Removal of incredibly easy-access to cheats

[Soupy Delicious]

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My request is that this finally gets removed. The argument that self control should be used is a non-argument; one could have said the same thing for when you could wallhack mobs by pressing F3. "Just use self control".

The more convenient a means to cheat is, the harder it is to self control. Therefor, I believe this button should be yeeted to the underworld. Perhaps it only stays active for the first few days of a world; perhaps you need to do some inconvenient edits to make the world cheat-ready. But as it is, it's another one of those weird remnants that should be fixed up!

[IssaMe]

Honestly surprised that FC didn't remove it himself

[Pot_Tx]

Totally agree with this.

[EpicAaron]

And then one day you log in to find a corrupted chunk right in the middle of your base.

The ability to go into creative and fix glitches is important. You don't realize you need it until something awful happens.

If you find yourself going into creative a lot to cheat... :p

[Soupy Delicious]

And then one day you log in to find a corrupted chunk right in the middle of your base.

The ability to go into creative and fix glitches is important. You don't realize you need it until something awful happens.

If you find yourself going into creative a lot to cheat... :p

I'm very glad that you had nothing to do with BTW's development.

[Hiracho]

First of all. There is no need to throw nasty remarks when you disagree with someone.
Second, CE is actually backing away from FC's black and white "only play the way I intended" stance.

We don't need to babysit people who are tempted to cheat and we certainly dont need to force em not to(thats an impossible job anyway, as there will always be ways). Whatever floats someone's boat is fine. We're not here to judge other people for playing how they enjoy something. That said. There's definitely ideas to promote and reward a fair played world instead of punishing a cheated one.

[EpicAaron]

I'm very glad that you had nothing to do with BTW's development.

Oh get off the forum and play the game.

Over time, tastes change. There was a period of time when FC was pretty amped up about a personal project called Return To Home that would essentially be his take on the sandbox survival game. It would have radically changed the Minecraft formula in a lot of ways. Better Than Wolves is an expansive, expressive project that across a decade constantly sought to redefine how we play with and think about Minecraft. BTW is transformative to the point of breaking your brain. Now that the mod is free from FC's extremely strict sense of IP protection, we can continue to do the same.

The Suggestions Forum (regardless of what we change its name to) will probably always be a pretty intense place because people have set ideas about what they like or what they find fun or how strict they want to playing by the rules. Minecraft, and BTW specifically, is just that kind of game. Over the years, a lot of drama has sprung up about design philosophy and the larger concept of the mod and its "intended" gameplay. I strongly urge any would-be drama queens to let the past be the past and embrace the era of CE :)

Hiracho hit the nail on the head. Dawn has literally bent over backwards to provide us an open platform for development (and will even bend over backwards to add personal hooks if you ask!!!). Even though I have not kept up with the latest CE versions in my own projects, Dawn & Co's work on organizing the BTW codebase and documenting their own changes has been a phenomenal resource for my own learning. If you want to learn how to make your own version of BTW in the way you think it ought to be played, it is easier than ever. FR

Now, if you want to make a version of the game that removes the LAN features so you can't cheat under any circumstances. Go for it. I bet it would be a couple lines of code commented out to remove the button. Somebody with a working CE 2.x code environment could fork you a version in a second. HOWEVER, chunk corruption DOES happen. Sometimes you exit out during a save or it just fucks up. It is like a an orbital nuke hitting a 16x16 piece of your base. I lost all of my leveled villagers like that once, and I was SOOOOOOOOOOO glad I had the option to jump into creative mode and get a fraction of what I had back.

[Niyu]

And to add a bit to this. Even Flowerchild said that using out of game solution to fix out of game problems wasn't the incorrect thing to do. So Even strictly following Flowerchild's vision, the cheat option would still be there.

[Blacklands]

On the matter of Return To Home, do we have any idea what happened to that plan?
Did FC have to abandon it due to health/time reasons? Is he potentially still working on it, or did he abandon it together with BTW as a whole?
Or did he never say anything about it? I only vaguely remember him mentioning it sometimes, way back.

Also, did he ever publicly write down a more detailed explanation of what it would have been, and how and where it would have gone further than BTW?

[gaga654]

Here's the full story as I understand it:

RTH was originally intended to be part of BTW that would serve as new post-endgame content. It would be a separate dimension that would be unlocked using steel and fortresses. (At this point it wasn't called RTH yet, but referred to as the "anniversary update.") FC initially put it off because he was waiting for vanilla Minecraft to get some sort of extended block IDs, but as time dragged on they didn't get implemented and he started to disagree with the overall direction vMC's development was going. FC decided that he would wrap up BTW's development and instead release RTH as a separate game, but around that time he started having health problems so for a few years BTW was in a bit of a limbo state of "almost feature-complete, just a few updates left to polish up all the loose ends." Then at some point FC changed his mind and decided to integrate his ideas for RTH into BTW in the form of version AAAAHHHHHHH and the subsequent updates.

[EpicAaron]

Also, did he ever publicly write down a more detailed explanation of what it would have been, and how and where it would have gone further than BTW?

My greatest regret is not prodding him to release his notes before leaving us. It just did not cross my mind. He also deleted his YouTube channel I think, so his RTH portal video is gone too? So, we are left with whatever FC wrote in this forum, the MC forum thread, and on Discord.

I play games like 7 Days to Die and The Long Dark and am always hit by how unpolished they are. Be it the inventory system, crafting, or some other quirk of design, these games always make me want to go back and play BTW. I have the sense that RTH would have been the ultimate version of these experiences.

[Niyu]

I kind of miss him, even if i rarely interacted with him. Hope he is doing ok.

I still have the anniversary video download on my computer. The one i didn't get in time that i also really miss is the animal farm one. In general, all the teasers and trailers were really full of personality. It was such a loss when they were removed.

[dawnraider]

For the record, there are other, more effective, ways to fix world corruption issues than using in-game commands.

But yeah Hiracho pretty much hit the nail on the head. I don't want to worry about policing how people play the game.

My greatest regret is not prodding him to release his notes before leaving us.

Zhil and I did ask, he said that the little he had actually written down was too scattered to be able to effectively gather and share, and that most of it was in various comments in the code anyway. So in other words, we already have most of what he wrote down.

[EpicAaron]

I still have the anniversary video download on my computer.

You should post a mirror to Youtube! I would love to see it again

[Soupy Delicious]

Oh jebus lol. So I'm not allowed to respond in kind to someone's jab, just because I hold a lone position on a point that is (strangely) important to you all?

"If you can't will yourself not to cheat, then... =P" Seems like a lite jab to me, no?

And Dawn sends me a forum warning. Adorable.

Anyway, putting aside all that absolutely weak stuff, if anyone thinks it's good game design to have literal cheats available not three clicks away at any time (in a pretty hardcore game) then... =P

[dawnraider]

Disagreement is perfectly fine, being a dick isn't. Doesn't matter who was a dick first, just don't do it, which goes for both you and Aaron. Doubling down on being a dick after being warned not to is not helping your case.

[EpicAaron]

I think I make a pretty reasonable case. I used to think the same way--why the hell can we bypass no cheat mode?

But shit happens. In the end, I was very glad I had access to LAN cheats when a massive chunk of my time suddenly vanished.

So where do we draw the line? Do we have a text file config so that it is super inconvenient to toggle cheats on and off? We can put a bunch of distance between the game and the cheat toggle, but I think there will always be a way to cheat.

I am sorry if my :p was seen as inflammatory. That was not my intention. I meant that there is a certain degree of self control needed to even play BTW in the first place. AND (and this might sound sacrilegious), if you do cheat once after a stupid death... that's fine! You'll be okay. The integrity of your world is not bunk, your time wasn't for nothing, and your gameplay stories were still awesome. I used to cheat every now and then whenever I had a "unfair stupid cheap" death. I learned as I went on, and nowadays I just roll with the punches.

[Pot_Tx]

I still think LAN cheating should be removed simply beacause there already is an option called "Allow Cheats" on world creation. When I turn it off I mean to give myself no chance to go into creative mode or get resouces with commands, even if I get into some troubles, because I would probably regret doing so afterwards, as it makes me feel the save "unclean". Now the problem is that you have convenient access to cheating regardless of that world setting about cheats, which I guess is kind of an irrational design.

[Soupy Delicious]

Disagreement is perfectly fine, being a dick isn't. Doesn't matter who was a dick first, just don't do it, which goes for both you and Aaron. Doubling down on being a dick after being warned not to is not helping your case.

Ah, well in that case I'm considerably less salty.

Hopefully anyone can see why I responded that way; a facetious response to a humble point you're making isn't a response in good faith; didn't have patience for it. Anyway, all ist gut.

[Blacklands]

Thanks for the clarifications on Return To Home!
So I guess we have some notes, mostly inside of code comments, and the rest is sadly lost within FC's head since he's gone.

I didn't know that he actually already implemented a percentage of what he wanted to do for RTH in BTW itself. So that's the new early game, then?
And the "post-endgame" content after having unlocked soulforged steel and the like, with a new dimension, he never got around to do?

I also wonder what he might have wanted to do for RTH in BTW but couldn't because of game code/engine limitations, where genuinely a new game would have had to be made from scratch (e.g. in Unreal/Unity). Would he have wanted dynamic lighting so you can carry a torch around for illumination, for example? (I guess that's technically possible in BTW, didn't someone make an add-on?)

Also, on the actual topic of this thread:
I personally don't have any strong opinions. I wouldn't be sad if the LAN button was gone. But it's only a little more effort to edit the player data of a world to set a player to Creative Mode, or things like that. If someone is genuinely so frustrated that they want to cheat, they'll probably go that little extra step. And if they are tempted to cheat all the time, I don't know, I'd assume they wouldn't stick with BTW for too long anyway?