Allekatrase

Last I heard, Bioxx doesn't want to get into food again when there's already other mods that do it well. As far as I know harvestcraft is going to be a permanent fixture. I believe there were plans to package them together, though, so you don't have to get them separately and some things about harvestcraft will be tweaked when running with TFC2.

9036307616341465573 Just had a portal drop me in the ocean. Went through a portal near948x, -10409z, 81y and then followed the path to the other side and the portal dropped me in the ocean around -155x, -1214z. Only happened the first time I went through. I tried again and it put me on land near a portal.

I just had this happen to me on the north portal of the first island in that seed I just posted about the lake in.9036307616341465573 I had switched to regular mode just before going through the portal where I timed out. Also, are mobs supposed to spawn in the Paths dimension? I just noticed chickens and donkeys spawning in there, too. I thought those kinds of animals were only supposed to spawn on grass, thought it was weird.

I know you said lakes are a WIP but I found an interesting one in this seed on the first island:9036307616341465573. The only large lake on the island but it's defying physics and threatening the lowlands.

The type of world gen he's using requires tessellating an area with a shape so that each piece of terrain has neighbors that it can get information from so that it can blend together. This is what allows things like rivers that run downhill and are continuous. Your shape options are limited to only those that will tessellate, so I guess you could go with squares, but then each cell only has 4 neighbors and you would probably see a lot of right angles. Hexes have 6 neighbors increasing the blending options and your angles are more likely to be around 60 degrees which is likely to look more natural than 90 degrees. I'm pretty sure some noise is going to be added in to blur the edges between hexes so they're less obvious and then I don't think this will even be an issue anymore. As far as your main point, I understand where you're coming from and definitely understand how limiting the islands can be, especially since they are currently planned to only have one stone type each. However, one thing that TFC1 suffered greatly from for me was a lack of progression and challenge. Sure, there was a technological progression, but the challenges never got harder which made the technological progression seem pointless. Grinding the next tech level just for the sake of having it even though you were no longer challenged by anything. The island approach, I think, solves this nicely. To continue technological progression you have to face increasingly difficult challenges and to face the next challenge likely requires that you develop what's available to you. The one thing I hope gets taken into consideration is transportation. With the island setup it seems highly likely that you'll want to be gathering resources from multiple islands. With the current size of the islands I would hate to have to be constantly walking back and forth with inventories full of stone from a quarry two islands over so I can get the stone I want in my main base. I'm really hoping some good methods of moving resources are considered, probably from integration with another mod, such as railcraft, much like food is being handled by harvestcraft. On the knapping issue, you can hold down and drag to go much faster and the pattern overlay is very helpful. I don't feel like it's that tedious and I think the larger grid size will allow for more patterns. I do agree that tedious processes should be avoided unless they're necessary, though.

I agree about harvestcraft. Finding "gardens" with random plants in them is just weird.

It's the ocean. There were streams running to the edge all over the place but they all stopped, defying physics instead of being waterfalls. The next island I went to was almost entirely covered with desert highlands but had green valleys with lakes and streams cutting through it. It looked amazing. EDIT: Here's a screenshot of the second island I went to in that world. The hexes are pretty visible but I think I read that it's likely that Bioxx is going to introduce some noise to blend those out a bit. Either way I think it looks amazing.

I don't know if there's a trick to getting water to flow during worldgen but I ended up on an island with short cliffs into the ocean in many places and where the streams ran to the edge they didn't flow over the edge. I love the rapid fire updates and I'm really looking forward to this mod when it gets fleshed out more. I love the concepts and the terrain is already beautiful.

There's a portal right next to spawn in this seed:-4528675957464237312 The portal goes to the Paths dimensions and drops you into the void. Are there supposed to be portals on every island? I spent a long time looking and went all the way around the first world I created and didn't find one and so ended up creating new worlds until one was near spawn. I don't know if this has been pointed out before, but streams and rivers have an issue with beaches where the sand is higher than the water level. The water will go up to be level with the sand instead of carving a small ravine through it. This happens all over the place so I'll be surprised if it hasn't been mentioned already.