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Zaecus

Clay Tablet

17 posts in this topic

(Apologies if previously suggested, couldn't find it.)

 

An early game tool for keeping in-game notes for those of us who prefer not to have to pull ourselves out of the game to check our notes before we have the ability to make leather.

 

Clay Tablet

 

Recipe 2 Clay balls and 1 Stick

 

Produces a rewritable (single page?) clay tablet that can be used to make notes.

 

Fired Clay Tablet

 

Place Clay Tablet in Pit Kiln and light. produces a read only clay tablet. Blank clay tablets are forever blank.

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So basically an early game copy of books? Nah. You can get leather early enough. Get a saw and flux and that's the only rare stuff you'll need for a book.

I personally find it easier to open up Notepad or such and just type down whatever notes I'm taking. Requires no resources,takes up no space.

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...for those of us who prefer not to have to pull ourselves out of the game to check our notes...

 

 

...I personally find it easier to open up Notepad...

 

So, basically, this suggestion wasn't intended to assist those who play the way you do but to give those of us who play another way a believable tech-tree friendly way to keep very early game notes.

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The problem with this is that books are damn-awful to try to mess with, they're so finicky. I also agree that books are currently easy enough to get that this isn't really helpful.

 

However, it could be made useful i guess.

 

IRL books were very difficult to get for a long time because the materials were expensive. I remember a prof saying that a bible in the middle ages would have taken something like 50 cows worth of leather to make all the pages. Many people were lucky to get their hands on a single cow, let alone 50 of them.

 

Obviously, (I don't want to scare anyone here) we can't make players slaughter 50 cows to make books. For starters, that's many, many more cows than you could reasonably find, and secondly, books aren't THAT important.

 

If storing and recording information was more interesting / useful, I can understand why they might warrant a crafting change.

 

As for clay tablets, I can see them as an early game alternative to books. A tablet would have a single "page" worth of text space, but wouldn't allow you to erase what you'd entered. They'd have to be fired to "finish" them. Possibly include an impetus to fire them, maybe raw clay tablets would eventually get damaged? Anyway, once you have your fired clay tablet, you can reference it as much as you like. Another interesting feature would be to allow them to be placed via right-click to function as a sign. You'd be able to get them before wooden signs and they'd have more text on them, but the smaller surface area and font would mean the words would probably be pretty cramped. Additionally, you wouldn't be able to edit them as you can with a sign.

 

Just a thought. Discuss if you like.

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perhaps the tablet should also have a function in which it can be posted/attached to another block for people to see, and paper making can also be reworked to reflect how tedious it is RL, it doesn't have to use new items, the simple use of barrels to make pulp out of wood rather than crafting three reeds would already change the gameplay.

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The problem with this is that books are damn-awful to try to mess with, they're so finicky. I also agree that books are currently easy enough to get that this isn't really helpful.

 

We obviously play very differently. I frequently need to make early game note of locations of resources well before I have cows, flux, and or even copper tools.

 

 

As for clay tablets, I can see them as an early game alternative to books. A tablet would have a single "page" worth of text space, but wouldn't allow you to erase what you'd entered. They'd have to be fired to "finish" them. Possibly include an impetus to fire them, maybe raw clay tablets would eventually get damaged? Anyway, once you have your fired clay tablet, you can reference it as much as you like. Another interesting feature would be to allow them to be placed via right-click to function as a sign. You'd be able to get them before wooden signs and they'd have more text on them, but the smaller surface area and font would mean the words would probably be pretty cramped. Additionally, you wouldn't be able to edit them as you can with a sign.

 

Clay (and wax) tablets were used well after the creation of papyrus/paper specifically because they could be written on and corrected or erased and rewritten on many times. Forcing the player to fire them for them to be of any use seems completely contrary to me, but then, being able to write and rewrite books right up until you sign them seems the same way, in the context of a TFC world. I can accept that reworking the code for books is too much of a hassle, though.

 

Also being able to use them as an early game sign could be interesting, but considering how easy it would be to mess up the writing on a clay tablet, firing them before placing them would be a must. And, it would add more of a coding challenge, but writing on a clay tablet-especially if it is carried around-being damagable could provide the impetus to fire them, possibly by giving them some kind of decay function  like food...

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I rather like this idea, though as some of the comments illustrate, not sure the majority of players would make any use of it. Like Zaecus, I like to use book and quill quite a bit rather than tab-out to notepad write notes - with the added benefit, I have the notes when I play in an smp world from different computers. It's more awkward than using notepad - especially for people like me with dual monitors - but it keeps things more immersive. And in smp, it can be a much better way to communicate with friends in-game that're on different play schedules than I am than signs, at least, when something more complicated needs to be conveyed.

 

If it were up to me, I'd combine this with the "more complicated paper" suggestion and add a handful of lower-tech paper substitutes, with clay tablets being the cheapest and lowest tier. The properly bound paper books would be more difficult to make - requiring making a good amount of thin, high-quality paper, and possibly glue and thread, as well as leather - while the other methods, including tablets, would be single-page, and not bindable into book form.

 

But while I might enjoy all that quite a bit, as I said up front, I'm really not sure enough other players would to justify the rather large amount of effort that would go into implementing all of it, so on the whole, I'd rather see that amount of development energy put into something like glass blowing or higher-tier ceramics (porcelain, non-breaking from use, with proper firebrick kilns) rather than tablets, paper, and books.

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We obviously play very differently. I frequently need to make early game note of locations of resources well before I have cows, flux, and or even copper tools.

 

I would say that you are definitely part of the minority of players who uses this play style. In my experience, the average person who plays TFC uses some sort of minimap mod with waypoints to note locations of resources.

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pah! minimaps are cheating! XD So, really, is f3. And much as I like this idea, some more things I'd rather have implemented than tablets or advanced books: sextants, for determining latitude (instead of "cheating" and reading z position from f3); a compass that actually points north, not towards spawn, for orienting during stormy weather or underground when the sun and moon can't be seen (again, instead of f3); a thermometer, for measuring the ambient temperature (the pattern should be clear now).

But yeah, Kittychanley is right. Sorry, Zaecus, but we're a pretty small minority on this sort of thing.

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Thermometers aren't needed as we are getting a new user interface when body temperature is implemented

 

http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/6207-body-temperature-mechanics-and-implementation/page-2

 

You can space torches/signs (or whatever) instead of using sextants

 

A north pointing compass would be useful, but these are all suggestions that really aren't relevant to clay tablets

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They weren't meant to be relevant except, as I said, as examples of things I'd rather see devs spend time on than tablets, and that from someone who really likes the idea of tablets. I'd ask about this new gui, but it would only derail things further, so I'll go search to find whatever source yer referring to instead...

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I'm actually not so sure if "we", who don't like using cheaty things like magic map mods, really are so few.

Aside from not really being ideal for immersion too, I still find using F3 positioning and taking notes much more reasonable and immersive than using map mods with magic markers!

At my last TFC world I went so far that I made notes of countless interesting finds like surface ores, plants and animals with pencil on a sheet next to my keyboard and then even drew a map the size of about 4x4 ingame kilometres which roughly showed their positions and gave me an idea how far away they are if I need them, and what else is around there to justify the far trip.

Having said that, I'd honestly rather like to see ingame/immersive/beliebable map and navigation means than improvements on Books/Tablets ...

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Holy shit... so...

 

...if you place written clay tablets in a 2x2 so that they all face away from each other, you should end up with a 1.5 block tall obelisk with that writing around it~Adding more layers of tablets would make the obelisk taller, of course. Height always being equal to the layers of tablets + 0.5

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We obviously play very differently. I frequently need to make early game note of locations of resources well before I have cows, flux, and or even copper tools.

 

 

 

Clay (and wax) tablets were used well after the creation of papyrus/paper specifically because they could be written on and corrected or erased and rewritten on many times. Forcing the player to fire them for them to be of any use seems completely contrary to me, but then, being able to write and rewrite books right up until you sign them seems the same way, in the context of a TFC world. I can accept that reworking the code for books is too much of a hassle, though.

 

Also being able to use them as an early game sign could be interesting, but considering how easy it would be to mess up the writing on a clay tablet, firing them before placing them would be a must. And, it would add more of a coding challenge, but writing on a clay tablet-especially if it is carried around-being damagable could provide the impetus to fire them, possibly by giving them some kind of decay function  like food...

"Cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a stylus often made of reed (reed pen). Once written upon, many tablets were dried in the sun or air, remaining fragile. Later, these unfired clay tablets could be soaked in water and recycled into new clean tablets. Other tablets, once written, were fired in kilns (or inadvertently, when buildings were burnt down by accident or during conflict) making them hard and durable."

 

All things considered, I think making them permanent is probably best. The other option would be to completely erase the tablet if you want to correct a mistake.

 

As for the first bit, I meant in terms of code! The book code is a mess, and I don't like trying to work with it.

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How about blackboards/slates? they were used for very early writing and could give Gypsum and Graphite a new function (as chalk to write with) Maybe we don;t even need a special item to write on, just use gypsum or graphite (or an item to write with derived thereof) on raw stone, and you can write a message, which will get erased by rain/water. not sure how early-game writing this will be, but I tend to have a hard time finding reed for paper... So a portable one page stone slate and bit of chalk, or a wall of stone I can scribble on would really help with notes.

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I would like clay tablets.

We could write on them, and if you make a mistake, you could put it in your crafting bench to 'wipe' it, erasing all text.

You should be able to read what's written even without firing it, but once fired, you would be able to put it up on walls like signs, but with more text.

It would be more useful in writing down messages, rules, notices, etc then signs since you would be able to put in more words per tablet, but the words would be smaller, so sings will be better for things that require less words but need to stand out more, such as building names, town names, etc.

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