Bihlbo

Don't overthink the bloomery. Make it's internal cavity 3 blocks high, then throw in 1 charcoal to start it, 8 cassiterite or sphalerite ore (not small ore), and 8 more charcoal. You're good to go. Play around with it some to figure out how to adjust it if you need to. With some metals that have a high melting point you'll need more charcoal. You can do the math if you think that's fun, but it isn't necessary. If the gui for the bloomery says it has more ore than charcoal, feed it more charcoal, etc. You'll eventually get the feel of it, and it's pretty hard to ruin things if you're off by a little.

Cave-ins can trigger when a block with nothing under it is broken. So if you are digging a tunnel, dig the top blocks first then the lower blocks. Think of it like this: if you're in a large cave and disrupt the floor; is that likely to cause a cave-in? What if you disrupt the ceiling that's holding up all that rock above you? When I started thinking like that, it was a lot harder to cause cave-ins. Yet it's still very handy to keep using support beams, they are awesome. Flux is indeed useful, but not crucial early on. You don't need it to make a bloomery, but you do need a chisel for the bricks that make the bloomery block. The whole bloomery can be made out of cobble with the exception of the bloomery block and the block directly above it. That block above the bloomery block has to be either a smoothed stone, a raw stone, or a bricked stone block. I usually find it easy to quarry a raw stone, but since you have the chisel already you could instead smooth a raw stone and collect it for the bloomery. Point is, you don't need to use bricked stone or flux to make a bloomery at all. Once you have the bloomery and have an easier time making lots of pickaxes, you have probably found at least a couple metal veins of tin, zinc, or copper. Keep digging down, sometimes the second layer of stone is a flux stone. If you find a location where one stone type changes to another, dig down there. When both of those transition into the second layer of stone, you have potentially two more chances to find flux stone. But, once you find it you have more than you will ever dream of using, limited only by your willingness to use up pickaxe durability to collect it. Dogs are pretty ignorable, unfortunately. Both because of the reason you've already discovered, and because they will despawn if you leave them alone for very long.

I can't tell you how much I love this idea. If I got along better with java I'd make this a mod right away to see how people like it.Let's say each time you die your maximum in health, thirst, or hunger at level 1 gets lessened by N%. You start off the game at level 1 with current life stats +N%, so 4 deaths leaves you at about the current maximum in those life stats (assuming the RNG gives you just one of each penalty). The end effect is that even though you can compensate for these penalties with gaining levels, each time you die those levels have less of a total effect. Eventually your penalties might get so bad that N% rounds to 0, but your ability to not starve, dehydrate, or survive even a small fall will be extremely low at level 1. Another possible penalty is in carrying capacity. If this penalty were imposed, you would receive an item on death that cannot be moved, grabbed, picked up, etc. This would necessarily have to be limited to your internal inventory and not your hotbar. If it included your hotbar this would equate to permadeath. There are already medicines in the game, of a sort: meals. In addition to what they already do, some meals alleviate one of the penalty types death can impose. Practice proper nutrition! Without discovering these meals, death would be indeed scary. The downside to this is that on servers where pooled efforts unlock these faster, and pooled efforts provide greater quantity of food for making the meals needed to get rid of the penalties, death is a material cost alone. That's where your other idea becomes brilliant. If your respawn point was not something you could set on your own, but would depend more on where you died, death could not be used as a teleporter that simply costs you food. And instead of the overly draconian method of making your respawn point totally random within a wide area (meaning there's almost no chance of getting your stuff back), you respawn locally but at a known location. The obelisks would need to be easily seen and above ground, however. I'm thinking they could only spawn if the following conditions were met: no blocks touch it except at the base, where it has to have a level area at least wide enough for a person to stand, and the top block should have direct access to the sky. That could be high on a mountain or in a deep ravine, but it will be accessable and won't leave you totally trapped. They probably shouldn't be too far apart, like no more than 124 blocks from each other. I'm also thinking that if your bed is close enough to an obelisk and that obelisk could be included in one of those at which you might respawn, your bed becomes the place that always wins the die roll. Get too far away and it wouldn't matter, but you wan an incentive to settle down and build. This shouldn't make exploration overly horrible, but it also should prevent every scouting trip from ending in suicide to get back home quickly.

You're lucky that the ravine had ore in it. Nearly all of the ones I explore are barren. But to answer your question, you probably won't find any veins of 9 pieces of ore like you would in vanilla MC. Veins are hard to find, but reward you big-time when you find them.

Aliceingame's guide is fantastic, I second that. tl;dr version: 1. Mark each spot where you find a small ore in a surface rock (I use torches since it takes nothing to retrieve them). That'll give you a rough idea of the area of a vein under the surface. 2. Get yourself about 10-20 blocks below the beginning of the rock layer, centered (more or less) in the area you discovered in step 1. 3. Pick a direction and mine. 4. When your propick goes from "very large sample" to "large sample", drop a torch and count 13 blocks back the way you came. 5. Turn 90 degrees and do it again. This should give you a spot strong enough to register as "very large". 6. Dig up or down until you hit ore. If the rock changes to a different type (or to dirt), you've probably gone too far. If you mine a block that has nothing below it (like when mining straight up), there's the possibility of triggering a cave-in. Always mine from the top down to minimize this. Stand on a torch if you get nervous and have not used supports to prevent your death.

Yeah I've fished with a spinner or with decoy bait I made by hand far more often than with live bait.

This is a neat idea. It is NOT an idea that needs to be in TFC, but would instead probably work better as a mod that could be applied to Minecraft no matter how you play. It would change the act of breaking blocks to more involve the skill of the player. It could also get fantastically annoying. Sand is and should be easy to scoop up. I like being able to hold down the button and get more than one block. Imagine playing MC with a diamond shovel and having to click as fast as possible to keep up with the unmodded speed. Maybe this would be better applied to only certain items. Maybe you have to manually whack a tree with axes made with certain materials, but not with better metals. There are a lot of things for which this probably isn't appropriate. I can't imagine needing to pull back my hand to whack a bunch of torches, for instance. If this mod were made it would need to retain block damage data, much like how the Multimine mod works. Check that out if you haven't yet.

Great job!! This is a neat idea, and in imagining what this would be like in the game it really seems to flesh out chickens a lot, and it seems to fit TFC very well. I'm impressed. Eggs I'm with you to a certain point. Giving items metadata is generally a bad idea as it causes clutter. A better solution is probably worth talking about. Here's a suggestion: There are two kinds of eggs, "egg" and "fertilized egg". An egg can be removed from the nest and cooked for food. A fertilized egg (f.e.) has metadata, but that's okay because there is no reason to remove it from a nest. Its only purpose is as a timer for a new chicken. The f.e. has metadata much like an item being cooked, but it doesn't cool down. Two of them won't stack with each other, but since they won't stack in the nest and the only reason you'd ever take them out is to put them in another nest again, that's not a big deal. It doesn't seem like you accomplish much by adding in spoiled eggs. Sure, if you're off mining for a week maybe you come back and have no eggs. But that's not really how raising chickens works. You come back and have to sort the new eggs from the old ones, but you still have new eggs. Since adding data for old eggs just clutters up the game with trash, why not just hand-wave the sorting process and let the eggs not spoil? Similarly you only harvest the carrots that are big enough to be eaten as food, you don't harvest all the withered, bug-eaten carrots and have to sort them as the player. You're probably thinking that you shouldn't know an egg is a f.e. just by looking at it. Okay yeah, but you have to initiate the fertilization from what your plan suggests, so you should have some feedback that tells you it was successful and not bugged (much like finding out a cow is preggers by clicking on it). A f.e. should be an obviously different item from an egg. Nests I don't want to devote any resources to something that can be trampled. How about a nest box instead? Chickens make their own nest in the wild and lay one egg in it at a time. You can trample those, or collect them (I'm imagining punching it and it pops out, like a mushroom does) and put them on a nest box to get egg storage. A chicken with an unoccupied nest within a certain radius doesn't try to make another nest. The nest box recipe could be a chest (or ceramic equivalent), planks or bricks on either side, and sticks above the planks/bricks. Place it in the world, collect a nest, right-click the nest box to "plant" the nest, and now your nest box becomes a more permanent nest that chickens will use and that will store more than one egg. I suggest that chickens will probably want a dry nest, so will try to make a nest on a block with some cover (leaves from a tree especially, or within tallgrass if no trees or overhangs are nearby). Maybe a nest in the rain gets "trampled". You'll want to put something over your nest boxes to block the rain.

Yup. Dunk has already said his goal is to fix those concerns you have. If you want beef, hunt wild arochs. If you want to raise cows, try to tame them and lead the cows back to a pen with your hard-earned crops.

On my recent arctic expedition I was pleasantly surprised by the snow. It randomly accumulates in 1/8th block increments when it snows! And it slows you as you walk through it! Awesome! However, then it thaws regardless of the temperature, and randomly. So you're left with an uneven surface of snow and bare ground everywhere. I suggest a couple of tweaks to the snow. 1. Snow doesn't melt until it's warm enough for it to melt. 2. When snow accumulation reaches 8/8, it turns into a snow block that can support weight ( you don't walk through it). This can be harvested for snowballs and turned into a snow block with which you can build stuff. 3. Something has to be done to prevent the RNG from giving us pillars of snow next to pits that never accumulated much. a. Maybe accumulation checks nearby blocks and cannot exceed the accumulation of adjacent blocks +4/8. One bonus from this idea is that hills will look far more rounded, since snow has to then accumulate from the valleys, up. The downside is that this is undoubtedly a lot of processing. b. Maybe cap snow accumulation to something like 2 snow blocks + 7/8. Accumulating snowfall then has to check two blocks below it to see if it's allowed to get thicker. 4. Snowshoes! Encircle leather boots with sticks in the crafting table to make them. This allows you to walk over snow accumulation as though it had more uniform thickness, and without being slowed down. 5. Thawing temperatures destroy placed snow blocks which have nothing on top of them. You don't get to have a summer igloo made of snow, but you can store snow in a cave even in the summer. I'm thinking they would get turned into snow accumulation at 7/8 thickness and then thaw out like regular snowfall does. 6. Snow blocks should probably share size/weight/stack properties with sand. So, you can store them in a chest but only in stacks of 32. 7. (This is an alternative to 5 & 6 above. Thanks to davoval0001 for inspiring this.) Snow blocks are too easy to make, and harken back to the simplicity of vanilla MC a bit too much for TFC. Snow in MC is meant to represent loose snow. When you can dig snow with a shovel, that's not hard-packed stuff. It's pretty hard to build anything but a pile with loose snow. The solution is in snowballs. Four snow balls combine to make 1 snow brick, which isn't a block at all. Combine four snow bricks (which equates to 4 snow blocks or 16 squares of accumulated snow) to make a snow bricks block. This is something you can use to build a house, and instead of looking like driven snow it looks like smaller blocks of compressed snow. You break a snow bricks like you would a wooden planks block - it takes the same amount of time and can be done faster with an axe or a saw. A snow bricks is resistant to thawing to a certain point. Maybe it has to be in thawing temperatures for more than a day to begin to melt, or it's melting point is simply higher. Please let me know your thoughts! I numbered the points to make it easier to reference. I'll add good ideas to this list as you suggest them. Edit: added #7 June 5th.

Snow shoes are shoes. They have durability. Get hit and they lose durability. If you're suggesting I'd be willing to sacrifice leather boots for something that wears out every time I go into my house unless I open my inventory, take off the snow shoes, and put on a second pair of shoes I carry around for when I'm not on snow, then I think you're simply sacrificing one annoyance for another. Why even add snow shoes if that's the case? Concerning your chiseled snow idea: Snow isn't hard to harvest, in real life or in MC. Really packed snow (which is not what a snow block is supposed to represent) can easily be cut with something like a stone axe. A chisel is not a harvesting tool. However, I totally agree that it would look cool. Maybe snow blocks that you craft are simply a different item than the ones in vanilla MC and they look like bricks. Better still, I don't really like how easy it is to get snow. I'm going to add an idea to the first post: point #7. Please take a look and tell me what you think.

If fish mobs are added, an option to the pole would be to swim and stab, just like with squid. If I had my druthers I'd just grab the code for the fish and whale from More Nature, change the whale drops, and call it good. Everything that mod does is done very well, though most of it is unnecessary. Watch one of the videos where the guy fishes to see what I mean. Fishing isn't less boring I guess, but at least it interacts with the environment beyond testing to see whether it's in water. There are two ways to add bait. One is to require it in order to get a fish. That simply makes an already boring process worse. The other way is to use bait as an amplifier (more fish with bait) so that in the process of trying to get fish you can spend some of that time on getting bait and less of it on waiting to get a bite. That is a step forward.

You're absolutely right. My suggestion 3a above should prevent it from getting to be a problem, as the largest difference between orthogonal blocks of snow would be 1. If it were more than 1 that would be a problem.As I suggested in 4, snowshoes would even out the thickness of snow. Ideally if what you're walking on is accumulated snow or snow blocks, your actual height would be something like an average of what's around you. You still have to jump to get up a hill, but you walk over snow blocks as if the difference were half a block or less. Already, walking through snow is a hassle and unpleasant. Probably by design, because that's how it is in reality. Because of the uneven, random accumulation and thawing it's like walking through a forest with randomly-placed soul sand under your feet and leaves in your way. Snowshoes should make walking on snow just about like walking on regular ground. One thing that might help is making it so snow can be made into "slabs" of a sort. When snow accumulates up to 4/8ths it still slows you down but you walk on it instead of in it. That way most of the differences between snow block levels (though not snow accumulation levels) would be a half block and therefore wouldn't require jumping. Or, snow accumulation cannot be walked through at all. You walk on it and it slows you down. A full snow block slows you like soul sand. I didn't suggest this at first because I've noticed how easy it is to glitch through charcoal when walking across different levels of it and I wouldn't suggest something so buggy for walking on snow.

I totally agree with you about combat in MC, mayaknife. The only reason I ever turn off peaceful is to enforce some realism in the day/night cycle. I would want to sleep through the night, not continue working forever, so the annoying moving garbage that comes out at night gives me an enticing reason to use a bed. That said, spiders are the easiest things to kill. Find some, lead them back to a hole, and drop in to punch them from a place they can't reach. Now you have string, then a fishing pole, then food.

No. It is not worth it going to the arctic. But, that touches on the reason you continue playing the game at all. Is it worth it making a cool house? If it is then is it worth it using stone bricks and chiseled decoration? If so then it's worth it getting the longest-duration chisel you can. That means it's worth it getting to the high-tier metals. If you aren't trying to make something big and pretty or hollowing out a mountain or some other pursuit then getting better metal is the reason you get better metal. So you set your own goals. Mine? "What's it like to live in the arctic?" That's not a question worth asking in vanilla Minecraft because it doesn't have that feature. I learned a lot from it and there are still some things I want to test out, so I'm going to keep at it. I'm ambivilant about the crop and tree situation. It's accurate that your window of reliably warm weather isn't long enough to raise even one harvest of crops. But it sucks that this means your only reliable source of food is fish - mainly because fishing is PAINFULLY boring. Man I hate fishing. Edit: fail of the year +1. My fail is better than yours, neener neener.

I recently set out to find a better settlement. I'm sure I could have found some ore by using a sluice, but that requires wood and takes at least as long as relocating. Being on a couple of small islands in the ocean is a fun limitation where the weather is nice, but it's prohibitively difficult in the arctic. First, I made a trip to warmer lands to collect seeds and more saplings. To the northwest I found a rather large landmass and settled in a shallow lake. I again dug myself a hole, relying on the ice to form my roof. I don't know why I didn't expect it, but even the arctic has warm summers where the ice thaws. I thought it was kind of neat to swim through my roof, and thought about calling myself Meatbob Squarepants, but then at night the temperature dropped. When the ice formed, it updated the water blocks, which then flooded my home. So this works fine in the winter but not at all in the summer. I soon got some crops planted. This had me very excited for the future, so I planted the saplings as well. Hopefully the warm winter months can supply me with all the wheat and wood I need for the year. I found some surface ores in quite a few places and have plans to start mining as soon as I have the pick. However, this landmass seems to have no peat so I might not be able to smelt more than one ingot with my remaining wood. The temperature fluctuations seem to be too great for my crops. Everything planted has uprooted itself. I retain the seeds, but I don't know if they will ever have a long enough period of warm weather in order to grow fully. After a week my saplings remain ungrown. Good news however! I have found two plum trees on the island and now have three bushes growing nicely near my snow house at the lake. These can supplement my fishing and egg collecting with food that doesn't need to be cooked. I'm surprised they grow without hesitation when a fir tree seems unable to take root. In this expedition I'm comparing the life I'm able to live with that of real people who have settled in arctic climates. One thing is certain: the game is not meant to be played like this. There is no possibility of replacing the numbers of animals I hunt for food and hides. The bones of creatures cannot be harvested to make tools or for building structures. Driftwood does not exist. Animal fat cannot be harvested for fuel. Temperatures seem to be tied only to biome and elevation, so an enclosed space like a valley or a deep cave is just as cold as the open ice. Archery is totally non-viable due to the finite supply of feathers (you can't ever breed chickens without crops). Fishing requires a huge real estate commitment rather than being possible through a hole in the ice. So aside from collecting snow and bragging rights, the arctic seems like it's simply there to make you wish you were somewhere else.

Where did you read about greenhouses? Is that something being considered or a feature in development?

You can fix that. Add the information to the popup that appears when you press N. People might argue that accurately telling the temperature requires technology not available to a person in the wild, but with our natural senses we are able to tell the difference between two temperatures that differ by only one or two degrees, so I wouldn't dumb down the debug info any further than removing the decimal point.

Woah guys, this is already a game steeped in magic. TFC just makes mundane things more a part of the game, so it gets obscured. When it gets dark your fears manifest in the form of monsters that should not be able to exist and have no reasonable source or purpose other than your own nightmares and death. Where do you think Don't Starve got the idea? Let's say the enchanting system from MC was enabled for TFC. The main beef I have with that is the use of levels for enchanting. TFC changes levels to equate to your actual experience as a survivor in the wild. And I'm putting that into an item I could easily lose and will eventually destroy? Why and how? I'm all for enchanting if it's made to fit TFC. And I like the idea of using gems, only because I hate that they exist and have no purpose. Give them any purpose at all and I'm happy. Ammo, fertilizer, grinding crystals, hog fodder - I don't care.

No one did. After I posted I realized that sentence didn't say what I meant it to say, so I edited it. Sorry that you got to it faster than I could correct myself. This is just like saying that adding a wide variety of digging tools could make mining more interesting. A pick that mines igneous rock really well but does poorly on minerals. A shovel that only harvests clay and peat. A hammer that mows through stalagtites. Come on, that doesn't make the game more interesting, it just makes it a game of changing your gear out as fast as possible. If something needs to be added, it needs to be able to replace the core tool that you would otherwise be using. Not a bow and a sling for when the sling is better - both are ranged weapons and it should be redundant to carry both.

Well, the game would not be better if the weapon you made out of tin was called a dagger while the weapon you made out of black steel was called a claymore. A tin pointy thing is different than a black steel pointy thing because one does more damage and has more durability than the other. Those are differences enough to make them different weapons, and they are just as meaningful to their use as the differences between a saber and a cutlass, or a mace and a morning star. If what's being argued is that the 12 or so weapons in the game are too similar to one another, and different traits could be applied to each variation on the combination of the 2 types and 6 metals (I don't know if that's the real number), then I'm all for that. If for instance the difference between a steel sword and a black steel sword were half a heart of damage and 15 points of durability, then they are too similar to be different items. Make the choice between steel and black steel mean something more, like mimicking one of the enchantments that have been removed from the game - and the content that already exists becomes less boring. But the Skyrimening of TFC is just going to result in players feeling the need to carry more weapons than a ranged and a melee option, and that is regressive design in this type of game. But keep in mind, I don't play TFC to PvP. I could imagine that running around hunting players in armor would benefit from a bunch of very different weapons, especially since your hotbar will be full but the rest of your inventory is totally ignorable. There are better games for that kind of gameplay, and I'm offering that comment up as fact, not just my opinion. But if that's what someone's after I would strongly suggest making a PvP-centered mod for TFC rather than hoping TFC incorporates the support of fringe gameplay at the cost of core design. And the fringe gameplay vs. core design conflict is the main reason TFC, BTW, and other game-changing mods work great as mods and shouldn't be incorporated into Mojang's product.

As cool as it might seem to have a cool sword and a cool spear and a broken dagger and a battleaxe made of pickles and 9 new types of weaponized pies, do you remember what it's actually like to play Minecraft? Your inventory is already full of tools, stuff you went out into the caverns to get and bring back, stuff that dropped from bad guys, and weapons. Your chest is already full of schematics and half a dozen metals and waaayyy too many seeds. You have to keep track of all that stuff. More stuff makes the game harder, so any new stuff should have a really solid justification for being added. "It would be cool" is too weak a reason. Here's what you need: ranged weaponmelee weaponmore expensive upgradesVanilla MC has the bow, the sword, and an enchanting system. The enchanting system has been removed from TFC, so the technology you gain gives you the upgrades. Your ranged weapon is the javelin, which aside from being a somewhat poor weapon, won't stack so it clutters your inventory. So you upgrade to a bow. Your melee weapon is a knife, but if you want more damage and durability you make something with steel, etc.There are 6 tool metals (I think) for a sword and for a mace, so that's 12 weapons. I think we can agree that maces and swords aught to be different in some way, but aside from that why does the game need to add another 6 weapons?

You're right, I misread that as "grow" instead of what he actually wrote. Thanks.But if it requires a clear shot to the sky, tree growth is difficult and requires vigilance. So far I haven't had the gumption to sit there and wait, ready to grab it if snow begins to fall.

I really love the fruit trees, and as far as tree growth goes I think they work far better than the vanilla mechanics for tree growth. In Minecraft growing trees is trivial. Even without a mod it's easier to grow a large tree than it is to grow some wheat. I'm not arguing it should be hard, but something harder and more interesting than trivial would add to the immersion and believability. 1. All saplings grow into a tree 1 log high and covered in leaves, like the ground-cover "bushes" found in jungle biomes. 2. Once a sapling turns into a tree, the type of tree it is determines its next level of growth. A faster-growing tree is going to have a higher chance of growing its next log and layer of leaves. The speed of growth for trees should be unpredictable, even within a species. The rate of growth should probably average about 1 log per game day for a tree with average growth speed. 3. Pre-gen trees don't grow. They've been growing for untold decades before you got there, so they are done. Trees grown from saplings - whether you placed them or they were generated on their own - are the only ones that grow. 4. When a tree first grows it generates a random number that determines its maximum volume or height, and how much branching it does. Different species have different volumetric ranges. Fully-grown trees should have all the characteristics of pre-gen trees of their species, including variety. 5. Girth variety becomes possible. When a tree first grows if it has space (5x5 centered around the sapling would be my guess) it has the option to thicken its trunk, depending on species. Instead of growing 4 trunks at once, it grows one, then at a certain volume it has the option for more growth to occur to the side of the base. Eventually, after at least four times the amount of time it takes another tree to reach the same height with one trunk, the species for which it is an option could end up with most of its height consisting of a 2x2 trunk. Those sequoia? Maybe they can grow out to 3x3 if you give them enough decades. Maybe they just don't stop growing until they run out of space, which is something you can engineer if you like tree-tending. * What this gives you is not just more believable trees, but options on how you farm them. If you want a lot of pine but only have a couple of saplings, maybe you only let them grow to about 3 logs high then harvest all the leaves for more saplings while they are easy to reach. Maybe you just want logs, so you cover a huge area in spread-apart saplings and come back a YEAR later for massive amounts of logs. * The downside to this idea, other than it probably being a lot of work to code, is that growing trees have to calculate things, which is another drag on the server. I wouldn't plan on trees checking for growth more than once per MC hour, but if you have a lot of people in SMP planting a forest this could still get to be a noticeable drag. If I knew more about coding java I'd know if this is unrealistic or not, but it might be a pretty small drag.

Well that means arctic living is not a long-term possibility by any stretch.