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Neurovore

Hiding through the first few nights

18 posts in this topic

I find myself now in a love/hate place with TFC.

 

I love the broad vision of TFC. I love the need for resources, and the quest of exploration to find the basic stuff to get going. The problem is twofold:

 

1) When I'm away from my spawn protected home on a quest for oak or flux or fleece or a feather, I pretty much have to hide the night away and sit still in a small dark blind. This is, to put it mildly, more than a little boring.

 

2) Because of how TFC / Minecraft  / Java handles memory allocation, TFC runs like a DOG after I shell out to another application even after I close everything else to go back to TFC.

 

This means that whenever I try to play TFC, I need a book to read or a bunch of household chores. I don't know about the rest of you, but I game to avoid real life. Due to the early game challenges, making a bed is a fair achievement and a stepping stone in TFC. Considering I will likely have to travel 3-4 days in several directions to get flux, oak, and wool, and later again for a feather (drafting table) - are there any strategies out there to alleviate staring at a static screen for 20 minutes at a time? I want to play TFC but I don't want to sit through that part.

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The best strategy that I've found is to stop yourself from doing any tasks during the day, that you could instead do during the night (which is only 10 minutes of real-life time). Starting out, these are tasks such as cooking food, creating torches, knapping tool heads, making clay objects, firing clay objects, organizing your inventory, etc. By the time you get to the point that all of those tasks are no longer things you do (you bring sandwiches so there's no food to cook, you make torches in the forge and already have stacks in your inventory, all of your tools are made of metal, so there is nothing to knap/form/fire) you very likely have already progressed to the point where you have made a bed, which you can bring with you to sleep through the night, then break and carry on with your journey.

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feather (drafting table) 

 

The scribing table is no longer in TFC, the plans are selectable in the anvil gui.

 

And when you have a sword an mace, the night is not as scary as you can fight back monsters and kill them without much problem.

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I find the pit kilns are especially useful for setting mobs on fire at night. It makes killing them a lot easier as well as providing light and firing stuff.

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Imho the biggest bulls**t in MC is that you cannot sleep without a bed. You could just lie on the grass and fall asleep, monsters aside. Because the game has no stamina system, you cant allow the players to sleep everywhere for less recovery benefit because it simply means no players needs a bed and everyone skips the night so monsters are obsolete etc pp MC is a very narrow sandbox

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The best strategy that I've found is to stop yourself from doing any tasks during the day, that you could instead do during the night (which is only 10 minutes of real-life time). Starting out, these are tasks such as cooking food, creating torches, knapping tool heads, making clay objects, firing clay objects, organizing your inventory, etc. By the time you get to the point that all of those tasks are no longer things you do (you bring sandwiches so there's no food to cook, you make torches in the forge and already have stacks in your inventory, all of your tools are made of metal, so there is nothing to knap/form/fire) you very likely have already progressed to the point where you have made a bed, which you can bring with you to sleep through the night, then break and carry on with your journey.

 

I just wanted to say here that in my experience that's a VERY bad idea to sleep and then break your bed to carry on :D

I now take multiple beds and leave each one in a nice hide or something, using a new one each night.

If I run out of beds, I follow the same trail back, usually making it a couple of beds worth of distance on the way back each day.

 

Destroying your bed means you go back to the original spawn point when you die, which can often be 1000's of blocks away in TFC! 

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I just wanted to say here that in my experience that's a VERY bad idea to sleep and then break your bed to carry on :D

I now take multiple beds and leave each one in a nice hide or something, using a new one each night.

If I run out of beds, I follow the same trail back, usually making it a couple of beds worth of distance on the way back each day.

 

Destroying your bed means you go back to the original spawn point when you die, which can often be 1000's of blocks away in TFC! 

 

While it is true that if you die you will go back to original spawn, the chances of you dying generally go down drastically when you consistently sleep through the night, so that no mobs are spawning. At that point the only thing that can kill you is another player if it's PVP, your own mistakes such as fall damage or getting crushed in a cave in, or the rare hostile mob such as bears or one that spawned in a shadow, which can be easily avoided.

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Planning around beds is all well and good, but I'd say less than 15% of the games I try I actually succeed in making ONE bed. Sheep can be awfully hard to find, all animals can be a pain to try to tame, and even if you kill them it takes 1 1/2 for each bed and a LONG time for when / if they respawn.

 

Take my last game for example. I spawned at y:-12k, which means a very limited selection of critters around. I had to travel almost 2k tiles to find CLAY, and I've seen 2 horses and 3 cows (no sheep). I have another 3-4k to go to find oak for tanin. I still haven't found flux. Having to be a scavenger along the way to keep myself fed has slowed down the process further.

 

It's now September and I have just put down my first wooden shelter and now have barrels / pots for storage, and am staring down the likelihood of a ROUGH winter without an adequate food stash. Still no bed. MANY boring nights sitting in blinds, and am losing ambition to keep going with TFC. Very few successful games have near 50% inactivity time from the player.

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Spawning at -1200 is not reason you're not finding animals. The seed I posted in seed thread is a -1300 spawn and there were a silly amount of animals about. I easily made beds before the steel age.

My strategy was to always have certain supplies at hand. I never leave my base without my barrel of vessels. I have 2 vessels of sticks (ladders and torches) and a vessel of planks (quick shelter and for extra boats). I make sure to keep at least 2 stacks of wood in my inventory and a couple of boats.

Then when traveling I keep my eye out for ore debris. If it is starting to get late I quickly try and find rough epicenter and slap down a shelter. I then spend the night locating the deposit. I restock if I need to and head off in morning. I restock my logs and anything else I need during next day of traveling. A key thing I find helps is to have a standard shelter you always build so that you can get it up in a rush.

I'm not too worried if I don't find a place to dig in since I don't find avoiding the mobs that hard if there are trees about. Open areas can be a bit of a challenge though. So for those I do at times just build a shelter and wait out the night. If it is a newer area I frequently will just dig straight down to determine the rock layers in the area. I find it has been benificial to build the sturdy wood plank shelters around as I now have a nice network of shelters where I can stop on trips.

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Spawning at -1200 is not reason you're not finding animals. The seed I posted in seed thread is a -1300 spawn and there were a silly amount of animals about. I easily made beds before the steel age.My strategy was to always have certain supplies at hand. I never leave my base without my barrel of vessels. I have 2 vessels of sticks (ladders and torches) and a vessel of planks (quick shelter and for extra boats). I make sure to keep at least 2 stacks of wood in my inventory and a couple of boats.Then when traveling I keep my eye out for ore debris. If it is starting to get late I quickly try and find rough epicenter and slap down a shelter. I then spend the night locating the deposit. I restock if I need to and head off in morning. I restock my logs and anything else I need during next day of traveling. A key thing I find helps is to have a standard shelter you always build so that you can get it up in a rush.I'm not too worried if I don't find a place to dig in since I don't find avoiding the mobs that hard if there are trees about. Open areas can be a bit of a challenge though. So for those I do at times just build a shelter and wait out the night. If it is a newer area I frequently will just dig straight down to determine the rock layers in the area. I find it has been benificial to build the sturdy wood plank shelters around as I now have a nice network of shelters where I can stop on trips.

 

Anecdotal, but in 79.15, on 2 seeds, I've made the trek down to the equator and stopped seeing any and all animals or crops by around -4000. Around -7000 to -10000 is a sweet spot for all the crops, fruits, and animals you could want though.

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Anecdotal, but in 79.15, on 2 seeds, I've made the trek down to the equator and stopped seeing any and all animals or crops by around -4000. Around -7000 to -10000 is a sweet spot for all the crops, fruits, and animals you could want though.

 

There is no hard limit on what can spawn based on latitude (z coord), but temperature will play a huge role. Chickens and pigs are the only animals that will spawn if the temperature is over 33 degrees, and even then they require a very high rainfall area. If you traveled far enough east or west at -4,000 you'd eventually hit an area with the right conditions despite the high temperature.

 

On the opposite end, there are also animals that will spawn all the way to -20 degrees, but also depend on the rainfall value to be in a certain range.

 

For the exact spawning criteria see the wiki: http://wiki.terrafirmacraft.com/Climate

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I'm coming through my second summer in my first world, and I also have no bed and flux. And I was terrified by hostile mobs even in vanilla, so in every of my adventures I tend to hide in little holes closed by logs at nights. But yeah, like Kitty said, organizing your chores wisely helps a lot (like it does in real life! :D). There's lots of things you can do at night during an exploration trip - cook up the food you found (if you have some bowls or a bucket, you can even do meals with the new foods!), reorganize your inventory so you have more space for stuff, take a core check. If you're lucky enough, you can find an ore vein during the day and mine some out during the night.

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Ya, if you're still looking for your initial base, it can be a bit boring sometimes.  Presumably you don't have metal, and that kind of limits activity to torch making, food trimming, and stone knapping.  Maybe clay forming if you've found clay but don't want to settle yet.  If you're still homeless though, you probably already have a stacked to the gills inventory and won't want to spend precious space on clay molds.

 

As far as tannin goes there's like 8 valid log types to make it, according to the wiki.  I think that's half the tree types in the game, so you shouldn't really have to travel far to find it.  I feel your pain on sheep.  I too have yet to find one, but I've been so busy close to home I haven't traveled far from base.  I found that with a good base, there's never a dull night, so straw bed suffices.  If you're good at combat, once you have a sword you can start spider hunting.  Eventually you'll get enough silk...eventually. But if you're really having that much trouble finding a good base location, it might be time to just try a new seed.

 

As for flux problems, you can always just drill down from your shelter to find out what layers underly you.  21 rock types, 4 are valid flux.  In theory you shouldn't have to do too insane a number of boreholes to find flux rock.  Though it's always more efficient to get them as side effect of a mineral mine of course.

 

Once I have a good metal supply, I do like Bunsan said and try to toss up small shelters over surface minerals, and spend the night digging down to find them.  Even if you don't have time to actually find the center before making that shelter (or they're too deep to propick) just dig down directly over where a surface mineral was, or right beside it, and you should eventually find at least that mineral block, which will at least let you figure out the quality. This does require you to keep well stocked on sticks during the day though to keep ladder supplies up.  Without a scythe that does slow progress a lot.  It can help to stock up with a container full of sticks before going on long journeys.  That or carry a scythe.

 

If I don't see any interesting surface minerals when it's shelter time, I'll make a slightly larger shelter, kit it out with a door, a rainwater barrel, tool rack, fire pit, a chest, etc.  Usually try to build it on a high point, or near fresh water.  I also often build a short tower on top with a jackolantern on top to make it easier to see.  As your temporary shelter network expands, you can range farther easier, because knowing you have a shelter lets you run farther, rather than having to take time at the end of the day to build a shelter.  Still, in new territory it's best to build over minerals whenever possible to pass the time, I've found.

 

After building a shelter for the night, the very first thing I do the next day is cut down and plankify enough logs to build the next shelter.  That way I'm not scrambling to do it in the evening.  I'll even pre-build the door if I have inventory room. My barebones shelter is only 2x2 floor space, so it only takes 20 plank blocks (10 logs) on level ground - less in a hillside.  Door, tool rack, chest, barrel, another 4 logs.  So one stack of logs/planks does a whole barebones shelter.  Floor space is one for a chest, one for a firepit, two for me to stand in.  Window facing east if possible.

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Inventory management is another great way to pass the time during long journeys.  That way you're not spending precious daylight juggling junk to make space.

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As for flux problems, you can always just drill down from your shelter to find out what layers underly you.  21 rock types, 4 are valid flux.  In theory you shouldn't have to do too insane a number of boreholes to find flux rock.  Though it's always more efficient to get them as side effect of a mineral mine of course.

 

Just thought I'd point out that doing core samples for flux stone is pretty much pointless. Except for Marble, the other 3 flux stones are sedimentary, which means they will only ever spawn on the surface layer. It's impossible to ever find them in the bottom or middle layer. Marble is metamorphic, which can only spawn on the surface and middle layer, so there's no point in ever doing a core sample down to the bottom layer.

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First few nights? I spent them making axes and collecting exp. If health=low, hide in leaves or path an escape. Later nights I already have a mace, mobs are no probs.

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When starting a new world my first concern is to find clay, Water jug, small vessels and Large vessel, also the possibility to dig under and just close the door with log piles.

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I'm kind of puzzled as to the starvation thing.  I hardly ever have a problem finding food.  I spent the better part of the first three years in my current game scavenging.  And I only killed a few animals, the rest was just plants I gathered as I went about my business.

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