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Rkaneus

Scythe work

24 posts in this topic

1 + 1 + 2 does not equal 10 just because we wish it to.

If God came along and declared it does, or some mathematician could use his brains to explain how it does, it may become 'believable'. If someone creates a game where anything purple is edible and contact with air kills these 'facts' could become believable so long as they were consistent throughout.

 

TFCs two most restated parameters are 'it must be believable' and being limited to pre 1500 Earth/humanity history.

Tools are usually designed for specific purposes. A knife cuts things, a pencil leaves marks on stuff and a philips-head screwdriver manipulates fasteners (one can use tools for things they weren't designed for like cutting paper with a screwdriver, but it wont be effective/efficient if it works at all).Using a scythe on a tree is not 'believable' to me because Ive seen real scythes, I know what they were made for, Ive seen footage of them being used. I currently accept their use in clearing tree leaves - because I can do it. This doesn't make it believable because seemingly every other 'tool' in the game was modeled explicitly from IRL history so it does what its IRL counterpart was created for. Pains seem to have been taken to make sure that tools are used for what they were designed for. eg hitting mobs with things like propicks or ladders does essentially nothing even though hitting someone IRL with a ladder might very well kill them. Instead we must carry knives or swords or other such 'weapons' to be able to kill things before they kill us.Its been stated that if scythes were not used for gathering sticks they would be useless. This is true, but only because people are not encouraged to use them for what they are designed for.

->If I stop using swords for their intended purpose of killing and instead stubbournly use them to punch out stone in mines to get to ores I want, is the sword then useless because I suddenly discover that the pickaxe is actually faster at removing stone? (the sword is still capable of doing what it was crafted t odo, as is teh scythe but is no longer used for 'other' purposes.)People don't use the scythe for harvesting crops as much as they should because:a) They only need small farms. Half a stack of wheat can feed them for several months or moreb) they are allowed to use this tool for other uses that make their lives easier (humans being lazy and all)Making enough flour for 4 loaves of bread from one stalk of wheat/rye etc is not realistic. It has however become believable because most of us come from minecraft variants where we are used to doing amazing things like pulling 20 doors from our pockets, fighting horrible things like withers, creepers, skeletons or dragons (which would kill almost any of us IRL), or gorging ourselves on unlimited food easily obtained from nothingness through convoluted perpetual motion machines of automation and container nesting.If you want consistency and believability and realistic mechanics based on ye old ancient humanity, make the scythe realistic by encouraging it to be used for what it was designed for - to harvest straw/crops.Having worked in many bakeries in my youth, I know it takes a fair  amount of flour to make bread. A 20kg bag of flour along with water and minor amounts of other stuff make 20-30 loaves of bread or a whole bunch of bread rolls depending on how it is portioned out. How much wheat or rye goes into making that 20kg of flour though? According to minecraft-math you could pull out a very small handful of grain and voila a small army is fed.Instead it should be more like:1 wheat = 4 grains4 (or more) grains in a quern = 1 flour3 flour + 1 water jug = 1 dough or with a crafting table6 flour and 1 water bucket = 2 dough1 dough cooked = bread roll (half star of filling)4 dough = 1 bread dough cooked gives a bread (4 stars of filling)It should be like this instead because:Something for nothing = magic. Magic = frowned upon.Something for nothing is also not believable or realistic, nor does it help provide the complexity and other requirements for specialization which are apparently highly desirable traits for SMP.In order to make mass bread and feed self/community it would be required to literally have fields of grains growing for which a scythe would have to be used to harvest it quickly.Instead of a scythe for clearing leaves and branches, the correct tool is a Billhook.A suggested recipe might be a saw blade + 3 sticks in a row since to have a copper sawblade means you have the means to have a crafting table. Since these tools are designed to reach heights they should also be able to knock leaves off trees at higher level than we currently can because we are using the correct tool for the job.  

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As to the scythe thing, I believe shears would be the closest implement for that.

As to the food thing, I believe you are half right. Right, because the challenge of gathering food is so short lived (usually only lasting till your first metal tool). Wrong, because you are out of prospective for how far food can go if you get 100% yeilds, it never ruins, and you usually only feed yourself.

I've heard it said time and again on the suggestions that we should have rotting foods, crop destruction, etc. Maybe these features would work, but still the utility of farming/ranching will always be greater than your need to consume, otherwise humans wouldn't have the time to advance.

Food defiantly needs a greater overhaul than just lots of crops and meals, I just hope whatever they do is balanced.

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All good suggestions but... tone probably could have used work. Don't hold your breath.

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Hello,

 

All good suggestions but... tone probably could have used work. Don't hold your breath.

 

In my opinion, tone is irrelevant so long as something constructive comes out of it. He/she makes incredibly valid points in the spirit of turning TFC into a believable survival simulation instead of a blacksmithing simulation with survival elements.

 

Cheers,

Michael

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ain't it possible to make crops harder to harvest by hand? like. if it took the same amount of time to harvest one crop that it takes to dig up one block of dirt with your hands then, hell i would make that scythe! i would make it and love it!

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ain't it possible to make crops harder to harvest by hand? like. if it took the same amount of time to harvest one crop that it takes to dig up one block of dirt with your hands then, hell i would make that scythe! i would make it and love it!

And that almost makes sense considering there's usually multiple sprouts.

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Many times I've read "but then scythes would become useless!" in response to a suggestion.

 

You've just explained the reason why - it's because scythes are currently being employed "out of character".

 

I fully support crops being very hard to harvest by hand.

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In my opinion, tone is irrelevant so long as something constructive comes out of it. He/she makes incredibly valid points in the spirit of turning TFC into a believable survival simulation instead of a blacksmithing simulation with survival elements.

---

 

Tone matters. It is your opinion on that that is not relevant. 

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Hello,

 

-

ain't it possible to make crops harder to harvest by hand? like. if it took the same amount of time to harvest one crop that it takes to dig up one block of dirt with your hands then, hell i would make that scythe! i would make it and love it!

-

 

GreenLeaf - that is an awesome suggestion; liked. Lower efficiency for using the wrong tools. Brilliant.

 

 When I spent summers at my grandparents house in Illinois, I would work in the fields for extra money.  It is incredibly hard work. Most plants don't want to be picked, even with the proper tools.

 

-

---

 

Tone matters. It is your opinion on that that is not relevant. 

-

 

puxapuak- And how, pray tell, is your post remotely relevent to the OP? That is a rhetorical question by the way; Not meant to illicit a response, as that would just further clutter this wonderful topic with more useless prattle.

 

Cheers,

Michael

 

Edit: responding to post #10 in pm, as to avoid cluttering the topic with off-topic content

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puxapuak- And how, pray tell, is your post remotely relevent to the OP? That is a rhetorical question by the way; Not meant to illicit a response, as that would just further clutter this wonderful topic with more useless prattle.

 

Cheers,

Michael

 

Tone is extremely relevant when it comes to suggestions posts. You may be able to ignore the tone and read through the entire post for the content, but when sifting through suggestion after suggestion, posts with negative tone are quickly dismissed and ignored, at least by me, which results in the suggestion not being passed on to Bioxx for consideration and essentially the whole topic becomes moot.

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Criticism is by nature negative (which this post is) is a form of feedback. If negative criticism and constructive arguments towards a solution are ignored because their 'tone' is bad, you have lost at least half of the mechanism many people use to make their projects/products 'better'.

 

Im with Vagabond. tone is irrelevant. Sure I could swirl up the idea is yes-man brown nosing manipulative sugar coating language to try and make it more semantically palatable, but Im a blunt kinda guy who thinks an idea should stand up for its merits rather than frilly language used to describe it. Id much rather use my time playing TFC and storming up other possibilities that might make useful suggestions than trying to 'convince' everyone that a skeleton of an idea is the most awesome thing since sliced bread. Thats what discussion and alteration based on knowledge of code we are not allowed to see or modify is about.

 

My understanding from reading through these forums is that this area is both a place for suggestions to be put to the devs for core inclusion, and also a place for moders and other supporters to get ideas or spark discussion. I do not typically fully hash out an idea because I am only one mind and not a mind reader. Instead I analyse a system (in this case TFC), learn its rules (nothing listed in the sticky post, nothing before 1500AD and it must be believable (hopefully more so than it currently is) and keep my eye out for inconsistencies, things missing, things that may add to the whole etc and then post about them to catalyse discussion. The fact there have already been replies says I succeeded. Weather there is wiggle room for bringing the scythe into consistency (and thus more intuitive use) with the rest of the content or for adding to the previously mentioned sticky as a fixed point falls purely into the staffs domain.

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'Relevant' requires qualification.

 

If tone is preventing a good idea from being considered, then it is relevant and no amount of wishing or stamping of feet is going to change that.

 

I think the word you are looking for is 'fair.' You don't think it should be relevant because you don't think it's fair that it is relevant. And yet it is relevant, whether you think it is fair or not. When you are working with people who volunteer their time to provide you with a free service, a lot of things become relevant that might not if you had actively hired them to do the job. Unless you are funding TFC, you should show at least the bare minimum of respect when you are criticizing the mod or its features in favor of a new idea. It goes a long way. 

 

Anyway, the OP suggests that bread is being made from 'one stalk of wheat' which isn't the case. It's a roughly 1x1 meter patch of wheat stalks. Which may still not be enough to warrant a loaf of bread, but as with most things in TFC, the scale of all things are shrunk down. I am not entirely sure how expanding the size of farms would end up playing out, but I'd certainly be interested to see. The main issue right now is that it's kinda tough to irrigate large crops. If we could solve that problem I'd be totally down with relatively larger farms being required.I also think it's a perfectly valid point that harvesting by hand could take longer. One issue I have with the scythe is that it's a relatively imprecise tool and if I am doing an early mixed farming plot then vegetables/grains may not be ready for harvest at the same time. So if we do go this route of making crops take longer to harvest, I'd like to suggest that the primary function of the scythe only harvest a single tile, while a secondary function harvests as it does now. Or perhaps vice versa.

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I think the reason you have lots of wheat to feed you in TFC is that almost everyone can do all jobs at once (farming, smithing) meaning almost everyone grows wheat. And comunities are smaller. Compared to IRL, much towns have 5 - 7 people in TFC. But IRL societies had 3000 - 5000 inhabitants by the bronze age. And maybe LOTS of more people. And not all of them were farmers. In IRL, from 5000 people, for example, 2000 would be farmers, meaning that the other 3000 citizens did NOT produce grain or other food. And without counting they had to feed massive herd of goats, sheep, cows or other animals. So, each farmer had to have at least a km2 of land to plant. And to make things look even more "believable", the minecraft/TFC world is way SMALLER than the IRL world. To give an example. To reach the north pole, you need to walk 5kms. So I think agriculture is good as it is.

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Criticism is by nature negative (which this post is) is a form of feedback. If negative criticism and constructive arguments towards a solution are ignored because their 'tone' is bad, you have lost at least half of the mechanism many people use to make their projects/products 'better'.

---

There are too many things wrong with this statement to get deeply into, but I'll break it down to the bolded section. This is just completely false. Criticism is neither negative nor positive. Tone indicates motivation which is the source of any negativity or positivity. If your goal is to help improve something through constructive criticism, then choose a tone that matches. If your goal is to tell people they are wrong and you are right, that's negative. You chose the latter in your op.

 

So here's the thing... you're on the dev's turf. If you can't be civil in your manner and humble in your suggestion, nobody will give you the time of day.

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Hello,

 

First of all, I would like to point out that the last few posts are in breach of the rules posted in the sticky by Bioxx about staying on topic. In the entire posts, nothing was contributed to the topic.

 

On Topic:

 

Scythes. I think we can all agree that they should be used for their intended purpose: Mowing and reaping. I think that we've also come to the conclusion that using the wrong tool is inefficient, thus one should be penalized (in speed, increased degradation of objects used incorrectly) in some manner.

 

We've come up with one such example: the reaping of crops, which should take a long time if done without a scythe.

 

But let us take a look at what features the scythe would be losing: the function of the billhook. Would it be more appropriate for the billhook to be used in conjunction with the axe while chopping the tree down (like how a chisel and hammer work), or should one need to use the billhook first (if one wanted to) if they wanted to get stricks/saplings.

 

My position is this: Regardless if you choose to do it before or after the tree is "Chopped down", logically, it has to be done in order to process the tree into smaller, more manageable chunks for transport/storage. No matter what order you do it in, you end up with logs, and everything that was previously attached to them (in game: sticks and saplings). As any forrester would have done through history, you would discard whatever you didn't need.

 

So I propose the scythe's function be split in two: Scythe (Mowing/reaping) and billhook (Pruning). The scythe would be required to do any sort of mowing/reaping effeciently, thus preserving it's usefullness. The billhook is another matter, though. I see it working in one of these ways:

 

A) How a scythe is currently used on a tree: clearing an area of leaves for sticks/saplings.

B) Used on a tree like an axe (before the axe), taking "X" amount of time based on how many leaves there are, but leaving the tree bare and ready to be chopped down with the axe.

C) Kept in the "belt" while using the axe in the same manner as the hammer/chisel. You'd get the wood, saplings, and stick all at the same time.

 

In closing, I would like to suggest that prior to metal tools (since the billhook is a metal tool), simply using an axe on a tree will produce sticks and saplings, just at a lower drop rate. Punching branches should not be effective- any branch thick enough to be usable for tools would be hard to take off with your hand.

 

Cheers,

Michael

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Machete's are used for hacking away leaves an branches, right? Do you want a machete? Wikipedia tells me machetes are very similar in form to the 13th century falchion.

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It was mentioned above but, I think it is important enough to warrant covering in more depth: This would require a complete overhaul of the food system at every level.

 

The food system needs an overhaul already of course, it is not that the suggestion necessitates it directly. Basically the suggestion covers cereal crops (and maybe a few others like beans or nuts). If cereal crops were made realistically hard to farm, then they would simply no longer be used by the majority of players as it would no longer be worth it. In reality food was basically the primary trade good for most of the period covered by this game, and cereals were the primary food, mainly because they last for a long time if stored correctly.

 

There are three additional issues with the current food system as I see it. (It occurs to me there is probably a separate thread for this):

 

Food is too easy to collect. Especially fruit trees, it seems like a couple of fruit trees will feed a player the whole year round with virtually no work. Fishing is also a problem but at least it takes some time. Every method of food collection should be nerfed.

 

Food never rots. This is a massive issue in terms of survival realism. A good hunter can bring down a large animal and gain enough meat to feed himself for months, but without the means to dry/salt/cure/smoke or otherwise preserve the meat, in reality they end up being fed for a couple of days at most (at least in summer). This is a massive hole in the survival aspect of minecraft in general. Without food preservation being an issue you don't really have a wilderness survival game at all.

 

It would be nice to also have a nutrition system, where you get debuffs if you only eat carbohydrates or only eat one type of vegetable. 

 

I would be happy to flesh all three suggestions out with implementation details, I can program java, but I am sure the great guys making this mod are more than capable of figuring it out for themselves, and probably better than me, so I won't unless asked.

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Food never rotting is, I think, a major problem. It's wildly easy to produce enough food to keep you fed for a huge amount of time. Yeah there's a time investment in waiting for crops to finish, but with three 25x25 fields I produced enough food with just a few crop rotations, that myself and a friend basically never needed to work for food again. It's piled up in a chest. It is, of course, supplemented when we run across an animal and collect some meat, or I get the urge to make cheese, or we find vegetables in the wild. But that is pretty minimal compared to the massive amount of veggies we have stockpiled.

 

Making it require larger crops to produce the amount of food they produce now would be a bit of a band-aid for this problem, but wouldn't fix it. It'd just mean more work to do the same thing.But this isn't a thread about food spoilage or completely revamping food. There's been plenty of those. I don't imagine that reworking food at this point is a very tempting prospect.The simplest solution to scythes would be to make it take a lot longer to harvest individual vegetable/grain blocks. The slightly better solution would be to rework the drops and make it require much more work and space to feed people with agriculture. Right now it's easy as long as you're patient.

 

Both of these solutions would also fit better into a broader food rework.

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And by "making farming harder" you mean what? Exactly what kind of involvement will make farming not "easy as long as you're patient"? Requirement to right click a block of crop every minecraft day, pretending you're weeding it?

Change to drops is just change to drops. It will just take longer to establish a field and nothing else, apart from making scythes slightly more useful.

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Machete's are used for hacking away leaves an branches, right? Do you want a machete? Wikipedia tells me machetes are very similar in form to the 13th century falchion.

 

That would be a nice, simple fix. Replace the scythe with a machete :) 

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And by "making farming harder" you mean what? Exactly what kind of involvement will make farming not "easy as long as you're patient"? Requirement to right click a block of crop every minecraft day, pretending you're weeding it?

Change to drops is just change to drops. It will just take longer to establish a field and nothing else, apart from making scythes slightly more useful.

That would mostly add tedium

 

However, a combination of:

1. Requirement of larger areas to get enough amounts of food and

2. Food that goes bad if it's kept too long and

3. The risk of a field going bad with spreading sicknesses

would add actual difficulty and require a lot of more considerations. Especially if point 2 and 3 is affected by how one does the farming (areas, nutrition amounts, temperatures etc - perhaps while a warm environment is generally beneficient to farming, it also increases the risk of the crops going sick and makes certain food types go bad faster).

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I, personally, would like the scythe to be a viable weapon. Perhaps replace it with a sickle for farming or harvesting purposes?

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This thread was entirely about using the right tool for the right job, and even though it was a little rude in it's delivery, it has a point. Scythes are *not* good weapons. In fact, sickles which you are proposing to replace the tool with in order to free the scythe as a weapon are about as close to a useable-scythish-weapon you are ever going to get IRL. Firstly, scythes do not have straight hafts. They're a pain to hold upright and are designed for the blade to be held parallel to the ground. Second, the blade faces inwards; in order to attack an enemy, you'd have to hook around them and let them into your guard, essentially giving up any form of parrying/blocking. Thirdly, it's balance is incredibly off; you can't use it as an axe, because of the inwards blade, so the top heavyness of the thing will put you off balance. 

 

Honestly, you'd be better off cutting the scythe off of the haft and sharpening the staff instead, even if the staff is all crooked and has handles in the wrong place.

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That would be a nice, simple fix. Replace the scythe with a machete  :)

aw look at you... posting on my birthday

 

 

I, personally, would like the scythe to be a viable weapon. Perhaps replace it with a sickle for farming or harvesting purposes?

 

I don't think the scythe should be a weapon, its good at cutting grain, but has the disadvantage of having the blade on the inside: whatever you hit with it will get yanked towards you, and if you don't kill whatever that thing is, you've now got a very angry something invading your personal space.

 

On that note, machetes might be a scythe-sword crossover

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