Impressions on B79

[Llywylln 1]

I've been play TFC since around B50 and I have watched a lot of good things happen to the mod over the various builds. I am still coming back to play TFC and I hope that it continues to improve. Not all of the changes are improvements though and I would feel remiss in my complacency if I didn't comment on them.

 

I originally disliked the idea of thatch but after one play through of making use of it to build a small grass hut I completely changed my mind. I thought the grass hut was awesome. Now, though, thatch has gone the way of the dinosaur since who watch to build a structure out of a block you can walk through? Don't want to make a roof out of a block that a spider will just drop through. it is basically useless except as a way of storing grass for making pottery. Such a waste.

 

I loved the idea of Mine Shoring as soon as I saw it in the game. Back then, though, you could shore up a shaft like 6 blocks high and wide. Yes, it was a pain in the butt having to keep making 2 different beams for basically the same job. Yes it was tiresome to have to put each block in place, especially on the top of a high beam. So in theory I like the new changes to the beams. Only 1 style, they stack to 32 and if you place one, it automatically grows up. However they don't seem to get any taller than 3 blocks now which is quite limiting  Combine this with the inability to chisel blocks on the sides if they hove stone above them and the increased frequency of cave-ins and you have a recipe for constant mine-failure.

 

I like the idea of the torches that can burn out but in practice it's a pain since there is no lighting alternative.

 

I love the new fishing system, it is more fun that previous fishing systems. I do have one complaint though and that is when you start off at Novice in Butchering you get ridiculously small fish. A 0.1 ounce fish is too small to actually bite the hook. A fish that small is bait, basically. About the size of a sild sardine.  We are talking about angling here and there is no way a sardine or a minnow would be able to take the hook and certainly not put of any fight. I'm not a big time fisherman and I've caught a 6 pound fish in my day. Even the little lady sun-fish are 4-8 ounces minimum. That one issue aside, I do enjoy it more than the vanilla fishing and hope that you continue to improve upon it.

 

It seems to me that in B79 you have implemented Large Biomes and it is causing my particular play through some serious problems. I have searched for many miles (thousands of blocks) and found only 1 boulder only 4 types of stone. Phyllite, Diorite, Slate and finally some schist. A lack of flux stone is a limiting factor that will keep me in the stone age with no leather, no pickling, and no mortar.  I've never  had so much trouble finding new types of stone in TFC but this time it's really daunting.

 

A few pigs and a pheasant or two are the only animals. no sheep is  troubling. No cows is more so. Even horses would be nice. Not that I can make leather, without flux and all, but it would have been nice. I seem to recall that the lack of animals was a issue before that was solved but it may have resurfaced.

 

I am glad to see that the nutrition bars are now more forgiving and are dropping off much slower than in the earlier iterations of B79 (I am using 79.10 now and in 79.0 it was deadly)  It seems as though the food Flavor system isn't working any more though. I didn't see a patch note saying it was disabled but I cant seem to fin any food I like for this new play through. In my first B79 game I did notice that at certain cooked levels I liked certain foods. They would change from 'Not Savory' to 'Savory' etc. Now there is no level of cooked-ness which makes any food I've encountered more tasty. If I cook it, all 5 flavors stay 'Not x' until the food is completely gone. I also recall it being said that there were 8 levels of cooked-ness and I only count 6 (Raw, Very light, light, medium, dark, and Very dark) so if it was supposed to be 6, no problem. it's possible that I just don't like fish, pork, cornbread, and sea week since that's all I've found so far but it seems unlikely. (who doesn't like corn bread?)

 

Speaking of food, I guess I'm in a warm region so I don't have any fruit trees or berry bushes and thank you (not) for making it require fruit in order to turn alcohol into vinegar.

 

I liked the new skill system idea but I preferred it when I could actually see the progress (numbers) the new words don't help you to keep a sense of progress. Having both would be much better.

 

The game now seems to start you out at the beginning of summer instead of spring... why I wonder?

 

Pumpkins and Mushrooms have been in MC forever... why haven't they been added to TFC as food yet? Seriously find a way to make them useful. I realize there isn't a lot of food value to a mushroom but if it is an edible variety you do get something out of it, even if it just improves the flavor of a salad A pumpkin, on the other hand will keep you alive for a while. It's basically a giant squash and since you have squash in the game, what gives?

 

Other than a few bugs which I wont bring up here that's my running impressions of B79  I am looking forward to more improvements on B79 and B80 should be hilarious... I'm looking forward to finding out what you guys do with the bunnies

[abdyman 14]

- While i agree that the change to the mining system can be annoying, i do understand why they did it.

 

- As for Large Biomes i completely agree. I have brought it up before with them, but they just pointed me to the config options thinking i had it enabled/wanted it enabled. The new default world gen might as well be large biomes, i dont even want to know what would happen if you enabled large biomes in the config

 

- also a fan of the torches, although without extrafirma there is no real source for a permanent light fixture that fits into tfc.

 

- the fishing change is nice, but i do agree that the change to butchery skill is a bit off. if i kill a pig or cow i expect to get a bit more then a few pounds of meat, no matter how bad i might be at it. Which like you mentioned makes all the smaller food sources worthless.

 

- the skill system still has a bar the goes up slowly as you level up intill you hit the next word(tier)

 

- i would also like to see something done with mushrooms and/or pumpkins.

 

- bunnies you say?

 

- flavors change per world, and they dont always make sense in regards to your taste profile. While i do like the changes they have made, i have asked the devs a couple of times if they can add a config option to retain current nutrient levels upon death, or enable it so you can select the % nutrient you respawn with, but they have always disregarded my comment in regards to that.

[Teagan75 14]

- As for Large Biomes i completely agree. I have brought it up before with them, but they just pointed me to the config options thinking i had it enabled/wanted it enabled. The new default world gen might as well be large biomes, i dont even want to know what would happen if you enabled large biomes in the config

 

 

I don't see anything about large biomes in the config files. I used TFC default to spawn my world. My B78 world was not like my new world. My new world looks all the same 2 days in all directions. Very frustrating. No horses anywhere so I have no fast travel. The human race would never have survived a TFC world irl. lol

[abdyman 14]

I don't see anything about large biomes in the config files. I used TFC default to spawn my world. My B78 world was not like my new world. My new world looks all the same 2 days in all directions. Very frustrating. No horses anywhere so I have no fast travel. The human race would never have survived a TFC world irl. lol

i was agreeing with you, i haven't looked at it myself. just saying what i heard, I also use TFC default and feel like most of the biomes end up being large biomes

[gloryofarioch 4]

I think the fishing thing is more meant to represent your ability to claim usable meat out of the fish, not the size of the fish itself. If you suck at butchery, you're going to make a big mess when you are cleaning the fish, etc. With more practice, you can increase your yield.

 

Regarding your other problems, it sounds like you just got a crappy map. I started a new map in 79.10, and after a couple of kilometers of traveling, I had found rock salt, flux, a breeding pair of every non-poultry animal, and acres of fruit. (Fruit trees in particular are much harder to find before 79.10; have you upgraded recently and started a new map?) However, minerals have been an absolute nightmare -- I have only found one scant source of poor copper so far, and even that was in the middle rock layer and only showed up in debris because it was pressed up against the top rock layer. The temperature on my part of the map is also very, very high, so my food rots very quickly if I do not pickle and dry every single scrap I get and store it deep underground (and even then, the temperature underground is 16°C!) However, that's the breaks on TFC — getting everything you need in one area is pretty difficult.

[abdyman 14]

I think the fishing thing is more meant to represent your ability to claim usable meat out of the fish, not the size of the fish itself. If you suck at butchery, you're going to make a big mess when you are cleaning the fish, etc. With more practice, you can increase your yield.

 

Regarding your other problems, it sounds like you just got a crappy map. I started a new map in 79.10, and after a couple of kilometers of traveling, I had found rock salt, flux, a breeding pair of every non-poultry animal, and acres of fruit. (Fruit trees in particular are much harder to find before 79.10; have you upgraded recently and started a new map?) However, minerals have been an absolute nightmare -- I have only found one scant source of poor copper so far, and even that was in the middle rock layer and only showed up in debris because it was pressed up against the top rock layer. The temperature on my part of the map is also very, very high, so my food rots very quickly if I do not pickle and dry every single scrap I get and store it deep underground (and even then, the temperature underground is 16°C!) However, that's the breaks on TFC — getting everything you need in one area is pretty difficult.

 

i have tested several maps, and in most of them i have to travel several thousand kilometers to find more then a handfull of diff rock types. It also sounds like you might have a similar issue though if you can only find a handfull of diff ores its because they are all in the same rock formation and only certain things can spawn there. As for the butchery, i understand fish giving a small portion of food, but then again fish already have small food weight in comparison to a pig or cow that can weight up to a ton. When i kill one of them, i expect more the 1 slab of meat, not to mention the first few kills are between 40-100 ounces. My suggestion would be to start at a slightly higher drop rate, and increase it slower. Especially when concerning smaller animals that are not even worth your time because you would waste more time getting the food then what it provides. You bring up other points, but not in regards to what i was saying, just to the OP.

[turtletechy 37]

I'd like to see thatch implemented as a block similar to spider webs. It would be very hard to get through, but possible, and possibly, would be designed so that mobs wouldn't pathfind through it, although it wouldn't act as a full, secure block like others, and would still be able to be affected by falling blocks and things of the sort. It's just that without it's roofing abilities, it's kinda useless. 

[Kittychanley 1,002]

• You can still make support beams that are more than 3 blocks tall. You simply need to climb up and place more support beams on top of the current one, instead of clicking on the side of it.
• The fish you caught wasn't a 0.1 ounce fish. The size of the fish item that you get is the amount of meat you successfully butchered from the animal. It's entirely possible that you caught a nice big 2 lb bass, but then when your player went to clean it, he did a crappy (no pun intended) job and split open the digestive tract and smeared it all over the meat. He also probably didn't know how to skin the fillets properly, and left a lot of the meat still attached to the scales. Hence, only 0.1 ounces of that 2lb fish was salvageable to eat.
• As far as I can tell, there was no "Large Biomes" change in 79 that so many people keep bringing up. In my 78 world, the surface stone was Granite for just about 4,000 blocks in every single direction. Sometimes you just get a shitty world seed. It's to the point where I have an episode of my 78 series called "Still F'n Granite"
• Animal spawns are based off of climate, and not being able to find them all in the same area is intentional. For more information, check out this wiki page: http://wiki.terrafirmacraft.com/Climate
• The problem here is that your cooking skill is too low. Increase the skill by making more salads and sandwiches. Players each have their own individual taste profile, and a low cooking skill, everything is either X (More than your profile), or Not X (Less than your profile). As your cooking skill increases, those messages will get more and more descriptive and it will be easier to make food that tastes good.
• The fruit change for vinegar was based off of two things: 1. The rewritten barrel system doesn't do very nicely in converting liquids when nothing is in the input slot. 2. In order to turn alcohol into vinegar, there needs to be some sort of source of yeast. In TFC, the fruit provides this. In real life, you don't need to add anything to wine to turn it into vinegar, but that's because the wine was made with fruit to begin with.
• The words and bars are there to keep your sense of progress. Eventually I will update the Skills page of the wiki to list all the different levels, and then you will be able to reference that to know exactly where you are. Numbers don't add to a sense of progress unless you know which numbers are milestones, and we will not be providing that information as it makes TFC a number crunching game.
• The game starts you out in summer to make it easier to find wild food. If we started you out in spring, none of the wild crops would be ready for harvest yet, so you'd probably starve.
• We've tried a few times adding pumpkins and mushrooms to TFC, it just never gets passed development stages and is scrapped before release, which is why most people don't know about it. We want to make sure there is a system in place that properly fits before it is released.

[Teagan75 14]

 

• You can still make support beams that are more than 3 blocks tall. You simply need to climb up and place more support beams on top of the current one, instead of clicking on the side of it.

 

I am actually going to try the support beams again. I used them in B78 but they seemed like they werent very durable so maybe I was doing something wrong. 

[Kittychanley 1,002]

I am actually going to try the support beams again. I used them in B78 but they seemed like they werent very durable so maybe I was doing something wrong. 

 

Keep in mind that support beams are for cave in prevention and they are not meant to be used for cave in protection. As long as you are using them correctly, you should have no issues. But if you do manage to cause a cave in, it is perfectly believable that tons of heavy cobblestone that comes crashing down is going to snap some wooden beams.

[Teagan75 14]

 

- i would also like to see something done with mushrooms and/or pumpkins.

 

Mushrooms I can see added raw to salads and sandwiches. pumpkins on the other hand are winter squash. They are never eaten raw but always cooked into a soup or pie. Since we have no clay brick ovens for bread baking, pies are out for believability. If they added soup then pumpkins could be used but you have to bake the pumpkin so it's soft enough for soup. So yeah complicated.

[Udary 20]

No so much biomes, as they vary quite quickly. It's the lack of change of rock formations that people are commenting about. I played a v78 with a friend on SMP and within 2000 blocks I'd got a nice collection (Museum piece) of all stone except conglomerate (never ever seen it) all the trees, except Kapok (eventually I did get some but had to go a LOOOOONG way) and 1 other, which I can't remember. We had all the different fruit trees and animals weren't really an issue.

 

v79....and I've tried a LOT of seeds, is far different. 2000 in EVERY direction commonly only gives you 1 stone type. The main world I'm playing, I'm lucky. Stone changes at about 800 blocks NE and again at 1500, but then oddly goes back to limestone. I've gone 5000 west and it's still Limestone. Thankfully it's limestone, or I'd also still be back in the stone age. To start with I stockpiled it as it's a flux stone, a previously uncommon thing. But I think I could make an empire out of limestone and still have literally tons left over. Oddly I do still stockpile it and I travel to harvest rock from 1000 blocks away....maybe I don't like the colour?

[Kittychanley 1,002]

I'll dig through the code once more to see if I find any changes, but like I said, as far as I know there have been no changes made to the size of stone layers in the code.

[Bunsan 323]

I wonder if the lack of variety is a consequence of other changes in worldgen, most notably ocean size. I see a moderate amount of variety, but the islands/continents are closer than they were on my 78 map and they tend to share rock types. But that is just my impression and well observational bias is likely.

[Terex 108]

In my world the top layer is mostly gabbro as far as halfway to the equator. As such I have only seen gabbro, slate, schist, marble, chalk, and basalt in the top layer.

[Udary 20]

Kitty, did you get anywhere with this? 

 

I've started a new world and give it a proper go and about 1200 blocks NE I see 3 different rock types on the ground level all of these 3 rocks expand for as far as I've traveled. Thankfully one of them is Chalk, the other 2 are Chert which loops back into the chalk in the north and Ryolite (sp?). I have a mountain range to the south that exposes it's 2nd level of rock, but still has Ryolite on top of it. I've only traveled about 3500 blocks over 2 island masses, but the chalk land area is gigantic. 

 

Seed: 2002088064446177343 which is a really nice seed btw. I've settled on the lake island just south of the spawn. Not hassling, just interested to see if things have changed between 78 > 79.

[Kittychanley 1,002]

I haven't been able to find anything proving a change.

 

Like I said before, worlds with endless layers of a single stone type happened in 78 too. And it is possible to find worlds other than this in 79. For example, while messing around with a few friends the other night, we tried out a handful of different world seeds and came across one that has three different stone types within sight of each other. You can obviously see by the beaches where the stone transitions from claystone, to dolomite, to gneiss.

 

 

The world seed is -1146742695

[Udary 20]

I've explored even more of the seed above and found if you go east there are more transitions and fairly close together. This is unusual for any 79 seed I've tried so far. 

 

I'm pretty happy with this seed, it's the closest in feel to my 78, apart from winter! Only -9500 ish and winter is very harsh, but I like it.

 

Thanks for looking.

[NikkyD 34]

You can always travel before you settle down, killing animals along the way, collecting stuff.

 

Too hot climate makes food decay too quickly, too cold presents farming trouble.

Somewhere between 9000 and 8000 is best, it never freezes but comes close to it and the summers are not too hot. You can plant all year or leave plants as they never uproot.

 

While traveling you might as well discover different types of rock but its true, some types are very dominant where others are super rare.