Bihlbo

Here's a fun story. I saw this, thought it'd be worth trying out (if for no other reason than I would love to see the cavern left by depleting that ore). I saw the discussion verged into the tools used for the screenshot and stopped reading. I start off in the game, of course, about 5 kilometers away from the lake described. I made the trip, and thought I was a pretty lame player for it taking a week and a half instead of the couple of days promised. I get there and it's just a jungle. No lake. No surface ore. Lots of galena without any small ores. Then I came back and read Truculent's post. /facepalm Still, I have some saplings to start a sustainable forest (kapok is the only thing within a kilometer), I have a beach, I have a mountain, and I eventually found some ore. One place is as good as another, in the end.

Can we just stay on the language topic? I'm afraid if someone tries to segue back to the original topic we'll have to start talking about expletives.

0. At some point you have to draw a line and say, "From here on it's a game." It seems that you want to keep pushing the line further away from a game and closer to a simulation. Simulations are fine, but they rarely play like a game. Many of the suggestions you have here are going to make TFC not a fun game to play, but instead a challenging pseudo-simulation. If that's the way things go, I'm not interested. I already half feel like quitting every time I spend an hour in front of a firepit for 1 ingot. I don't give two whits that it takes at least an hour to smelt ore in real life - my time is valuable. Your points: 1. It already takes an annoying amount of time to cut a tree. Granted, it's tons faster than in vanilla MC if the tree is big, but I don't build out of logs for fear I'll miss-click and have to rest something against my mouse button, sit back, and wait for the block to get broken. You're talking about making it take longer? Pointless and backward. Likewise with the hand trowel - the difference between a stone shovel and the speed of doing it by hand is already slight, so I don't see anyone justifying using their resources to make a tool that doesn't save them any time in the long run. 2. If you could get a branch from leaves that could be used as firewood, it becomes an alternative to using logs for that purpose. I don't think it's necessary to replace one of the utilities of logs. It's not as though logs are in short supply, and it's believable that your efforts to keep warm are going to have a bigger impact on a forest than just on its leaves. As for it being a weapon, where do you see it in relation to the knife (which is more than just a weapon)? What justifies me wanting to keep track of another tool in order to use a branch as a weapon, when a javelin gives me range and a knife has other uses? I don't care if it's realistic, if you have to keep track of more than about 5 tools the clutter overshadows the variety. 3. This is the only point you've made with which I totally agree. It makes animal pens just as useful in the same ways they are in real life, and it would be kind of exciting. Especially if pigs are really fast, hehe. 4&5. Typically before I get metal I'll make around 50 or so stone tools. I've gone through a whole stack of rocks in one play session just for axes and shovels. Are you really suggesting I'll need to kill way more animals than I could ever replace, spend hours killing grass, find a source for tar and build infrastructure in order to process it, and use up durability on more tools in order to do the same thing? See point 0. The lashing idea itself is good, even if I strongly disagree with the use you have in mind for it. I like the idea that a subcomponent could be made out of a slew of different raw materials, if for no other reason than to consolidate my inventory and increase the utility of the materials (like zombie flesh). But requiring this much effort for stone tools is just pointlessly granular and time-consuming. 6. Why would armor have to wait? Make a clay "barrel" to do the same thing you do with a wood barrel. 7. I agree with what Xechon said about stamina. Stamina is already in the game, it simply doesn't have the label you want it to have.

I am fine with beds as they are now. But in reading the plans for the future, making the vanilla bed with planks is going to require quite a lot more work than it does now. Of course your design goals don't include preventing people from sleeping in the stone age, so I thought I'd suggest a solution.

With the planned changes making it impossible to make planks until you have metals, we're going to be going without sleep long enough to start seeing giant steam-powered pig monsters over every hill. There's got to be an alternative way to make some bedding that doesn't require planks. Here's one approach. Basic Bedding Find two blocks of long grass next to each other and with 2 blocks of air above both, and right-click on the nearest one with a sheepskin. This replaces the long grass with an animal skin texture that occupies both blocks. You don't sleep very restfully and wake slightly damaged and quite hungry and thirsty. When you do wake, the bedding disappears and the sheepskin can be recollected, but the long grass is gone. Stone Age Bedding Once you find a suitable workbench (planned to be simply a flat surface on which you click with a tool, much like the stone anvil) you can combine 8 sugarcane to make matting. Matting can be applied to the surface of any block, has the same thickness as a plank, but instead of being a stick it covers a square 1/16th the size of a block (or, 4x4 pixels, 2 pixels thick), and cannot exist without being attached to a solid block (break the block, all matting falls off). You could use this for an attractive flooring if you wanted to. However, if you completely cover the top of two non-dirt blocks with matting (256 sugarcane, which might take a week to grow and collect), you have the start of your first bed. Next, make your wool into yarn then into cloth. Three cloth and a raw hide (shapeless combination) make a blanket, which is no doubt going to have multiple uses later on. Next, apply your blanket to the matting-covered blocks to finish your first true bed. When you wake from this bed you aren't damaged, and you are less hungry and thirsty. This and future beds persist after you wake. If you break this bed you retrieve your blanket. The matting was never changed into anything, and stays where it was placed. Wood Age Bedding This is much like your stone age bed, but it is made from planks covering at least every other position, parallel to one another, over the length of two blocks (16 planks). What is under the planks is unimportant - they could even be elevated and attached to the wall. Once this is done you should have space enough for a 17th plank at the end of the row before you're on a third block. Call this the head plank and place it. Wood age bedding is accomplished by throwing a piece of leather and 8 wool into your rows of planks, then right-clicking the head plank with a blanket. The planks and loose items are replaced with a solid, unified construction about the same shape as the bed in vanilla Minecraft, without the legs. This is a good bed and you wake suffering "standard" hunger and thirst. If you break this bed all the components (17 planks, 1 leather, 8 wool, and a blanket) fall as loose items. Want to get fancy? How about silk sheets? A pillow? Make a matress of straw (any of the harvested grain plants). Double beds with metal frames. The ultimate in luxury: hundreds of feathers. Fancy beds could increase skill gain for a few hours, leave you feeling barely peckish instead of hungry, or give you a buff that lasts half a day.

The main thing about knapping that annoys me is that I can't drag-click to remove them, and if I try to go as fast as I know I can, I end up double-clicking at some point. Either the drag-click should be added, or the double-click should be removed. Otherwise I love it, and I strongly disagree that 5x5 is too big.

Rotten flesh from zombies, after being scraped, would make a good source for leather strips.

Well I feel dumb now. I never tried digging a hole for it, but that makes a lot of sense. Maybe the suggestion should have been "update the wiki to let people know how water works." Maybe I can do that myself, make up for my emberrasment.

Am I mistaken in thinking this was a Monty Python thing? Anyway, hillarious!

It didn't do that last time I tried it. I placed the bucket water and it drained right out. I didn't think to jump in to drink, but it didn't last very long. Are you saying I could have lugged up 9 buckets full of water and made a 3x3 pool out of them?

You know, I don't have to see an acorn for a tiny tree to begin to grow. Likewise we don't have to see erosion happen for more rocks to be exposed. If every time it rains there is a very slight chance of some rocks being generated - so slowly that maybe after a TFC year a cleared-out area looks like it's only half cleared-out - I would find that to be utterly believable and not even close to challenge-breaking. Because really, the only argument that holds up against respawning rocks is that it breaks the challenge. Find the balance point and it's not an issue.

I love the idea of using ice for construction, but it probably aught to be treated the same way as dirt and sand are (hard to stack) but it can float on water. The biggest problem with this is probably the fact that if you can pick up a block of ice, Minecraft says you can then move it, thaw it, and it becomes a new water source block. Awesome, but probably not the modders' intent.

You know, if you could use bones instead of sticks to make arrows and javelins, that would be all the use they would need. I like the idea of using them for construction because it would look cool, but a bone is more analogous to a stick than a plank, so unless sticks get that functionality I don't see any reason to give that to bones.

I don't like the idea that you take damage stepping on it. It's already hard enough to move around without overlapping blocks, and you have to assume that the body you are using is at least as capable of avoiding a contained fire as it is tripping, getting stuck in mud, or bumping its head. But the graphic is sweet.

I really like the images you found/made for the bait and fish. Excellent, easy to understand, and simple. Though probably too high-res for the textures I'm using. Also, if there's a fishing revamp, please: NETS. I fall asleep when fishing in Minecraft; I want something that doesn't require me to stare at a bobber attentively, as if it were actually interesting or exciting.