Super Better Than Wolves Dev Diary ft. BETA RELEASE?!

[hoshi]

Hi Aaron
just wanted say thanks for this addon

it makes BTW early game much more approachable for me.

[EpicAaron]

Hi Aaron
just wanted say thanks for this addon

it makes BTW early game much more approachable for me.

Thank you for your note!

I think an update is overdue.

A few major upheavals are happening in my life right now. In two weeks, I am going to move to a new place for like the 6 or 7th time since September. I was ramping up my modding every day leading up to Thanksgiving, but for the past two months I have been largely unable to work on modding. Part of me just wants all of this to be over with. BTW weighs on my mind a lot and makes it hard for me to relax. At the same time, I don't feel good playing the game until I get everything to my new yet uncoded standards.

I mismanaged the scope of this latest update a lot. I should have had a hotfix ready to go for CE 1.4.1 so that SBTW would be on the same page feature wise as CE. Now CE is on to 2.0 and slowly creeping toward a pretty incredible MC Version update, and my mods are still in limbo. I feel like I haven't given SBTW fans a timely level of support, and I'm sorry about that.

Thankfully, Sockthing has been here to keep me motivated!



Sockthing is getting very close to releasing a playable version of Sock's Crops! Since we want to host a new Community Server ASAP, I have forced myself to get back into the saddle and prepare a little update to BPM. Mainly, I am porting over the hunger tweaks from SBTW, like being able to jump while famished and increased starvation time. I will also be addressing Battosay's issue of Tweaker not being compatible with BPM. I feel bad I let that sit for so long.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Jolicraft updated with Deco support:
https://www.sargunster.com/btwforum/vie ... php?t=1663

After the Community Server Modpack is done, I am leaving CE 1.4.1 behind as feature complete. I want to focus on SBTW, as I want to overhaul environmental generation. In the long term, however, I want to prepare for BTW's shift to MC 1.6 by getting a workspace set up for CE 2.0/Fabric.

In the short term, I am releasing another SBTW with a significantly stripped down changelog. If you are interested in the scope of this new update, I have included the current changelog and and TODO list of Super Better Than Wolves below:

Spoiler

Show

SBTW VERSION 2.0
Started August 8, 2022

Additions:

TODO-Added branch slabs, created by shift+right clicking the ground with 16 branches
TODO: gravity block, if it falls more than 1 block it explodes

TODO: change requirement that stick be placed in soft material for block
TODO: shift right click to place

TODO- Added 9 new seeds for each type of pumpkin and melon
TODO>ACTUALLY DO THIS!!

-Added new item: Bucket of Mortar
>right click to apply mortar to a block, depletes contents of bucket (16 uses)

TODO- Added new tool: the trowel
TODO- BROKEN with buckets of mortar!!!!
>right click to apply mortar to a block from your inventory

-Added new block: Wet Mud Bricks
>Can be dried in the sun or baked in a kiln to produce bricks more efficiently than with clay balls

-Added SLEEPING!
>Like Arminias mod/CE 1.4, the world is simulated during sleep. Time is not skipped! Monsters still lurk outside...
-Added the bedroll, from CE 1.4. You can sleep on this! It is crafted with 2 knit wool and an extra piece of wool for stuffing or a string!

-Added more efficient recipes for tanned leather armor
>crafted using cut tanned leather in the 2x2 crafting grid, like untanned leather

-Added rib cracking: use a sharp axe to quickly get meat off a rib
>the rib itself is reduced to bonemeal in the process

-Added the ability to cure ribs with nitre

-Added the Time Cube to the creative menu (WARNING: I am not responsible for any corruption that temporal shenanigans unleash upon your world)

-Added lava and powered axle to creative menu

Changes/Fixes:

-Changed pumpkin seeds to stack to 64 rather than 16 for storage and automation purposes OH NO MY INVENTORY BALANCE!!!!!!!!

TODO -Changed pumpkin and melon varieties to grow by seed rather than biome.
TODO STILL HAVE TO PROGRAM MELON SIDE OF IT!!!
>EX: a yellow pumpkin requires a yellow pumpkin seed to grow. In Sock's Crops, biome determines the fruit.

-Changed gourds on the vine to take a few days to mature (like wheat) (rather than being random)

-Changed wicker baskets to recycle into 3 wicker rather than just 1

-Changed rib bones to be grindable in millstone to produce 6 bonemeal

-Changed dead bushes to be a little tougher and made some more bountiful than others

-Changed FCAddOn to no longer display a V next to version number when loading into a world.. for pretty much no reason

-Fixed an issue in which the vase was also a Time Cube

-Fixed an issue where ribs looked kind of buggy to eat. That was my attempt at making them take longer to chew, but it looked sort of dumb


- ~ - ~ -
TODO CONTENT:


O- Added Yany's Hardcore Hell from Yany's Stuff&Things Addon
>https://www.sargunster.com/btwforum/vie ... 3&start=25
>Big shout out to Yany, creator of amazing addons

O-New in-world crafting recipe: Pile of sticks -> Campfire
right click branch/stick against top of block to place it down just like pregenerated branch blocks in forest
right click again to create "X" of sticks (drops 2 sticks)
right click again to add another stick on top (drops 3 sticks)
right click again to create a campfire

***GOURD TODO***
O-Make distinct melon seed and plant types (just like with pumpkins)
>Watermelon seeds in mineshafts
>Watermelon flower can randomly become giant melon
>Giant Watermelon flower can randomnly become magic watermelon with single block stem
>Honeydew generates on floor of jungle
>Canary melon seeds generate in desert temple


O-FIX yellow and white melon seeds

O-Add new gourd type, Wild Gourd

O-Choose how to find each plant type (seeds, natural spawning gourds, etc)
> Wild gourds generate in forests

O-Make a semi-dead vine and stem, have plant vines die into this plant
>it looks like a live stem but deteriorates into true dead stem

O-Make dead stem able to be overwritten by other blocks like grass

O-Remove weeds from gourd stem plants

O-Craft pumpkins/melon varieties into proper ratios of seeds and slices

O-Pumpkin Jack hitboxes do not conform to model... can that be fixed?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~OWO~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

O-AUTOFILL water bucket in crafting grid if player is near water source block
//detect a block of source water / full cistern within 3 blocks of you?

O-add right click pick up bricks and torches

O- think about buffing iron knife uses by +15
O- 1 SPRITE Tweak iron knife texture to be a little smaller

O- Add knife cutting recipes for tanned leather, NOT scoured leather?

O- change goggle overlay

O- stop hoppers from locking up dispensers

O- 1 SPRITE Redo final frame for bow stringing, make it bend inward a bit at the last moment (maybe make it easier?)

O- Fix the trowel, it's current implementation doesn't work with the bucket of mortar
O- 1 SPRITE trowel item

O- Envelope item
>stores nbt data of item, right click or uncraft to unwrap present

O-Custom death message for being stabbed to death by a knife. Also, clubs if there isn't one already.

O-FIX sleeping gimics (always face north, 3 blocks high)
O-HARDCORE SOAKED: Can't sleep if being hit by rain (check torch extinguish code perhaps?)
O-REMOVE the chat window unless player presses t while in sleep menu
O-CHANGE wake up button to be smaller, off to the side?

POSSIBLE MAJOR CHANGES
O- Add back crafting recipe for eyes of ender-> e pearl + blaze powder. Change soulforge recipe to be just SFS so trading not needed
O- Change tier 2 priest trades to be not shit, efficiency IIIs and such

One of the notable omissions from this coming SBTW update will be the new earlygame building blocks I have planned:

Stacks of branches, shafts, reeds, and cut grass can be used to build with. They are unstable/gravity blocks until tied with string or fiber, at which point they can be used as roofing material. They aren't strong enough, however, to support heavy stones or players walking on them. Spiders probably won't cause them to break, because that would suck.

Sock's Crops is filling me with fresh inspiration. I want to sprinkle the SBTW world with wild crops and new plants galore, but FIRST I NEED TO RELEASE THE SLEEPING UPDATE! Gourd Mania/Hardcore Sleeping/Brick& Mortar

:p

[EpicAaron]

My new job starts on March 6, so I have a couple of weeks to finish the new version of Super Better Than Wolves. I am going to try to work on it every day.

Yesterday and today I was working on a convenient little tweak: torches can now be picked up with right click! I intend to expand this convenient hotkey to bricks.



No more Hardcore Fumbling In The Dark! This change makes caving more fluid, since you don't have to break the torch block and pick up the item every time you need to shift light source.

[dawnraider]

Huh, that's actually a really neat idea

[PlasmaFox]

That with dynamic lighting and lanterns will make the BTW lighting progression godlike

[EpicAaron]

Huh, that's actually a really neat idea

I have my moments :>

I remember that the Discord Vintage Story server was running an addon that made almost every item in the game placeable on shelves. It feels good when the items in the world do not need to enter a transient "floating item" state to be picked up. Having the CE ctrl click modifier hotkey would be really useful for me hehe...

That with dynamic lighting and lanterns will make the BTW lighting progression godlike

A lantern that can be lit and extinguished at will would be an awesome transitional light source. Moving candles over to the timer system would also be cool. But how should Steve make tallow before bellows rendering tech? And how will Steve light these the wicks so quickly? A plastic lighter from 7/11?

I think an unintended consequence of CE's new lighting/mob spawning system is that players can now use redstone blocks to create unlimited light sources. This makes the crude light stage even shorter, which I think warrants some brainstorming. I know a lot of players probably want to get to safe animal farming as soon as possible, but I really like how BTW privileges light so much early on. Instead of giving the player an infinity light block, I'd like to try a slow burning lantern that players can hang over their animal cages. For the upkeep cost of keeping the lanterns lit (maybe 30 minutes, longer if the player remembers to light and unlight them?), the player can keep a few animals safe before finding Nether Torches. Lots of potential for shenanigans when the player ultimately forgets to keep the lights on... What does Deco use as a fuel, hemp oil? I'd like to do something with tallow/animal fat. Either way, I think redstone blocks are ugly.

Of course, lanterns would be a SBTW 3.0 type feature... I am serious about sticking to my limited changelog for this current release!

Today, Sockthing made me some beautiful textures for a new SMP item: envelopes!



Inspired by Forestry! Players can wrap up any item they want and give it to another player to unwrap as a gift! (Though I am still trying to figure out the best way to do this in the code...)

No mailboxes yet... but it would be pretty awesome to have like an owl or something fly out and deliver packages across the world. Feed him a snack of gratitude or he will peck you!

I would love to make a lot of different letter variants. For example, the red one is a Chinese New Year envelope.



I woke up this morning with two ideas in my head. It would be really cool if Steve could smoke weed, and it would be really cool if Steve could climb up into a hot air balloon and explore the world from the sky.



I really shouldn't waste dev time on this kind of stuff.... but it would be very cool...

[PlasmaFox]

I think redstone blocks are OK because CE light changes only apply to caves, monsters still spawn normally on the surface because of sky light 7 not 0.
As for envelopes, the texture is nice except maybe a little blurry? If you want a delivery system, look into bats; perhaps a cool mechanic with sending them off to other players but to simplify they would fly out of render distance and then tp for simplicity sake. Finally a use for bats!

[Hiracho]

I think redstone blocks are OK because CE light changes only apply to caves, monsters still spawn normally on the surface because of sky light 7 not 0.

Aarons point is that you can make safe animal pens pre nether. Sky light doesn't matter in that regard, mobs get blocked from spawning with any artificial light level, no matter the sky light

[PlasmaFox]

Before CE, redstone torches emitted light. So if anything, redstone blocks taking on that functionality improves the "issue". I don't see how keeping animals pre nether is a problem in the first place.

[EpicAaron]

Before CE, redstone torches emitted light. So if anything, redstone blocks taking on that functionality improves the "issue". I don't see how keeping animals pre nether is a problem in the first place.

Aw man, I had a whole reply written out to you but I got caught up with something and turned off the computer without saving. In short:

You are misunderstanding the difference between the old and new mob spawning mechanics. In SBTW/Old BTW, every light source has a certain brightness that radiates outward from the block. Torches and glowstone, for example, are bright enough to prevent mob spawning. Redstone torches and blocks are dull, however, and are not bright enough to prevent mobs even though they emit a little bit of light.

In the latest CE, mob spawning has been changed so that any artificial light will prevent a mob from spawning. This increases the effective range of torches considerably. On paper, this is an amazing feature. It makes random creeper spawns inside your base way less likely (though you lose a good bit of retro MC anxiety about dark spots as a result), and it really helps builder type players like Dawn create beautiful structures without needing to spam ugly torches all over it. An unintended consequence, however, is that red stone blocks are now perma torches.

First off, giant redstone blocks on fence posts is ugly ugly ugly. We should be burning that kind of stuff with fire, not encouraging it.

Given that cows produce sweet delicious nutritious mommy milky, having cows (or chickens or any kind of animal) as soon as possible is a great idea for transitioning out of hunting lifestyle. Redstone blocks as perma-torches make it so players can start to do this way earlier. BTW Discord users, is this strategy widespread? Are players just building redstone pastures now?

Before, permanent light sources were strictly locked behind the nether. In SBTW, players need to balance depleting sources of meat and fish with intense cave dives to the deepest, darkest pits in order to find three diamonds for a pickaxe. Even then, netherrack alone is a crude permanent light source that takes some care to use. Glowstone is great, but scarce and hard to reach. It isn't until players find soulsand and build a mechanical infrastructure that they can process netherrack into real permanent torches. This leads to a cool progression system whereby players slowly transition their bases from splotches of flame to fully mechanized empires of light with fields of torches stretching into the horizon.

Now, redstone isn't exactly super easy to find in large quantities, but since CE also reduces the required pasture size for animals, it seems like players only need a few blocks to get milk flowing. A single block will keep a coop of chickens alive.

Why is keeping animals so soon a problem? Besides being a lore failure, having a pre-nether resource plateau strikes me as a recipe for slumping. I mean, the players on my server built some redstone farms and then waited around at spawn for someone to go find diamonds. The sense of urgency behind diamond diving is a major driver of gameplay. And if we do want to give players the ability to hang out at base and farm earlier on, I don't think unlocking cow farming is the way to do it. Cows are serious farm animals.

Solutions? Either un-nerf pasture sizes so that cows require large amounts of space, or just turn off redstone blocks as an early light source. It never really made sense to me that players could take 9 piles of dust and create a solid block from it anyway.

[dawnraider]

Redstone blocks have always been able to prevent mob spawns, although in a shorter radius before the mob spawn light level changes. They give off a light level of 11 IIRC (maybe 12?). The lighting changes, along with performance concerns, is part of why redstone torches no longer emit light, since it makes it way more expensive.

Why is keeping animals so soon a problem? Besides being a lore failure, having a pre-nether resource plateau strikes me as a recipe for slumping. I mean, the players on my server built some redstone farms and then waited around at spawn for someone to go find diamonds. The sense of urgency behind diamond diving is a major driver of gameplay. And if we do want to give players the ability to hang out at base and farm earlier on, I don't think unlocking cow farming is the way to do it. Cows are serious farm animals.

Honestly I'm more inclined to reduce the amount of pressure behind getting diamonds, since it's so RNG focused and can feel really bad to have everything gated behind finally finding diamonds. Having more things to do and options to pursue is way better than hard gating so many things behind something that's entirely RNG, making players beat their head against a wall until they finally get lucky.

Also what exactly is "being a lore failure" supposed to mean?

BTW Discord users, is this strategy widespread? Are players just building redstone pastures now?

This is definitely not something I see hardly at all. The motivation to get animals that early in such an expensive manner really isn't there. Keeping a couple cows still requires like a stack of redstone to make enough blocks. I really don't see many players who 1) have that much redstone without first finding diamonds (it happens, but rarely) and 2) care enough to spend it all on a pen to keep animals that early, when you really don't need to.

Using it to keep chickens is much more reasonable, but that's already possible without permanent lighting anyway.

[EpicAaron]

Redstone blocks have always been able to prevent mob spawns, although in a shorter radius before the mob spawn light level changes.

One of the big brain players on the server figured this out after our first deep cave dive:


A single cow for milking is almost renewable food in itself. 8 is like having a McDonalds in your backyard. I am all for loading up on viable gameplay alternatives to diamond hunting in this particular portion of the game, but this nullifies the hunger issue entirely. Pasture sizes have increased while light scarcity has decreased, putting high capacity cow farming right up in the early game. And they look like big heat lamps.


(The clearer ender spec overlay is very nice BTW)

Redstone blocks in CE 2.0 are about as effective as a normal torch at making a pasture safe. A pasture less than half the size of the one pictured could probably handle 2 or 3 cows. Below is the old redstone block range for reference:



A redstone pasture is something I would make every time in later CE now that I know about it. We could keep the trifecta of cows pigs chickens going pretty cheaply. I tend to ignore redstone ore when crude mining because I know I can gather more of it when I actually need it later on, but mining out half a stack or more of redstone is both lower risk and more immediately rewarding than finding three diamonds. On the server, I had an idea to build a zombie farmer with a local spawner to sure up our supply of bait, but a single mining trip has changed our whole food dynamic.

In terms of progression, I think the gameplay loop of exploring for new caves and hunting while optimizing full moon fishing cycles is way more interesting than letting players slap down a cow box and start sipping milk.

Here is how I have kept two cows alive in my pre-CE/SBTW single player world:



That screenshot^ is in SBTW, so I could probably fit another two cows in here. In OG BTW, however, this is a pretty safe pasture size for keeping two whole bovines alive. They are my big cranky milk cows. Being able to fit an industrial quantity of these guys in a space even smaller than this really devalues them in my eyes. Beef automation is, I think rightfully so, a high tech, endgame project. With SBTW, I want to preserve this feeling that cows are these big, consumptive animals. They eat a ton and require time and effort to keep alive.

I remember players complaining about a "snowball" effect that occurs when you squeeze too many cows into too small a fence. I just don't see how punishing the player trying to skimp out on space is a bad thing. The cows eat through their grass supply and you come back to find them starving in a dusty pen. FC even created new textures and behaviors for starving animals--we are supposed to come face to face with this while playing. In my mind, Animageddon was supposed to make animal farming less of a braindead "lure animals into a hole in the ground" activity. It creates a ton of new gameplay considerations for the player. Namely, preparing backup stores of animal fodder for emergencies and the need to build increasingly larger pastures to compensate for Steve's growing consumption of meat and animal byproducts. I've had to rotate animals out of pens to fresh grasslands while figuring out how much space was needed. Like with campfires, I feel like certain kinds of players want to reduce animal farming to numbers, but the systems weren't intended to be straightforward. We've got an interesting representation of husbandry progression and industrial animal farming inside Minecraft, not a lot of media captures it quite like how BTW does.

When I talk about redstone blocks as a "lore failure," I am getting at some of the above. We are depriving players of interesting midgame experiences and stories when we reduce animal farming (and maybe cow farming in particular) to a vanilla-level of ease. I think Steve's relationship with industrial animal farming starts out small--a few chickens in a box--and grows into this complicated, intertangled flow of ingredients and farms. On another front, entering the nether is supposed to be this groundbreaking moment of change. You are confronted with a place that has INFINITE light, and you scavenge what you can and start to refine the hellish materials in order to devise new lightsources that dramatically change the environment around the yourself. When you break into the nether, you begin the process of expanding outward from your cozy hole or cabin or fort into a real, horizon spanning base/city/farm whatever the player wants to build.

Honestly I'm more inclined to reduce the amount of pressure behind getting diamonds, since it's so RNG focused and can feel really bad to have everything gated behind finally finding diamonds. Having more things to do and options to pursue is way better than hard gating so many things behind something that's entirely RNG, making players beat their head against a wall until they finally get lucky.

I agree with this, though I don't think handing over all of animal farming pre nether is the best solution. Chicken farming is enough in my mind, or maybe a single cow with effort. In SBTW, I am giving players more building blocks that reward having a surplus of string/fiber (like thatch and blocks of branches). I also give players the stone hoe so they can start agriculture sooner without sacrificing caving momentum by dedicating three iron ingots to hemp. In fact, I want to give the player more crude crops. Letting players keep large animals in tight spaces before establishing agriculture is like putting the cart before the horse.

Redstone blocks feels so busted to me. Perhaps we are the first players to discover this?

[PlasmaFox]

Your essay has some great points :)

I think FC made animal farming so difficult on purpose. Sustainable food so early on (like cows) unbalances the food system and overshadows other methods of food gathering; it turns hunger from a hardcore mechanic with interesting solutions into a chore to keep your HUD bar filled. I feel like cows are the main issue as they literally provide infinite free food that can be combined with fish to create a late-game class food.

You mentioned how maintaining a farm can be stressful sometimes because animals like cows can eat up grass like machines and require a vast amount of space. This is good for the game and forces the player to think and act like creating multiple pens and moving cows from one to another, feeding them with grass or wheat later on. Once the player advances to the late game, cow automation should become possible with infrastructure and automated wheat farms. STRAW! I think straw is an underrated item (perhaps gutted by sparse grass) and it should be viable to save cows. I say "save" because as previously mentioned animal keeping shouldn't be easy early on and starving cows would love a snack.

My vague improvement ideas:
-We could buff straw and tall grass to try make it a viable feed for livestock
-Change animal hunger AI to be more complex like eating more after being milked or random appetite
-Nerf redstone light

Now I am not demanding anything or complaining but simply discussing the current state of animal farming. I wish to help improve the animagedon system in the future. Hopefully you guys are on the same page

[Hiracho]

I'm With Dawn on the redstone argument. In fact, the redstone thing might actually be the balance change needed to make not finding diamonds way less punishing. As I've experienced in multiple playthroughs where I had explored entire third strata systems without coming back with diamonds. I would always come back with a bunch of redstone. having a very limited but almost guaranteed amount of perma light that can only be found at a level where luck will hand you infinite perma light seems like a good way to soften the disapointment.

I do agree that streamlining BTW makes it lose some of its charm though.

I feel that grass should probably be balanced back a bit. The best and easiest solution I see that happening is slowing the grass growth. It could also help introduce some more randomness if animals would eat patchy grass before starving. If they'd eat it at a less common rate, or simply walk to another block before eating so they dont eat twice at the same spot it could make things more interesting as that would not prevent dirt from showing up at all

[EpicAaron]

As I've experienced in multiple playthroughs where I had explored entire third strata systems without coming back with diamonds. I would always come back with a bunch of redstone. having a very limited but almost guaranteed amount of perma light that can only be found at a level where luck will hand you infinite perma light seems like a good way to soften the disapointment.

Players can make diamond dives worthwhile by picking up iron and gold on the way. Yeah I guess it is disappointing to come up without the shiny stuff, but compare that to the giddy intense awesomeness that is spotting your first diamond ore. The grind can be maddening in a good way, and the change that diamonds bring to a world is permanent. One diamond pick can create an indestructible gateway to hell that can be used to connect to any other place in the world. Also, we have beds now, so it isn't like the time between cave dives needs to be very large. Skip those pesky nights, dig/build/fish/hunt during the day, and return to the depths with fresh materials for another go.

All that said, I see what you guys are getting at. Players want to be able to sit at base and chill at some point, and you don't want that to be gated behind diamond RNG. Redstone blocks more than accommodate that, and I'll be honest that hanging out in the cow pen sipping milk was kind of nice.

Pre-nether redstone lamps is not how I will tackle this design question in SBTW. I have a few different approaches in mind. One is the Sock's Crops method: give the player some wild crops to grow. Carrots and potatoes (that cannot be combined with steak to create mega meals!). For the time cost of tending a garden, players can sustain a relatively sedentary lifestyle.

Another method involves labor intensive animal husbandry. For keeping a cow, I have this system in the back of my mind of cutting grass and drying it to create hay. *Sockthing has actually already coded up a demo of this!!!*

In block form, bales of straw or hay can be placed in a cow's enclosure and the cow will munch away at it over the course of a day or maybe longer. The idea is that as long as the player keeps on top of straw production, the cow will be okay even in a tight space without much grass. Sheep could be kept that way too I imagine. Pigs wouldn't eat that grassy shit though, so you'd need to feed them mushrooms and rotten flesh.

Big picture question: Am I wrong in my thinking that a lot of us miss being able to just relax and play some Minecraft BTW without constantly stressing about sudden death or a ticking clock to starvation? Like, Hardcore BTW is awesome for so many reasons, but sometimes I just wish all the new tech could be backported into pre-hunger Minecraft. Vanilla Minecraft with BTW mechanical automation is still one of the best modded experiences you can have even compared to modern modded experiences. So.... why not add a config to disable the hunger bar/rollback the hardcore hunger changes? I'd like to play something like that.

I feel that grass should probably be balanced back a bit. The best and easiest solution I see that happening is slowing the grass growth. It could also help introduce some more randomness if animals would eat patchy grass before starving. If they'd eat it at a less common rate, or simply walk to another block before eating so they dont eat twice at the same spot it could make things more interesting as that would not prevent dirt from showing up at all

^^^ I do think grass is a bit crazy rn. Slowing grass growth and making cows less intelligent about preserving their own grass supply would go a long way toward making the system feel natural.

~~Meanwhile, today~~~

Slow and steady.. A 2.0 release is getting closer and closer by the day, but April is looking more realistic than March. Coding, yes, but writing too. I want to release my new version with some basic documentation. BTW is so old now that new and old players alike have only a vague sense of what to do in the game. This is fertile ground!

Today I programmed Hardcore Soaked:


Steve cannot sleep if he is being rained on. I even have it coded so that Steve wakes up if it starts raining on him!

I have two other planned tweaks for sleeping: Removing the chat window while sleeping unless the player hits t and Hardcore Sleep Paralysis.

Hardcore Sleep Paralysis is FUN. And it is the first feature in a larger set of Hardcore Nightmares. Sleeping in the nether should definitely do some interesting shit....

[Moldiworp2]

I always wanted to be able to milk creepers in some way to produce a gas thats used in hot air balloon travel for better than wolves. Something about it just seems.... right.

[IssaMe]

I've always imagined getting a ghast bladder or something, but milking creepers? That's new to me.

[EpicAaron]

I always wanted to be able to milk creepers in some way to produce a gas thats used in hot air balloon travel for better than wolves. Something about it just seems.... right.

I've always imagined getting a ghast bladder or something, but milking creepers? That's new to me.

Wow. What strange insights!

If I remember correctly, FC's own idea for BTW flight involved hooking corrupted sheep up to a basket. You'd float through the air beneath an inflated farm animals. Sheer the sheep to lose altitude! I like the idea of a plain old balloon, but a ghast skin for it would be too cute. Mob head bloons!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGVMUJnMeog

I am easing back into the code this week. Unemployed again so making the most of it. I haven't touched gourd code since November, so picking up where I left off is taking some relearning. I am dreading it honestly, I am just not interested in this TODO list... I am going to grind at it every day until it is done. Hopefully by this weekend? I'm going to stream my banging my head against the wall to do it, will post links in here when I do.

First objective: Upper Man showed off a world-bricking bug in one of his recent videos. When you try to piston shovel ash, the game totally breaks down and the world can't be reloaded. I'm going to check out how ash and piston shovels work and see if I can't diagnose the problem.

Can't seem to get the console to open up in eclipse though.... the headaches man. I am not looking forward to coding a single thing on my TODO.

[EpicAaron]

Thanks to the prior work of the CE team, I managed to copy and paste the lighting bug fix!

BEFORE


AFTER
(in theory, I haven't noticed the bug yet so I assume it is fixed)


I also fixed the game brick from shoveling ash. Turns out, I just needed to add a method to confirm that, no, one cannot piston shovel ash off the floor. But maybe we should be able to? It would be cute to harvest potash from the wreck of a burnt forest.

I streamed today's progress on Twitch. I'll be doing the same throughout the week:
https://www.twitch.tv/flesh_boy

[EpicAaron]

Coding Stream Coding Stream:

https://www.twitch.tv/flesh_boy

Alright... today I tackle the gourds. Here is the little TODO box I made for them:

Spoiler

Show

***GOURD TODO***
1 O-Make distinct melon seed and plant types (just like with pumpkins)


2 O-FIX yellow and white melon seeds

3 O-Choose how to find each plant type (seeds, natural spawning gourds, etc)
> Wild gourds generate in forests
> Watermelon seeds in mineshafts
> Watermelon flower can randomly become giant melon
> Giant Watermelon flower can randomnly become magic watermelon with single block stem
> Honeydew generates on floor of jungle
> Canary melon seeds generate in desert temple


4 O-Make a semi-dead vine and stem, have plant vines die into this plant
>it looks like a live stem but deteriorates into true dead stem

5 O-Make dead stem able to be overwritten by other blocks like grass

6 O-Remove weeds from gourd stem plants

7 O-Craft pumpkins/melon varieties into proper ratios of seeds and slices

8 O-Pumpkin Jack hitboxes do not conform to model... can that be fixed?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~OWO~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

#1: Okay, so #1 is already complete on the pumpkin side. Basically, I created a "sleeping" variant of each growth stage that is identical to its waking counterpart. However, it can't grow unless it is day. The gourd wakes up in the morning and can grow again. This is pretty much how wheat works. So, rather than having an avalanche of gourds constantly poofing into existence, the fruit goes from flower to baby lil gourd to big chunker over the course of a week. Make sure to say good morning to your babies every day!

In the past, melons were a renewable food source that took almost no effort to maintain besides weeding and waiting. Each stem would shit out a whole gigantic melon every so often, and with a field of melons in a checker pattern, you just had a waterfall. And I love this. I had my pig pen and my cows and my melons and I was happy. It's totally busted though, and takes away from other neat aspects of farming at that stage of the game. SO, these new large melon plants are bountiful, but they are more like living plants now. You have to care for them and watch them grow. If you have never tried to grow anything in real life, I recommend finding some dirt and sticking a seed in it! Add water and give as much sun as you can.

On the western frontier, melons were a survival crop. People lived on them. The case holds up in BTW.

#2: Each gourd type has a unique seed. This is complete on the pumpkin side, not even begun on the melon side. However, the textures for white and yellow pumpkin seeds aren't working. Probably an issue with the lang file.



#3: I think I still agree with this list. I like the idea of canary melons in desert temples and and watermelons in mineshafts (because that's just how it is). Watermelons are the smaller variety, I guess maybe 3 slices per. So you'll need to grow the crop in batches in patches to gather a lot at once. "Wild Gourd" was my concept for the starting plant in the gourd evolutionary chain. In a previous post I detail my selective breeding system, but I don't think I want to worry about that right now. It is possible that the current system of initializing gourds does not allow for each vine type to connect to fruits of other types. So, you'd find wild gourds in the forest (because I feel like the forest is a fun biome for scavenger type gameplay, because you get lost easily if you aren't careful). Gourds are definitely more of an arid plant in the wild, so the forest doesn't actually make too much sense.

Since this is Minecraft, however, I think having the yellow pumpkins spawn in forests looks cute. Here is a demo:

I wish there was an arid forest biome or something. I'd put fetid gourds in there, along riverbanks. WAIT, Sock actually coded the changes necessary to allow biome-unique river types. So, if I wanted to, I could make certain types of gourds generate along the banks of rivers in deserts, like a kind of oasis with fruit. NOT TO BE IMPLEMENTED UNTIL AFTER SBTW 2.0!!!!!!!!! SERIOUSLY!!!!!!!!!!!!! I promise, my dev flow will be less centralized next time with more branches so I can push smaller scope updates faster and have less feature stress. BUT FOR NOW, SCOPE.

So, here is what I am going to implement for now. It will serve until a more robust biome generation and breeding overhaul is ready:
>watermelon seeds generate in mineshafts, but they only grow to the third (medium) stage. Very rarely, I could have one grow to the maximum stage?
>giant watermelons occasionally sprout from a normal watermelon bud. They have their own giant watermelon seed, so getting one lets you make more! And giant watermelon plants can occasionally grow dwarfs.
>canary melon seeds generate in desert temples
>canteloupe generates in jungles
>honeydew generates at desert wells very rarely?
>Magic Watermelons (the vanilla 1-block stem plant for automation purposes) can be created by sprinkling soul flux on some giant watermelon seeds.

>yellow pumpkins generate in forests (very rarely)
>white pumpkins generate in tundras (can we make snow generate over them?) (helps the whole barren wasteland problem a little lmao)
>green pumpkins generate carved in swamps. Sometimes a solitary uncarved green pumpkin will generate with a seed in it
>Giant orange pumpkins? IDK! Perhaps there will be an extremely small chance of one popping up with yellow pumpkins? If this works in the code, I will do it. Otherwise, they will spawn carved in plains and uncarved outside of HC spawn radius.
>Magic Giant Orange Pumpkins (the vanilla 1-block stem plant for automation purposes) can be created by sprinkling soul flux on some orange pumpkin seeds seeds :) Magic Dust Solves Everything in game design! Of course, this won't be the final way to get these, but I want to make sure players still have access to the old fashioned stems so that old builds are still possible.

4: Fuck this man, too much work for this particular update. Currently, when a gourd vine is cut, all the detached plant immediately turns brown. I want to create a new dead variant that looks identical to a living plant (but doesnt grow of course). This plant then decays into the dead looking plant. Then, it decays into tall grass. Succession of the garden. I am not sure I will bother with this, but it might be easy?

5: Yeah, this shouldn't be too hard. Just need to figure out how Minecraft determines if a specific material can be overwritten. Vines already overwrite tall grass, so I just need to make dead vines on that level.

6: This might be harder. Sock gave me a breakdown of how weeds relate to farmland. I need to make it so gourd stems prevent weed growth. Why? Because there is enough maintenance as is. I have hydration plans.

7: Proposed ratios:

(all melon slices can be crafted into a seed variant. Seeds also occasionally get spit out when you eat a slice)
Watermelon - 4 slices
Giant watermelon - 5 slices
Magic Giant Watermelon - 5 slices
Canary Melon - 4 slices
Canteloupe - 3 slices
honeydew - 3 slices

(pumpkin seeds are not derived from slices. They are obtained like usual, when the pumpkin is carved or cut)
Yellow Pumpkin - 3 slices, 3 seeds
Giant Orange Pumpkin - 4 slices, 4 seeds
Magic Giant Orange Pumpkin - 4 slices, 4 seeds
White pumpkin - 2 slices, 2 seeds
Green pumpkin - 3 slices, 5 seeds

8: I'm just not going to worry about this issue for now :>

So that's the gourd plan. Changes to hydration might come after, not sure.

[dawnraider]

Fixed the piston shovel on ash crash. It was caused by the game attempting to drop a null item, although the crash appeared on the other side of a packet transfer so the actual source didn't show up in the stack trace.

If you want to backport the fix, add a check to see if the item id dropped is 0 where the ItemStack is created in TileEntityPiston.destroyAndDropIfShoveled():

Code: Select all

int idDropped = tempBlock.idDropped(storedMetadata, worldObj.rand, 0);
					
if (idDropped != 0) {
	tempStack = new ItemStack(idDropped, tempBlock.quantityDropped(worldObj.rand), tempBlock.damageDropped(storedMetadata));
}

[EpicAaron]

Thanks Dawn! How has work on CE been lately? The CE github repo is so well organized that I have been able to find super specific commits from months ago for my own reference. I am learning to appreciate the value of Git every day I code.

I am not going to be streaming today. Just more gourd work. Specifically, I am testing to see if I can get the gourd vines to accept multiple variants.

[dawnraider]

Lol I would call the BTW CE repo "acceptable" at best lol, but yeah it's definitely serviceable. Version control software is absolutely indispensable when it comes to software development. The fact that FC did not use any kind of VCS, and was able to make what he did blows my mind and further convinces me he was a madman lol.

[EpicAaron]

As of now, all gourds and seeds have been coded. Seed textures not final! GOURD MANIA is finally coming to a close... until next update has me reworking them again :)

Wicker blocks were an unfortunate casualty of hardcore basket weaving. It was one of my favorite aesthetic blocks in OG BTW. I think it fit the medieval primitive vibe of the mod really well.



I would like to bring this block back as thatch, an earlygame roofing material that offers shelter but is not durable enough to hold the weight of players or heavy blocks on top of them. This is an area of design where CE and SBTW will diverge further. CE limits the amount of reeds you can grow by how many unique plants you can find out in the world. Until Sock's Crops eventually perfects a method of germinating cane roots, my version of BTW opts to keep the original reed growing mechanics as they were. You can sow as much as you want, and now massive quantities can be used for aesthetic construction in the earliest stages of the game! Note, the conversion to thatch roofing is permanent--you can't use blocks of thatch as mass storage for sugarcane.

[Battosay]

CE limits the amount of reeds you can grow by how many unique plants you can find out in the world.

Don't forget that you can pretty easily buy them from the farmer so it's not that limited ;)