Island Survival

[mayaknife 82]

While building a transoceanic causeway I happened upon an archiplego of six small islands, ranging in size between 100 and 1,000 square meters, and situated well out of site of any other land. I wondered what it would be like to spawn in such a place, whether survival would even be possible. So I topped up my food bar to simulate a fresh spawn, threw everything I'd brought with me into a chest, and proceded to give it a go.

My first task was to harvest all of the stones and long grass on the islands. The stones netted me zero nuggets of ore: not a good sign for the success of my endeavour. The grass haul turned out much better. I got seeds for beans and maize and, even better, 3 ripe green peppers, 2 unripe green peppers and 3 ripe wheat. I left the unripe peppers in place to ripen.

Without metal I would not be able to create a chisel, which meant no smooth stone blocks, which meant no quern base, which meant no flour. So instead I created a stone knife, converted the ripe wheat into wheat grain, and then ate it. It only boosted my hunger bar by a couple of pixels. :-(

Nowhere on any of the islands did I see any animals, which pretty much doomed my chances of survival. Nonetheless, I planted the seeds that I'd found and then waited, mostly trying to conserve my energy but occasionally doing the rounds of the six islands to harvest any new long grass which had sprouted.

The three ripe peppers I'd found kept me alive long enough for the remaining two to ripen, and those kept me alive long enough to see some of my crops get to their second stage of growth, but without animals I never stood a chance. I don't know how big a land mass has to be for there to be a chance of animals spawning on it, but clearly 1,0000 square meters is not big enough.

So what changes to TFC would be required to make island survival possible?

My biggest problem was the lack of quickly harvestable food. You could fix that by increasing the odds of animals spawning on small areas of land, but it actually makes sense that they don't, and in any case that would then make survival too easy. Some better ideas that I came up with were:

• There were plenty of squid in the surrounding ocean. If squid dropped fish when killed that would do the trick.
• Sugar cane was available on a couple of the islands. Sugar cane grows fast enough that if sugar was edible then you should be able to plant and harvest enough to keep you alive.
• Sugar cane is very fibrous, so another possibility would be to have a way of making string from it. That would let you make a fishing rod and then fish for your food supply.

My second problem was the lack of surface ore. However, in terms of pure survival I don't think that's too important. It's not impossible to mine rock with your bare hands, it just takes a really long time. More importantly, once your food supply is secure, you can swim to the horizon looking for larger land masses. So one way or another you can eventually get metal, you just have to be patient.

[Gwtheyrn 70]

Interesting read. It sounds like a worthy experiment. Tough luck on the crops, though.

Rather than the suggestion you made about making string from sugarcane, I offer a counter-suggestion for a spear-fishing mechanic. Or squid should drop calamari?

[Omicron 62]

In such a case I would probably make an inventory ful of javelins and spend the nights hunting for spiders.

A risky endeavour admittedly, considering your food bar drains a lot faster while injured, but with the other option being slow starvation I'd probably take my chances. If luck was on my side, a single spider could drop the two string required for a fishing rod, and once I have that I won't be going hungry again.

[PanRouge 5]

Keep one island torchless and wait for night. Kill spiders for string. Get sticks from trees and make a fishing rod (I'm assuming that you had 1-2 trees considering you managed to make a knife. BAM! Food. Then, make a boat. Leave the islands. Never look back... at least until that one day when you are looking for gold, only to realize that you were sitting on a gold mine.

[mayaknife 82]

In such a case I would probably make an inventory ful of javelins and spend the nights hunting for spiders.

I neglected to mention that I play on Peaceful, so hunting mobs is not an option.

[Eleazzar 33]

I neglected to mention that I play on Peaceful, so hunting mobs is not an option.

In case you didn't t realize it, technically it IS an option, you can change that setting in the middle of the game, as often as you want.

[Aridhol 41]

Sounds like fun...

Makes me wanna try it...

I can't imagine playing on peaceful tho, minecraft is easy enough with monsters

To each his own tho, play however you like...

So lets see.. assuming you do have trees, you could make sluices, try to get your ore that way.. And yes, a fishing rod would be excellent for food.

You would have the eventual problem of finding leather for a bellows... If there were more viable means of item transport that would be much less the issue..

[mayaknife 82]

I can't imagine playing on peaceful tho, minecraft is easy enough with monsters

To me the mobs in Minecraft are like having someone slap at your hands while playing Jenga. Yes, it makes the game harder, but not more enjoyable, just more annoying.

If I want to kill things there are a raft of games out there with much better combat systems than MC.

[killster550 401]

the only reason i like mobs at all is because 1: ITS EMPTY without them, 2: SURPRISE CREEPER 3: SURPRISE ENDERMAN all the other mobs just have me there going: ah goddammit, gotta deal with your shit again?

[mayaknife 82]

I was watching a TFC video recently and saw someone harvest bell peppers with a right-click, which left the plant intact and capable of producing more. I didn't know you could do that! Had I known during my island experiment I might have been able to harvest more peppers than I did. I doubt that it would have changed the end result, but I might have at least lived a bit longer.

[Bihlbo 29]

I totally agree with you about combat in MC, mayaknife. The only reason I ever turn off peaceful is to enforce some realism in the day/night cycle. I would want to sleep through the night, not continue working forever, so the annoying moving garbage that comes out at night gives me an enticing reason to use a bed.

That said, spiders are the easiest things to kill. Find some, lead them back to a hole, and drop in to punch them from a place they can't reach. Now you have string, then a fishing pole, then food.

[mayaknife 82]

Since making the original post I've played two seeds in hostile (Hard) mode, to see what it would be like. The first time I found that I needed to mine a lot more ore than usual, to have enough for armour and weapons, which make things more interesting. But the second time I mostly slept the nights away so my only encounters with mobs were in underground caverns, which were easy to avoid.

Having mobs around also forced me to build shelter. In Peaceful I'm often lazy and don't bother to build one since there's no reason to. So the presence of mobs did force me to up my game a bit in that regard, but I'm hoping that the body temperature mechanics that Bioxx and Dunk have talked about will do the same thing without the need for mobs.