FlowerChild's Dev Diary (Week of October 1st)

[Graphite]

The thing that pisses me off about endermen is that they tend to run off with said resources. Though I know it won't get that bad (in part cause they are limited in what they pick up nowadays), I always end up reminded of the ender experiment (warning: loud music). Ever so slowly your world is deprived of its resources :P

[Thorium-232]

The mod will even get an extra resource out of it as an added bonus ;)

Shit yes.

[Mason11987]

is them picking up dirt blocks /that/ bad? or am i missing something important here?

I think it's largely dependent on your level of OCD and your particular base layout. In my main base, it doesn't bother me much as I live in a walled compound that extends out to mob spawn distance.

In my SMP base on the other hand (the one I often put pictures of in this thread), my base is smaller and I like the terrain surrounding it, and have spent a fair amount of time landscaping. Constantly coming out to find random holes in the terrain here and there compels me to repair the damage, and it's just getting stupid. Not being able to skip the night anymore is also amplifying the damage caused as it means more Endermen are present for longer stretches of time.

Again, there's no meaning to it, it doesn't add any gameplay, and it's just a nuisance. That part of the behavior is also exceedingly easy for me to disable (like ten minutes work), so the cost/benefit ratio is rather favorable.

Wooo! Love to hear you expressing this like I did. Can't wait to see it resolved :D.

[Battlecat]

This business of a new resource from enderman activity is very intriguing and the potential for player benefit is even better. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you came up with!

[johnt]

Sweet! Logical is always better

Yeah, it occurred to me that it wasn't necessarily them grabbing the blocks that's a problem, but rather where they are grabbing blocks from (forming random holes in the terrain), and that should be a relatively easy fix.

I also realized that there's an aspect of the Hardcore changes I was going to make, and probably make optional, that I can also do relatively easily without actually making them "hardcore" in terms of being an additional hazard, that makes their behavior make a hell of a lot more sense.

The mod will even get an extra resource out of it as an added bonus ;)

Excellent, I've always thought that minecraft needed entropy and that Endermen were a good way of providing it (I also like the idea of rain putting out torches as another source of entropy and danger), but Notch really half-assed the implementation of enderman and basically abandoned it instead of finishing it. I guess what i love about Enderman in principle is the idea that if you abandon a base, you'll come back to it in ruins from them picking stuff up and moving it around over time. But that actually isn't possible the way they're currently coded.

[Blazara]

I'm hyped for another form of challenge / feature to Endermen. Outside of Hardcore / hard difficulty they present no issue what so ever.

I remember prior to the original release they were "bigged up" in an grotesquely OTT manner. They were intended / believed by the community to be scary, what we were given however was a three block tall thin man who was scared of water and might steal some dirt. Even the later added buff to the Endermen still left them disappointingly monotonous. They were more annoying than scary :/.

I digress... In my eyes, any change to mobs that sprinkles some much needed challenge flakes on MC is a good change in Blazzy's books :)

<3 Flower

[FlowerChild]

Keep in mind guys: I'm not planning on giving them "the full treatment" that I want to in the future. What I am doing is taking a few aspects of that, that won't significantly impact gameplay too much (at least in terms of making them more dangerous), to make them immediately more interesting and less annoying.

There will still definitely be more work to do on them in the future, but I suspect this will strike a good middle-ground for the time being.

[Mr_Hosed]

@FlowerChild

I've ALWAYS hated the griefer-men. Thank god you're going to address these fugly bastards :) I think you said it best in another thread when you pointed out that Mojang had a bunch of interesting ideas and decided to shove them all together into one mob, which was just lame.

[FlowerChild]

Good news guys: Endermen have gone from lame and annoying, to fucking cool. I love them now. I want them to have my Enderbabies.

<dances>

[Sarudak]

You tease! D:

[SterlingRed]

Good news guys: Endermen have gone from lame and annoying, to fucking cool. I love them now. I want them to have my Enderbabies.

<dances>

I'm looking forward to it! :)

[morvelaira]

You tease! D:

*sigh* I love it when he teases. *fans self*

[Dralnalak]

Enderbabies

This terrifies me.

[Stormweaver]

Enderbabies

This terrifies me.

Teleporting placenta?

[Thorium-232]

Teleporting placenta?

Please let this be the new resource.

[Blazara]

Oh lord, please let the Ender placenta teleport onto your head, permanently obscuring your vision when attempting to use a bed.

[FlowerChild]

Decided to put some more time on the Endermen today to get them *just* right. Here's a screen of my final round of testing:

Spoiler

Show

And yes, this is in a creative with a spawning machine going to simulate long-term Endermen action ;)

You'll notice that despite that massive number at work, the terrain still looks fairly natural thanks to some of the changes I've made. Obviously, the grass would normally have time to grow back.

[dawnraider]

Awesome! Can't wait to try ot out.

[Peach774]

Its like Endermen are the Native Terra-formers of Minecarft. They smooth the terrain and make it still keep a nice look instead of a pitted desert full of random holes.

[FlowerChild]

Its like Endermen are the Native Terra-formers of Minecarft. They smooth the terrain and make it still keep a nice look instead of a pitted desert full of random holes.

Yeah, that's what I was going for. Endermen as a force of erosion rather than just random chaos. They still "grief" your terrain, but do so in such a way that you're unlikely to notice unless there are an absolute shit-ton at work or you've remained in the same area a very very long time.

Anyways, that's just a small portion of what I've done to them, but it's the aspect that largely takes care of their extremely high annoyance value.

[Panda]

Decided to put some more time on the Endermen today to get them *just* right. Here's a screen of my final round of testing:

Spoiler

Show

And yes, this is in a creative with a spawning machine going to simulate long-term Endermen action ;)

You'll notice that despite that massive number at work, the terrain still looks fairly natural thanks to some of the changes I've made. Obviously, the grass would normally have time to grow back.

...I had a very scary and 'unusual' dream about a group of enderman last night... oh god that's scary, as long as they only get grabby with the environment we'll be fine though. : )

[Dralnalak]

Yeah, that's what I was going for. Endermen as a force of erosion rather than just random chaos.

I really like this idea.

Now to start plotting out how to get Enderman to spawn in just the right spawn to flatten areas for me. Who needs a bulldozer when you've got Enderman De-Construction Services? :)

[Itamarcu]

Hmmm...so the Endermen are trying to make the Overworld more similar to the End by destroying mountains and hills?

[Gunnerman21]

...by destroying mountains and hills?

Or they're flattening the entire minecraft landscape for their own mob-trap. Which is quite suspicious, considering if they are farming mobs.. or us?

[SpaceGuyR]

Superflat worlds support more villages, maybe the goal is Testificates. (iron? slime? best souls/exp?)