Few well thought ideas

[Yawooza 8]

The Ideas are ordered depending on how much thought i put into each one, and how much i think each one is fitted enough to join the game and how important it is to the game.

 

-Significance of Rain- Before the modern age, life were extremely depended on rain, although most minecraft players probably hate and cuss the rain, but i think giving it more significance in TFC will add greatly to the game. Farming more depended on rain at early stage, later using hoes and shovels or planks to make watering canals for water to run from a near by water source to the crops.

using water holes to collect rainfall, or putting empty containers outside on the ground hoping for some rain to drink. or building watering trough for your livestock (there are records of watering troughs back from the old bible days). Water = Life

 

-Turkeys, Ostrich and eagles- More wildlife has probably been shouted out a million and one times at you coders. I just wanted to note that I have had a few games were i could not progress because the only source of feathers are chickens and they are to be found only in 2 types of biomes in the world (Temperate Forest and jungles). Turkeys in some forest or hills, Eagles on some cliff or mountain, and ostrich running in the plain. Besides, Livestock came on very late stage of our so called "Stone age" , hunting game was for the most part, the only source of meat.

 

-Knowledge is power- Having the ability to store knowledge in game, except saving a lot of going back forth to the wiki page, will look nice and smooth, having a recipe book (perhaps crafting Book+Bowl) to keep track of meal recipes by placing the meal into the book and saving the ingredients to the book. or having a metallurgy book (maybe Book+empty mold) to keep track of alloy concentrates and metals working and melting temperature, or Agricultural books and chemistry books. any of the books not showing new knowledge, but only keeping records of such you have already discovered in game.

 

- Culture - Despite it could be a big and frightening idea, i think implementing certain cultural items into the game would add another great aspect and motive to the game, ofcourse progressing with chronicle order as your game progresses, from cave drawings of animals, to making totems and camp fire stone circles,Certain wood or rock carvings with chisel, ceremonial masks to decorative drums. this would add a great creative side and interesting , fun-to-try aspect in the game. (very similar to alcohol at this stage of the game) +++Bonus Fact+++ There are cave drawings drawn by hunters, explaining animals weak spots as far as 40,000 years ago!+++Bonus Fact+++

 

-More "Placeables" - having the option to place items in world is a great add of depth to the game, adding the possibility to place leathers on walls or racks, placing buckets outside to catch some rainfall, maybe placing a plate of hot meal on a table, all those things add extra depth to the game

 

-Fixable tools- Obviously, even today, when your best available tool breaks, your first option is probably to try and fix it, Tools were never "One use", the ability to "patch" tools would add certain realism to the game, and a great amount of play-ability. Not making tools last for ever, but patch them at certain amount of times to extend the durability just a bit longer.

 

-Culture II - Perhaps a bit less important to the game, but as you might know, our cave-fellows believed the drawing of animals, and totems of abundant, and ceremonies before going out to war, gave them mystical powers, so i see it as a possibility to give certain cultural items certain perks, for example: drawing animals paintings on caves will give some hunting boost, or Totems giving crop boost to near by crops. 

 

I will appreciate any comments to the ideas greatly and open discussions about them, as a player who played quite a lot of TFC and loves it i find these ideas very appealing to the game.

Hope you enjoyed reading

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Sda215 8]

Words cannot describe my reaction to your post (do not worry: it is positive).

 

Also,

 

WELCOME TO THE TERRAFIRMACRAFT FORUMS, YAWOOZA!

[Yawooza 8]

Words cannot describe my reaction to your post (do not worry: it is positive).

 

Also,

 

WELCOME TO THE TERRAFIRMACRAFT FORUMS, YAWOOZA!

 Thank you  

[Sda215 8]

On the topic of the significance of rain, you do know that TFC is not going for the Industrial/Modern ages, correct?

 

EDIT: You're welcome.

[Yawooza 8]

On the topic of the significance of rain, you do know that TFC is not going for the Industrial/Modern ages, correct?

 

Of-course, I don't mean making any industrial farms, I'm talking about the first farms, netted with water canals that were dug down hill from a  water source, having a the option perhaps to build a simple canal system with few planks and fill it with water buckets to water the crops.

 

The term Modern is very relative, everything today is relatively modern to yesterday.

 

So are you talking Bronze age modern, The Ancient Rome modern, or Middle ages modern, very Modern times, yet differed by decades.

[Sda215 8]

The present times.

 

I didn't think the term "Modern" would be so relative, considering that most would assume that the term is referring to our current time periods. You learn something new everyday, don't you?

 

I was just making sure. You cannot always too cautious. Let's see what does Mr. Dunkleosteus has to say about your suggestions. Also, the animals are already covered, but Mr. Dunkleosteus hasn't had the time to finish the animal update, as of today.

[lalmei 0]

While I was really glad they removed finite water, mainly due to being so buggy and resource hungry, having a use for rain would be great. Even if the only thing you could build would be a rain collector. Or even if barrel could be left open and filled with rain water. 

[dunkleosteus 2,425]

Rain is something we've wanted to take more control of for a while. There's a lot of potential with rain, but the way vanilla handles it (not very nicely, it's hard-coded to behave the way vanilla wants it to), we're rather limited. If we could, we'd have rain storms happen independently in different parts of the world, relating to the rainfall level in specific areas. Additionally, rain wouldn't be tied to the sleep cycle as it is now, and could stop or start at different times whether you slept or not. Further, it could be more heavily implemented in farming, instead of having to til soil near water, you could rely on rain to irrigate your crops, and we could add ways to move water around to irrigate manually. 

 

More animals are on the way, although birds are finicky. Soaring birds like eagles are difficult, because they're not great at agile movement, and pathing algorithms in 3 dimensions are much different than for animals locked to the ground. Bat pathing probably wouldn't work. Over the past year or so, I've periodically released images of mob models I've toyed with. Most of them haven't been developed much further, but it might give you an idea of the things I've considered. Animals in general (and how they behave in-game and behind the scenes) is due for an overhaul, which is planned to happen in the [relatively] near-ish future*.

 

[* - keep in mind we released b77 in august and we're no where near releasing b78]

 

There were tentative steps towards different ways to record information in the past, but for the moment, you can write in regular old books like in vanilla with a book and quill.

 

As for culture, that's a little more difficult. Culture really just imparts a benefit (some might consider it a placebo in a way) on the person involved, and usually involves their own beliefs and values (works of pure art aside). Totems and the like can't really impart any benefit to the player without us coding that in, which is something we're not planning to do. However, if what you're looking for is simply outlets for artistic creation and expression, we can probably do something. The chisel mechanics technically allow for crude sculptures and works of the like (although resource intensive and having a very large learning curve), when done correctly, you could make some pretty spectacular pieces. Maybe try playing around with a few marble blocks in creative and see what you can make. Art could be interesting though. It's always been an important part of nearly every culture throughout history and from a multi-player game point of view, allows players with a particular set of real-life skills to express themselves and share it in-game. Cave paintings or writing with charcoal probably wouldn't be too difficult, and as an extension of that, canvases and paints could allow players to make or draw pretty much anything they want. As a side note on the topic of being able to paint, it probably wouldn't be an in-game copy of MS paint, but more like a simply painting simulator. Mixing different mineral pigments (which I've discussed earlier and are already half-implemented) allows for many different colours for the player to work with, but also adds a progression to the system, something to collect to give you more tools to work with. Obviously, we'd have to be limiting what could be painted to a quite pixelated image (hopefully not /too/ pixelated) but if I could, I'd want it to behave similarly to how real paintings are done, possibly different types of brush strokes and touches of that such to give a player made painting resemble an actual painting and not a pixelated MS paint doodle.

 

 

Placeables- something we've thought about for a while. They can add an aesthetic to the world which can be great, but there hasn't really been real motivation to add it for a concrete reason.

 

Fixable tools is an iffy topic. IRL tools or weapons can become heirlooms in families, passed down by generation (less commonly today) and even when damaged, are often able to be fixed. However, we can't really make TFC a perfect model for real life. On one hand, with the shear volume of work you can do in-game, we can't make comparisons. While it only take a few seconds, the tonnes of rock in the cubic metre you mine while digging is equal to the ware of many, many hours or even days of work in real life. On another note, player's have have access to large amounts or raw ores, the ability to process them and to fashion the metal into tools and weapons. The way the game works right now, a player is able to harvest enough raw materials to satisfy the needs of small armies by them selves; tasks which historically required hundreds of miners and transporters, people working forges and hammering metal for hours and hours to produce the tools and weapons used by empires / nations (specifically, I'm talking about Ancient Rome).

 

As a final thought on culture:

"Long ago, there came a thought. This thought festered and grew in a mind until being too large, it was expelled and birthed into the world in the form of a thread. This thread grew, some liking it, others despising it until it caused a great divide between the people who encountered it, bringing hostility and aggression to what had once been a peaceful place. The rulers of this land saw the damage being done to their people and spoke out against participation in the topic. While having their own thoughts on the matter, they tried to be neutral to diffuse the situation. Small feuds and arguments broke out across many different threads, polluting discussions unrelated to the original instigator thread. Eventually, through much effort, the thread was squashed and buried deep away from people who might find it accidentally. This thread was called "The Religion Thread" and represents a dark period in the history of the forums.". Basically, supernatural or spiritual effects / happenings are a no-go and aren't talked about. TFC is more about what you can see and understand for yourself, a world of understanding and empirical proof. It's a solid game, which is an important aspect of the game. We have no "magic" boxes (magic being anything unexplainable, whether claimed as technology or otherwise) like you might see in another mod (meaning a block or item with a recipe representing the object or its capabilities without any real explanation to why it functions the way it does. Ex: IC2 has electronic circuits made of iron, copper wire and redstone. It's implied that these objects can do simple calculations or make basic decisions, but it's never explained how some glowy dust on a chunk of iron with some rubbery-coppery tubes does this). TFC is an in-your-face "here-this-is-how-the-game-really-works-good-luck-with-that" sort of game.

[transcengopher 349]

I don't like the way it is suggested to have books that are crafted and filled in automatically, actually. We don't need anything of this sort, we have perfectly working vanilla style writable books that can have all information you would ever want to put in it rather than a specific predefined set of info that developer was willing to be logged.

[Yawooza 8]

Thanks for the feedback, convinced me on most aspects, the idea of sculpturing is always in mind with the chisel, my idea was having such ingame built sculptures, some thing abit more linear and relaxing than holding a chisel infront of a pile of marble, with mindblowing options.