The Shadow

Ore spawns need to be revised at some point. T0 and copper never spawn above 130, so surface nuggets from rocks make those really easy to find with your first pick. And yeah deeper tunnels at 60 will eventually lead to everything else. Exploratory mining is kinda boring and predictable in recent versions.

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.

Changing the year length changes the month length at the same time. 96 days in a year means 8 days in a month. So if you increase that to say 144 days in a year, that ups the month length to 12 days.

Got it, didn't know that.  Thanks!

There is an option in TFCOptions.cfg (The Config File) to determine how long you wish for your SSP month to be in days. So technically, year length is entirely configurable.

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'.

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.

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.

The metallurgy table can be made by any type of raw stone, all blocks have to be the same type. Basically it's just a stone table with channels chipped out of it to help spread and blend metals into alloys.

When the Caution warning appears the metal is close to evaporating, meaning it might just dissapear. This heat mechanic isn't implemented into the bloomeries yet, can't remember about forge....

Just never place a "Caution" warning mold into a firepit, that instantly looses you that metal, the mold stays however

I hope that you've seen that most of the wiki pages are up to date on the changes from 47f

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 actually use copper as a starting metal as you can smelt it in a firepit. I know for sure since i tried it and it worked, though i did it by towering up to 255, then burning hickory and using a bellows.

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'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?

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.

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?

Theory: For a given location, a sluice box can only ever find one type of ore, no matter how many ores are in range. This is based on my results with 9 sluice boxes.

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 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?

My experience is that the ingot must be placed last for it to work properly.

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

By “stone anvil†you mean “piece of stone you hit with a hammerâ€, right?

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 found a spot with two cassiterite, and set up triple sluice boxes there. I've gone through 2, maybe 2.5 stacks of gravel without getting any cassiterite from the sluices. However, I have gotten 10 native copper nuggets. The only native copper I found in rocks was a bit over 100 meters away, so I found this pretty surprising. (The sluice boxes are only a couple meters from where I found the cassiterite.)

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.

Also, it doesn't matter where the gravel comes from, right? It all stacks together, so it seems like it has no data tucked away inside.

I wondered the same thing, but like you say, if it has data it shouldn't stack.

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?

One thing about animals: If they're going to take a realistic amount of time to grow up, shouldn't they also be born in realistic-sized litters?

I also am enjoying this build much more than 45 or 46. Nearly ragequit when I accidentally spilled not one but *two* molds of unshaped zinc, but I'm recovering with plentiful sluices.

Gold-panning seems nearly useless, I haven't figured out how to do it efficiently, but sluices are awesome!