4.65 Spoiler Discussion

[TSA]

since charcoal was removed some people had difficulties at the starting of the game.
Before we used it to cook and to make torches in the early game.

But FC done something i don't get quite well.

He removed charcoal and gave logs the same durability as coal.

So we just need coal for torches. And in the late game we can use the kiln for automated SFS

[Graphite]

Actually, it depends on the kind of log you're burning. Oak logs are comparable to coal (8). Birch is a bit better (10), spruce a bit worse (6) and jungle wood is worst (4).

With regard to kilns: I had to redesign my kiln as it occasionally burnt the wooden logs instead of turning them to charcoal. Be sure to design it carefully so that there are no air-spaces next to the log while it's "cooking" :P

[TSA]

oh i see...

i only tested oak...

that makes a bit more sense.

and 1 coal dust + 1 hellfire dust gives 32 uses. (4 nethercoal) and that is awesome =)

[Simurgh]

Its also a nice boot up the arse to get yourself a bellows and kiln.

[Nutty]

A quick question regarding Wither skeletons and their drops.

Are Wither skeletons still meant to drop stone swords seeing as they were removed from being crafted?

Also sorry if this shouldn't be in this thread. I did not feel that this warranted a new thread and I was not too sure where the best place for this would be as I am still getting a feel for the forum.

Regards,

Nutty

[TSA]

FC only removed the stone sword because it was a bit overpowered in the early game.
You could just craft one of those and have a decent offence.

since you need diamond to access the nether and a good armour set to deal with all of the mobs there. I see no problem with wither skeletons droping stone sword.

At that point of the game you will find them useless.

[wirer]

going to have to disagree with stone swords being useless after that point. stone swords are a disposable decent weapon to carry around.

its definitely better than risking your iron swords or SFS weapons on a recon trip outwards.

plus its useful for non-automated animal slaying. no wasting iron durability on that

[TSA]

well you are right sir.

taught too quickly there. =P

in some cases they might come handy to have.

But once you hit the crucible i think they lose interest. you can re-smelt you iron.

[Simurgh]

What are these stone swords you speak of?

[TSA]

The ones you can't craft but are still dropped by wither skeletons.

[FlowerChild]

He removed charcoal and gave logs the same durability as coal.

I suspect you're not thinking the ramifications of that through.

First, you could get a comparable burn time out of a wood log to coal previously through splitting it into planks. Coal was just so abundant that nobody thought twice about it. The huge difference between the output of logs and planks didn't make a whole lot of sense, and only resulted in crafting-grid busy work for the player, so I fixed that. Also, charcoal having a greater burn time than the wood which was used to create it didn't make a whole lot of sense either.

Secondly, the major coal consumer in the game isn't furnaces. It's torches. Leaving charcoal in the early game while increasing the value of coal would have just resulted in people chopping down more trees in order to make torches, and left coal largely as the bastard resource of MC.

By pushing charcoal to the later game, it leaves coal in the position of being extremely valuable early game, and provides an automation method for creating your torches in the late through auto-kilns.

Regardless, is coal in far greater demand then it was before during play? Yes, most definitely. Given that, not sure why you'd find how I went about it questionable, as the end result has certainly been achieved.

going to have to disagree with stone swords being useless after that point. stone swords are a disposable decent weapon to carry around.

What I already did for the next release is remove vanilla's crafting-grid repair method of combining two damaged weapons. Given that change, I have no issues the the wither skeleton stone sword drop as it will just provide you with damaged emergency weapons you might get a few uses out of in a pinch, and which will hog inventory space like crazy if you carry a bunch of them.

[DaveYanakov]

Sorry, should have specified that I turned hardcore spawn off in SSP until I got something built worth finding my way back to. I've only been affected by hardcore spawn on the server abd I haven't really logged in often enough for the death every two hours I'm scheduled for.

[Equitis1024]

What I already did for the next release is remove vanilla's crafting-grid repair method of combining two damaged weapons.

Oh thank you! I assume this applies to all tools, not just weapons? I've always been annoyed by how the game encourages me to go through the distracting busy work of combining low durability tools for such a marginal benefit. I'd find it significantly more enjoyable to just save myself the mouse-clicking and let the tools break, if it weren't for the nagging knowledge that I'm wasting resources by doing so. I'm so glad to hear that you'll be killing that mechanic.

[FlowerChild]

Oh thank you! I assume this applies to all tools, not just weapons? I've always been annoyed by how the game encourages me to go through the distracting busy work of combining low durability tools for such a marginal benefit. I'd find it significantly more enjoyable to just save myself the mouse-clicking and let the tools break, if it weren't for the nagging knowledge that I'm wasting resources by doing so. I'm so glad to hear that you'll be killing that mechanic.

Yeah, it's honestly never been very useful or fun in vanilla (to the point where I had actually forgotten it existed), the mod has its own "repair" method through recycling materials in the Crucible, it was creating exploits in BTW like the wither stone sword thing, and it never made a whole lot of sense to begin with, so I decided to just axe it and be done with it.

I think Notch was going for a Fallout-like repair mechanic there, but the thing is that in Fallout you're generally dealing with guns and other fairly high tech contraptions where it makes a little more sense that you could salvage parts from two beat up devices to make a better one. When you're dealing with low tech stuff like two stone swords or something though, you wouldn't exactly expect banging two rocks together to give you a better rock :)

MC tools just don't really have parts that you could really see being salvaged in the same way. It winds up just feeling weird and very gamey. IMO, it's a good example of how a decent mechanic from one game may not translate well to another given the context.

[TSA]

He removed charcoal and gave logs the same durability as coal.

I suspect you're not thinking the ramifications of that through.

First, you could get a comparable burn time out of a wood log to coal previously through splitting it into planks. Coal was just so abundant that nobody thought twice about it. The huge difference between the output of logs and planks didn't make a whole lot of sense, and only resulted in crafting-grid busy work for the player, so I fixed that. Also, charcoal having a greater burn time than the wood which was used to create it didn't make a whole lot of sense either.

Secondly, the major coal consumer in the game isn't furnaces. It's torches. Leaving charcoal in the early game while increasing the value of coal would have just resulted in people chopping down more trees in order to make torches, and left coal largely as the bastard resource of MC.

By pushing charcoal to the later game, it leaves coal in the position of being extremely valuable early game, and provides an automation method for creating your torches in the late through auto-kilns.

Regardless, is coal in far greater demand then it was before during play? Yes, most definitely. Given that, not sure why you'd find how I went about it questionable, as the end result has certainly been achieved.

You are right. I have never taught that 4 wooden planks would give 6 uses (vanilla). Never crossed my mind to try so either.
But the point there is that it makes no sense to me that a log or charcoal have the same durability as a fossil fuel.
Charcoal is way overpowered in vanilla. it should always have had half the uses of coal.

coal is fine with 8 uses, you have to mine it, it is a fossil fuel and its not renewable. Now burning wood to get a piece of charcoal and making them equivalent its totally wrong and i take my hat off for trying to solve things.
But i feel like charcoal its still overpowered. And with the new addictions wood became overpowered too.
To me it would only be fine if it was about half the uses/durability coal has.

so in resume

charcoal = wood log its ok

charcoal & wood = coal its wrong to me.

and i loved the way you worked out the different logs having different durabilities.

I am not putting your work down or something. I love the time you spend making all of us happy yourself included, only a true lover of minecraft could make such a amazing job.
And i know this is not the most appropriate place to post this but the balance topic was closed and this was even wrong in the release thread.

cumps

TSA

[FlowerChild]

Yeah, your points are irrelevant and have no significant impact on gameplay. Probably best to drop it and consider them further on your own.

A "lump" of coal is an arbitrary amount. The advantage of coal (or charcoal for that matter) in the consensus reality is that it's a *compact* fuel source. Given the way MC stack limits work, that's rather meaningless, except in the case of crafting something like torches, and I definitely don't want to get into stuff like different stack limits on different kinds of blocks (like logs). Also, having two fuel sources (coal & charcoal) that look identical, and have the same functionality in terms of crafting torches (which is definitely something I want to retain due to the late game automation potential through kilns), but which have different burn times, would just feel odd.

I closed down the balance thread because I didn't want to hear anymore of the above man, not to invite it to spill over into other threads. If you have a suggestion (which is what the above really is) that you feel is absolute genius (which the above really isn't), then post it to the suggestion sub-forum so we can cut to the lock/ban chase. Keep in mind that I've spent a very long time considering all this, and thus any points you make will likely not be relevant unless you do the same. Underlining them doesn't change that, it just comes across as rather rude.

[Kazuya Mishima]

Went back to my main world and was exploring for a village and while traveling at night I ran into two spiders eyeball to eyeball in the middle of a lake. I have never seen behavior like this from spiders so I began snapping away photos and as I started the posturing between the arachnids elevated from trying to establish a pecking order to all out kill or be killed.

Spoiler

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The aftermath.

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My guess is the two spiders were hunting in such close proximity, they locked onto the same prey item and one spider unintentionally shot the other with web instigating the hostilities. With just a small tweak minecraftia is beginning to have an actual ecology and emulate territorial aggression between hunting species.

[FlowerChild]

My guess is the two spiders were hunting in such close proximity, they locked onto the same prey item and one spider unintentionally shot the other with web instigating the hostilities. With just a small tweak minecraftia is beginning to have an actual ecology and emulate territorial aggression between hunting species.

Hehe...that sense of an ecology is something you may notice I've focused on quite a bit with some of my recent changes, like the way mycelium interacts with cows. I've got additional changes in the works of that nature as well.

I absolutely love that kind of thing as I believe it adds greatly to the sense of being within a living world, and I often try to come up with features that will lead to that kind of emergent behavior. Interacting as a player with a world is one thing, but getting the sense that world is functioning just fine without you is another.

Glad you took note of it :)

[Xeo]

It appears as if mobs are spawning during day time rain. I had a tough experience where I died from a lone skeleton right after dawn in the rain and upon returning (my spawn location hadn't changed) the area was flooded with mobs despite it being day. Can someone else confirm this? This update has made me paranoid Bat-shit insane.

[FlowerChild]

It appears as if mobs are spawning during day time rain. I had a tough experience where I died from a lone skeleton right after dawn in the rain and upon returning (my spawn location hadn't changed) the area was flooded with mobs despite it being day. Can someone else confirm this? This update has made me paranoid Bat-shit insane.

That's vanilla man.

[Xeo]

Really? Is that a recent change? I've always thought that mobs didn't spawn during daytime rain and just didn't burn.

[Calo290]

Really? Is that a recent change? I've always thought that mobs didn't spawn during daytime rain and just didn't burn.

They won't spawn during a normal rain, but they'll spawn during a thunderstorm as it's darker.

[Xeo]

Really? Is that a recent change? I've always thought that mobs didn't spawn during daytime rain and just didn't burn.

They won't spawn during a normal rain, but they'll spawn during a thunderstorm as it's darker.

Wow I can't believe i've never noticed that till now? While on the wiki page for weather I also found out that rain makes fish more common. Is that an unknown fact or am I just uninformed about this game?

[DaveYanakov]

I've seen this sort of behavior as well but in my case it was a couple endermen that had spawned in broad daylight without the benefit of cover, just walking around like nothing was wrong. On the plus side, it meant we all got to hear Icy's enderman impressions.

[Gabecraft1234]

Did dungeon spider spawners always spawn poisonous spiders? Because I just approaced one thinking it contained the managable non poisonous variety and died horribly.