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Bioxx

Torch Discussion

184 posts in this topic

You're right CreepyD, but if it worked only for the last bed you slept in, bed spamming would be useless and this would be work exactly as SP works now. It could even be made so that every time you sleep in a bed you add one to a counter attached to it, and the bigger the counter, the wider the area protected around the bed.This would also nerf using a bed to bypass the night when exploring: if you do that, you may have a nasty surprise when you return home.

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Something else came to mind as I was playing. My days are pretty filled in game from dawn til dusk. Gathering wood, tending crops, trying to build, firing a kiln, keeping track of food decay and storage, finding new mines, etc. Even though torches that burn out are realistic, the amount of time in a MC day is too short compared to a real life day to fit in every little realistic task. I have 20 minutes, not 20 hours to accomplish my daily tasks. Changes for realism and believability are fine in my book, but you have to consider time in MC. There are only so many minutes in the MC day. Adding things that simply take time is not really beneficial to gameplay if they don't lead to something better. Pretty much everyone who has posted is simply going to turn off the change. Seems like a lot of wasted effort for the Devs if the majority just turn it off.

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Something else came to mind as I was playing. My days are pretty filled in game from dawn til dusk. Gathering wood, tending crops, trying to build, firing a kiln, keeping track of food decay and storage, finding new mines, etc. Even though torches that burn out are realistic, the amount of time in a MC day is too short compared to a real life day to fit in every little realistic task. I have 20 minutes, not 20 hours to accomplish my daily tasks. Changes for realism and believability are fine in my book, but you have to consider time in MC. There are only so many minutes in the MC day. Adding things that simply take time is not really beneficial to gameplay if they don't lead to something better. Pretty much everyone who has posted is simply going to turn off the change. Seems like a lot of wasted effort for the Devs if the majority just turn it off.

This is exactly the discussion I had with bioxx when the feature was first announced. Burnt-out torches can be relit by right-clicking with a lit torch in your inventory (inventory torches never go out), so once you make torches, relighting them is quite easy. For mines with long, narrow hallways, it will be quite easy. Monsters may take up residence while you're gone, but that sort of adds to the fun in my opinion. You'll likely be walking past all the torches anyway and so tagging them as you go really won't be too big of a problem. A house that is well-established will likely have sufficient spawn protection to avoid any nastiness from spawning, even if you leave the area for a long time. I think it's interesting that if you abandon your home, it will begin to be reclaimed by the wilderness. The maintenance of living in your house won't be much more than the equivalent of flicking a few light switches every day.

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This is exactly the discussion I had with bioxx when the feature was first announced. Burnt-out torches can be relit by right-clicking with a lit torch in your inventory (inventory torches never go out), so once you make torches, relighting them is quite easy. For mines with long, narrow hallways, it will be quite easy. Monsters may take up residence while you're gone, but that sort of adds to the fun in my opinion. You'll likely be walking past all the torches anyway and so tagging them as you go really won't be too big of a problem. A house that is well-established will likely have sufficient spawn protection to avoid any nastiness from spawning, even if you leave the area for a long time. I think it's interesting that if you abandon your home, it will begin to be reclaimed by the wilderness. The maintenance of living in your house won't be much more than the equivalent of flicking a few light switches every day.

This

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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.

First off, I did not "miss the part" that torch burnout could be turned off. My point is that it should be turned off by default — that 79 should come out of the box with the torch burnout config setting set to 0 (or a control boolean set to false), so that people just wanting to update to 79 don't have to deal with this untested feature of TFC, and it is untested along with spawn protection itself. If someone wants to be a guenna pig —and I don't think you'll have any shortage of those— then that should be a voluntary, explicit choice. It's the "on by default" that I'm objecting to. I don't want to be the first one to get smacked in the face by the unintended consequences.Second, I suppose there will always be a difference of opinion about what the intent of the game entails, or if that's even proper in an open sandbox game. However, I find two problems with your stated position. The first is that you are constraining gameplay before the mod is feature-complete. That is, before all the tools to provide variation within the "intended" gameplay are in place. The second is the position that a certain amount of hermitism in TFC is somehow not "working together," or that I have to "work together" with my fellows every second I play TFC. Sometimes I just want to get away to work on my own TFC projects for a while, or prepare a surprise away from spawn.Third, spawn protection sounds very much like simulating the effects of abandonment, whether it be a mineshaft or a settlement. As such, it should end in a finite period of time, and 10 months in game is quite generous (perhaps too generous). Your recommendation for the server admin to edit the configs is a repudation of how spawn protection assesses when a site has been abandoned. The site is NOT abandoned; the people who are at the site are offline. Spawn protection only works as advertised, accurately telling when a site is abandoned, in the case of a single player.Think about that for a second: you guys say that TFC is meant to play multiplayer, yet one of its major mechanisms is actually more geared towards single player play. No wonder I feel at times that this mod is schizo.Now, you say that the players can coordinate when they can be online. Real life doesn't work that way. People have fairly rigid schedules when they can and can't be online regularly. Even in a single time zone, this kind of coordination can be hard to achieve, because people's schedules differ by the days they will be playing TFC — they have lives outside of TFC that they want to put significant time into, and exceptions can only be rare and as such cannot be used for routine maintenece. This just gets worse if players are scattered all over the globe. Even with a close-knit group like MindCrack, where playing games on video is their job, times when all of the members may be on line is quite rare and only for special occasions (like the beginnings of the seasons and special events like hunting the first Wither and killing the Ender Dragon). Most of the time, only one or two people are online, a handful max. Events like TerraFirmaCrack last two weeks because that's how long they can be practically sustained, and even then there is only three sessions where everyone could be online at the same time.While on the subject of TFCrack, using spawn protection as a tactic is low-risk and uncreative. You just need to be online, and you're depleating other factions' spawn protection. Furthermore, you don't even need to be planning to do it. The factions don't need to be openly hostile to each other or intending each other ill for them to deplete each others' spawn protection.I also find it hilarious that you are saying so much about what spawn protection will and won't do to protect the spawn when one of the reasons you're implementing torch burnout is that the effects of spawn protection has been effectively masked since its inclusion by torch forests. I don't know how anyone can say how spawn protection will affect gameplay or how it will behave because its never been tested in real gameplay. Bioxx may have run a few tests, but this just means that his mechanism works as he programmed it. Bioxx may have even played a few games single player to test its effects on single player gameplay, but I already acknowledge that the current spawn protection mechanism works fine for single player. The only way to find out if it will work as expected in multiplayer... is to play it for real in multiplayer and see what happens.Quite frankly, I'm not hopeful. You are really introducing two gameplay mechanisms here, because the mechanism you're introducing is going to unmask the first gameplay mechanism for the first time to many players.I personally think that spawn protection should be attached in some way to spawn points, because it's really at the spawn points that they are most sorely needed; it is here that the player spawns in naked, barely alive, hungry, thirsty, with no food, water, weapons, tools, armor or supplies — their most vulnerable. (Perhaps a region of spawn protection in contact with a spawn point is far more stable than one out in the wilderness, but that's another discussion.)Finally, to blue steel lanterns. You basically reiterated what I had said. In any practical survival scenario you would only have access to blue steel lanterns when you have access to blue steel armor and weapons, whereupon you will be laughing at dark mobs anyway. (Remember, you get hardier with experience, so good armor will allow you to soak up a lot of damage. The dark mobs don't, even if they have blue steel armor themselves.) Blue steel is an endgame metal, and as such, it's already going to be very expensive. If you're swimming in enough blue steel to leave BSLs in abandoned mines, you're playing the game very well (or cheating).

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Actually, I have tested this whole spawn protection in multiplayer thing, because even my single player games are run on an external server, because I have to in order to play in the first place, I have never had an issue with it, and I have exactly one light source in my whole base, because that's how I play and it's technically not even in my base it is just outside the entrance so I can find the thing. There have been a couple of times where I've had a couple of mobs spawn in my base, but that is what I get for logging in right as the night started. Hell the whole sleeping server thing that 79 is gonna have is only gonna make things that much easier for me.

 

And people seem to keep forgetting that mobs don't spawn in unloaded chunks, so even if people purposefully try to 'run down' the spawn protection clock, unless your base is loaded, nothing is gonna happen. 

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That's good to hear.

 

Personally I'm going to go further when 79 is out and reduce the spawn protection hours given from 8 down to 1.  I don't want just 4 minutes in an area to have it spawn protected :)

My first few game months at a new game with torches burning out was way too easy.

Being I was gathering local resources from a large-ish area and building a home, the whole lot was spawn protected, I never saw mobs anywhere even at night with no torches in sight.

I once saw a skeleton way off in the distance towards a desert I hadn't approached yet.

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@wyrmofvt Not in a million years would I have articulated all this so perfectly. If this gets blown off too I say abandon ship. No sense kicking dead horses.

You have my thanks for taking the time to put this up here.

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This

If i spend 5 minutes a day IRL turning lights on and off, it's only 5 minutes. If I spend 5 minutes in MC relighting torches, I have just wasted 25% of my day. Would you turn off light switches if it wasted 6 hours a day? Because that's what a few minutes is in MC.

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Wyrmofvt 

 

Although yes the spawn protection system may need some adjustments in regards to multiplayer I have to disagree on a bunch of the things your saying

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 your first point that you don't want this change to be a opt out rather then a opt in one because as you say you don't want to be one of the first to encounter unexpected consequences.

 

One of the reasons it is being put out is to test for any bugs with it. it would take a hell of a lot less time to find them if it was on by default. like with the past updates there will be lots of patches right after the main build is out to fix those "unexpected consequences." if you do not want to deal with them just wait a few days until everything is ironed out or just opt out. Even though you may not like the new mechanic playing the game that is said to have this mechanic is the explicit choice and I'm pretty sure the deva really need the whole playerbase to test things in order to find some of the more odd bugs. The more error logs the faster they can see what's wrong.

 

 

 

For the second point I'm not sure if you read the other thread but the point of releasing the game with no tools to work with this change is firstly to see how people will react. As was said before working harder just to do the same thing you have been doing before is the wrong idea to go into this with. I know I will be building my buildings around lava or with all the lighting in the middle. And secondly because bioxx did not want to pile on even more work while he still needs to update the game to the new versions.

Personally I'm quite curios about how people will adapt as well.

 

Also the whole working together thing going with tfc is that the game is balanced with multiplayer in mind. You can be a hermit or just do your own thing sometimes, not like there is anything stopping you. I know I always build my own things. Its just going to make the game harder of you are a hermit.

 

 

The third point I agree almost completely that the spawn protection should get another pass on. ’ell with the loss of torch forests and I'm pretty sure that peoples bases are more or less torch forests in of the self, there will be an update to the spawn protection system. With it now in the open we can see if it needs changing. If it does it will be fixed within the first week or two because of people who have played the game will say its broken.

 

 

For the bed spawning mechanics. Sure if its a problem that could be a possible solution although I am a bit worried about people abusing that to make spawn protection right over the place they are mining in for the night. It does warrant more discussion.

 

 

And finally with mining shafts and caves that is what is supposed to happen and its one of the reasons this update is being implemented. The mineshaft you make now hold a possibility for mobs to spawn, although not much of one as it’s quite a small surface area compared to the caves, so while going back you light up the torches that are on your way there anyway and you may have to fight a zombie and one or two skellys to regain control of the mine. There's more incentive to get armor and to block off the spaces that you do not need.

 

Even though the nights are dangerous there has never really been a need for armor unless you go into caves and even then after a few runs the whole place would be filled with torches that would make it as safe as walking in the sunlight. The update is also here to stop people from just torching up all the caves and then being free to walk around unarmed inside.

 

 

Maga nothing is being blown off but I think its not going to be anywhere as bad as people think its going to be

 

DriftinFool if you have torches nearer each other and don't cover your base with them it should take a couple seconds tops in theory. Lets see how it works out and then see If it needs to be changed.

 

 

 

And so ramble at 0:37 in the morning is done and I have a new hatred for typing on a tablet. Sorry if some things aren't spelled correctly, some phrases are weird or if it sounds like I'm being rude. Lets just see how it turns out first before we say if things will be terrible or not. The devs aren't deaf to us nor are they stupid so I'm sure if there is a problem with the system we can fix it.

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Since the discussion is still going on, I probably wont have this kind of lighting in b79 with temporary torches. Not a torch forest by any stretch of the imagination. Jack O Lanterns might work in inaccessible spots in buildings (like roof), but not in all places.

Posted Image

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I need to play every game with a clear idea of how it was meant to be played. I'm turned off by notions of, "If you don't like it, switch it off." I view this as "permission" to cheat.

 

I think torches burning out is a good idea. While I have concerns, I'll wait and see how it actually plays before deciding if the tedium outweighs the immersion. 

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All I can really say to those of you with doubts is that I have a few early testers that have been playing 79 for a while now to QA everything I do, and every single one has told me that the torch change is not the issue that they'd assumed it would be when they started, and in fact they actually liked it.

 

As to those that would rather opt-in than opt-out, TFC is a constantly evolving beast and there is no set roadmap. She'll be done when it feels right. As such, it takes experimentation and lots of trial and error to learn what does and doesn't work. The more people finding this out for me the better. It does me no good at all to make everything opt in. I create the mod as I want it to be played, but its up to you to decide if you want to play it that way. 

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As long as there's a config to make torches last forever I have no complaints about this change. The type of server I'm playing on right now kinda wants a permanent light source. I dislike the change overall but I'll save my final judgement until I actually play with it

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I have been playing only SP and haven't been into caves yet, but already I dislike the new torch system. And I imagine it is not going to be better when I start exploring caves. The main problem for me is not that torches burn out, after all the constantly lit and burning gardens are a bit strange to watch, the main problem for me is that there is no alternative.

Running around my house re-lighting the torches is not fun and does not add to the game, it is just a nuisance, so eventually I used pumpkins to stop that. But now my house looks strange with those jack-o-laterns grinning at me, but that's about the only way to keep your house lit, which is meant to be a form of decoration. So with the torch change you as well removed a form of decoration and did not give us an alternative.

The secondary effect, that monsters now spawn in huts that you build somewhere remote to have a small base of operation for some resources that is around there is another issue. And every time you go there, you need to clear off the monster army first, just because you happen to not live there. So how do all those monsters get into a perfectly secured area with no entrance other than the locked door? This is where the new system actually reduces realism, because no matter how we build our bases, there will always be mobs inside.

As a solution: add a lantern type block that provides light but that requires metal to build. The main purpose would be decoration, and the cost should be high enough that people don't just spam it, but low enough that you can afford to put them in your house. This would solve both the decoration and the "there are mobs in my base... again" issue. As an idea the lantern could be build using the gems we find all around, which would very much limit the availability but wouldn't increase the cost, as those are not used for anything else.

 

 ▒ ◊●◊    -> Lantern ▒ ▒ - Metal sheet◊ - Any type of gem● - Coal/torch/something else
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So would you say that spawn protection is not really working for you? Or are you just spending so much time traveling that you never manage to build up any protection?

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I love the new torch mechanics, but hate the vanilla light based spawning mechanism.

 

I've always hated that monsters just poof into existence inside my walls without a source I can actively work towards quelling beyond either smothering my fort in lights or awkwardly spreading my stationary work areas all over my compound.

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I think one solution for the monster spawning would be to change spawning so no monsters would spawn on player placed blocks. So they would still spawn outside your house, and you need doors, fences, walls and gates. But they would not spawn inside any structure that was made by a player. As much as I know we already have the mechanic to check if a block was naturally generated or placed, so it would be a question of changing the mobs spawning.

Not a coder myself, so I have no idea how hard to implement this, but it would solve a lot of problems and add believability  to the game. So if you leave your door or gate open and the monsters got in, it would be your fault.

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As much as I know we already have the mechanic to check if a block was naturally generated or placed

 

This mechanic actually does not exist, and would be ridiculously memory and performance intensive to implement.

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thanks for the info Kitty. I heard someone saying that when making a farm I should tile existing dirt, because if I placed dirt and try to tile is going to be low on nutrients. I have not tested , I just assumed that if TFC could know if a dirt block had been placed them....

Even so I think if we changed mob spawning so they would not spawn on player made blocks it would solve the issue for people complaining about mobs spawning on old bases. Make it so mobs can only spawn on dirt, gravel, sand or stone. No more creepers inside the house that has a wood, cobble,  smooth or brick floor.

I personally haven't tested the new torch enough to make an opinion. Had a couple of busy days and the rest of the week looks the same. I will hold my judgement until I actually test it, but I am glad  that if I don't like it I can just turn it off.

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I haven't played this mod for very long (I started it 3 days ago), but I figured I'd throw in my two cents.

 

I play in the dark.

 

A rediculous statement, I know. The only light I get is from my smelting pit. I was forced to abandon my first house after skeletons kept coming along and killing me. Now on house 2, I kept about 5 torches burning down by my farm (Because I know crops grow faster with light, and have no idea if that mechanic exists in this mod). Why didn't I make more torches and light up my areas? Because it's a pain to have to load sticks into my fire 1 by 1 to get a handful of torches. Now that those torches burn out, I'm just not bothering with them. Everybody talking about a permanent light source leads me to assume redstone lanterns and glowstone don't exist in this mod. That is a shame, since my play style is traditionally to dig down deep and make an underground fortress. The lack of long lasting light sources will certainly limit my decorative pursuits, but it's not like I'm playing this mod because it enhances my megabuilds. I'm playing it for the fun of a semi-realistic survival experience. I like the fact that I barely survived my first weeks because I couldn't find any animals and yellow bell peppers only filled me up so much. Finding enough food without getting 1 shot by skeletons throwing spears was the biggest challenge I've had in a long time. At some point, walking around half blind is going to annoy the **** out of me, and I'll find a way to adapt to this new challenge. I do like the idea of a better light source I can work towards. I just managed to make my first loaf of bread, and it was the most satisfying thing I'd done all day. Being able to go on a quest for a super rare non-cultavatable flower that has a light level of 20 or having to climb the many rungs of a tech tree that will grant me a couple extra days of light would be exciting. I'm not against permanent light sources, because I feel like you should be able to earn a reprieve from having to light your torches over and over. But I am also not in favour of forever burning torches.

 

That's just my opinion

 

(Also, Jack o Lanterns really are dumb.... I can barely get mine to burn for long enough so that I don't have to relight them halfway through an evening of trick or treaters)

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Why didn't I make more torches and light up my areas? Because it's a pain to have to load sticks into my fire 1 by 1 to get a handful of torches.

You can make a forge and cook torches 5 by 5. All you need for a forge is some charcoal and cobblestone.
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I don't like this idea about torches.

For me TFC is a great mod to build some amazing building that I can't build in vanilia MC mostly because it doesn't have chiseled blocks and different types of stone and wood. So I use tons of torches to light it all up. And for me it will be such a pain to run all over my building to light it again and again.

For example, that's a small part of my last town:

Posted Image

So mostly all towns will be in the dark and that's sad...

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You can make a forge and cook torches 5 by 5. All you need for a forge is some charcoal and cobblestone.

 

I don't have a forge because there are barely any trees in my area and I don't want to make the resource commitment until the wiki stops warning my every 5 lines that forges are outdated/have been removed. :)

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