McFrugal

I don't see why we can't bake clay into bricks. We can bake clay into molds, but not bricks to make a bloomery? Another method for low-level smelting that should be available is via kilns, which are hot enough for copper for sure. Secondly, if we can't make stone swords, I suggest there be some similarly-effective melee weapon available at the start. A stone club, perhaps? The stone axe is almost good enough, but without any armor to speak of and without the ability to BLOCK, you're gonna die if you encounter more than one skeleton at a time. Because of the amount of wandering you need to do to find ore, this means you will lose your shit simply due to unlucky monster spawns. This is not fun. This is not even much more realistic than vanilla minecraft. The fact that you can't make a compass and thusly no MAP makes this problem even worse. I would also like to suggest a different, more realistic, less exploitable way for the prospector's pick to work. Instead of a flat reading based on how much ore is in the scanning area, it should give a reading based more on distance to each individual block of ore, with a multiplicative effect on the reading. To keep things basically equivalent as far as accuracy is concerned, the distance readings would need to spread out in a nebulous fashion rather than a square. Basically I'm saying that big deposits should be detectable from further away, and as you get closer to them the traces get larger- the pick shouldn't be just counting ore in a uniform detection cube. That's way too exploitable. Because you always detect ore from the same distance away, you can just triangulate and get a near-pinpoint location of where your ore is. This doesn't take skill, it takes MATH. You can just mine in two directions then take readings along the tunnels and mark where they stop to do the triangulation. If the points where readings stopped were based on distance AND quantity then you wouldn't be able to tell exactly how far away you were from the ore by when traces stopped; you'd have to take way more samplings and get a feel for the shape of the trace "cloud" and where it's most dense. It would be a hell of a lot more fun than just counting tiles, that's for sure. Also, saplings not dropping when you cut down a tree is completely pointless. The leaves vanish, where do they go? They must've gone somewhere. If they got cut off during the logging process, then surely it would result in saplings being dropped just like if you cut them off yourself. Manually shaving trees every time you chop down a tree in order to get saplings is MAXIMUM NOT FUN. The scythe is not a solution; it is even worse than shaving them yourself for tree farms because you get less saplings. It is only useful for getting sticks. Lower sapling drops does not make wood more scarce- you can easily farm willow without even shaving half the tree, and maple/hickory drops enough saplings via shaving that it's renewable. Hey, that's the BEST WOOD. All the tree types that are hard to farm are only sought after for their wood color. If you want to make tree farming harder, make trees grow slower. Much slower. At least then we know we WILL get more of the same wood eventually, rather than gambling on a sapling drop on trees with less leaves while manually punching each leaf block. One at a time. Not fun, not realistic. All trees are renewable in real life, even sequoia.