Includes bedrolls for sleeping!
Welcome to the development diary of EpicAaron29! I post modding updates and design musings here.
I have been modding BTW since FC first released AAAAAHHH back in 2018, but I didn't release anything until more recently. I currently have two published addons and various other unfinished works that may never see the light of day. My published works are...
SUPER BETTER THAN WOLVES
Compatible Versions: CE 1.0.1
Forum thread: SBTW DOWNLOAD
BONE PICKAXE MOD
Compatible Versions: CE 1.4.1 (works with Deco, BTA, etc)
Forum Thread: BPM DOWNLOAD
Please feel free to reach out to me with feedback or to share experiences, I love to talk about BTW!
~~~ORIGINAL FIRST POST~~~
Spoiler
Show
For some months now, I have been developing an addon for Better Than Wolves aimed making the early game more fun. In order to keep my inspiration burning for this final [[[grueling]]] push to a 1.0 release, I have decided to follow Sockthing's lead and show off some of the features I have been working on in diary form.
This project is called Super Better Than Wolves.
The addon's github description reads: "This mod is the ultimate answer to the BTW earlygame-- a massive infusion of content to enrich the experience and give players more to do both during the day and at night." Grandiose, I know, but I have been religiously playing the post-AAAAAAHHH earlygame for years at this point, and I believe I have identified solutions to longstanding pacing problems within Flowerchild's epic camping simulator.
Don't take my word for it, have a look at the centerpiece of my project--the Bone Pickaxe!
If you have been around for a while, you might remember that before BTW version AAAAAHHHH changed everything, the game resembled a slower version of vanilla Minecraft. You still punched trees for planks to craft a workbench, and you still ultimately create a stone pickaxe to dig a hole to grind cobblestone and iron ore. Back in those days, the work/life balance that the game offered the player was still fairly straightforward--during the day you explore, build, and farm, and at night you mine, enlarging the hidey hole or digging deeper for treasures in the depths. BTW version AAAAAHHH radically changed this dynamic by requiring the player to to make an iron chisel before having access to a pickaxe (a process that can take well over an in-game week). The resulting gameplay was less than ideal; while daylight hours were extremely engaging, the available, safe nighttime activities were reduced to maintaining a cooking fire, knitting, or scraping stones out of the bedrock. The downtime can be refreshing even now, but after hundreds of hours of knitting with my stapler resting on my mouse and my eyes glued to my phone, I can safely say that I have exhausted that shit.
A man can only be made to knit so long before he breaks... In fact, back when AAAAAHHH first came out, I secretly made an illegal addon that allowed the player to craft a stone pick on their second night by carving it from rocks. Since I couldn't share this addon with anybody without being banned, I stopped using it after a while and went along with the knitting masses. Enter the bone pick!
The bone pickaxe is the refined older cousin of my original stone carving mod. Ancient man once quarried flints and stones from the earth using crude antler picks. Now, Super Better Than Wolves players can do the same! Mechanically, the bone pick is as effective at mining as the stone pick--slow and steady. Bone is about half as durable as stone, so players looking to undertake larger mining projects will eventually seek a proper stone pick. In the meantime, however, the bone pickaxe opens up some amazing gameplay opportunities. Once again, players can carve out basements and mine shafts within their hidey holes. Players can even start some basic strip mining for that elusive iron ore if resources (food and torches) allow. All of this quarrying gives the player extra gravel and cobblestones to work with, which means new opportunities to build paths and even non-wooden structures when the player needs them most. This new pickaxe can also mine ores as effectively as its stone counterpart, so gathering those initial chunks of iron and coal is a lot faster with it.
The wide impact of a proper mining tool in the first few days of a fresh world was immediately evident. Suddenly, I was planning a staircase up a hillside that would eventually lead to a watchtower. It really puts the *mine* back in Minecraft, and the result is a more creative earlygame survival experience. I think Flowerchild might have been too strict in limiting the player's ability to manipulate blocks in the world, and a weak but achievable pickaxe within the first week of play (or even second/third night if lucky) returns some much needed agency to the player. It is no longer necessary to rush four ovens and 8 blocks of iron ore for the "real game" to start.
This tool is evidently a major upgrade over the sharp rock, so I wanted to have the process of getting one feel unique and meaningful (and not just be a free pickaxe like in the olden days). In short, you fashion a bone pickaxe from the rib of a cow. Killing a cow is no easy feat even with armor and swords, so players will have to be clever (or really stupid) in order to earn a pickaxe. You do not need an oven or any iron to make one, so the bone pick acts as a standalone tech objective alongside clay drying. I think this is one of the most important aspects of the feature--it creates an entirely alternate path to the standard oven-centric progression that players can choose to engage with when the generic clay path feels stale or overdone. Realistically, both goals can be kept in mind at the same time, adding an extra layer of depth to the survival stories we weave as we play!
Another gameplay-redefining feature of my addon is a lot simpler: leather armor has been made accessible!
This is one of the first features I programmed. With a "progress recipe" similar to knitting, players can use flint to work a piece of leather into two pieces of cut leather. This cut leather can be used to craft leather armor (and perhaps other items like slings...) in the 2x2 crafting grid. Not only does this mean that players will be able to access leather armor pre-workbench, it also just generally lowers the cost of leather armor to acceptable levels. Think about how expensive it is to produce a set of leather currently. 24 pieces of leather is multiple herds of cows. That just doesn't feel right, and in terms of gameplay I could very rarely justify the cost in singleplayer, and equipping a team in multiplayer with leather is just downright wasteful. Leather is such an important crafting material! Waterwheels, pumps, bellows, and more all compete for it. At five pieces of leather for a full set, good armor is finally within grasp of players when they need it most.
Now, we can all wrap ourselves in leather goodness, and the benefits are immediate. Playing naked in BTW is a death sentence, but so often the scarcity of materials forces players to attempt dangerous caving expeditions without a layer of proper protection. I admit that this change sort of relegates wool clothing to the trash pile, but I would argue that it was already trash. There is a reason Flowerchild never gave us socks. The protection that leather offers is so much more tangible, and it brings me back to the days of Minecraft Beta and Paulsauresjr when going out and hunting cows for armor was one of those things you went out and did because it felt right in a survival game. Alongside the bone pickaxe, getting oneself a nice leather suit is another early game objective for the player to think about in the first weeks of play. New players and players that tend to die a lot will certainly appreciate the increased survivability, and I generally hope this feature allows more players to be comfortable taking risks for ore and profit.
This feature does need some more play testing. I kind of want a string cost associated with the armor too, but I am not sure how best to go about that within the confines of the 2x2 grid.
Also, the tuque recipe has been adjusted to make knitting a cute little cap of your own more reasonable in the face of leather ascendancy.
And who can forget... knives knives knives!
Remember how I said that players can use a piece of flint to cut leather into pieces? Well, I decided early on that I wanted to create a new type of tool to facilitate a slew of "cutting" recipes, and knives seem perfectly positioned to fill the hole in the earlygame crafting gap.
Richard Cowen in "Primitive Geology" illustrates an image of primitive man as one dependent upon geology for survival. Identifying and working with rocks to survive is the bedrock of our species, and Minecraft demonstrates this reality very well. Lacking the strong jaws or rending teeth of other animal predator, Homo Sapiens was forced to turn to stone tools in order to fulfill a diet rich in protein. Contrary to Minecraft's magic hunting where animals POOF transform into prepared meat in a puff of steam, real primitive hunting required the use of flint knives and hammers to cut through tough hide and crack bones to expose the nutrient riches inside. As much as I would love to have players literally cut up a dead animal carcass in stages, such a feature is beyond my current scope of abilities (though I HAVE worked out how it would all work, entity corpses and all). Instead, I have elected to add new drops to animals that can only be properly processed with a specialized stone tool. That is where the flint knife comes in!
By sculpting/"knapping" a piece of flint with a stone, the player can craft a flint knife to use for a myriad processing tasks. "Flint knapping" is a new kind of progressive recipe I have created, but it isn't just knitting with a new name. Instead, the player holds right click to draw back the stone (similar to drawing a bow). Releasing right click causes the player to strike the flint with a satisfying clicking sound. If the player releases right click too early, however, the flint receives a bad hit and has a chance of shattering. The feature is not yet functional, but I have plans to animate the drawback. It will be a little crafting mini-game! I like to think that, if BTW existed on a more complex game engine, activities like knitting or carving would have some real technique to them that the player can learn and master while playing. Flint knapping isn't exactly the most exciting thing to do, but I think it is a step in the right direction toward making knitting-style progress recipes more engaging.
So, knives, what do they do? Primarily, they are necessary for carving a hunk of cow rib into a suitable head for a bone pickaxe. The cow rib can of course be cooked and eaten, but it takes extra long to eat the tough meat and it cannot be cooked over a campfire. Carving it up with a knife, however, separates a nice piece of beef from the bone! As mentioned, knives can also cut leather for armor crafting.
Other uses for the knives include:
-cutting branches from leaf blocks to use as fuel
-harvesting vines to create vine traps pre-crafting table
-harvesting hemp (because I think it is just ridiculous that you need two iron ingots to cut down a plant..)
-cutting up webs much faster than a sharp rock
-stabbing things
Planned but currently unimplemented uses for knives include:
-whittling logs into bowls, totems, pipes and other useful little items (the features surrounding these items early game has yet to be implemented anyway..)
-cutting grass for a new straw-making process
-even more animal processing recipes... mutton into sinew as a string alternative?!
-dark rituals involving animal sacrifices
It is important to note that the flint knife does not require any string to create, so in situations where the player fails to find string day 2, a knife acts as an alternative objective. Currently, not finding string day 2 results in an incredibly lame repetition of first day. It sucks, you probably already know that. The knife gives the player a decent stabbing tool (not as effective as an axe, but good in a pinch) and a more efficient fuel gathering tool than a sharp stone. My favorite aspect of the knife, however, is that is adds a ton of value to gravel pits. Not only does the player get slabs for pathing, but the reward of a few flints for knives and arrows is awesome.
A knife is a flex tool, a literal swiss army knife. An iron version is also available, made from 2 iron nuggets. It has 75 rather than the 15 uses of its flint counterpart (durability values not yet set in stone), and it stabs with the same power as a stone axe. I did not want it to be as effective as an iron sword because then nobody would ever craft iron swords. At this time, I do not think many players will craft an iron knife, though it is much faster as processing materials than the flint variety. As I develop more uses for knives in general, however, I think its appeal will grow. I would love it if all animals had processing recipes related to some of their drops (cutting fat from pigs for primitive oil lamps, sinew from limbs, more rib carving fun). Eventually, maybe I can even program a corpse butchering system. Skinning and processing an animal would be such a departure from the typical Minecraft hunting experience!
On that note, I intend to create a "bow stringing" recipe to allow the creation of bows pre-crafting table. Seeing a pattern? By giving players more content to aim for before iron smelting, the actual prospect of waiting for iron to smelt is suddenly a lot less grueling. I want players to feel like they are playing Minecraft right from the start rather than waiting days and days for Minecraft to eventually start. Bow stringing will be a little minigame like flint knapping--if the player doesn't time the string correctly, the bow snaps. That feature is currently incomplete.
Foraging and fuel gathering!
I will let these pictures speak for themselves.
Which looks better?
Never carve a tree in a forest biome again. Huge thanks to Sockthing for setting this up for me! He whipped this feature out of nowhere! Seriously incredible.
I want forests to feel more alive. As is, they are giant death traps of shade made to be chopped and burned. In Super BTW, they are an amazing source of fuel for campfires. You forage branches right off the ground, and potentially much more. I would like rotting logs, berry bushes, and mushrooms to generate in them too. If you have ever walked in a real life forest, you know what I am talking about. Rainstorms will cause rare edible mushrooms to propagate in forests for a brief period of time.
Here is another change I am working on... acorns! Well, maybe not acorns, but I want saplings/acorns to have a chance of planting themselves when they land on grass. I also want trees to take fucking forever to grow. I strongly disagree with CE's changes to tree growth speed and automation >:) I think trees should be a precious organism that is not easily replaced.
Much needed mid/endgame fixes: mining charges and steel tool enchanting.
I am getting tired of writing, so I'll keep these brief.
Using feedback provided in our mining charges discussion, I have made tallow more available and will be looking into tuning animal breeding to make automating tallow production possible earlier. I am also buffing mining charges to have a slightly larger blast radius and shorter fuse time to make tunneling with them practical. I want mining charges to be useful for building, as explosives on the whole got shafted by AAAAAAAAAAHHH.
The steel tool enchanting fix is one of those things few modern players realize is a serious problem. Currently, steel tools cannot receive enchantments in the standard table. They can only be enchanted with scrolls in the infernal enchanter. This means that steel tools are essentially worthless compared to diamond, because the effort required to get unbreaking and efficiency on a single pick (let alone the stacks of them that the player is likely to burn through while playing) is ridiculous. When I implemented this feature, CE had not yet released a fix for silverfish farming, but even with silverfish farming I do not think it is at all fun to force players to wait even longer to use a mattock. Thankfully, just enabling the standard enchanting table with steel tools easily solves this problem. Since very few players actually beat the dragon these days anyway, it is a change that has not been discussed often. I wish I had brought it up back when Flowerchild was still alive.
Hiracho's dynamic lighting comes included in the box, of course:
I will never play BTW again without this addon. It is so fluid, so perfect.
Crock pots, chunkloaders, and more!
So much more. But these details will have to wait for another diary entry.
BTW badly needs chunkloading for HC spawns, and if nobody else is going to do it, then I will!
I think this is exciting work. Initial playtests got my dopamine pumping, and I believe this addon has the potential to awaken a fresh BTW craving in a lot of players. Animals have been tweaked to drop a little bit more food, and this combined with the new fuel gathering methods culminates in a respawn experience that is a hundred times more accessible. The first few days are no longer a total slog, and I think the simple fact that players are encouraged to gather sticks off the ground rather than carve them from solid wood is 100x more intuitive to new players. It is also, to put it bluntly, more fun and dynamic, because it encourages the player to actually move around and explore their starting environment as opposed to sitting in one sport and holding left click on stones and trees. The value of flint gathering, too, will encourage players to be more mobile and active as they seek places for shelter.
SUPER BETTER THAN WOLVES!
I am aiming for an early February release, but who knows? I intend to accompany the 1.0 release with an anarchy server and some handy documentation to get new players into the game.
Blah blah blah, I'm tired. Before I hop off, I would like to thank some important people for making this all possible.
Sockthing!
Zhil!
Dawnraider!
Hiracho!
EXP!
The ghost of FC!
Yany, Greenknight, Stinky, Lanny, and so many more! (sorry if I missed you, I'll get you on the next pass)
Thank you all so much for the constant help and community support. You are some of the most generous and sane people I have ever met.
EDIT: Textures are not final! Many of these are test textures.
This project is called Super Better Than Wolves.
The addon's github description reads: "This mod is the ultimate answer to the BTW earlygame-- a massive infusion of content to enrich the experience and give players more to do both during the day and at night." Grandiose, I know, but I have been religiously playing the post-AAAAAAHHH earlygame for years at this point, and I believe I have identified solutions to longstanding pacing problems within Flowerchild's epic camping simulator.
Don't take my word for it, have a look at the centerpiece of my project--the Bone Pickaxe!
Spoiler
Show
If you have been around for a while, you might remember that before BTW version AAAAAHHHH changed everything, the game resembled a slower version of vanilla Minecraft. You still punched trees for planks to craft a workbench, and you still ultimately create a stone pickaxe to dig a hole to grind cobblestone and iron ore. Back in those days, the work/life balance that the game offered the player was still fairly straightforward--during the day you explore, build, and farm, and at night you mine, enlarging the hidey hole or digging deeper for treasures in the depths. BTW version AAAAAHHH radically changed this dynamic by requiring the player to to make an iron chisel before having access to a pickaxe (a process that can take well over an in-game week). The resulting gameplay was less than ideal; while daylight hours were extremely engaging, the available, safe nighttime activities were reduced to maintaining a cooking fire, knitting, or scraping stones out of the bedrock. The downtime can be refreshing even now, but after hundreds of hours of knitting with my stapler resting on my mouse and my eyes glued to my phone, I can safely say that I have exhausted that shit.
A man can only be made to knit so long before he breaks... In fact, back when AAAAAHHH first came out, I secretly made an illegal addon that allowed the player to craft a stone pick on their second night by carving it from rocks. Since I couldn't share this addon with anybody without being banned, I stopped using it after a while and went along with the knitting masses. Enter the bone pick!
The bone pickaxe is the refined older cousin of my original stone carving mod. Ancient man once quarried flints and stones from the earth using crude antler picks. Now, Super Better Than Wolves players can do the same! Mechanically, the bone pick is as effective at mining as the stone pick--slow and steady. Bone is about half as durable as stone, so players looking to undertake larger mining projects will eventually seek a proper stone pick. In the meantime, however, the bone pickaxe opens up some amazing gameplay opportunities. Once again, players can carve out basements and mine shafts within their hidey holes. Players can even start some basic strip mining for that elusive iron ore if resources (food and torches) allow. All of this quarrying gives the player extra gravel and cobblestones to work with, which means new opportunities to build paths and even non-wooden structures when the player needs them most. This new pickaxe can also mine ores as effectively as its stone counterpart, so gathering those initial chunks of iron and coal is a lot faster with it.
The wide impact of a proper mining tool in the first few days of a fresh world was immediately evident. Suddenly, I was planning a staircase up a hillside that would eventually lead to a watchtower. It really puts the *mine* back in Minecraft, and the result is a more creative earlygame survival experience. I think Flowerchild might have been too strict in limiting the player's ability to manipulate blocks in the world, and a weak but achievable pickaxe within the first week of play (or even second/third night if lucky) returns some much needed agency to the player. It is no longer necessary to rush four ovens and 8 blocks of iron ore for the "real game" to start.
This tool is evidently a major upgrade over the sharp rock, so I wanted to have the process of getting one feel unique and meaningful (and not just be a free pickaxe like in the olden days). In short, you fashion a bone pickaxe from the rib of a cow. Killing a cow is no easy feat even with armor and swords, so players will have to be clever (or really stupid) in order to earn a pickaxe. You do not need an oven or any iron to make one, so the bone pick acts as a standalone tech objective alongside clay drying. I think this is one of the most important aspects of the feature--it creates an entirely alternate path to the standard oven-centric progression that players can choose to engage with when the generic clay path feels stale or overdone. Realistically, both goals can be kept in mind at the same time, adding an extra layer of depth to the survival stories we weave as we play!
Spoiler
Show
This is one of the first features I programmed. With a "progress recipe" similar to knitting, players can use flint to work a piece of leather into two pieces of cut leather. This cut leather can be used to craft leather armor (and perhaps other items like slings...) in the 2x2 crafting grid. Not only does this mean that players will be able to access leather armor pre-workbench, it also just generally lowers the cost of leather armor to acceptable levels. Think about how expensive it is to produce a set of leather currently. 24 pieces of leather is multiple herds of cows. That just doesn't feel right, and in terms of gameplay I could very rarely justify the cost in singleplayer, and equipping a team in multiplayer with leather is just downright wasteful. Leather is such an important crafting material! Waterwheels, pumps, bellows, and more all compete for it. At five pieces of leather for a full set, good armor is finally within grasp of players when they need it most.
Now, we can all wrap ourselves in leather goodness, and the benefits are immediate. Playing naked in BTW is a death sentence, but so often the scarcity of materials forces players to attempt dangerous caving expeditions without a layer of proper protection. I admit that this change sort of relegates wool clothing to the trash pile, but I would argue that it was already trash. There is a reason Flowerchild never gave us socks. The protection that leather offers is so much more tangible, and it brings me back to the days of Minecraft Beta and Paulsauresjr when going out and hunting cows for armor was one of those things you went out and did because it felt right in a survival game. Alongside the bone pickaxe, getting oneself a nice leather suit is another early game objective for the player to think about in the first weeks of play. New players and players that tend to die a lot will certainly appreciate the increased survivability, and I generally hope this feature allows more players to be comfortable taking risks for ore and profit.
This feature does need some more play testing. I kind of want a string cost associated with the armor too, but I am not sure how best to go about that within the confines of the 2x2 grid.
Also, the tuque recipe has been adjusted to make knitting a cute little cap of your own more reasonable in the face of leather ascendancy.
Spoiler
Show
Remember how I said that players can use a piece of flint to cut leather into pieces? Well, I decided early on that I wanted to create a new type of tool to facilitate a slew of "cutting" recipes, and knives seem perfectly positioned to fill the hole in the earlygame crafting gap.
Richard Cowen in "Primitive Geology" illustrates an image of primitive man as one dependent upon geology for survival. Identifying and working with rocks to survive is the bedrock of our species, and Minecraft demonstrates this reality very well. Lacking the strong jaws or rending teeth of other animal predator, Homo Sapiens was forced to turn to stone tools in order to fulfill a diet rich in protein. Contrary to Minecraft's magic hunting where animals POOF transform into prepared meat in a puff of steam, real primitive hunting required the use of flint knives and hammers to cut through tough hide and crack bones to expose the nutrient riches inside. As much as I would love to have players literally cut up a dead animal carcass in stages, such a feature is beyond my current scope of abilities (though I HAVE worked out how it would all work, entity corpses and all). Instead, I have elected to add new drops to animals that can only be properly processed with a specialized stone tool. That is where the flint knife comes in!
By sculpting/"knapping" a piece of flint with a stone, the player can craft a flint knife to use for a myriad processing tasks. "Flint knapping" is a new kind of progressive recipe I have created, but it isn't just knitting with a new name. Instead, the player holds right click to draw back the stone (similar to drawing a bow). Releasing right click causes the player to strike the flint with a satisfying clicking sound. If the player releases right click too early, however, the flint receives a bad hit and has a chance of shattering. The feature is not yet functional, but I have plans to animate the drawback. It will be a little crafting mini-game! I like to think that, if BTW existed on a more complex game engine, activities like knitting or carving would have some real technique to them that the player can learn and master while playing. Flint knapping isn't exactly the most exciting thing to do, but I think it is a step in the right direction toward making knitting-style progress recipes more engaging.
So, knives, what do they do? Primarily, they are necessary for carving a hunk of cow rib into a suitable head for a bone pickaxe. The cow rib can of course be cooked and eaten, but it takes extra long to eat the tough meat and it cannot be cooked over a campfire. Carving it up with a knife, however, separates a nice piece of beef from the bone! As mentioned, knives can also cut leather for armor crafting.
Other uses for the knives include:
-cutting branches from leaf blocks to use as fuel
-harvesting vines to create vine traps pre-crafting table
-harvesting hemp (because I think it is just ridiculous that you need two iron ingots to cut down a plant..)
-cutting up webs much faster than a sharp rock
-stabbing things
Planned but currently unimplemented uses for knives include:
-whittling logs into bowls, totems, pipes and other useful little items (the features surrounding these items early game has yet to be implemented anyway..)
-cutting grass for a new straw-making process
-even more animal processing recipes... mutton into sinew as a string alternative?!
-dark rituals involving animal sacrifices
It is important to note that the flint knife does not require any string to create, so in situations where the player fails to find string day 2, a knife acts as an alternative objective. Currently, not finding string day 2 results in an incredibly lame repetition of first day. It sucks, you probably already know that. The knife gives the player a decent stabbing tool (not as effective as an axe, but good in a pinch) and a more efficient fuel gathering tool than a sharp stone. My favorite aspect of the knife, however, is that is adds a ton of value to gravel pits. Not only does the player get slabs for pathing, but the reward of a few flints for knives and arrows is awesome.
A knife is a flex tool, a literal swiss army knife. An iron version is also available, made from 2 iron nuggets. It has 75 rather than the 15 uses of its flint counterpart (durability values not yet set in stone), and it stabs with the same power as a stone axe. I did not want it to be as effective as an iron sword because then nobody would ever craft iron swords. At this time, I do not think many players will craft an iron knife, though it is much faster as processing materials than the flint variety. As I develop more uses for knives in general, however, I think its appeal will grow. I would love it if all animals had processing recipes related to some of their drops (cutting fat from pigs for primitive oil lamps, sinew from limbs, more rib carving fun). Eventually, maybe I can even program a corpse butchering system. Skinning and processing an animal would be such a departure from the typical Minecraft hunting experience!
On that note, I intend to create a "bow stringing" recipe to allow the creation of bows pre-crafting table. Seeing a pattern? By giving players more content to aim for before iron smelting, the actual prospect of waiting for iron to smelt is suddenly a lot less grueling. I want players to feel like they are playing Minecraft right from the start rather than waiting days and days for Minecraft to eventually start. Bow stringing will be a little minigame like flint knapping--if the player doesn't time the string correctly, the bow snaps. That feature is currently incomplete.
Spoiler
Show
I will let these pictures speak for themselves.
Which looks better?
Never carve a tree in a forest biome again. Huge thanks to Sockthing for setting this up for me! He whipped this feature out of nowhere! Seriously incredible.
I want forests to feel more alive. As is, they are giant death traps of shade made to be chopped and burned. In Super BTW, they are an amazing source of fuel for campfires. You forage branches right off the ground, and potentially much more. I would like rotting logs, berry bushes, and mushrooms to generate in them too. If you have ever walked in a real life forest, you know what I am talking about. Rainstorms will cause rare edible mushrooms to propagate in forests for a brief period of time.
Here is another change I am working on... acorns! Well, maybe not acorns, but I want saplings/acorns to have a chance of planting themselves when they land on grass. I also want trees to take fucking forever to grow. I strongly disagree with CE's changes to tree growth speed and automation >:) I think trees should be a precious organism that is not easily replaced.
Spoiler
Show
I am getting tired of writing, so I'll keep these brief.
Using feedback provided in our mining charges discussion, I have made tallow more available and will be looking into tuning animal breeding to make automating tallow production possible earlier. I am also buffing mining charges to have a slightly larger blast radius and shorter fuse time to make tunneling with them practical. I want mining charges to be useful for building, as explosives on the whole got shafted by AAAAAAAAAAHHH.
The steel tool enchanting fix is one of those things few modern players realize is a serious problem. Currently, steel tools cannot receive enchantments in the standard table. They can only be enchanted with scrolls in the infernal enchanter. This means that steel tools are essentially worthless compared to diamond, because the effort required to get unbreaking and efficiency on a single pick (let alone the stacks of them that the player is likely to burn through while playing) is ridiculous. When I implemented this feature, CE had not yet released a fix for silverfish farming, but even with silverfish farming I do not think it is at all fun to force players to wait even longer to use a mattock. Thankfully, just enabling the standard enchanting table with steel tools easily solves this problem. Since very few players actually beat the dragon these days anyway, it is a change that has not been discussed often. I wish I had brought it up back when Flowerchild was still alive.
Spoiler
Show
I will never play BTW again without this addon. It is so fluid, so perfect.
Spoiler
Show
So much more. But these details will have to wait for another diary entry.
BTW badly needs chunkloading for HC spawns, and if nobody else is going to do it, then I will!
SUPER BETTER THAN WOLVES!
I am aiming for an early February release, but who knows? I intend to accompany the 1.0 release with an anarchy server and some handy documentation to get new players into the game.
Blah blah blah, I'm tired. Before I hop off, I would like to thank some important people for making this all possible.
Sockthing!
Zhil!
Dawnraider!
Hiracho!
EXP!
The ghost of FC!
Yany, Greenknight, Stinky, Lanny, and so many more! (sorry if I missed you, I'll get you on the next pass)
Thank you all so much for the constant help and community support. You are some of the most generous and sane people I have ever met.
EDIT: Textures are not final! Many of these are test textures.
