Primitive beds

[Bihlbo 29]

With the planned changes making it impossible to make planks until you have metals, we're going to be going without sleep long enough to start seeing giant steam-powered pig monsters over every hill. There's got to be an alternative way to make some bedding that doesn't require planks. Here's one approach.

Basic Bedding

Find two blocks of long grass next to each other and with 2 blocks of air above both, and right-click on the nearest one with a sheepskin. This replaces the long grass with an animal skin texture that occupies both blocks. You don't sleep very restfully and wake slightly damaged and quite hungry and thirsty. When you do wake, the bedding disappears and the sheepskin can be recollected, but the long grass is gone.

Stone Age Bedding

Once you find a suitable workbench (planned to be simply a flat surface on which you click with a tool, much like the stone anvil) you can combine 8 sugarcane to make matting. Matting can be applied to the surface of any block, has the same thickness as a plank, but instead of being a stick it covers a square 1/16th the size of a block (or, 4x4 pixels, 2 pixels thick), and cannot exist without being attached to a solid block (break the block, all matting falls off). You could use this for an attractive flooring if you wanted to. However, if you completely cover the top of two non-dirt blocks with matting (256 sugarcane, which might take a week to grow and collect), you have the start of your first bed.

Next, make your wool into yarn then into cloth. Three cloth and a raw hide (shapeless combination) make a blanket, which is no doubt going to have multiple uses later on. Next, apply your blanket to the matting-covered blocks to finish your first true bed. When you wake from this bed you aren't damaged, and you are less hungry and thirsty. This and future beds persist after you wake.

If you break this bed you retrieve your blanket. The matting was never changed into anything, and stays where it was placed.

Wood Age Bedding

This is much like your stone age bed, but it is made from planks covering at least every other position, parallel to one another, over the length of two blocks (16 planks). What is under the planks is unimportant - they could even be elevated and attached to the wall. Once this is done you should have space enough for a 17th plank at the end of the row before you're on a third block. Call this the head plank and place it.

Wood age bedding is accomplished by throwing a piece of leather and 8 wool into your rows of planks, then right-clicking the head plank with a blanket. The planks and loose items are replaced with a solid, unified construction about the same shape as the bed in vanilla Minecraft, without the legs. This is a good bed and you wake suffering "standard" hunger and thirst.

If you break this bed all the components (17 planks, 1 leather, 8 wool, and a blanket) fall as loose items.

Want to get fancy?

How about silk sheets? A pillow? Make a matress of straw (any of the harvested grain plants). Double beds with metal frames. The ultimate in luxury: hundreds of feathers.

Fancy beds could increase skill gain for a few hours, leave you feeling barely peckish instead of hungry, or give you a buff that lasts half a day.

[dunkleosteus 2,425]

yeah, we're just lazy, but hopefully we'll get around to this at some point.

[Bihlbo 29]

I am fine with beds as they are now. But in reading the plans for the future, making the vanilla bed with planks is going to require quite a lot more work than it does now. Of course your design goals don't include preventing people from sleeping in the stone age, so I thought I'd suggest a solution.