4.64 Balance Observations & Discussion

[FlowerChild]

Huh. That's a really interesting side-effect man. Definitely food for thought.

[jecowa]

I started a new world for 4.64. I spawn on an ocean island with no trees, but my bonus chest has a little wood and a few apples. Luckily, though, there are 3 pumpkins on the islands. I turn them all into seeds and plant 12 pumpkin plants. I mined a bit to try to find coal, but my pick broke, and I didn't have enough wood to make another. So I built a small barricade to protect me from mobs and AFK. Eventually a pumpkin fruit grows. I eat it immediately, but it didn't save me from starving to death.

Fortunately, I respawned on the same island. I take the 4 torches that spawned around the bonus chest and plant them in the pumpkin patch so they can grow at night. (I should have thought of this during my first life.) Eleven of the pumpkin stems are fully grown. I think this is enough to sustain me. Hopefully I'll be able to stockpile enough pumpkins eventually to swim out in search of other islands.

[moonracer]

I've been away from the game for quite some time but dropping in to keep track of BTW. The new coal/charcoal and iron changes finally convinced me to get the game back up and running.

For various reasons it took me about five days before I found any coal. The positive is that this forced me to experiment with that shortage. I got to like the idea of using furnaces as a lighting source. At the current burn rate I can use wood to convert a stack of cobble into smooth stone and illuminate that area for the night. However the resources required to light up larger and larger spaces this way quickly becomes prohibitive.

Because of this and my bad luck finding surface coal I resorted to strip mining a pit area just large enough to be illuminated by a furnace and placed one at the bottom each night.

So even if you are very lazy there are ways to work around no charcoal early in the game. I suspect it will mostly just require getting used to new early game routines. Now that I'm used to it I'm sure the next fresh start will go smoother.

I haven't played past that stage yet but if I have any further observations once I do I'll add them.

[MrGrau]

One thing I've noticed with Hardcore Hunger is that I don't feel there is enough incentive to cook my meat before i eat it on the first few nights.
Sure, I'll get food poison, and stop walking for 20 odd seconds to stop my hunger dropping to zero faster than I can say 'God damn it, Flower!', but then i just eat a few more pieces of raw meat and carry on. Not terribly efficient, but there has been no lack of animals for me to molest in my worlds.
This is also carried on in the early game combat, I'll see a skeleton or two in a cave/temple, decide to top off my food bar to take them on, but get food poisoned on the raw meat, and then jump in and kill a few hostile mobs while I'm vomiting up the contents of my stomach.

However, that being said. I can't believe I'm having so much fun in minecraft again. So thank you, Flowerchild!

[Rawny]

Muahahaha! Run amuck my ptetty plague. I'm not crazy ; NOT I say. The powers of OCsoD are strong. Must feel the joy, burn and chaos of a new survival. Spread and infect my pretty.

Wonderful chages FC.

[xou816]

There's one thing I really like with the coal change. Your wooden tools are seriously revalued as an early-game fuel! I think I never made a wooden sword before...!

EDIT: after some more play testing, the coal change doesn't affect much the player. I started out an hardcore map and have survived for 3 nights atm and the coal isn't a problem; whenever I settle for the night I almost always find coal, and I now have more than a stack.

EDIT 2: I'm having much fun out of this for now, and I am planning my life as a nomad, which is pretty cool. At some point I crossed a desert while on my trip (I keep going north with the hope of finding a village) and I saw cactus... The night that followed, I set up some basic defenses for my shelter: trenches plus a cactus line. This way I lured mobs, hit them in the legs while in my trench and lured them at the same time against my cactus lines. That was very fun!

[FlowerChild]

but my bonus chest has a little wood and a few apples.

Pro-tip: anything involving a save with a bonus chest doesn't belong in a balance discussion thread.

The number of face-palms I've pulled today is getting rather extreme. I think I better call it a night before I start hitting myself with my own ban hammer.

[nmarshall23]

The changed to the torch recipe, has made me conserve each torch. Cured me of my torch spamming ways. The early game play is reminding me of how vMC felt before charcoal was added. Surviving your first night can be a real challenge.

I was lucky to find some coal my first day, but only for just two torches. The next few days, I couldn't find any more exposed coal. So I started looking at all of the surface caves, I'd place one of my precious torches at the entrance to a cave take a peak, see if there was coal I could get to.

It actually took me several more days to find more. Only because I forgot to look at cliff faces.

After I started spelunking, but I quickly acquired plenty of coal. it feels like I've moved on to another phase of the game. From struggling to survive to building up my homestead. While I wait for my hemp harvest to come in, I am building a network of roads. Oddly I keep on running out of dirt, thanks to HCM.

One more observation, it's been a long while sense I relied on stone pickaxes, I forgot how slow they are. Hmm, that might be whining. I need to go to bed. It's been awhile that Minecraft could keep me playing all night.

Edit: I forgot, with these latest changes Sarudak's very cautious style, doesn't feel so tempting or right. Might because my play style has adapted to the changes, or that for this world I have settled down.

[devak]

I am a pragmatist. I use nethercoal for torches at the very point i can get nethercoal. However, what i find weird is that apparently nethercoal burns twice as long as coal, but gives equal torches. I did use netherrack for lighting at one point, but as i am in a forest area and use quite some wood for building, i hated the thought of potential accidents.

i do produce a ton of wood just by expanding my base and lighting up the area, so cost is not my problem. Still, it does feel like quite some effort for a marginable gain.

Work needed for torches:

I go to my chest, take out my Fortune III pick and some coal ore. i produce about a stack of coal this way. This goes into the millstone. I go to the nether, mine a ton of netherrack. That too goes into the millstone (i have a double millstone setup). I work on some project until the stuff has been processed. I take the required coaldust and ground netherrack. If i have the clay, i fill some urns, but otherwise i just waste the souls and produce hellfire. that goes into a cauldron. Then i again do something else to kill time, and finally i have my stack of nethercoal. At which point i take some wood from my saw and produce two stacks of torches.

For repeat orders, i can just convert some ground netherrack into hellfire, but the majority of the work stays the same.

in my old base i had reserves i could just cook some stuff from, but untill i can fill entire chests with hellfire and coal in my current base, it's quite intensive work.

[DaveYanakov]

Rather than continue into the ravine I found while caving out of my basement I've turned around and started excavating a 3 high, 7 wide tunnel and paving it with slabs as I go. I simply cannot afford the torches to push out into that much dark space even with the three stacks of coal I've pulled out of the ground so far. I may have to knuckle under and build an enchanting table to try and get one of these fortune picks people keep talking about.

This is actually really cool. Not only has it pushed me to build a more utilitarian subway tunnel toward spawn, allowing me to be as decorative as I damn well please, I have a long term project to plan and prepare for in exploring and exploiting a large ravine network.

[ion]

made a new map to experience the 4.64 this morning. i was lucky to get cows for armor and chickens with pumpkins for a little farm. the slow pumpkin growth is good and works fine for me. coal and iron was mostly scavenged at first from some open air caves until i was able to make myself a full leather armor. then i just started slowly to do spelunking and mining coal and iron.
my goal on this map is to try a sedentary life and start few farms until i move on the quest to find villages. so first i made shears to be able to move cows and sheep around. second i made a bucket to milk some cows and get some omelettes going. i disregarded at first making an iron pick and just used stone tools for most of the mining and i use an iron pick just for mining gold and redstone. no branch mining started yet, but after 7 hours i have some stacks of torches so it's doable by now.
i've learned from my last map where i got lost trying to find the village and right now a made a map and a compass and i'll start mapping my world for the village quest. overall the difficulty is very good and all the little bits merge perfectly to create a great nomad-farmer experience.
i'll post again when i'll find my villages :)

[Mud]

Started a fresh new world with 4.64. I've not yet progressed enough to start charcoal production, but I have found my first active village and settled down for the short-term.

Firstly I was fortunate enough to start an Extreme Hills biome which meant finding enough coal for a handful of torches before my first night without entering any caves was relatively easy. I spent the remainder of the first day as I did in 4.62 traveling while killing pigs and cows and acquiring just enough stone for a furnace. My preferred shelter for night is to find a small hill which I place 3-4 torches on, dig straight down into to create a 3x3 hole and top off with a trap door. The only change from 4.62 is that I now collect my torches before leaving my makeshift shelters each morning. I tried to collect as much surface coal and iron as possible while moving without straying too far from my path, but I avoided going deep enough to caves to require the use of torches.

By the time I reached my first village I had somewhere around 30 iron ore and about 48 coal. After the first day I didn't find myself needing to make any more torches if I collected the ones I used during the night. But I have noticed that my previous practice of starting a branch mine my first night in the village has been halted due to lack of torches. While more limiting, it feels appropriate that I don't immediately have the resources necessary to start branch mining right after coming out of my first nomadic stage. This is the first major effect I have felt from the change to coal in 4.64, and my early game experience is otherwise not too different from 4.62.

In terms of village changes in 4.64. I did not come across an abandoned village on my journey, but upon finding my first active village the transition out of my first nomadic stage felt far more natural than in 4.62 since I only gained access to wheat. This was also different in that I will now be using sandwiches as my staple food as before I was able to transition from plain cooked meat to stew almost immediately, which makes the progression of food feel more natural. I will only be settling down for a short duration before starting my second nomadic stage, which I'm very excited about. Another interesting element introduced to me in 4.64 is the question whether or not to butcher the villagers before I leave, which is something I would not have considered in 4.62 as my first village supplied the resources necessary to justify fortifying it as my first base.

I have yet to find a desert temple.

[FlowerChild]

Ok guys, I think some are interpreting "balance observations" as "long winded stories about my entire play-through that Flower will be forced to read to get to the meat".

They're really not the same thing :)

Can I ask that people tone it down to relevant statements please? Changes that work, changes that don't or feel off, things that feel they need to be taken further, specific changes you've made to your playstyle, that kind of thing?

[Foxy Boxes]

Limiting coal's had a real effect on my gameplay, causing me to focus more on any uncovered coal veins than expanding my mine. The balance for that life promptly went out the window when I discovered a ravine-mineshafts intersect that had about five spawners full of loot. Anyway, went to the Nether and died.

Second life I decided to be more normadic. Came across an abandoned village and decided to use it as a shelter for the night. Collected wood whilst it was still daytime. The differences between the two types of village is the difference between "Oh that's handy" and "YES! YES! SWEET MOTHER OF MYSELF YES!" which was nice. The changes to iron also complexifies early gameplay - I found myself deciding between a bucket for my cow or an iron pickaxe.

In short:
Village changes good/near perfect.
Coal changes... interesting, coal feels slightly underpowered but only slightly, and that might just be me.
Iron - Whilst buckets made of iron taking up 27 nuggets feels wrong, having to choose between advancing up the food tier or up the mining tier feels so good/right.

[FlowerChild]

Iron - Whilst buckets made of iron taking up 27 nuggets feels wrong, having to choose between advancing up the food tier or up the mining tier feels so good/right.

Yeah, that's a tricky one to be sure. It's definitely overpriced right now, but you're also right in that it leads to interesting decision making for the player.

Oddly, an iron bucket has always consumed the same amount of iron as a pick, but we've never really noticed before. Probably due to the abundance of iron, so we just never cared one way or the other.

Now though, it feels distinctly weird to be making something so simple, that could easily be made out of more abundant materials (like wood) with the result being just as effective (assuming HC buckets is on and you can't pickup lava).

And there in that last point, we actually have a nice example of how options can lead to design paralysis, like I always go on about. My natural instinct is to change buckets to be made of wood, but an optional mode makes that an invalid solution, so instead I'm left futzing with iron values in order to try to make it feel less punishing despite the amount of material in the object itself not being totally unreasonable either, and people playing with HC Buckets on are stuck using their valuable iron for something that feels like it really shouldn't require it.

It basically results in a situation where there's no "right" answer here because things are going to feel weird in one mode or the other. Yes, I could go so far as to provide both options (wood & iron, with wood buckets being destroyed when you try to pickup lava), but we're obviously then getting into complicating things rather substantially for the sake of accommodating that option.

I suspect that last bit will be the route I'll have to take with this to get it right though.

[FlowerChild]

I am a pragmatist. I use nethercoal for torches at the very point i can get nethercoal. However, what i find weird is that apparently nethercoal burns twice as long as coal, but gives equal torches. I did use netherrack for lighting at one point, but as i am in a forest area and use quite some wood for building, i hated the thought of potential accidents.

Well, it's not the torch thing that's actually weird, as it would also be weird if nethercoal effectively doubled the value of your wood if you used it to craft a torch. Given torches infinite burn regardless of what they're made of, the burn time on nethercoal in a furnace really isn't relevant.

I think the problem rests more in the output of the nethercoal recipes and the doubling of the burn time in the furnace in the first place. I think the solution that I'll likely go for is to double the output of the recipe (so you get 4 lumps instead of 2), and halve the burn time in the furnace.

So, you'll still get the same effective burn time in the furnace for your volume of initial materials, but it will also automatically apply the 4X efficiency multiplier to torch production, instead of making you feel like you're getting jipped by only getting a 2X multiplier if you use it for torches instead of furnace fuel.

I suspect that will be sufficient motivation for people to favor using their netherrack for nethercoal as it allows them to get 4 times the lighting for the same amount of netherrack, at the cost of a lump of coal, some sticks, and some automation work. In combination with not having to go through the work of encasing their open flames or risk walking into them, avoiding fire hazards, and not using flint and steel, I think it tilts the balance back towards nethercoal and torches at a latter point in the tech tree, or at least puts it on par so the player then is free to make their own decisions based on aesthetics.

[FlowerChild]

One more observation, it's been a long while sense I relied on stone pickaxes, I forgot how slow they are. Hmm, that might be whining. I need to go to bed. It's been awhile that Minecraft could keep me playing all night.

As I responded previously to another post: then you're really going to hate the next release :)

A severe nerf to stone (and wood, along with a boost to the durability of iron) tools is part of what I've already implemented for it, based on previous discussions in these threads and my own play experiences. At present, the jump between stone and iron is far too small to justify the effort involved, or to serve as a sufficient reward to the player that chooses to favor upgrading their mining equipment (as opposed to weaponry, armor, or even buckets as was mentioned above).

Really, iron is the first "real" tool material you gain access to, and thus I feel the jump should be dramatic and profound, almost like how the Wind Mill serves as a big piece of candy for the player when they enter the stage of the game of coming into possession of real mechanical power. Not on the same scale mind you, but same underlying idea. There should be a "fuck yeah!" associated with it that just isn't (at all) there at present.

[Sarudak]

As I responded previously to another post: then you're really going to hate the next release :)

A severe nerf to stone (and wood, along with a boost to the durability of iron) tools is part of what I've already implemented for it, based on previous discussions in these threads and my own play experiences. At present, the jump between stone and iron is far too small to justify the effort involved, or to serve as a sufficient reward to the player that chooses to favor upgrading their mining equipment (as opposed to weaponry, armor, or even buckets as was mentioned above).

You mean you're going to implement *my* idea! :D ... ;)

Seriously though I love this idea. Tunneling through stone like it's made from so much styrofoam is IMO not something that should be possible early in the game. And even once you get iron choosing to do so should be a questionable decision. Caving would be strongly encouraged and players would build above ground at the start for the same reason humans do now. No more casually hewing out a shelter from the stone just to spend a single night it. I like!

[FlowerChild]

You mean you're going to implement *my* idea! :D ... ;)

I hope you're happy. Now that poor puppy has to go through his entire life with that nasty limp, all for the sake of that joke :)

Yeah, I certainly agree that it felt way off, with the problem being the more that I refine the early game, the more glaring those kinds of things become in contrast. I never liked it, but now it feels like a priority issue whereas before it was just a lingering nuisance that you got past in the first 5 minutes of play (unless you're one of those certifiable OCD types that insisted on using stone because iron used to be "non renewable").

Like I previously mentioned, I suspect I'll have to go fairly whole-hog on all this to get it to the point where I'm fully satisfied now. It appears I'm surrounded by shredded aluminum and disoriented worms, and that I've committed myself to a full rebalance of the game.

Anyways, it's probably the right move as after spending 2 years on this project, the least I can do is invest a couple of more weeks in an overall balance pass to tie up the loose ends Notch left behind.

[Sarudak]

I'm glad you are doing this. I think honestly that the work you're doing right now is providing the greatest ROI as far as hours of gameplay and fun / hours of work of anything that you've added to the mod in a long long time. The changes it has made to gameplay are truly revolutionary and I know it's just a taste of things to come in RTH.

:)

[Shengji]

I'm finding this latest update has improved the balance of glass.

I've always found glass rather odd in that it is a material which performs the same basic function as dirt or cobble and yet gives you the huge advantage of being able to see through it when mobs can't (Nor does it trigger creeper explosions like fences), yet every stack of sand translates into nearly 3 stacks of panes.

With the increased pressure on coal, until I get my kiln up and running, glass is a true luxury and consequently those surprise! creeper moments are increasing!

[Sarudak]

To get back on topic. I like the abandoned villages. I still haven't gotten far enough out to find a live one so I can't speak to weather it's too far or not but it definitely seems far enough and I like how it really gives some space for the early game. It also really helps make death a big deal because having to travel so far from spawn before you can settle down means you have a lot to lose by being careless. I do agree that buckets feel awfully expensive.

Is there any way that health regeneration could be made more interactive? I just don't like that the optimal response if you get in a sticky situation is to hole/wall up and wait until you magically but slowly return to full health. It feels like maybe you should need to make bandages or rest in a bed or something such that if you get injured caving the question is how can I get out in my current condition not how long to I need to read a book/browse the internet before I can play again? I totally understand if you consider that out of scope but everything seems so good that that's all I can think of to complain about. ;)

[Ulfengaard]

I'm not as savvy with design as most folks on this thread. However, I have noticed that, in the early game, fishing is vastly superior to pumpkin farming. I have stems which have been full-grown for days and haven't produced a single pumpkin. Each stem has several options for placing their pumpkin around them. I don't know how much you changed the growth rate of pumpkins, but given that they only provide a few seeds at half a pip each, they seem a bit unbalanced next to fishing. Granted the risk of a spidery death should be rewarded, but I find combating them not all that difficult.

I'm not sure if that's helpful. I'll try at a more detailed report if need be. I'm just not used to posting in these sorts of threads.

[Sarudak]

It's not unbalanced compared to fishing because pumpkin farming has the extreme advantage of being able to create food without steve having to do anything beyond initial setup whereas fishing is a direct drain on steve's time so every fish you get is time you didn't spend doing something else. If fishing should be compared to anything it should be eggs/scrambled eggs/omlettes which are also rather labor intensive.

[Ulfengaard]

For once, I think I would have to disagree with you, Saru. I find fishing rather easy: not labor-intensive at all. Six fish in a matter of a minute or two is quite significant next to 9 fully-grown stems not popping a single pumpkin after six days (six days of full-growth).