Hardcore Headwear SPOILERS

[LupusExMachina]

Where are my hats?
No, seriously, I havn't seen a single hat since a couple of updates.

I have an ocean close to my base and tried to observe some of them. I fell into water more than once, but I have yet to see a single hat anywhere. Am I missing something? Is my installation bugged in a strange way? I need desperate help, I really want to drown.

[jkievlan]

Where are my hats?
No, seriously, I havn't seen a single hat since a couple of updates.

I have an ocean close to my base and tried to observe some of them. I fell into water more than once, but I have yet to see a single hat anywhere. Am I missing something? Is my installation bugged in a strange way? I need desperate help, I really want to drown.

Are you looking for them at night? They dive to the bottom during the day.

[LupusExMachina]

Yes, at night.
I have a nice view over an ocean from a hightened position, but have yet to see any squishy squid.

I'm not sure if that is of any consequence, but there are no animals around the area anymore. Either eaten by me or zombies.

[Taleric]

Just go swimming at night and sing the jaws music, it summons them :p

[derekiv]

I just had my first accidental encounter with hats. I was wandering near a river, saw a chicken feather and wondered what became of said chicken. I got close then saw the hat. I stopped immediately, but it desperately wanted to be on my head. I axed it a question and quickly left.

Edit: Oh god, just had my first encounter after dark. Was digging a hole near water when suddenly a hat pulls me into the water. Having just used my last axe hit on a cow, I had to beat it off with a shovel then a pick. It was awesome. I can now hear them gathering outside my hiddy hole.

[WeedFather]

Whoa. I go away for awhile, and suddenly, squids hats are actually one of the coolest and most dangerous mob types in the game, and are actually FUN to have around and fight. I really like that extra touch where they shoot a tentacle out at you!

I was on a boat crossing the ocean, and although I was well aware of the new features, and even though I saw a school of hats, I boldly tried to speed on past them since I couldn't turn fast enough, but NOPE! They grab me, fling me the FUCK out of my boat and into the air, and then one of them proceeds to latch onto my head while the others swarmed me as I sank to the bottom, not having the strength and the energy to stop them.

Oh, God. The horror...

[FlowerChild]

I really like that extra touch where they shoot a tentacle out at you!

Hehe...that part was actually the bulk of the implementation. It's a little beyond what mobs are generally capable of doing in MC ;)

[Milady]

As the first night fell, in my new world, I took to the tree's for safety, seeing as how I didn't have a base.
With the exception of the screams from livestock being devoured by mobs all was quiet. So with time on my hands I took to my sketch book to wait out the night till morning. . . That was until what I thought was a spider-jockey caught my eye.

Spoiler

Show

I nearly peed myself from laughter. Thank you FlowerChild.

[ryoloth]

So I was dealing with an escaped wither on pk420's server, it was over an ocean shooting randomly into the water, only it wasn't randomly.. it was attacking the hats! curious about this I waited until night time, the hats seem attracted to the wither though I didnt see any live long enough to attach to the wither... though i would have loved to see what would happen if it were to happen xD

[brab]

I had my first encounters with the hats ... Note to self: do not hunt animals too close to the shore when it's raining. I managed not to panic and killed the first one, but it had brought a friend along. It was my demise.

So now I just respawned in the middle of a jungle, it's still raining and past mid-day. I suspect I won't live long ...

[jkievlan]

Tip: hats are fairly easy to hunt (though they haven't dropped any scrolls for me yet) if you build a sizable platform on the shore with 1 block of water above it. They'll swim onto the platform to get to you, but they don't yank you out far enough to get into deep water so you can kill them and jump back onto shore with whatever they drop...usually just ink sacs. Damn, I need a hat farm...

On another note...gotta love the fact that nobody has called them "squid" since the update :)

[Mason11987]

So I knew of this update. I also watched vioki's video where they first discovered it and I laughed. I remember now that FC had said he wanted to make the oceans less safe, but I just didn't put it all together.

So I decided to go out looking for my last village (for potatoes). I went far through the nether fully equipped for however long a journey was necessary and built a portal back. No nearby village so I just decided to go completely away from spawn, to try to find one, all fine, I survived several nights easily and kept moving. Eventually I came across an ocean, oh well, maybe I'll have more luck on another continent, so I set out.

I'm now in the middle of nowhere when the sun starts to fade... wait...

I see hats in the distance, moving upward. Oh god.

I spin my camera around in every direction, there's one TINY island off to the side, I make a break for it. I'm probably 100 blocks away when the first hat strikes, I'm launched WAY up in the air.

"WHAT THE HELL!"

I hit the water and immediately start taking off my armor. Instantly I'm being dragged down. Two squids are killed with my battle axe, up up up up up... drowning.... dead, maybe 4 blocks from the surface.

I will never ever find my stuff again, and this was by far the most exciting fight in my time with Minecraft. Thanks FC!

[AddyBaha]

I was really terrified today by seerall hats, that somehow menaged to pull me so far under ice that I not directly died by the hats themselfs but becouse I paniced and instead of breaking the ice tried to find the edge to get some breath.

[Prohack0421]

So several months ago, I tried my hand at BTW while looking for mods to put on a server, but the owner ended up going with FTB instead, and so I focused on that (what a boring mistake).
A few days ago, in the quest for finding an interesting mod, BTW was mentioned again. So after watching some videos with flowerchild in them talking about design philosophy (which was enlightening, to say the least), I thought i'd actually give it ago.

After a few days of single player, i convinced a friend to join me on a LAN game tonight. After he died the first few times getting the hang of it, we started up a world and finally got a somewhat modest start. As I have refused thus far to read spoilers or WIKI unless absolutely necessary, many things were unknown to us. But, after some time, we decided to go for the gold and find a village to get delicious wheat. Having lots of tools, food and even a half stack of iron ore, we set out on our quest. And, as evening on the third day of our quest fell, we came across some water, and the often heard 'beware of fish' joke was made.

I immediately swam across, but my friend decided to check out it's depth, sinking quite rapidly into the dark (gloom took effect, and he slowed down). As he was remarking about his air going quicker than he thought, he started to take damage. Panicked and blind, he cried out about a "watery glitch" and I look over to see that he still has plenty of air! I run to the water to see where he is, but to no avail. He ran out of air and died. It was then I saw it...A lone hat, innocently swimming by. And that is when we knew what had happened. A squid ate my friend.

And that was all the BTW for the evening. Flower child, you are a mad genius, and I thank you.

[FlowerChild]

Where are my hats?
No, seriously, I havn't seen a single hat since a couple of updates.

You know, I think you were right about this. I've been noticing a disturbing lack of squid in my world anywhere except near original spawn as well after extended play, so I started digging into the spawning code and I think I figured out what the problem was. I suspect this was a vanilla issue, we just never noticed since squid were largely irrelevant.

It seemed to only be generating them on world load or chunk generation, so once those despawned...no more squid for you.

Anyways, I want to test this out a bit more to make sure it's working right now, but I may put out a release later today to correct this along with a few other small things I've thrown in over the past week, as I suspect it will affect balance rather dramatically.

[FlowerChild]

Ok...I think I really figured this sucker out, and it's a general problem with spawning in MC. It's just most noticeable with squid because their spawn cap is so low (5 squid at a time which is lower than any other creature).

Looks like what's happening is that entities don't update once they are at the perimeter of the loaded chunks. This is normal and is why minecarts stop updating when they're about to hit the edge of what's loaded and that kind of thing.

Thing is, the ones at the edge stay in memory, even though they aren't being updated. Meanwhile, for mobs, the entity updates are what causes them to despawn when they're too far from the player and that kind of thing. This means that these entities lingering around the edges never despawn unless you move within range of them, and they're still added to the mob cap to determine whether more can spawn.

SO, what I think is happening is that with chunks being always loaded around original spawn now, every once and awhile, a squid wanders out into the periphery of those loaded chunks, and essentially becomes trapped there, unable to update, thus unable to despawn, but always counting towards the mob cap. If a few of those accumulate (5), then no matter where you go in your world, no more squid will spawn again because the game already thinks there are too many in the world.

I also think what's happening is that when you load up a game or create a new world, the chunks around you are slowly filled in, with squid in unloaded chunks not being counted, so you spawn in a few here and there.

Anyways, I initially fixed this by increasing the spawn cap on squid, which works fine, but upon further consideration I realized it wasn't really addressing the core of the problem, and that this was likely affecting spawn rates across the board. I just tried a quick experiment where I don't count those periphery entities when calculating spawn caps, and it seems to correct the problem. It's not the solution I want to use in the end as I suspect it will just lead to more and more entities getting trapped in those periphery zones with no limit on them, causing a potential memory leak, but it does seem to indicate I'm on the right track. I think the solution I'll adopt in the end is to check for despawn independently of regular updates, and apply it to the periphery creatures as well to prevent them becoming permanently trapped like that.

Why am I telling you all this? Dunno...guess I'm in a talkative mood :)

[Dralnalak]

Why am I telling you all this? Dunno...guess I'm in a talkative mood :)

Perhaps the internet forum version of thinking out loud? :)

I for one greatly enjoy the glimpses we get into your game design and game logic here on the forum. Your discussions of game balance and other issues on this forum have given me more of an education than some of the articles that I have read specifically intended to be purely about teaching game design aspects. It's why I continue to read this forum daily even in periods where I am not playing Minecraft.

So, while I have gotten much enjoyment out of playing your excellent mod, I value the things I have learned from it along the way even more. Thank you.

[FlowerChild]

Perhaps the internet forum version of thinking out loud? :)

Yeah, I guess. Maybe particularly because this was such a subtle and insidious little bugger. Heck, I don't think anyone at Mojang or in the community even realized this was happening before now, so I guess I deserve to pat myself on the back a bit for figuring it out :)

In the end, I setup mobs in general to be able to despawn while in stasis in these fringe zones, and it works great. I doubt it will have a large impact on other mobs, but some may notice mob spawning in general to be more regular in the next release. I threw in a few of my usual optimizations to the affected code as well for good measure ;)

As an aside: So looking forward to getting away from this code base and the whole working with deobfuscated code nonsense. It seems if I look anywhere long enough I discover something like this and start having to reverse engineer how yet another system works while dancing around just how far I should go in modifying base-classes. It's really a silly way to work :P

[LupusExMachina]

Where are my hats?
No, seriously, I havn't seen a single hat since a couple of updates.

You know, I think you were right about this. I've been noticing a disturbing lack of squid in my world anywhere except near original spawn as well after extended play, so I started digging into the spawning code and I think I figured out what the problem was. I suspect this was a vanilla issue, we just never noticed since squid were largely irrelevant.

It seemed to only be generating them on world load or chunk generation, so once those despawned...no more squid for you.

Anyways, I want to test this out a bit more to make sure it's working right now, but I may put out a release later today to correct this along with a few other small things I've thrown in over the past week, as I suspect it will affect balance rather dramatically.

A big thanks for fixing that.
The behaviour you mention is an exact replica of the situation in my world. I have a base away from original spawn, which in turn is an Island, so many squids around there of course. After I rediscovered it with a compass, a couple of squids started to appear at my base away from original spawn
I guess during my visit the squids cought in the border-limbus were able to relocate and despawn as intended.
Very nice work on finding that bug, it actually took a lot out of the game. I have been attacked by the hats a couple of times now and it always made my heart jump a little. Especially the first time... it's devious how you changed them. It's kinda like you're a 50s radioactive antihero. Whatever comes close to you gains evil intentions and horrible superpowers.

[FlowerChild]

A big thanks for fixing that.

No probs man. Believe me, it was rather depressing after all the work I put into them to have a "Hey! Where the fuck are all my squid?" moment of realization.

The sad part is, I think it's slowly made me more casual around the water again. Going to need to retrain myself :)

[SterlingRed]

Well had my first experience with hats yesterday! Finally allowed myself to take a peek at this thread. I got a pretty good shock after being grabbed from my shoreline and tossed into the bay. After being tossed around a bit I finally got enough hits on the 4 squid to regain my feet. I now know what the milk feels like.
Thanks Fc for making water scary! It was much needed!

[Daisjun]

I thought I had hats worked out but a few observations last night made me think otherwise.

For instance, I was convinced they wouldn't attack during daylight if it was raining, I even tested this to some degree. Then last night I was traveling over water when it started raining and OMGWTFDGWEHEW...luckily I was pretty close to land at the time. If that is the case, what the hell do you do if you're traveling over open water and it starts raining? At least you can tell when the sun's going down, rain is completely random.

I also took a jump into some deep water from a high ledge, this is definitely not advised...you'll fall down into the gloom and any hats you aggro down there will stay aggro'd even if you make it back to the surface.

This also appears to be true if it turns to daylight and you've aggro'd hats in the night. They will stay aggro'd on you regardless if the sun has gone up. But they do appear to lose interest after a time.

On a side note, I noted the first instance of an animal making it back to shore with a hat on it. Animals running around in a panic is hilarious enough, add a hat to them and it makes it makes it look like a Benny Hill skit.

I also love how hats have basically gone from the dumbest, most pointless mob in the game to probably the most terrifying overworld mob.

[FlowerChild]

I also love how hats have basically gone from the dumbest, most pointless mob in the game to probably the most terrifying overworld mob.

That's what I do :)

As for the rain: it's actually storms. You know how mobs can spawn during a lightning storm because the light levels drop low enough? Same kind of deal here.

I always hated how people would boat around in storms with lightning striking all around and it was all good. That's no longer the case. If it starts to rain, then I'd suggest heading for land, and in general, trying to keep track of where the closest landmass is in when you're out in a boat. Staying near the shore is relatively safe, but if you get caught out in the ocean in your dingy when a storm kicks up, with land nowhere in sight, well...you be fucked.

[Daisjun]

Ah excellent :)

I never really noticed the distinction between rain and storms before and I definitely never knew that mobs could spawn during a storm, and I've been playing MC for years. Doh. That'd probably explain a lot of random daylight mob encounters I've had.

But that makes perfect sense, it explains why I didn't notice it before and why there was a delay between the rain starting and getting attacked. Thanks for the clarification :) I'll have to be a lot more cautious in future.

[FlowerChild]

I never really noticed the distinction between rain and storms before and I definitely never knew that mobs could spawn during a storm, and I've been playing MC for years. Doh. That'd probably explain a lot of random daylight mob encounters I've had.

Honestly, I think the game would benefit from storms being more visually distinct, because yeah, it can be rather subtle at times. I might take a quick look at at least darkening the clouds a little more so that it's a more instantly recognizable state.

Regardless though: being out on the ocean in a rowboat during a storm is bad, mkay? :)