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Bioxx

Torch Discussion

184 posts in this topic

Looking back into TFC after watching Pakratt's live stream and personally: I like the idea of torches burning out. Going back through old mines (or stumbling upon another player's old mines) hightens that sense of danger while you explore the world around you. While torches burning out at your home might be a problem, staggering the torches at home can prevent large problems. Light up the home, and after a day or two, break down half the torches and replace them. That way once you see a few go out, you know when to relight/replace the other half. It's a little routine task to do, but this is coming from a game where making iron tools requires multiple steps.Also, getting the dynamic lighting mod helps immersion a lot... with torches going out I might install that mod with TFC, and maybe find servers that promote Dynamic Lighting mod to be used.Best of luck to the TFC team and can't wait to get back into it. ^_^

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you know, with this thread some people seem to be forgetting something. yes there is not a permanent light source or at least one that lasts a lot longer right now (not including jack'o'lanterns) but they be in the game after a bit once we adjust to the change. so everyones giant builds will be able to be lit up after a while. just not right now

 

That and bioxx says that he wants to get build 80 out as soon as he can. I'm thinking that with that build there will probably? come more lighting sources along with whatever he and dunk will have been working on at the time.

 

all in all I say we will just have to build will less torches for a bit. perhaps we should make houses based on having the lighting source in the middle to have less torches be needed. if you find a lava pocket you can cover it with glass and build your house around the lava, sort of like a giant lava lamp lighting everything from the middle of your house

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I like the idea of building your house over lava, that's cool.

 

You say about using less torches too.  Something that in my testing I automatically started doing.

You quickly find that you don't actually NEED all those torches :)

 

For the time being I have a handful of jack-o-lanterns to do the job in my main few areas.

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well i will say that i love the idea for ssp (mostly because i use light sources sparingly already and it will add a little more challenge) 

 

however there is an issue when it comes to the smp aspect: if i cant log on  every single day (real time) and spend enough time in my base to bring spawn protection upto max (10 full mc days or a whopping 3 hours 20 minutes real time) then eventually i am going to have no spawn protection and no lighting to prevent mobs so my "base" will be just as hostile at night as the rest of the world.....

 

i say this is an issue because of the huge difficulties ive experienced in just trying to set up a forge TFC server on both linux and windows server OS, if i had to start editing the configs aswell just to make it possible to have a small base where no mobs will get me i doubt i would bother doing it in the first place.

 

i laud the idea for ssp because that world isnt constantly running (depleting spawn prot nd burning out torches) even while i sleep so not having an alternative is fine but in smp the only way i can even have a safe zone is by using the repulsive looking jack o lanterns.

 

i have one alternative to suguest: make beds that are spawn points (so only one per player per world) confer spawn protection to the chunk they occupy. at least that way you can have a safe bedroom at least for if you die

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however there is an issue when it comes to the smp aspect: if i cant log on  every single day (real time) and spend enough time in my base to bring spawn protection upto max (10 full mc days or a whopping 3 hours 20 minutes real time)

 

The only time that I ever really see this being an issue is if you aren't truly playing SMP as TFC intends, and are instead doing essentially single player on a server. 79 added a rough ability for a server to "sleep" when no players are online, so that time passes extremely slowly. The only way that I can see a full 26 hours and 40 minutes of default max spawn protection being completely depleted is if other players are constantly online while you are offline, but none of them are remotely close to your base. TFC is balanced towards an SMP environment in which players are working together, and therefore creating bases relatively close to each other. I never understood the reasoning behind players who join a server, and then travel off into the distance far away from everybody else.

 

As for the argument of the effort required to set up the server and edit configs, you probably shouldn't be running a server then if you think that is too much work. Starting a server means that you are responsible for maintaining that server. The setup for creating a server, and editing the configs of said server is extremely easy if you actually know what you are doing. We're talking less than 10 minutes time from start to finish. If you find those simple tasks too difficult, I honestly wouldn't trust having you as my server admin, because you'd likely have no idea what to do if something went wrong.

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however there is an issue when it comes to the smp aspect: if i cant log on  every single day (real time) and spend enough time in my base to bring spawn protection upto max (10 full mc days or a whopping 3 hours 20 minutes real time) then eventually i am going to have no spawn protection and no lighting to prevent mobs so my "base" will be just as hostile at night as the rest of the world.....

 

You will be able to make your base have spawn protection 24/2 (with default configs) once you have a chisel.

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You will be able to make your base have spawn protection 24/2 (with default configs) once you have a chisel.

 

Slabbing your entire floor isn't really a realistic solution. Especially since you have to slab away the top part of the block, so any time you want to place something that has to go on a solid block (like a door) or you want the stuff you place to actually be touching the floor, there is going to be a ugly little step up. What mobs care about is the top surface of the block being at the correct height, which is something that you cannot hide if you change. For example, mobs won't spawn on bottom half-slabs in vanilla. Mobs will spawn on top-half slabs in vanilla, because the top of the block is at the correct height.

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well kitty its funny how you ASSUME that i dont know what im doing to set up a server and you ASSUME that i run off in smp and play solo there. for one it is a small server for 8 of us so there is not always someone on (we are in fact all in the same timezone so there is often about 18-24 hours of people being offline) we dont spend all our time in our base (and considering it takes 3hours 2 mins to get full spawn prot that is significant) i have no problem with losing spawn protection because IMO the night should be very dangerous, my issue is that the only way i can have a safe re-spawn zone is if i either chisel the floor so its uneven and unpleasant aesthetically or if i put a vile jack o lantern up.

 

also i would request that you as an admin try to act responsibly and refrain from insulting people when they have raised a valid concern. i agree that setting up a server is piss easy if im on windows 7 or windows server OS (not tried windows 8) however i cant justify £120 for a copy of windows server OS let alone the win7 (which takes up far to much ram and HD to be used on a dedicated server box) so im using Ubuntu server and unfortunately none of the MC hosting software available has been made for ubuntu (most of it is just "compatible") so troubleshooting is a great deal more difficult and due to not being proficient at coding its rather difficult to solve issues (if you want to reafirm your point earlyer then your basicly saying that you either need large disposable incomes or a decent amount of coding knowledge to run a server successfully which is frankly BS as ive run successfully a pixelmon, a FTB and 3 vanilla servers.)

 

after spending 13 hours trying to solve the compatibility issues of ubuntu and forge to run a tfc server i gave up and paid a company to set one up for me on their server and it still took them 2 days to resolve all the issues and have it running smoothly so please in future refrain from insulting people when they are trying to provide constructive criticisms and valid suguestions you are a moderator not a forum troll

 

so yet again the torches are not great for anything short of large size smp servers because there is no alternative (no im not asking for unlimited spawn protection nor am i asking for torch forests i just want a safe bed-ROOM)

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So it sounds like some of you will be on each evening, and then nobody on until the next evening?

Your scenario sounds like it wont be a problem since Kitty said that time passes super slow when nobody at all is online - no worries.

Other than that, jack-o-lanterns are your friend for those super important places like bedrooms :)

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Other than that, jack-o-lanterns are your friend for those super important places like bedrooms :)

And extremely easy to hide.

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also i would request that you as an admin try to act responsibly and refrain from insulting people when they have raised a valid concern. i agree that setting up a server is piss easy if im on windows 7 or windows server OS (not tried windows 8) however i cant justify £120 for a copy of windows server OS let alone the win7 (which takes up far to much ram and HD to be used on a dedicated server box) so im using Ubuntu server and unfortunately none of the MC hosting software available has been made for ubuntu (most of it is just "compatible") so troubleshooting is a great deal more difficult and due to not being proficient at coding its rather difficult to solve issues.

 

after spending 13 hours trying to solve the compatibility issues of ubuntu and forge to run a tfc server i gave up and paid a company to set one up for me on their server and it still took them 2 days to resolve all the issues and have it running smoothly.

 

I hate to break it to ya bud, but if you had to pay a company to set up an MC server on ubuntu, and they took 2 days to do it... you got scammed.

 

You say that "none of the MC hosting software available has been made for ubuntu", which is complete and utter bull considering that you don't need any special hosting software. Minecraft is written in java, the servers run right out of the box using the Minecraft files because Java is cross-platform compatible.

 

To prove just how piss-easy it is to set up an MC server on ubuntu, I'll walk you through the steps (It should be noted that these steps were quickly figured out by simply googling "Minecraft Forge Server Ubuntu"):

 

  • Go to files.minecraftforge.net and grab the installer for the version of forge you need.
  • If your machine supports GUIs, run the file and select the Install Server option where you can select the directory to install to.
  • If you machine does not support GUIs, place the installer file in the directory where you want the server located, and then run it using the command (Please note the parameters are case sensitive)
  • -jar installerFileNameGoesHere.jar --installServer

And that's it. If you come across some sort of weird error, you are more than welcome to make a post in our support forum, or perhaps seek help from the forge staff. Here's a link to a couple of topics where this information was found:

 

http://www.minecraftforge.net/forum/index.php?topic=12474.0

http://www.minecraftforge.net/forum/index.php/topic,21370.0.html

http://www.minecraftforge.net/forum/index.php/topic,4301.0.html

 

To mod the server to include TFC, you just follow the steps on our installation guide: http://wiki.terrafirmacraft.com/Installation#Server_Installation

 

I'll even be so kind as to copy them here for you.

  • Create a directory called mods in your server directory.
  • Download and copy TFC into the mods folder.

And that's it. After you run the server at least once, a config directory will appear next to the mods directory, containing all of the config text files which you simply edit directly on your machine, or download, edit, and re-upload to replace.

 

In case you couldn't figure out how to run your server, this is the command (I'll use the current recommended version of forge for TFC so you get an idea of which file to run), obviously you need to be located in the directory of the file to use this command:

java -jar minecraftforge-universal-1.6.4-9.11.1.965-v164-pregradle.jar

If your system does not support a GUI, you can add nogui to the end. If you wish to allocate more memory, you can add in JVM arguments:

java -Xmn1G -Xms2G -Xmx2G -jar minecraftforge-universal-1.6.4-9.11.1.965-v164-pregradle.jar nogui

If you don't want to copy that command over and over every time you want the server to run, you can put it in a run.sh file and just run that.

 

The steps are exactly the same as running a vanilla server, you just use a different .jar file. For more information on other options, you can read the vanilla Minecraft's wiki page on server installation:

 

http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Tutorials/Setting_up_a_server#Linux_instructions

 

The page is also kind enough to provide a bunch of links to different startup scripts to use with ubuntu, which I'm going to go ahead and ASSUME is the functionality you were looking for when using unnecessary MC hosting software.

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actually kitty you are wrong to say its bull because they are all made for java not for ubuntu and ubuntu has a different directory sytem which can cause issues when trying to find relevant files for troubleshooting.

 

and yes i did get a wierd issue that was that the server was burning through all 8 gb of dedicated ram with no one on it. if you logged on you just fell into the - values for infinity. the server logs listed no issues and there was no data anywhere to indicate why it was burning through the ram with nothing loaded (as far as all the logs were concerned all was fine and dandy) the same process to set up the server is the same that i used for pixelmon which had no problems whatsoever. anyway after many hours of trying to find the cause and not finding any support for this issue that worked to resolve it i gave up and got someone more adept than me to set it up.

 

setting up a server is easy until something goes wrong and the server software doesnt think theres anything wrong. especially when that issue is not fixed by the only data and help you can find to fix it

 

when i paid for the server they set it up in 5 mins and it was fine if 1 person was on but if more than one ram usage went from 5% to 100% and everyone would fall through the world and the world would fail to load any blocks (again server logs thaught everything was fine and dandy) this was the issue that took 2 days for the managers to fix. apparently some kind of clash between the most up to date forge for 1.6.4 and tfc causing ram overload.

 

so no its not easy to fix it when there is an issue that the server doesnt know about especially when ubuntu has much less troubleshooting tips than windows for stuff like this...

 

so please cut the insults kitty you have been about as unhelpfull (even to the extent it seems you only post to try and provoke and insult me) as its possible to get and been downright rude to me without any provocation while im trying to suggest a possible issue with your new torch system.

 

if your going to refuse to acknowledge a valid concern and then go on to insult a member of your comunity who voices that concern why the fuck have you got a topic on this matter? why are you reading it? are you here only to listen to positive feedback? are you here purely to use your admin privileges to insult people? if you want to be a troll kitty try to avoid doing it when you have a badge that suguests your mature enough to not do it in public

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As much as I don't like to fuel wars I have to agree with smoothpop that there was no need to be insulting here. That said can we please try and keep this civil and make amends? I don't want to have members of our community fighting or being angry at each other.

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As much as I don't like to fuel wars I have to agree with smoothpop that there was no need to be insulting here. That said can we please try and keep this civil and make amends? I don't want to have members of our community fighting or being angry at each other.

 

i have tried to be civil here so sorry if i may have slipped

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Hate to see people arguing, kiss and make up please :)

I think we really need to just wait for the update and try it.

I honestly think it will be fine - there is a solution in place already for almost every issue mentioned in this thread.

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I just found TFC recently and am on my 1st world. Stumbled upon this forum just a few days ago. Are all the people in charge here as rude and condescending as Kitty? If so, I might as well just uninstall and go play other mods. I'm almost 40 years old and I'll be damned if I let someone treat me like that. Barely poked around here, and already seeing mod attitude that makes me leave games and forums.

 

 

As for torches, I will simply turn off the config or go so far as to switch to peacful mode when I am trying to do something. Having to constantly relight torches seems like a waste of time. Without a replacement, other than using a different mod or ugly jacko lanterns, I don't think it adds anything to the game. I have never mad a "torch forest" in all my time in MC. I always have used fences, slabs, etc to control mod spawning. I light for asthetics. I like to hide torches behind blocks so they light areas without being seen. Since chiseled blocks can't be broken without being lost, all my hidden light options are gone. I'd have to break a block to relight torches, and then re chisel it, or break the wall behind it to access it. Monontony and challenging do not mean the same thing to me. If I wanted pointless grinding, I'd go play Gregtech. I came here for a challenge, not a time sync.

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I apologize if I came off as rude, or condescending. The fact of the matter is that I deal with a lot of people who just aren't cut out to host a server on a regular basis. So I easily get frustrated when dealing with what seems like another one of these people.

 

When it comes to mod development, there is no point in adding in a feature, only to have it set to off by default in the config files. The configs are there if you wish to change it. If you don't want to edit configs, and therefore do not want to play the mod because the default config options are not what you want, that's your decision.

 

Smoothpop was also obviously frustrated with his experience in setting up a server, but it also needs to be noted that according to his post history, he never came here to these forums for help regarding the issue, which would have gladly been given.

 

As CreepyD pointed out, I did indeed address smoothpop's issue regarding them all logging off and the spawn protection depleting no longer being an issue with 79's new server sleep function. Max protection gain, year length, and the amount of spawn protection you get for each hour spent is also highly configurable. You are welcome to play around with these numbers to suit your needs, and submit them if you feel that the default values make the game unplayable when being played in the intended way.

 

I have never once on this topic bashed the idea of the addition of more lighting options. However, the discussion for that topic is irrelevant here, because it has been stated that they will not be included in 79.

 

As for DriftinFool's issue, if you are hiding the lighting behind other blocks, why is it such a bad thing to just use those "ugly jacko lanterns" since they will be hidden and you aren't going to see them anyways?

 

I apologize again if you think I was rude or condescending. As the forum admin there are times when I need to be firm, or even what may be considered a little bit "harsh" in order to keep things moving in the correct direction.

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Hura glad that we could sort this out like reasonable people.

 

 

Hate to see people arguing, kiss and make up please :)

I think we really need to just wait for the update and try it.

I honestly think it will be fine - there is a solution in place already for almost every issue mentioned in this thread.

 

yea there's more or less a solution for everything and with better lighting sources it looks like smooth sailings ahead.

 

I just found TFC recently and am on my 1st world. Stumbled upon this forum just a few days ago. Are all the people in charge here as rude and condescending as Kitty? If so, I might as well just uninstall and go play other mods. I'm almost 40 years old and I'll be damned if I let someone treat me like that. Barely poked around here, and already seeing mod attitude that makes me leave games and forums.

 

nah everyone usually friendly here. you just happened to come in on the wrong time.

 

that said if you see a suggestion locked with no real reason other then a flat out "no" from one of the devs or kitty its not them being rude although it may seem like that, it's one of the topics that has been talked to death, necro'd and talked to death again. Every so often one of them is brought back to life and is almost all the time just a repeat of the same things that have been said before.

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The "ugly jack'o lantern" option is only here because, as I can understand, they aren't really considered replenishable and/or bothered to taken care of yet.

From what I understand from Bioxx's posts lately, TFC will not have any craftable permanent light sources eventually.

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The only time that I ever really see this being an issue is if you aren't truly playing SMP as TFC intends,

Quite frankly, I believe this to be the single most dangerous class of statements that can be said about a mod, that a certain mod is intended to be played in a certain way. While it's all fine and dandy to make a certain kind of play easier to accomplish with the specific mechanics, but its when players play the game in a different way and are able to pull it off by using those mechanics in a way unintended by the mod developer is where the really interesting play comes in. This is why I find this statement strangely contradictory to Bioxx's previous statement further up that he wants to see something other than "the same old routine over and over". I seriously cannot reconcile these two statements — that you guys want to see new gameplay, yet seem to do everything in your power to shackle us to a single style of gameplay.

 

But back to Kitty's original admonisment that smoothpop seemed to be trying to play solo on a multiplayer server, and that because one player is off on his own that he somehow is not "working together" with other players. If all resources were to be found in one place as in vanilla Minecraft, I might agree with this statement, but the way TFC worlds are actually arranged makes progression practically impossible unless someone goes out and explores — finding all the crops and mobs, trees and fruit bushes, and especially ores. They don't all spawn in the same area. With limited options for long-range transport this practically necessitates outposts — regions far away where people can gather and refine local resources for transport back to the main settlements. So if someone is in a far away outpost smelthing iron ore into ingots while people at home are building up the town, farming food and raising cattle, they might not be in proximity to other players, but they are certainly working together with them.

 

The second problem I have with this statement is the unwarranted assumption that everyone on the SMP server is working together. As Pakratt's TerraFirmaCrack series proves, this is not always the case. Sure, the people on the same faction are working together (... supposedly; you wonder about some players), but the factions themselves are working against each other. As such, a rather cheap strategy now becomes viable: camping the server for as long as possible to try to drain others' spawn protection and let their torches burn out. Thus, when Team Day Job come on to do some more work to advance their agenda against the dastardly Dirty Little Stay-Ups, they find their base unsafe and swarming with mobs.

 

The third problem is whether or not this spawn protection scheme is really going to work the way you're thinking. As I understand it, torch forests have been masking the effects of spawn protection, and as such, we don't really know what effect it will have on gameplay. Sure, the mechanic may be working as programmed and cause the effect you envision, but that doesn't mean that the spawn mechanic mechanism will affect gameplay as you planned. Consider our outpost example. One fellow on your server working that one off-day (real time) to smelt all that iron ore into ingots to bring back home in time for other players to log on ("I did good!") will find that his iron-smelting binge has completely wiped out spawn protection for his village and all torches burnt out, among other effects. If players log on while it's night time, they will find their village instantly beset by the beasts of the night (and the day, when you get to moving the unnatural mobs to the underground and replace them with dangerous wild animals — bears don't burn up in the sun). Either this will discourage exploration for resources (unnaturally hobbling tech progression), or balkanize the servers themselves to players able to play at much the same time.

 

And to address Bioxx's concern that replacing the torch functionality with lanterns would be "the same thing," torch spamming is effective because the resources to make tons of torches are available early-game. Lanterns would require metal, which is in short supply, and as such you won't see lantern spamming unless someone is playing in creative (which makes the danger issue moot), and the ability to make lots of lanterns will come after the ability to deal with mobs effectively. Blue-steel lanterns may last forever, but they will not be made in any quantity that will make spamming them realistic in survival, and blue-steel armor and weapons will reduce dark mobs to an annoyance anyway. Instead, they will be used to protect critical areas and as beacons.

 

As such, I echo Maga's call (though in slightly different form): make default torch burnout be tied to a more permanent replacement. For 79, the torch burnout mechanic should be implemented, but optional. I think some server admins and LPers will be brave enought try it, and we can see what effects both torch burnout and spawn protection actually have on gameplay. Meanwhile, those of us who are used to the old mechanics don't have to worry about the update messing up our style.

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Quite frankly, I believe this to be the single most dangerous class of statements that can be said about a mod, that a certain mod is intended to be played in a certain way. While it's all fine and dandy to make a certain kind of play easier to accomplish with the specific mechanics, but its when players play the game in a different way and are able to pull it off by using those mechanics in a way unintended by the mod developer is where the really interesting play comes in. This is why I find this statement strangely contradictory to Bioxx's previous statement further up that he wants to see something other than "the same old routine over and over". I seriously cannot reconcile these two statements — that you guys want to see new gameplay, yet seem to do everything in your power to shackle us to a single style of gameplay.

 

But back to Kitty's original admonisment that smoothpop seemed to be trying to play solo on a multiplayer server, and that because one player is off on his own that he somehow is not "working together" with other players. If all resources were to be found in one place as in vanilla Minecraft, I might agree with this statement, but the way TFC worlds are actually arranged makes progression practically impossible unless someone goes out and explores — finding all the crops and mobs, trees and fruit bushes, and especially ores. They don't all spawn in the same area. With limited options for long-range transport this practically necessitates outposts — regions far away where people can gather and refine local resources for transport back to the main settlements. So if someone is in a far away outpost smelthing iron ore into ingots while people at home are building up the town, farming food and raising cattle, they might not be in proximity to other players, but they are certainly working together with them.

 

The second problem I have with this statement is the unwarranted assumption that everyone on the SMP server is working together. As Pakratt's TerraFirmaCrack series proves, this is not always the case. Sure, the people on the same faction are working together (... supposedly; you wonder about some players), but the factions themselves are working against each other. As such, a rather cheap strategy now becomes viable: camping the server for as long as possible to try to drain others' spawn protection and let their torches burn out. Thus, when Team Day Job come on to do some more work to advance their agenda against the dastardly Dirty Little Stay-Ups, they find their base unsafe and swarming with mobs.

 

The third problem is whether or not this spawn protection scheme is really going to work the way you're thinking. As I understand it, torch forests have been masking the effects of spawn protection, and as such, we don't really know what effect it will have on gameplay. Sure, the mechanic may be working as programmed and cause the effect you envision, but that doesn't mean that the spawn mechanic mechanism will affect gameplay as you planned. Consider our outpost example. One fellow on your server working that one off-day (real time) to smelt all that iron ore into ingots to bring back home in time for other players to log on ("I did good!") will find that his iron-smelting binge has completely wiped out spawn protection for his village and all torches burnt out, among other effects. If players log on while it's night time, they will find their village instantly beset by the beasts of the night (and the day, when you get to moving the unnatural mobs to the underground and replace them with dangerous wild animals — bears don't burn up in the sun). Either this will discourage exploration for resources (unnaturally hobbling tech progression), or balkanize the servers themselves to players able to play at much the same time.

 

And to address Bioxx's concern that replacing the torch functionality with lanterns would be "the same thing," torch spamming is effective because the resources to make tons of torches are available early-game. Lanterns would require metal, which is in short supply, and as such you won't see lantern spamming unless someone is playing in creative (which makes the danger issue moot), and the ability to make lots of lanterns will come after the ability to deal with mobs effectively. Blue-steel lanterns may last forever, but they will not be made in any quantity that will make spamming them realistic in survival, and blue-steel armor and weapons will reduce dark mobs to an annoyance anyway. Instead, they will be used to protect critical areas and as beacons.

 

As such, I echo Maga's call (though in slightly different form): make default torch burnout be tied to a more permanent replacement. For 79, the torch burnout mechanic should be implemented, but optional. I think some server admins and LPers will be brave enought try it, and we can see what effects both torch burnout and spawn protection actually have on gameplay. Meanwhile, those of us who are used to the old mechanics don't have to worry about the update messing up our style.

 

The reconciliation of the two statements are entirely possible because the "intended" statement covers a much more broad availability of options, in which a bunch of new different gameplay methods can be created within.

 

Yes outposting is required in TFC. However, the people on the server can work together and delegate tasks so that not everybody is outposting at the same time, and instead there is always at least one person doing tasks around the base such as maintaining farms, animals, and building up the town, and therefor keeping the spawn protection from depleting.

 

I see the second problem as a non-issue in regards to factions servers. Using spawn protection as a weapon of sorts is definitely a legitimate strategy. For servers who do not want this to be a possibility, they can alter the spawn protection options in the config to stop it from happening.

 

The third problem follows the exact same thing. If a single player being online passes enough time to deplete the entire rest of the worlds spawn protection before any other players are online, then the server admin needs to edit their configs so that isn't a possibility. They can either increase the yearLength, or increase the max protection gain, or a combination of both, which all would result in that single player having to be online by himself for a much longer time in real life with nobody else online before it causes any problems.

 

If an actual permanent light source such a blue steel lanterns were added, they would likely be ridiculously expensive. As for cheaper lanterns made out of lower tier metals, they would not be a permanent light source. It is much more likely that the cheaper lanterns would simply be torches+, in that they last longer before they burn out.

 

As for your final statement, I'm guessing you missed the part where we said there is already a config option for the mechanic. It is on by default, but you are more than welcome to edit the file to make torches last longer, or set the value to 0 to disable the new mechanic entirely.

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I suppose metal lanterns should be a bit cheap on metal? like, 8 unit and maybe 40 mB of oil/candle/tinder/lava/whatever.

 

I like the idea of burnt torches.

 

Isn't horses long-range transportation?

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I can't see how a permanent light source wouldn't fit into the game.

 

As pointed out a thousand times by now, the focus is believability within the context of the game, not realism. What makes a permanent light source any different from an infinite water source, why should we believe one but not the other.

 

At any rate a lantern will be expensive and take a while to craft, so you can't exactly light up forests.

 

It seems here that this whole "believability VS Realism" concept is just thrown around whenever an idea is being trashed, and is disregarded when an official feature is being implemented. 

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why don't you tie Spawn Protection to the presence of a bed, instead to the presence of an active player? This way you can keep your settlement safe without being on server 24/7, and this would also give an interesting usage for straw bed (they mark your base, and make everything safer around)

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I could see bed spamming attached to that, maybe it could just work for the previous 2-3 beds you slept in or something.

Nice idea though.

 

I do think spawn protection activates too fast for the area you're in though.

That comes from me testing while exploring and being caught out at night while chopping trees away from home or something - spawn protection has already kicked in by the time the sun sets so no danger.

Ahh, I see the default is just 3 hours to activate spawn protection but it's changeable in the config file!  I'll change it for myself :)

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