Content: Slate Blackcurrant Watermelon Strawberry Orange Banana Apple Emerald Chocolate Marble
Background: Slate Blackcurrant Watermelon Strawberry Orange Banana Apple Emerald Chocolate Marble
Pattern: Blank Waves Notes Sharp Wood Rockface Leather Honey Vertical Triangles
Welcome to TerraFirmaCraft Forums

Register now to gain access to all of our features. Once registered and logged in, you will be able to contribute to this site by submitting your own content or replying to existing content. You'll be able to customize your profile, receive reputation points as a reward for submitting content, while also communicating with other members via your own private inbox, plus much more! This message will be removed once you have signed in.

  • Announcements

    • Dries007

      ATTENTION Forum Database Breach   03/04/2019

      There has been a breach of our database. Please make sure you change your password (use a password manager, like Lastpass).
      If you used this password anywhere else, change that too! The passwords themselves are stored hashed, but may old accounts still had old, insecure (by today's standards) hashes from back when they where created. This means they can be "cracked" more easily. Other leaked information includes: email, IP, account name.
      I'm trying my best to find out more and keep everyone up to date. Discord (http://invite.gg/TerraFirmaCraft) is the best option for up to date news and questions. I'm sorry for this, but the damage has been done. All I can do is try to make sure it doesn't happen again.
    • Claycorp

      This forum is now READ ONLY!   01/20/2020

      As of this post and forever into the future this forum has been put into READ ONLY MODE. There will be no new posts! A replacement is coming SoonTM . If you wish to stay up-to-date on whats going on or post your content. Please use the Discord or Sub-Reddit until the new forums are running.

      Any questions or comments can be directed to Claycorp on either platform.
starshard0

Blast Mining

33 posts in this topic

Has anyone found an efficient way to use powder kegs for mining? I was testing it out in creative mode, and it seems like without the ability to fly and see in the dark, you're risking losing a lot of the resources that drop when the keg goes off. I do really like that it can be an easy way to find a vein though. Rather than spending a bunch of time using the pro-pick, you can just a find any place that gives you a result, plop the keg down, and set it off. since the blast radius is only slightly smaller than the pro-pick radius, it's likely that you'll either reveal the vein, or blast the resource free so you can just pick it up.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

It would be, if gunpowder in the needed quantities (256 per keg) wasn't so prohibiitively expensive.

That's 128 each of charcoal, saltpeter and sulfur. The most saltpeter I've ever found in a single vein was about 80, and I've never found sulfur, ever, though I've checked a LOT of caves that touch the magma sea.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

From my understanding, sulfur only spawns near the lava pools that spawn underground at various levels, not near the lava layer at the bottom of the world. They are like the underground water pools, only filled with lava and less common. Because of this, it is really hard to find enough sulfur to make blast mining worthwhile.

If spawn protection wasn't a thing, you could make a decent mob spawn room and kill all the creepers for gun powder but that won't really work anymore. You have to go out exploring to find them now.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

i use them when that one vain of the ore i need just keeps avoiding me and iv had enough after 2 hours :D its a good thing that its so expensive though or else it would be the only way people would ever mine >.<

 

wish we could only fill half/or a forth  of the barrels for half/a forth of the explosion though

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Spawn protection forms in a 3x3 chunk square centered on the player, so 17 blocks away if you stand on the edge of the center chunk. Mobs don't start spawning until 22 blocks away.

It could be overcome. That's obviously not how you are supposed to play the game but you'd get bronze and copper gear, potatoes, wrought iron ingots etc.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Spawn protection forms in a 3x3 chunk square centered on the player, so 17 blocks away if you stand on the edge of the center chunk. Mobs don't start spawning until 22 blocks away.It could be overcome. That's obviously not how you are supposed to play the game but you'd get bronze and copper gear, potatoes, wrought iron ingots etc.

 

It was increased to 5x5 chunks in 77.5

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

gunpowder barrels are a really nice way to get raw stone and mine things like coal. Also I find saltpeter everyone and always have it's annoying. Sulfur is the major bottleneck for the barrels. You could also make a mob system like I did but it seems there's something weird that is messing with it. The mobs just stop spawning for some reason...

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Guys, powder kegs aren't an early-game tech option. If 128 charcoal seems like a lot, you're not producing it on a large-enough scale. Get some good axes, start a big tree farm, make a lot of it. With a couple friends, I'm pretty sure you could manage to collect all the blocks that drop from the explosion. A single lava pool gives more than enough sulfur for a powder keg and saltpeter is one of the most common minerals. The materials aren't hard to get, it's your job to find a way to use the kegs to accomplish something. They're quite handy in PVP scenarios if you want to take someone's base down quickly or set a trap for someone else. Their uses in mining are a bit limited, but they certainly save a bit of time. You can destroy around 2000+ blocks in a blast, which at 1 block / second is 33 minutes of hitting blocks.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

dunk, it would take less time to actually mine that amount of stone than to make the charcoal. Also, why would you need to do that? Just mine few shafts to get idea about the ores.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The requirements for the powder keg is kinda wildly excessive. I don't really think it's 'believable' that you should need a 4x4 charcoal pit just to get enough charcoal for one powder keg. Nevermind that the other ingredients are not exactly the easiest to find. That amount of charcoal would feed a forge or bloomery for quite a while. Taken as a comparison, that much charcoal for one single-use item that does the same job as a pick/shovel made with one or two charcoal, it's frankly shocking.

 

I just don't see the point of using that much charcoal for a bomb when charcoal is also the only resource that can be used for middle and late-tier metal smithing. It's a massive waste of resources for a novelty that has extremely limited usefulness.

 

I think the requirements should be scaled way, way, way, waaaay back. Like probably 1/4 what they are now, to make powder kegs even remotely worthwhile. I think even that cheap and you wouldn't see people using them very often. But that's just me.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Basically blowing things up is fun, but TFC tends to not have late-game PVP.TFC servers are seldom violent enough to justify powder kegs as weapons. It takes a certain level of maturity to not ragequit by the third night, and advanced players have a lot of time and effort to lose very quickly if they go to war. It's actually a pretty interesting social experiment. The worst that'll happen on a TFC server is a starving peasant breaking down your doors to steal your greenbeans, not trololol your base is now lava like it would be in vanilla. It's also very different from FTB, where everybody's zipping around in power armor with stacks of TNT or nukes looking for bases to vaporize.It's nice. It's like moving from the hood to a nice neighborhood. If I'm not going to blow up noobs with my gunpowder (well, maybe a few) then what shall I do with it? Fireworks? Eh. Mining though, that's a good use. I just wish it were a bit cheaper and left a nice round hole. 

1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Dunk makes an excellent point; powder kegs can be useful in the context of a town mine, where you have enough people bringing in resources to support the use of explosives, as well as the manpower to collect the resources dropped by the explosion. For single-players though, they don't have as much usefulness, which I think is fine.

1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Bioxx and I have already stated that we're no longer balancing the game for single player. It's supposed to be played SMP.

2

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Bioxx and I have already stated that we're no longer balancing the game for single player. It's supposed to be played SMP.

 

D:

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Bioxx and I have already stated that we're no longer balancing the game for single player. It's supposed to be played SMP.=

================================

 

Posted Image

 

 

GLORIOUS! GLORIOUS VICTORY FOR SMP!

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Bioxx and I have already stated that we're no longer balancing the game for single player. It's supposed to be played SMP.

Ugh. As a single player gamer it really sucks to hear this. As much as I love TFC I don't have the free time to do the work of multiple people. I hope someday we SSP players get some more options in the form of 1) Config settings that lessen the grind, 2) More mod compatibility so at least we can install other mods that help us out, or 3) someone makes an add-on that does something similar to these first 2 options.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Bioxx and I have already stated that we're no longer balancing the game for single player. It's supposed to be played SMP.

 

Seriously? I did not see this in big bold letters on the wiki frontpage... :(

EDIT: And please modify the forum so that quoted text is clearly separated from a response...

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Just because it's balanced for SMP doesn't mean it's unplayable in single player. I think you guys are overreacting. I've had no problems playing alone, and just like in vanilla Minecraft, having more people just makes things go faster.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

EDIT: And please modify the forum so that quoted text is clearly separated from a response...

THIS! It is the single most annoying thing about the forums. You can never tell when the quote ends and the response begins. It's even worse than the slow load times.
0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think the main point is for TFC and Minecraft in general to be played on SMP instead of Single Player. SP is as good as finishing the game... Nothing more. Where on an SMP you can do multiple things, other people do a lot also and the collective of various ideas mix. Not to mention different aspects of gaming that can be done - Roleplay, City building, great building projects, Strict Survival, etc.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

EDIT: And please modify the forum so that quoted text is clearly separated from a response...

 

 

THIS! It is the single most annoying thing about the forums. You can never tell when the quote ends and the response begins. It's even worse than the slow load times.

 

 

Down at the very bottom of the page, there is a link called "Change Theme" Switch it from Minecraft to TFCraft and you won't have this issue.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Bioxx and I have already stated that we're no longer balancing the game for single player. It's supposed to be played SMP.

 

This is news to me.  Pleasant news though.  Public or private SMP?  They tend to have very different playstyles.  

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Basically blowing things up is fun, but TFC tends to not have late-game PVP.TFC servers are seldom violent enough to justify powder kegs as weapons. It takes a certain level of maturity to not ragequit by the third night, and advanced players have a lot of time and effort to lose very quickly if they go to war. It's actually a pretty interesting social experiment. The worst that'll happen on a TFC server is a starving peasant breaking down your doors to steal your greenbeans, not trololol your base is now lava like it would be in vanilla. It's also very different from FTB, where everybody's zipping around in power armor with stacks of TNT or nukes looking for bases to vaporize.It's nice. It's like moving from the hood to a nice neighborhood. If I'm not going to blow up noobs with my gunpowder (well, maybe a few) then what shall I do with it? Fireworks? Eh. Mining though, that's a good use. I just wish it were a bit cheaper and left a nice round hole. 

 

Great post.

 

Considering that most players (I think) play a more cooperative game and there is not the emphasis on PVP (Uggh!) that optimizing the powder kegs for industrial use rather than skulduggery makes way more sense. We are going to be doing a server where ALL minerals will have value as "exports" so using powderkegs for mining those giant coal deposits would be helpful.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I got mad at an incredibly diffuse garnierite vein, so I found the approximate center and blew it up.This was incredibly satisfying. Take that, annoyingly distributed virtual minerals!

1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

If you do some legwork and test a few blasts, you can figure out it's average diameter.  Since usually when I use a barrel I'm intending to get all the blocks (but I play single player), I start off by carving out a base.

 

This base consists of essentially a bowl where the bottom layer of the blast would actually end.  That way, when it blows, I don't have a jagged bottom, rather a flat bottom.  A dozen or so blasts ago, I figured out how to do the walls too, giving me a quite easy pickup.  Of course, I have a room right off the "bowl" with about 4 double chests and a single.  The single holds my stuff while I gather to keep an organized inventory.  

 

Took about 2-3 blasts to figure out the bowl, about 4 more to figure where the walls go, and about 8 more to get the setup just right.  Enjoy and Experiment!

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites