I haven't enjoyed myself this much since I built my first windmill, shortly after windmills were added to the game. I thought I would share my new experiences with the mod as a way of saying thank you to Flowerchild and the BTW community.
My first day with all the new changes - hardcore wood, ores, tools etc - was really tough. I spent an excruciating day chopping down wood, and punching some animals. When it became dark I realized I needed a shelter - and could no longer just dig one in 5 seconds flat. Digging into the wall would take more time than I had, and I hadn't any dirt piles on me to wall myself in somewhere. I was on a hill next to a tree, so I beat down some leaves and jumped on top. I spent the night flattening the top and shaking in my boots.
Very quickly BTW taught me what a horrible decision this was. It became a danger to collect cobblestone or coal because the cave was some 50 blocks away. By living in a tree, I gave a home to skeleton archers shying from the sun - it became a danger to step outside my door. Now, you had to jump to get into my tree-house but while thinking about some of the changes (I had done some reading beforehand) I realized that were I ever to run out of food, or more importantly become grievously wounded, I would not be able to enter my base. I could only imagine being slowly killed while running to my base and dying right outside because I was too wounded to climb into a tree.
The sheer relief win a zombie died and gifted me an iron shovel with unbreaking III and efficiency II! That night my tree gained walls on the top, and I filled the underside of the canopy with dirt. No more skeleton archers.
Thank you Flowerchild, for that experience.
On that note, I really like having that palpable fear of dread, which vanilla minecraft lacks. I used to just charge the mobs and stamp them underfoot. Now I never leave my house without walking a full 360 around it to ensure a perimeter against creepers or skeleton archers from the night before.
Whenever I started a world in vanilla minecraft - and also in older version of BTW - I'd often spend the entire day walking around looking for a cool place to build my house or planning my manufacturing buildings. As a result, I'd often go through several worlds until I found one I liked. Now, if I don't get my ass working on a shelter immediately and punching some pigs, I face having to build an inadequate shelter and having to wait out the entire night - if I don't die. Because that first day is now so excruciating to play through, but also essential to do well, you have effectively cured me of my world-restart-syndrome. I no longer have the option of finding some cool-ass mountain to live in: in this hostile world if I don't find shelter wherever I can find it near me, I'm dead. The new changes really drive home the fact that Steve is very very far from home, in hostile lands. Way back when hardcore beds was added I thought the "You are too troubled to sleep" was more or less a polite way of saying the beds no longer worked. Now that message feels as much a part of the game as the windmill. With those wolves howling, and how I fear for my life inside my own home I can't imagine being able to sleep soundly.
--------------------------------------------------------
I am currently living in a stone basin that occurred naturally in a forest biome. It didn't have a very large entrance so I rigged up a dirt wall that only leaves 1x1 openings so at least nobody could walk in. It has a cave too, and I plan on walling that asap as well. My first night there I was already working on getting more cobblestone when I realized that there holes in my dirt roof, for any zombie to fall into. When I heard a pig die nearby I thought I was done for. I had trapped myself in an area of little maneuverability and without the knockback I'm not sure I could have fended the zombie off. Luckily he never fell through. I was enormously pleased to see he had burned to death right outside the entrance leaving me a very nice bacon breakfast.
----------------------------------------------------------
I do have some questions though:
- The mobs no longer respawn but the changelog I think mentions over-hunting. If I only kill a few animals in a herd, will there be more later, or is overhunting really your only option? I'm a little worried about the food source since I'll need to go further and further away just to find food, and until I find a village, which will be quite some time I won't have the domestic crops.
Hardcore hunger added the fat bar which the wiki says is visible, and i think is something apart from the meat haunches. I either can't find it, or don't have one. It also says I should be able to add to it by overeating regular food or eating deserts when full. The former doesn't work for me, it doesn't let me eat meat if I've got a full hunger bar. Or is all this normal?
The wiki also lists sawdust and bark as having a 3:4 fuel:meat cooking ratio, or .75 per unit. It takes 8 sawdust to cook something in my game giving a ratio of 8:1, for an 8-fold decrease in efficiency. This makes it rather difficult to keep my food cooked, since I need to cut down about two trees just to get enough sawdust and bark to cook a porkchop, and until I find iron that coal puts a real dent into my cobblestone and torch needs. Or is this just another case of the wiki being wrong?
