Rkaneus

1 + 1 + 2 does not equal 10 just because we wish it to. If God came along and declared it does, or some mathematician could use his brains to explain how it does, it may become 'believable'. If someone creates a game where anything purple is edible and contact with air kills these 'facts' could become believable so long as they were consistent throughout. TFCs two most restated parameters are 'it must be believable' and being limited to pre 1500 Earth/humanity history. Tools are usually designed for specific purposes. A knife cuts things, a pencil leaves marks on stuff and a philips-head screwdriver manipulates fasteners (one can use tools for things they weren't designed for like cutting paper with a screwdriver, but it wont be effective/efficient if it works at all).Using a scythe on a tree is not 'believable' to me because Ive seen real scythes, I know what they were made for, Ive seen footage of them being used. I currently accept their use in clearing tree leaves - because I can do it. This doesn't make it believable because seemingly every other 'tool' in the game was modeled explicitly from IRL history so it does what its IRL counterpart was created for. Pains seem to have been taken to make sure that tools are used for what they were designed for. eg hitting mobs with things like propicks or ladders does essentially nothing even though hitting someone IRL with a ladder might very well kill them. Instead we must carry knives or swords or other such 'weapons' to be able to kill things before they kill us.Its been stated that if scythes were not used for gathering sticks they would be useless. This is true, but only because people are not encouraged to use them for what they are designed for. ->If I stop using swords for their intended purpose of killing and instead stubbournly use them to punch out stone in mines to get to ores I want, is the sword then useless because I suddenly discover that the pickaxe is actually faster at removing stone? (the sword is still capable of doing what it was crafted t odo, as is teh scythe but is no longer used for 'other' purposes.)People don't use the scythe for harvesting crops as much as they should because:a) They only need small farms. Half a stack of wheat can feed them for several months or moreb) they are allowed to use this tool for other uses that make their lives easier (humans being lazy and all)Making enough flour for 4 loaves of bread from one stalk of wheat/rye etc is not realistic. It has however become believable because most of us come from minecraft variants where we are used to doing amazing things like pulling 20 doors from our pockets, fighting horrible things like withers, creepers, skeletons or dragons (which would kill almost any of us IRL), or gorging ourselves on unlimited food easily obtained from nothingness through convoluted perpetual motion machines of automation and container nesting.If you want consistency and believability and realistic mechanics based on ye old ancient humanity, make the scythe realistic by encouraging it to be used for what it was designed for - to harvest straw/crops.Having worked in many bakeries in my youth, I know it takes a fair amount of flour to make bread. A 20kg bag of flour along with water and minor amounts of other stuff make 20-30 loaves of bread or a whole bunch of bread rolls depending on how it is portioned out. How much wheat or rye goes into making that 20kg of flour though? According to minecraft-math you could pull out a very small handful of grain and voila a small army is fed.Instead it should be more like:1 wheat = 4 grains4 (or more) grains in a quern = 1 flour3 flour + 1 water jug = 1 dough or with a crafting table6 flour and 1 water bucket = 2 dough1 dough cooked = bread roll (half star of filling)4 dough = 1 bread dough cooked gives a bread (4 stars of filling)It should be like this instead because:Something for nothing = magic. Magic = frowned upon.Something for nothing is also not believable or realistic, nor does it help provide the complexity and other requirements for specialization which are apparently highly desirable traits for SMP.In order to make mass bread and feed self/community it would be required to literally have fields of grains growing for which a scythe would have to be used to harvest it quickly.Instead of a scythe for clearing leaves and branches, the correct tool is a Billhook.A suggested recipe might be a saw blade + 3 sticks in a row since to have a copper sawblade means you have the means to have a crafting table. Since these tools are designed to reach heights they should also be able to knock leaves off trees at higher level than we currently can because we are using the correct tool for the job.

- The tin page lists it as an ingredient in bismuth bronze as well as bronze. Bismut bronze is made form bismuth, copper and ZINC, not tin. - in the tools and weapons page it lists the spindle as requiring metal age, but a spindle is made from one clay and a stick, then another stick added after firing... - Is the amount of hides/leather that a barrel of limewater/water/tannin can process going to be added to the wiki once they have been..modified? This is exceedingly important information as putting in too much results in the loss of the excess (Which i discovered to my sorrow on Earth3) even though other object behaviors suggest it would have just not worked.

Criticism is by nature negative (which this post is) is a form of feedback. If negative criticism and constructive arguments towards a solution are ignored because their 'tone' is bad, you have lost at least half of the mechanism many people use to make their projects/products 'better'. Im with Vagabond. tone is irrelevant. Sure I could swirl up the idea is yes-man brown nosing manipulative sugar coating language to try and make it more semantically palatable, but Im a blunt kinda guy who thinks an idea should stand up for its merits rather than frilly language used to describe it. Id much rather use my time playing TFC and storming up other possibilities that might make useful suggestions than trying to 'convince' everyone that a skeleton of an idea is the most awesome thing since sliced bread. Thats what discussion and alteration based on knowledge of code we are not allowed to see or modify is about. My understanding from reading through these forums is that this area is both a place for suggestions to be put to the devs for core inclusion, and also a place for moders and other supporters to get ideas or spark discussion. I do not typically fully hash out an idea because I am only one mind and not a mind reader. Instead I analyse a system (in this case TFC), learn its rules (nothing listed in the sticky post, nothing before 1500AD and it must be believable (hopefully more so than it currently is) and keep my eye out for inconsistencies, things missing, things that may add to the whole etc and then post about them to catalyse discussion. The fact there have already been replies says I succeeded. Weather there is wiggle room for bringing the scythe into consistency (and thus more intuitive use) with the rest of the content or for adding to the previously mentioned sticky as a fixed point falls purely into the staffs domain.

Not really worthy of their own threads I think so Ive just put them here for consideration/discussion. Farmable lillypads ->we can currently farm every other kind of plant there is in game (except long grass which grows back automatically anyway) and these are very useful. Only counter argument I can think of is 'but then what would you go out exploring for' for which there are two answers 1. Everything else. More minerals, any fruit trees I have obtained samples of, animals I dont have yet and extra everything. 2. By this logic we should also not be able to bring back crop seeds or saplings and plant them where it is more convenient to harvest them and animals should not be able to be 'led'. Instead trees should auto regrow where they were spawned like long grass crops should just randomly spawn over and over at random places and animals would have to be bred where they are found and left to wander. Markers ATM Im using Reis minimap waypoints to mark stuff, but it would be nice to be able to instead make some kind of marker that can be plonked down as I find nuggets and stuff as Im going. It also makes sense that ye old neanderthal would have some way to record or otherwise mark locations to come back to. A piece of dirt with a torch on it jsut becomes another piece of grass with a random torch on it after a while an we have no point, GPS beacons or such. I figure something like a stone with a stick or bone through it and a flower or feather or something tied to it or notches carved on the stick etc would be something that might have been used. Or perhaps have animals killed also drop a skull we can paint with basic dyes and shove a stick into and/or notch in a pattern or something.

Ty for the responses Because it will wear out my sword and I will have nothing I can use to kill the nasties? Also see my thread in suggestions titled "Scythe work" I cannot see this question listed anywhere before Euphorics post. I believe the original question was Why cant I...drink from a water bucket If I had to guess the answer I would say that a water bucket holds 2xthe volume of water of a jug and code is not in place to deal with miliBucket amounts of liquid like some other mods use so one cannot have a 'half full' bucket of water after filling a jug from it.

My reply evolved into something that should be in a thread of its own so it is now here

I dont disagree with there should be a sleep bar or something to force resting, but while it doesn't exist so does not constitue one of the environmental parameters I work within. I dont break belivability or character perspective by not sleeping because it is not not required. Early on when there is so much to do a little waiting is inevitable but Im not going to stand around bewailing the fact I dont have a bed or have nothing to do (thereby wasting a lot of time). As Ive mentioned elsewhere, there are a number of mechanics that heavily influence ones decision making process in how you play the game. Knowing these going into a fresh world influences what priority weightings are given to different tasks. If I don't have access to a bed, I prioritise lighting the area up and building secure work areas so I can keep 'working' at night. On Earth3, I had a 3k+ block, nearly straight, mostly paved and all staired road linking all my installations and outposts. It was lit up like a xmas tree with torches every couple blocks so that at night I could run along between facilities without being eaten because I got very lucky by having a major multi node copper vein under my first installation site but for a very very long time I had no bed because I had no sheep. (Dying was bad because well it was dying, but also because spawn was a couple hundren blocks away on a tiny peninsula where creepers and undead liked to spawn at night. Now on Earth4, one of my initial foraging sweeps has found a pair of sheep and I just got a sheaf of wheat, so I will have wool, but still the only metals in the area are tin and zinc and these metals apparently cannot be used to make tools so no saw to make a bed and no chisel to make stairs along roads means lot of jumping in transit at night.

..There already seems to be different damage types..slashing piercing blunt..so stones are the stone age blunt javlins are piercing and axes/knives are slashing Then you get improved versions or variations once you have collected a few more specialized materials...horns, ores, string etc Different damage types naturally kill different nasties better.. spiders with hard chitinous shells need piercing damage to be effective, rotting zombie flesh would not notice blunt or piercing damage but slashing can chop them into rotten flesh and skeletons have not flesh to pierce or slash so they must be clobbered/crushed with blunt..my thought had been this is why maces existed so once I made copper age in Earth3 I always carried both sword and mace with me. There has been emphasis both on 'once you know how you can do it everywhere - ie Smithing, and 'anything you learn here is useless elsewhere' - ie cooking. I think perhaps both are needed. A player can gain knowledge of how to do something in one world and carry it with them, but Steve in world A is not Steve in world B. A skill count encourages one to use the skill to 'practice' which is how you gain skill points. This skill level is thus representative of a given players practice in a given world. Some examples: -a pvp player who goes off into single player and 'practices' then goes onto a MP server and rips everyone a new one even thought he has only been in that particular world there 5 mins -a hunter who has been purging every nasty in the hills around his communities base for several in-world years Who shoudl be better at slaughterage be it player or mob? Since 'skill' might be called a mix of knowledge and practice, you learn the mechanics, then practice in the given world to be awesome. Tying in how hurt you are to calculations with your skill level also helps increase believability since if I came and busted you up near your field/house (read log cabin/tree farm) you aren't going to run or throw things at me very well. Taken to the Nth degree, one might also consider that changing variables such as the armour your (not)wearing and other buffs or weather might also modify how well you would do in any given situation even if you are all meta-knowledgable and practice-skilled in a given world.

Do none of you do other things in your house at night while you wait? Granted the first week tends to be boring as hell, but after that Im busy making tools or cooking stuff or once I have a mine I can spend my nights in it. I also tend to light my areas up to the point where I can be outside harvesting crops or trees etc

Going the rout of having proper wine cups for the wine, you could also make tankards for the beer and shot glasses ro something for the spirits. As far as music, assuming you 'knew' how to play the instrument, you could prewrite a piece of music in a txt file in configs or something and have it displayed in a small list of 'songs you know' interface....or just a set of buttons bound to keyboard or the mouse is used on to 'play' the instrument.

Why cant I...eat mushrooms ? IRL many people swear they are a good food and when your just starting anything you can get can be needful. Why cant I...use a sword to cut grass and get straw? Straw is dried grass cut with a cutting edge (scythe/dagger - so why not also a sword? Why cant I...eat raw meat? After slaughtering a pig we cant wolf down its meat to avoid starving without first going home or creating a firepit and cooking it. Why cant I...use water to cool metals down? I should be able to stand in water with or throw into the water, metals ingots and stuff to cool them down so they can be taken out of molds and stacked. Why cant I....use other grains to lead animals into my storage pen? The idea is 'here is something you want to eat so follow me and you might get to eat it' yet we can breed them with other grains.

Even in really old games like the Sega game Dragon Crystal you had this...you find rod or potion etc you had to first use it once in order to find out what it was/what it did. Until you had tried something there were random names used "Red Scroll" "Blue Rod" etc the nonce you discovered what it was, its name was filled in. The point to food preparation recipes (all 73k+ of them,) to be tied to seed is to force manual discovery and make each world unique. Why then should this not be consistently the case wit other things? Each ore mined could have its randomised 'bland name' then as you discover its properties by mixing with other things, trying to melt it, hammer it, carve it, grind it i a quern to make powder..for use as fertilizer or dyes or w/e its tooltip can be filled out. If you cant discern a property immediately (eg dont have wood to get hot enough to melt it) you put it aside until you do. Wood would work similar..try burning different woods to see how hot they burn, how long they last etc then add this info to in game tooltips..no need to have such info on a wiki anymore then. Once you know all properties of something its default name can be added so you know what it is, or you could give it your own name.

I use scythes mostly FOR gathering straw or on occasion crops when Im in a hurry. (I do use them on trees also but at some point i need far less wood so my treefarm just sits there looking like a forrest for long periods of time. I agree with Vagabond that trees should drop their other resources when chopped down as this is far more believable than half the tree just vapourising on the spot. If you want to control inventory..dont make the tree drop 20 million sticks and saplings...have it drop like 2 or 3 saplings for the whole tree, and a few 'branches' that can initially be crafting gridded (snaped/broken) to get sticks. If your worried about 'make things easier' require people to 'process' say a 'branch' object - depending on how its snapped off it could be a sapling or a couple sticks. (2 branchies on top of each other is sticks, one on its own is sapling) Once you have some sticks you can make knives to trim/prune branches to get more sticks. Pick any tree you like outside and go look at how it is formed. Then consider..just how many of its pieces would actually be considered a 'stick' the way we use them in minecraft (tool/weapon handles, making fences etc) It makes more sense (more 'believable/real' for the main stick acquisition to be from chopping trees down and pruning the 'good' branches than for swinging a scythe designed for harvesting certain crops at a tree blindingly hoping to cut it just right. To extend the discussion slightly its also more believable to use either cut logs or early on 'branches' to make fences and ladders than 'twigs' too.

Why could the cake not be eaten and still had? Many mods have configurable settings...and since TFC has a calendar and timer built in...configure how long a 'rest unit' is. A Fatigue bar would be like the hunger/thirst bars - i represents how tired we are and it depletes a unit every day or something and one 'rest' replenishes the fatigue bar either to full if its a full nights sleep, or however many units are rested different quality beds could be implemented to grant more rest units based on quality * length of sleep rest should not NEED to be only at night. Sleep is something you typically do when tired - shift workers, hunters and other types work at night when conditions are better for them and sleep during the day. Those who play in SMP could utilize a server side option that disables the fatigue bar since a) as RL humans we DO log out and sleep/eat etc so in in-world terms that is when your steve is also resting in SMP, but in SSP the whole universe goes into stasis when we log out as it is not a persistent world. There isn't any conceivable way to resolve the temporal distortions that would result in one person laying down to sleep for 8 hours at sunset and awaking an instant later to it being day, while the hunter goes out at night and is consciously 'awake' If you went further down the path, how tired you are could effect combat effectiveness, chance of mistakes/errors or materials loss etc. Could also implement modifiers such as foods to modify tiredness state and poisons/traps/drugs that make you sleepy etc

Why do they need specific inputs? The protection meters just require 'chipped gems' An alter might just require a marble plinth and 3 normal or better gems...you know.. gods of one place are not necessarily gods of another..so you takes what you gets..and use it. Chimes to use as a sort of defensive ward or polished stones to capture sunlight in a mirror box don't have to some specific sort, and if you can make tools to cut gems, you could take a regular one and 'cut flaws off' to make a perfect one, or chop/break others into the bits needed. Granted if you wanted to some specific flavor of gem for some vain or hyper accurate scientific use we would currently need to excavate large quantities of rocks to 'hunt for gems' but some randomness is the spice of life no? It also creates another couple problems for people that may cause further evolution - 'what to do/build with all this rock' and 'how to not make it take 2 million years' both of which addon devs might be able to help with.

This might help to get the FAQ ball rolling: ================Begin FAQ===================== 1 TerraFirmaCraft (TFC) 1.1 What is the current status of TFC? TFC is still considered to be in Beta. As such please be aware that there are still bugs being found and ongoing development and implementation of content, features and documentation. 1.2 Is there a list of already known bugs available? A list of known bugs for the current version of TFC can be found in the Support section of the forums HERE 1.3 How can I report a bug I have found? First you should make sure you are running the current version of TFC as the bug you have found may have already been fixed. If your running the latest stable version, next check HERE to make sure the bug is not already known. If it is not listed visit the Support section of the forums and follow the instructions at the bottom of the sticky/pinned thread titled Read Before Posting: xx.xx Official Bug List 1.4 What is TFC about (why build it when there are so many other mods already in existence?) Click the info tab at the top of the page 1.5 Why is this mod called TerraFirmaCraft? <insert answer here> 1.6 Is TFC trying to be as realistic as possible? No, the aim of TFC is to bring some much needed believability to Minecraft. This means that sometimes realism is compromised for the sake of gameplay while still trying to present a world that feels real. 1.7 Aren't you making things too complicated? That's really up to the player themselves to determine. Doing even simple tasks can take a while in TFC. We believe this adds to the sense of achievement. 1.8 How is TFC different from all the other mods? Because TFC strives for believability it is essentially a Total Conversion (rewriting many of the mechanics, objects, recipes etc) For a full list of differences we suggest you read our overview page in the wiki <here>. 1.8 What about feature X? It's not very real! TFC is very much still under heavy development. There are whole sections of the mod that aren't even implemented yet. If something doesn't seem to make sense, I ask you you look past it for now and wait for the final product to make your judgement. 1.9 Is this mod compatible with X mod? I have no idea. This mod uses forge and tries not to edit base classes when it can help it. However it does a lot of things that no API can help with so it must edit some base classes. As long as you aren't using anything else that edits base classes, there should be no issues usually. You will probably run into problems with recipes in those other mods. If you need to use some item that is disabled, there is an option in TFCOptions.cfg to enable vanilla recipes which will often times allow you to convert TFC items to their vanilla counterparts. 2 Community 2.1 Are there any 'forbidden topics' or TFC specifi rules I should know about? There are a number of things that we ask you to not talk about or ask for which are documented in each forum in Sticky posts. An example of this is that you not request or suggest that NPCs be added to the game which is mentioned in the Suggestion forum. Discussion of this was finalised a long time ago and design decisions/balancing issues irrevocably settled so asking when told not to is considered a form of trolling and will be dealt with. 2.2 Who are the developers of this mod? Bioxx and Dunkleosteus 2.3 Does this community have a community accessible game server, IRC channel or TS/Vent server? A list of game servers can be found in the Servers Forum. For the IRC channel click the IRC Popout tab at the top of the page. No TS/Vent Server 2.4 This mod is awesome so Id like to donate some money towards its continued development. How do I do this? See that big green button at the top of the page that says Donate? Click it. 3 Gameplay 3.1(a)Whats with all these little blocks on the ground? 3.1(When I try and punch a tree down it takes forever and the block just disappears?!? 3.1©Why can't I find x? 3.1(d)It's not letting me make x! 3.1(e)I see 'x' which Ive never seen before, what is it? What does it do? How does it work?!? Its an Elvis Presley. Seriously, there are many new features, mechanics and items added and describing them all is the job of the Wiki. If you are frothing at the mouth to dive right in, at least take the time to read the Stone Age Guide as even the best gamers are likely to be frustrated without some foreknowledge of how to survive the first day/night. If you would prefer to takes ya chances, the Quickstart Overview is a short list of significant changes to skim rather than trying to inhale the entire wiki in one gulp. You can then look through the extensive wiki to determine what the thing your looking at is (preferably before it kills you, how to use or make something before you die from not using it or you throw it away and try screaming profusely at the screen wishing you hadn't. ================End FAQ================ edits: updted Q3.1 answer (still needs quickstart guide link once its built) -added Qs 1.1 - 1.3 -added question numbering to help with referencing -misc spelling/typos corrected need to Add index/contents table at top Add links/answers to some questions Add preferred formatting (bold Qs, colour links, keywords etc), insert images or links where needed rewrite to use less big words and add personality

World Ive read comments to suggest world generation has been modified in some way to generate distribution similar to the real world with discussion about 'latitudes affecting mob and fruit tree generation' etc No info on how this works however. Is it merely some kind of +/- from 0,0 determines it, or is a modified biome effect where each biome generates then decides which flavour of it is ? is there now some limit as to how far the world can extend N - S now so that polar caps could be implemented? If there are bears and deer added to land, do I need to be more careful crossing the vast oceans lest ye kraken or whales come to try and eat me? Given what is mentioned above the 3 column lists of page links on the main page I expected some kind of 'this is whats different' overview page boldly linked right up front/top that would cover (even just briefly then link to main pages for): =========== World generation New/changed variables (Temperature, altitude, sea level, Latitudes and climate variations etc) IS lava truly only spawn on teh very bottom layers now? There is no nether (or that getting into it and having your game not crash is problematic) There are many many more different sand/dirt/stone/trees New features (fruit trees, thatch, new crops, minerals and ores exist Items/recipes removed or changed Mechanics Mob differences/additions (spawn rate, drops, spawn location differences) Physics (dirt etc now efected by gravity, caveins, New crafting mechanics (pottery, leatherworking, smithing, cooking) ========== Some of these topics exist as their own pages even though they are small/almost nonexistant (some are even linked on the main page) but most of this is all on one topic 'how TFC is different from vanilla' so should be together. On top of this a lot of the areas that warrent their own page (such as the Animals page) are woefully short on info Animals I did notice that the animal page has had some updated info added but it contains very little I would expect to find there "[Note: '*' indicates an animal that hasn't been added to TFC yet. Bolded names refer to animals that don't exist in Vanilla]" leads me to expect perhaps a listing of animals or a table containing animal info, but no such table exists and no star or bold markers I can see in 'documentation' In my current world I have been unable to find even 1 cow within most of a 3k block radius of spawn that I have explored, only 1 sheep, a bunch of chickens on a beach, and pigs just everywhere. Its taken several days of piecing bits of forum comments together to understand that: - most animals are a lot more rare and only spawn within specific parameters (chickens in jungle, sheep in extreme hills) - chickens spawn in jungle/forest but the 'jungle/forest' does not mean heavily tree'd but in fact a biome which has kapok in it and/or that F3 tells you is that biome. - there are apparently 'deer' in TFC but I have never seen mention of them existing in vanilla so I assume they are a TFC feature - bears (assuming another feature) and wolves may or may not breed depending on which info is read - chicken breeding is disabled except if you 'cheat' using pumpkin seeds and eggs are now unobtainable (I got a couple of them in an earlier version before I updated a couple weeks ago) - Ive heard no mention of ocelots so I assume they have been disabled? Food Food preparation tells of a wonderful system to create 'meals' by combining ingredients but the food page doesnt list all the different things that count as food (cheese is documented elsewhere in the wiki but not mentioned here for eg) It doesn't specify 'game rule' information like '4 of any one food is not a valid combination' or the fact that just looking at a 4 food item combination of the 38 that I know of that seem valid, this generates slightly over 73000 possible combinations, so unless you cheat, play for a very very long time or turn it into a community wide effort (if you play on a server) which in this community is considered a cardinal sin apparently, you have no way of testing this kind of list beyond a few random shots in the dark. Nor that items such as eggs are currently unobtainable and sugar, mushrooms, alcohol which is otherwise useless (unless you have seen the v77 vid outlining new changes that mentions alcohol may randomly give some buff) and who-knows-what else are not part of the subset of foods that are meal-foods. Is mushroom soup even a craftable/edible thing anymore? (I dont remember it being listed on the disabled recipe list) do cocoa beans even still spawn anymore? ...I have a fair amount of time on my hands, but Im not sure other than throwing lists of broken/missing things at you guys and suggestions to the suggestion forums for discussion potential integration into TFC or a addon what else I could do to help.

Erm I just looked at the FAQ and there are only a few things I can discern as potentially broken: -> sequotia saplings do (now?) in fact exist as I have a small group of them at two of my main installations. -> the formatting is terrible..at least when I view the FAQ page it is shown as all one big text blob with questions merely bolded to try and make them visible. Every other FAQ Ive read/written has followed the standard of each question on a new line with the answer on the line below it As far as information, personally Im more accustomed to look at a wiki or other centralized documentation for in-game info if I have questions about in game stuff which is how I found out kapok saplings dont exist FAQs seem to be more for 'business rules' or 'OoC'/meta stuff, and also taken as an opportunity to point people to other material, communications channels or methods they may help (donations, how to help on the wiki, where the community vent/TS server or IRC channel is, important posts that perhaps should be read before doing anything else, local laws/rules that may be in effect that are not otherwise part of netiquette standards etc). If you try to put much in-game stuff into the FAQ..where else is the line drawn such that you dont just duplicate the wiki or other documentation and how do you ensure that when one is updated other copies of info are also updated? One pink elephant that might be added to the FAQ category which Ive encountered is "what is with all the cloak and dagger hiding half the information?" A couple of posts Ive read in the forums talk about 'devs designing the game to be played a specific way and for players to specialize themselves in SMP' and there seems to be bit of 'we like this, don't like this and you shouldn't post about this or that within this community'. A good chunk of this attitude is displayed in a thread..somewhere...here talking about some web-based recipe collection/filing system someone threw together, posted in the forums and the resulting arguments about it revealing things that should be hidden. If 'these are forbidden topics' or 'this is where the walls of this box' are important, some statement should be in the FAQ, Community is about information sharing which includes positive 'this is how to fix problem x', negative 'I found a bug doing blah', dissemination 'Here is how to do x', evolution 'I have a alternative way to do x' and expansion 'I have created a new tool/table/block of processed data'. Since there is a community with most of its potential infrastructure here I assume the intent is for a fully breathing living community to exist but the wiki has a lot of glaring omissions that look more like its been butchered rather than being just incomplete due to busyness or lack of volunteers.

But IRL (which TFC would appear to be strongly based on) very few things are ever truly useless forever. People find something - especially as shiny and interesting as gems - and they find uses for it, or anthropomorphize it, or use it as some placeholder. Even way back when...shiny things held value either to worship, or as tokens representative of trade or as ingredients in things. To just burp a whole bunch of things out I havent seen in discussions Ive read so far as I riffle through the forums looking for shinies: 1) One problem with gems is they take up so much inventory/chest space. Gems are tiny things so could we not have/make some kind of gem bag or small metal box which could store many types or quantities of only gems? Each of my primary installations has a 'bedroom' which includes a bed chests and racks as 'armory' and one or more chests for 'shinies' since there seems to be so many gems/interesting rocks the wiki lists as having no use) 2) There might not be any hard core magic/spells to be implemented but what about placebo effects, religion, other information or effects and repellants... "Oh great and mighty blue dragons eye smite me not for I have put you on a pedestal to guard my house..." -> Just because a person thinks something does something doesn't mean it does. Also although the placebo effect itself does nothing its ripples can. Could be modeled something like a regular minecraft beacon. Set of perfect shiny stones mounted on an alter to some 'god' make Steve feel safe from the bad things while he is inside so he regenerates his HP faster or since he is in shade doesn't dehydrate as fast or something. Such effects would seem miraculous unless you know the 'meta data' of how things really work...which stone age Steve obviously does not *s*. Undead are unholy evil things supposedly killed by brute force..or holy things..what makes something holy though? some mumbled words over a bowl of water? Investing mental energies - 'good thoughts' - into some talisman? Polishing some shiny crystal until it catches sunlight and holds it for hours into the night? Salt, crystals and herbs etc have been used in 'pagan' beliefs/rituals etc for a very long time.. Who is to say mega-giant-person-eating spiders are not repelled by certain sounds..eg some crystals hitting pieces of metal or that gemstones carved polished and set into a giant eye or symbol are not scary to creepers who prefer to creep up and hug you before you know they are there? Not to mention: -> grinding gems into powders (stained glass, 'medicinal' uses etc) -> shattering bigger gems into chipped versions (more shiny green indicators) -> other kinds of 'indicators' -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_telescope_technology (seeing far, reflecting light etc has been known a longtime) -> starting fires outside

@Tsuarok this is true so I shall have to remember it for the future. In this first case however I was also using the construction of the farms to consume several large hills worth of dirt rather than continuously filling additional chests/vessals with it as I terraformed around my first main base and opened up mines. What uses does everyone use for copious amounts of dirt?

A few posts into THIS: http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/4735-agriculture-question-not-on-wiki/ thread discussion started about getting water for crops/moving water. It took me some time to figure out how to get the copper to make my first saw and having a steady food supply was kinda important to get started quickly so I used a method (documented here) I was shown a long time ago for Vanilla which still works for TFC. Find a decent sized water source (coastline near the ocean, or a river/pond with a long enough shore for your needs) http://s20.postimg.org/rx2n0o5lp/image.png Straighten out one bank of a river (or the shore of an ocean). Do this by removing corner blocks that have water touching at least 2 sides so they will fill the empty space with a new source block. Trying to alternate which blocks you dig or get fancy will more than likely muck it up so just be patient and clear dirt/sand one corner at a time as fixing flowing water blocks can be their own PITA puzzle otherwise. http://s20.postimg.org/8vxskwlst/image.png Clear an area 4 blocks wide from the edge of the water (more if you want space for a shelter or path etc and till the 4 block wide swath so its marked out and can hydrate etc. Then leave a 1 wide strip of water and bring the ground up level on the other side of it out to 5 blocks. http://s20.postimg.org/c1dsxdf19/image.png The inner 4 blocks are of course the other half of the farmland. The 5th is to allow you to place torches for lighting, and or walls or fences for protection. This extra block also helps during harvesting to prevent crops falling into the ocean. Note: 1: You must be careful you don't start filling in the water strip accidentally or it can get messy to replace the water block. 2: If your using ocean shores in TFC it can take quite a bit of dirt to fill in this much ocean so hopefully you have already flattened a hill to make a tree farm or cleared dirt to build a mine or something before hand. My finished variant: http://s20.postimg.org/ma6a37331/finished.png Because I needed a good food supply fast, I started with the landward half of this plot (and the two others like it around the peninsula I live on) and as my terraforming and mining produced dirt used it to fill in the other halves. Crop selection was initially anything I had, then one colour grouping per field once I had enough seeds, and now each shelter has a single chest for seeds of each group and now I plant one group in all fields and harvest it whenever I get back from whatever thing Ive been working on at my other bases or outposts. -> Lilly pads mean i can move back and forth at will while harvesting or fighting things coming out of the water to try and eat me, -> thatch can float in the air so they hold yet more torches (with poor eyesight I like things to be very bright and easy to see -> sugarcane, when lit by torches makes a huge glowing wall that can be seen for miles which helps find my way home sometimes when Im out foraging. -> this plot is 32 blocks long exactly so I can plant 2 stacks of seeds in each half (way over kill probably for many but having to mess with farming stuff less often means more time to dig or explore etc. -> Oh and the shack also has weapon racks under the roof that hold spare tools and weapons since I never know when replacements will be needed or hungry things might try to eat me.