TheBlindPeople

I do sorta like the devs for being brutal about breaking the game for releases because it's a work in progress, it's not necessarily playable. But at the same time it's hurting them. At this point in the mod balance is not a thing to consider as they are just trying to make systems work and introduce all the intended mechanics. If you add too much stuff to farming now it'll require a bit of a rework when you get to properly feeding animals, for example. So the emphasis is really on getting a lot of people to play so they can test all the features and report bugs. Cutting off a majority of people who play this mod at this point in time may be a bit unwise, especially since the features that prevent singleplayer use are not permanent. I'm asking them to add an easymode crop that grows much faster than other crops. And possibly add other such features to other systems if they are so brutally cut off from specific crowds of players. It's the minimal amount of work needed to include SSP players and can be dealt with later when the game is in a place to think about balance. When everything they want is in they can completely drop SSP support as they won't need us to test things anymore. It would be nice in the future if they made playing multiplayer simpler/easier, but I struggle to think about how they could achieve that. I do wish them luck in finding the most successful decision in the face of this new information, and I thank them for looking into what their decisions affect.

I would abuse the fuck out of any AI they give such an NPC to not only rob a players chests, but also their inventory when they log out. Although the concept of an NPC that is only really active when the player logs off is neat. It would just have to be incredibly powerful and tough to kill, as well as bound to some form of home zone block so you don't plop it in somebody elses place and log out. Not that it matters, people will still just tunnel under the chests and rob 'em blind.

The changing of grass being an X formation of two textures to a hash pattern of four textures essentially doubles the graphic impact of grass. Which currently isn't much of an issue in the game, but isn't really necessary for large fields to look nice like they already do. This is only really wanted for small patches of grass anyway. Patches of grass with the hash formation could be a sign of higher fertility, perhaps even indicating how good the soil is underneath them. It would provide a bit of transparency to the farming process without giving hard numbers. The process of having grass grow back over a field would take some time, so it's not a perfect tool you can use all the time.

When we eventually get pumpkins and melons integrated in the farming system, occasionally they'll be jack-o-lanterns that drop as regular pumpkins. In Terraria they have these boulder trap entities that sometimes spawn in caves. When you walk over a pressure plate they remove a ceiling and release a boulder that does pretty significant damage to the player, killing most players without max health. Granted their wire system works very differently in Terraria and it wouldn't be feasable to make current cave generation make the required redstone to activate such a trap, but I would be completely fine with cheating this and just having a stone pressure plate in caves that causes a boulder to drop from a hidden door.

Not gonna quote that because both this forum software isn't made for that and it's a formatting nightmare for conversations. I will still dispute your love for simulations and straight up say they are not games. But ultimately the definitions of both are somewhat open to interpretation with all sorts of artsy games breaking such classifications. So to really get onto this we would have to define what we consider each term to mean. Games to me are experiences. Much how movies don't necessarily have to be entertaining to provide value to deep thoughtful films, games don't necessarily have to be fun. The interactivity of games allows players to fulfill an experience, whether this is the experience of a soldier on the front line of WWII or the meditative busywork of minigames. Even not necessarily fun experiences in artsy games. It's just an advancement in storytelling, going from observing an experience to fulfilling it. Simulation is an odd term, because simulating small parts of something else doesn't necessarily make something that we would consider a simulation. A game having gravity doesn't make it a simulation, especially when gravity works totally differently. The term Simulation seems to have specific intents and cannotations when it comes to games. These seem to have focuses on accuracy, where games that simulate gravity don't really care for accuracy. One could argue that trying to fulfill a specific experience is trying to simulate it asaccurately as possible and I could sorta go along with that. It's still a really awkward broad term to use, and I really doubt you had this sort of intent. The TFC experience so far, dealing with intended difficult systems, sparse resources and environmental hazards so you don't die, would go fine with some form of limited inventory. But the intended experience seems to be 'Oh, heading out logging, better put away my pick and take my axe with me for more space' and not 'well shit, getting three different types of gems cheated me out of three stacks of cobble on this mining trip.' Inventory management is funky to manage, especially in this game where we have a ton of seperate stacks of esources we can't just go out and get.

Gravity is simply the ever present etheral tentacles of the Enderhorrors, whose eternal lust for the physical realm causes them to pull everything towards their domain, the Void. I kinda dig fantastical physics systems like how the Elder Scroll series has, as normal physics don't really work with Minecrafts infinite thin crust between two infinite voids.

I appreciate you taking the wisdom of your own words here. This was me going beyond various limits, and it doesn't really have a good reason for it. I think at some time I made points with a calmer attitude, perhaps even communicating has unleashed some form of floodgate. I still maintain a dislike towards the community over what I classify as being short-sighted about design goals, only reason I can say this with confidence is experience interacting with games that sorta dealt with similar issues. I really should be more humble about claiming understanding about design though.

I'm pretty much just here because of the devs/mod and a need to shoot down the same stuff I see repeated over and over on here. Lurking is insufferable. And here is the reason this thought process is dumb: The two things being compared here? Completely different focuses. To say one is objectively superior to another is to say an apple is objectively superior to a hat. They have such drastically different focuses and intents that it boggles the mind. Vanilla minecraft is primarily focused around maintaining and embracing the old creative mode spirit. The additions of resource collection and basic survival don't really get in the way of the player building whatever they want. It's tougher and requires some more upkeep than straight up creative mode, but it makes constructions feel more rewarding for most people. The difficulty never really got in the way of building whatever you wanted. And that is a perfectly fine and valid focus. This mod has an emphasis on survival. Things are herder, perhaps even unfair. Resource collection is hindered and storage is unsupported to really emphasize the fact that you shouldn't be massing construction resources. All sorts of blocks in the world fall apart to your misfortune. These mechanics get in the way of building whatever you want because the focus is not on creative constructions. The focus very much seems to be fulfilling a fantasy of a survival game Minecraft was never meant to be. And that's neat, exactly the sort of stuff fitting for a mod. Vanilla MC would be an objectively worse game if it had the TFC mechanics, as that detracts from the main purpose of building whatever you want. Same as how TFC would be an objectively worse mod if it had vanilla MC mechanics maintained. I know the responses to this, "Minecraft has a specifically titled survival mode and creative mode, if you want to build whatever you should be creative" and "But TFC has microblocks and a handful of different wood and stone types, something vanilla MC doesn't have". The first I already pointed out, 'survival mode' in vanilla is still heavily a creative game. There are many mechanics that the devs could have tossed long ago to make the survival aspect more challenging, but they wanted to utilize the strength of the engine; Breaking and placing basically anything. Being creative is still the focus of survival mode. As for microblocks, dozens of different rock and wood types and a laundry list of ores for creative mode use? Mojang wants to keep things simple, with distinct differences for recolors like wood. At some point too many of the same yet slightly different blocks becomes a hassle to utilize. It offers more choices, but as people already massively run into with vanilla too many choices is paralyzing. Adding in different shapes helps smooth things out, but it very quickly runs into the same issues as too many block types.

Because it's a dumb baseless statement that forms the very basis for why I hate this community. And that's on top of my general hate for the Minecraft community. Bioxx, you do a helluva job. You are trying stuff nobody has tried before for some weird reason. A total conversion mod, trying hard not to use vanilla resources as the baseline for play. You can approach concepts with this that would completely violate the intent and purpose of vanilla. You are even tenacious and ballsy about some things, like setting a hard line about designing for multiplayer primarily, and pushing updates that clearly break the game because it's beta deal with it. I like your style man. And I know you plan this stuff well in advance so I shouldn't be worried about straight up stupid ideas that get a lot of support getting in, but I gotta be testy man.

Whoop whoop whoop good job forum software

Despite me saying it should be reverted I never said I had any right to demmand this or expect it to be changed. I'm taking a hardball stance on the potential direction development could go. Ultimately this mod may not be for me, but so long as the design desires outlined to us are vague enough to avoid this clearly silly bullshit I'm voicing to the devs that I don't want a realistic simulation. Any vitrol I'm projecting is not aimed at the devs here, it's at you, the other players here. Not gonna let you guys sway things towards bad mechanics without thinking about things.

I'm alright with the change if approached in the right way. If stuff falls over because 'dirt can't make pillars in real life' then this was made for the entirely wrong reasons and should be reverted immideately. We have already established that realism isn't a thing. If the main purpose for this is to make it more difficult to pillar early-on, essentially turning pillars into a tiered advancement with some resource cost(Pick durability), then sure, go for it. It turns a core mechanic of the game into a more difficult to use tool, in line with all the other tools in the game. It's genuinely a mechanic that is sorta jarring with the directing the mod is going, but it can't be removed completely due to how the block-based world works and would make other potential mechanics, like undigable stone without the proper tool, unweildly. It's something that needs to stay but can be adjusted to not trivialize specific expected gameplay encounters.

You seem to have a major yet simple misunderstanding of the whole situation. This. is. a. game. Everything that makes this fun, everything that draws us in, has little to do with realism and simulation accuracy. The only aspect that requires anything tied to the real world is providing a context for everything going on. Saying "This block is dirt" provides some basic assumptions for players so they get a rough idea of what is going on. This does not mean the 'block of dirt' needs to have anything closely resembling realistic dirt behavior. We are attracted to this because it provides a different difficulty curve from normal Minecraft. Things are more complicated, resources are more difficult to gain and advancing is slower. It's just as legimitate of a curve as Vanilla, or mods where resource gain grows exponentially. TFC could even be compared to mods that introduce fantasy metals with their own trees of advancement, only this mod uses real-world metal names to assume some basic properties about said metals. It has no obligation to be tied to real-life further than this familiarity.

There is a difference between not displaying the mechanical behind the scenes information and not telling players what wood has what attributes. The player doesn't really need to know the direct heat numbers of specific metals because there is a mechanic to it that does not depend on knowing those specific numbers. Knowing one wood burns better than another should not be hidden. Thus why pages on what metals can be used for tools and what fruits are in the game are good.

You'll only get trapped in a hole if you are not too careful. It'll only happen if you have no picks, no blocks, and somehow find yourself underground. The problem of this fringe instance problem isn't enough to remove the potential features it creates.