The Shadow

A couple questions about the changelog: What are the kaolinite and graphite powders used for?What's the point of alcohols? Sure, imbibing too much is bad, but what's good about imbibing them at all?

For what value of 'eventually'? I've gone through several bronze picks at level 60. I've found massive amounts of coal and a bit of sphalerite, and I've seen readings of saltpeter and gypsum that I didn't bother to track down. But nothing else, at all. Am I doing something wrong, or do I just need to keep on mining? EDIT: Yes, I'm keeping track of what ores can spawn in what rock.

Got it, didn't know that. Thanks!

Multiplayer obviously has its own pressing needs, but I discovered something interesting the other day I thought I'd share. Clearly, Minecraft is scaled down from the real world; you can walk across a biome in a day or two, to name just one thing. But just as obviously, the scaling isn't linear. One Minecraft day is clearly supposed to correspond to one real-world day. But a Minecraft month is only 8 days, while a real-world month is about 29.53! The scaling must be logarithmic or something similar. So I worked out what it would have to be. It turns out that a factor of 10 in the real world corresponds to a factor of about 4 in Minecraft. (4.114, to be a bit more precise.) With that in mind, how long should a year be? It turns out to be close to 37.5 days. TFC requires a multiple of 12, so let's round down to 36. Each year is then 4.5 months long. A season is 9 days, a month and a day. The growing stages of plants are incremented in 3 day periods - which corresponds to very close to 6 real-world days, so let's call them weeks. Going in the other direction, the day should divide into about 7 hours to match the real-world's 24. But that's hard to work with, so let's call it 8. Each of those 8 hours should divide into 10.8 minutes - call it 10. And each of those 80 minutes should divide into about 13 seconds. But if we make it 15 instead, then a Minecraft second exactly equals a real-world elapsed second - obviously a desirable thing! I'm tempted to expand this into an exploration of the effects on the laws of physics, and I may yet do it... it might well end up explaining how Steve can carry so much, among other things.

Oh, and I just looked and don't see the option to change the month length? Am I missing it somewhere? I do see the day-length and year-length options.

Guys, my tongue was at least half implanted in my cheek. I do feel that 96 days is too long a year for single-player, though; and it was gratifying to find that the (unintentional) scaling of the vanilla game suggested I was right. (And while I'm flattered, Soboy007, it didn't really take very long - a few minutes with a calculator.) It would also be possible to approach it the other way 'round... Notch has long since said that one block is exactly one meter. So if one assumes that the second is treated the same way - one in-game second is one real second, and ditto for the day, one arrives at an 'ideal' month length of 8.26 days. So in some sense the 8-day month is 'right', for whatever value you choose to assign to 'right'.

Apologies if this is the wrong section, it seems to fit best here. So I've looked at the wiki, I've watched the Spotter's Guide videos - both seem out of date. I've read the change log archive, but it's rather sparse. I've lurked about the forums and have done a fair bit of searching. I've downloaded the mod and have played a bit. And I've developed some questions for those kind enough to consider them. * First and most pressingly, I notice that trees sometimes don't disappear when I chop them down. Is there any easy workaround for this? Leaving the game and re-entering doesn't seem to help. * Second, and also pressing, the Spotter's Guide videos said that ores were best found between layers 30-50... but that was before the height of the mod was raised. Where does one tend to find ores now? I've read threads that say the big veins are 'deep', but that doesn't tell me much. * Are all metals within a tier basically the same in terms of durability and mining ability? Or is there a progression within tiers? * On a related note, I don't have any sense of scale for how good the different tiers are. How good is, say, bronze or black steel compared to vanilla iron and diamond? This is especially pressing for red steel and blue steel, which don't seem to have any real-world equivalents. * Does obsidian still exist in its invulnerable vanilla form? If so, what do you mine it with? * Likewise, do some later ores require better than stone picks to mine? * I understand that redstone now occurs in cinnabar ore, but the wiki gives me no guidance as to what sorts of rock cinnabar appears in?

I've played on a couple of different B47 worlds now, and I see a very restricted number of biomes. In both worlds, I've seen Plains1 and Forest1, and in one I've seen one example of Taiga5. Nothing else (not counting rivers), and I've done quite a lot of wandering around. A friend of mine who just started playing TFC started in a swamp, though I don't know the number. Is it supposed to be this way? I seem to recall seeing it mentioned somewhere that Bioxx wanted the game to play through very differently each time - does the seed determine certain biomes to be dominant, and then the occasional exception?

So I'm told that obsidian can be harvested with wrought iron. Is there any way to ignite a Nether portal at present? Will a firestarter do the trick? Fast travel looks awfully appealing, with the way ores tend to be spread out.

It is, thank you! I'll note that I have found two fairly large deposits of copper - one of them quite close to the surface.

I've done quite a lot of wandering - like you, about a click and a half from spawn. Plus lots of exploring from my main base for ore. Now that you mention it, I did think the forests were rather small compared to the plains. And I can honestly say I've never seen a 3km vanilla biome except for oceans.

Thank you, that was very helpful. I'm wondering how that's going to work in the bloomeries, since at least at present, metals always come out 'Brilliant White'.

What is the metallurgy table made out of? From the wiki, it *looks* like eight granite blocks... but will other stone do? Also, I've noticed that when unshaped metal is well above its melting point, the temperature displays "!Caution!" along with it. What, practically speaking, does that mean, if anything? Is there some in-game hazard to it?

13 or 14 biomes?! Like I said, I've only seen 2 or 3. Am I just getting a weird luck of the draw?

You can smelt it, but you can't make copper tools on a stone anvil, can you?

Personally, I like making *smaller* charcoal pits. I did a 3x3x2, and it gave me over a stack and a half of coal - plenty for what I needed.

I have to take this back. I have now seen a set of sluices that pump out both native copper and magnetite, and both cassiterite and bismuthinite.

What do you need to pick up an anvil without destroying it? A pickaxe?

I just found a big vein of sphalerite in mudstone, which the wiki says shouldn't be possible. And I keep getting surface propick readings of cassiterite in a biome with siltstone on top and chert underneath. Not that I've been able to actually FIND it, mind you. (There is a small lava lake in the siltstone surrounded by rhyolite, but it's such a thin layer I don't see where the ore can possibly be.) Is the wiki just wrong? Or is this a bug?

I've developed the same theory, on the basis of many more sluices than 9. In a given location, they all seem to spit out the same ore. Pyrocantaes: I haven't seen even a single scrap of bismuthinite. On my current world, there's sphalerite everywhere instead. And I can't find any stones suitable for flux! I've got tons and tons of sedimentary rocks around, just the wrong ones.

The change log says that cassiterite can be found in any igneous stone. Siltstone and chert aren't igneous, and the propick can't possibly reach lower than that.

I want to make sure other people see this before I use the bug tracker... I've got a hammer head plan, but when I put it and a hammer and a (workably) hot zinc ingot in a stone anvil, no rules show up, and I can't seem to make it. I've made other tools with no problem. Anyone else have this issue?

Huh. That worked. I must have accidentally done it right for my first three tools, then wrong on the hammer? Anyway, thanks!

Yes, I'm doing it the way it's supposed to be done. I've made a zinc chisel, pickaxe, and propick with no troubles. But I need the hammer to make flux, so i can make a copper anvil.

I had something similar - I found native copper on the surface, set up loads of sluices, and got only limonite. Lots of limonite, and not a bit of copper. Then I went mining in that area, and found the copper vein without much trouble. I got nothing. I wondered the same thing, but like you say, if it has data it shouldn't stack.