would be making chests harder to construct, or adding tiers of chests, with better chests allowing normal amounts of storage space. Look at it like this: Say I'm designing an RPG. It's in beta testing. Furthermore, let us say that each player has 8 slots of "general inventory storage". These slots can hold any kind of item -- weapons, water, food, scrolls, armor, or containers. Containers can hold more items. Now, let's suppose that when I implemented the container system and pushed that out for testing, I made the standard container size 10 slots, so that a player with 8 containers could carry a maximum of 80 items in their inventory. Now, players have been playing like this since the container system has been added. Suddenly, I reduce the size of containers down to 4 slots. Even if I plan to later add tiers of storage containers (better backpacks, magical backpacks, etc), which hold more than 4 items each, possibly going back up to the original size of 10 items, players would rightly feel frustrated at this change. You never half-ass a feature if you don't have to. It doesn't matter if the new 10-slot backpack in the game requires hard to find components to craft, and is difficult to make -- you do not fundamentally alter that aspect of game play upon which so many people are depending until you have it already to roll out. Firstly, it pisses the players off because they have lost items when the bag size was changed, and now they are able to only store a fraction of what they were before hand, but it also is a poor design because it fails to reward players who are able to or willing to spend the time required to get materials to make bigger bags. If, when Bioxx had implemented the reduction to chest sizes, he had also added three additional kinds of chests, so we have, say, Tier-0 chests, made out of wood planks, that hold 9 items each, and then Tier-1 chests, made out of wood planks with metal (of any kind) reinforcements at the corners that holds 18 items, and Tier-2 chests, made out of metal (at least iron) solely, then I wouldn't have anywhere near as much of a problem with the design change as I do with the actually implemented design change, because then people like me could still store the same amount of materials in the same amount of space if we were willing to sacrifice extra resources to do so. As it stands, I cannot store the same amount of materials in the same amount of space no matter what kind of materials I am prepared to sacrifice to do so, and to store the same amount of materials I have to use three times the space, no matter what materials I use. It limits player choice by arbitrarily restricting something to simulate greater difficulty, without giving the player any option or choice in the matter. It's a bad design.

Some things melt at different temperatures than others. Downstairs, in my rock collection, I have several different kinds of ore, including cinnabar, native copper, hematite, and magnetite, just off the top of my head. I'm fairly sure I could melt the native copper in a campfire, though I'm not about to try to find out. I also used to make bullets from lead for my muzzle loading pistols. I assure you, lead will melt in a campfire.

I have first-hand experience in the process of designing and programming a computer game. I am far more aware than you seem to be of exactly what is involved in the process.

It's not a "fix". A "fix" implies that it was "broken". There was nothing "broken" about chest sizes. This is what is called a "nerf" -- reducing the utility of something because of some deemed overusefulness.

Even Dwarf Fortress, which this mod is allegedly inspired by, has settings to increase or decrease the frequency of Ores occuring. There's an option in the configs to change the frequency of cave-ins. Why not, therefore, an option in the configs to change the frequency and distribution of ores? Or of chest size?