Gunpowder production (small recipe change)

[Veb 2]

For the next update, I have a suggestion on a small change. As it is now, you use one sulfur powder, one saltpetre powder and one piece of charcoal to make a portion of gunpowder. I think it would make more sense if you crushed the charcoal in a quern and got 4 powders from it. I think one whole piece of charcoal is a little too expensive for one gunpowder. Let me know what you guys think.

Edited 29 Jul 2015 by Kittychanley
Moved topic to Suggestions forum

[Kittychanley 1,002]

Charcoal is a renewable resource that is ridiculously cheap once you have even the tiniest of tree farms set up. I really don't see the point of adding an entire new item that has absolutely no purpose other than to be used as a crafting ingredient.

[Veb 2]

The point was that it is how they do it in real life. You would have to crush all the ingredients into powders before mixing them into gunpowder. If you use gunpowder for mining, you will need a ridiculous amount of charcoal. Having a bloomery or a blast furnace in addition to this will make charcoal your most used resource. All of these little changes is (in my opinion) what makes a great mod. All that needs to be done is to change the colour of one of the powders, name it charcoal powder and replace the charcoal in gunpowder with it. It is, of course, only a suggestion.

[Kittychanley 1,002]

http://terrafirmacraft.com/faq.html

 

Is TFC trying to be as realistic as possible?

[*]No, the aim of TFC is to bring some much needed believability to Minecraft. This means that sometimes realism is compromised for the sake of game-play while still trying to present a world that feels like it could actually exist. [*]Believable does not mean that everything has to be accurate. The idea behind believable is that it gives us much leeway to change facts as we see fit to provide a desired gameplay outcome. A great many things are possible in the real world, but that does not mean that all of those things are beneficial to providing a progression based gameplay experience.

[Veb 2]

I am aware of what the mod tries to achieve, yes. You got my point wrong. Most of my arguments were related to being beneficial for a dynamic gameplay, I was not coming up with a realism improvement. I guess it would be believable not having to crush kaolinite to make fireclay also then? Because it's the exact same idea. And if we are going to bring a little realism into this, traditional gunpowder as it is made for example black powder weapons only contains about 15% charcoal (saltpetre being the dominant ingredient). I agree with the ''believability rather than realism'' idea of this mod, but I believe there is a point of balance. I am at the level of having realistic alloy mixture ratios. I find having to crush charcoal into dust before mixing it with sulfur and saltpetre quite believable. Charcoal being the dominant ingredient in gunpowder is just wrong. Believablity is a point of balance between realism and dynamic gameplay.

Edited 29 Jul 2015 by Veb

[TonyLiberatto 364]

For the next update, I have a suggestion on a small change. As it is now, you use one sulfur powder, one saltpetre powder and one piece of charcoal to make a portion of gunpowder. I think it would make more sense if you crushed the charcoal in a quern and got 4 powders from it. I think one whole piece of charcoal is a little too expensive for one gunpowder. Let me know what you guys think.

I don't use much gunpowder, The few times I try it was not worth the effort, but I like the aspect of you suggestion that talks about grinding the charcoal into a dust before using it to make gunpowder.

Honestly I think you lost the power of your suggestion when you talked about making it cheaper, I think the reception to your idea would have been different have you not wrote the portion in red.

[Veb 2]

It's a small change and it's more believable to use 1/4 of a charcoal piece in gunpowder. And gunpowder is actually a really cool way of mining, I think.

[landryx 36]

Yeah it is. But I think you Veb play alone (like many others). TFC is developed for server play.

Well, it's really something that keep me away of this mod, well this mod is....in my opinion one of the most original and completely different mod of all minecraft mods I ever tried this last 6 years, and I will probably continue to follow his development until its end or mine craft's end but yeah... in a single player, TFC tend to be a bit tedious and less well-balanced in term of gameplay and devs here are really strick to this.

Edited 29 Jul 2015 by landryx

[Veb 2]

The only suggestion I made was to reduce the amount of charcoal in gunpowder. Nothing more. It's not hard to do and it wouldn't change the gameplay much. Besides, you can always ban powderkegs on mp. And btw, I don't always play alone. I play on a server with my friend and we use gunpowder to mine a lot.

Edited 29 Jul 2015 by Veb

[landryx 36]

No problem veb.

[Kittychanley 1,002]

Powder kegs are primarily there just for the fun of creating explosions. Prior to a very recent release, you could only ever have one size of explosion, and it was big. The dynamic-sized explosions were added only as a way to get the super crazy huge explosions back in the game, and still have them be expensive.

 

We don't want powder kegs to be your primary way of mining, so we're not going to make gunpowder any easier to make.

[Veb 2]

One person speaking on behalf of a vast number of players. Delicate.

[Kittychanley 1,002]

One developer speaking on behalf of how the developers view the thing they created, and their vision for how they would like it to be played.

[Veb 2]

I don't see where the problem is, though. What you could do is increase the amount of saltpetre needed to make gunpowder. Therefore balancing it at least. Adding a lump of coal doesn't make any sense.