New Release! (BTW V4.891)

[jorgebonafe]

;)

Is this a hint that you are adding an electric drill in the next release?

[FlowerChild]

Is this a hint that you are adding an electric drill in the next release?

The fans requested it, and as always man, I always do exactly what the fans demand :)

Spoiler alert!

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanning

Turns out in the end game, Steve finally figures out a way to enjoy vanilla as is ;)

[Mikko_blu]

Nice release. :) Care for a three way with that makeout session?

[slango20]

can I install modloader so I can have the MineLittlePony Mod? and yes, I know, install before BTW for modloader, and why does FC have so many classes like: FCBlockLilypad, FCBlockPistonBase, FCBlockPistonExtension? the mod makes no changes to those blocks that i'm aware of




I'm a brony and I'm proud of it (the latest season [as of posting time] is a piece of s*** though)

EDIT: is the BWF war over? can I revert my signature?

[FlowerChild]

Thank you for identifying yourself as a Brony. It makes herding you all into the camps that much easier.

[BinoAl]

Thank you for identifying yourself as a Brony. It makes herding you all into the camps that much easier.

...Ok, now that make-out session has to be a four-way.

[FlowerChild]

...Ok, now that make-out session has to be a four-way.

Hehe...I didn't ban him for being a brony of course, but I figured using that as the explanation would result in much hilarity.

I was not disappointed :)

[BinoAl]

Hehe...I didn't ban him for being a brony of course, but I figured using that as the explanation would result in much hilarity.

I was not disappointed :)

Heh I know, you may be insane, but you're at least reasonable :)

[Ross_Varn]

Hardcore Archery, eh? I recently found a jungle temple early game and scavenged a decent amount of arrows from it, bolstering my supplies with the odd chicken throughout the place. End result was that I always had about a stack of arrows on hand, and several dozen notches in my bow after racking up mobs that just couldn't reach me. I'm glad to see this change, and rather pleased to see the change in workstation breaking. One of my first thoughts on the first dawn ingame as I was finishing chopping down my workbench was you know, this really shouldn't be a thing I can do- but as it is with exploity behavior, players do it because it is possible, and I've always been one of them.

This is going to make me take those extra steps in the bloodthirsty fight against the all-claiming darkness in the early game. Thank you for that.

[Lars]

Wow, impressive changelog. Seems like a real challenge. There's one thing I'm dreading though, the amount of gold needed to craft a gearbox. It's an interesting change though, because it will force me to build more sources of power, as that will be much cheaper then just dragging miles of axles and gearboxes from one power supplier. It also puts the windmill a bit further up in the techtrees. I'm curious how this will work out =D. Thanks again for your impressive hard work FC!

[FlowerChild]

Wow, impressive changelog. Seems like a real challenge. There's one thing I'm dreading though, the amount of gold needed to craft a gearbox. It's an interesting change though, because it will force me to build more sources of power, as that will be much cheaper then just dragging miles of axles and gearboxes from one power supplier. It also puts the windmill a bit further up in the techtrees. I'm curious how this will work out =D. Thanks again for your impressive hard work FC!

Yup, I discussed that on MCF as a point that I'm actively considering. Since then though, I've had a chance to play a bit more, and it feels about right to me at present. Here's the MCF post for further info:

Honestly, the Gear Box thing is a lingering question for me as well, and may require further balancing. At present it is consistent with the changes made to the other blocks with the latch, but given the volume of Gear Boxes required in the early game, and given that only a small fraction of Gear Boxes are ever powered by redstone, may be overboard for that one case. I want to see how this plays a bit more, but I may replace the Latch with a single gold nugget to represent the contact to disengage the gears, which remains consistent with the idea of gold converting a redstone signal to mechanical force, while not attaching the same heavy cost to each individual box. I'd prefer not to do that though as it takes a certain amount of consistency away from the recipes ("if I'm producing force with redstone, I need a latch here"), but it's an option if it's really necessary for balance.

And yeah, I was holding off on the gold nugget change for a long time as I was hoping that mining for gold would remain interesting later in the game, but it just wasn't working out.

The thing with this kind of balancing, is that you may lean too far to one side in an attempt to straighten things out, and need to go back a bit on the other to get it just right ;)

Previously gold was stockpiling like crazy with no particular use for it (other than rather sploity tool creation) in the early game. It's all a matter of getting it just right so that the rate of use matches up with the rate of consumption so that finding gold deposits is more along the lines of "Oh! Gold!", rather than "Oh...gold" (and I don't know about you, but it was at the point I found myself getting disappointed it wasn't iron so it was bordering on "damn it...gold"). We may be there now with these changes, or we may have gone slightly into "AAAHHH!!!! NEED MORE GOLD!" territory :)

As an additional balance point, I'd like it to get to the stage where the player is also further motivated to build a nether mob trap in the late game to help keep up with their gold needs.

Anyways, it's the kind of thing that can only be really established through extensive play testing, so give it a try and see how it works out. I'm certainly not beyond the point of making additional tweaks as required.

At present, the way it feels to me is that the rate of acquiring gold in the early game while mining/caving for other resources matches up just about right with its rate of consumption through Gear Boxes. You tend to have just about enough on hand to build your basic systems, while still feeling enough pressure on the resource to make finding gold a happy moment while mining rather than a let-down. It's also enough to inspire thoughts of "man...can't wait until I have a nether mob trap", which is another thing I'm shooting for.

[mogulus]

...while still feeling enough pressure on the resource to make finding gold a happy moment while mining rather than a let-down.

Pretty much sums up my reaction to finding gold up until this point past the first initial mining run...
Awesome release this time.

By the way, my wife told me to mention somewhere that being able to snip a creeper is the most awesome change ever. Doing it to the poor guy mid explosion is even better.

[FlowerChild]

Pretty much sums up my reaction to finding gold up until this point past the first initial mining run...

Good to hear. I may start up a balance discussion thread on this in a few days (to help ensure people take the time to try it first instead of reflexively complaining), as it's a point of fine balance that I do have my own questions about as I mentioned above.

By the way, my wife told me to mention somewhere that being able to snip a creeper is the most awesome change ever. Doing it to the poor guy mid explosion is even better.

Hehe...it is indeed a lot of fun isn't it? As I mentioned in the near-death thread, maybe a bit too much fun as it leads to players engaging in risky behavior, even me :)

BTW: If your wife is enjoying this kind of castration-based gameplay so much, I might consider sleeping with one eye open ;)

[primetoxinz]

Awesome update FC . My friend and I were wondering if the looting enchantment was removed as well, it seems like one of the big enchants that would require the infernal enchanter.

[FlowerChild]

Awesome update FC . My friend and I were wondering if the looting enchantment was removed as well, it seems like one of the big enchants that would require the infernal enchanter.

Nah man, looting really isn't a big deal given the late game focus on mob-traps in BTW. The kind of resources you get from it are the ones you have in massive quantities in the late game already, so it wouldn't make much sense to delay its acquisition until the late game as well.

[jorgebonafe]

I was just exploring an abandoned mine and I found four or five minecart chests, in them a total of 9 gold ingots. My reaction of extreme happiness would not have existed before these changes to gold ore :)

[mogulus]

BTW: If your wife is enjoying this kind of castration-based gameplay so much, I might consider sleeping with one eye open ;)

If such a thing occurs, all I ask out of life is to make the front page :)

By the way, you managed to bust my totally overused empty bucket exploit where I could breathe underwater forever! Where mojang failed, you have succeeded. Bravo!
This release was full of tiny little things that really added up. HC archery is probably my fave. I always had an issue that you couldn't decide which arrow to use and now I can.

[cam94509]

Changed Crafting Tables and Furnaces to drop parts instead of whole blocks when harvested (unless a silk touch enchant or Block Dispenser is used) to fit better with the concept of these being non-portable workstations in contrast to the small crafting grid the player has in their inventory. This is intended to encourage putting a bit more thought and planning into the setting up of more permanent installations for these crafting devices rather than just carrying them around and placing them wherever and whenever they're needed.

Huh... That makes things awkward. I assumed that a hunter/gatherer playstyle was the intended (or perhaps "expected" is a better term) way to play in the beginning, but this makes me wonder if I was wrong, given how little hunger one can shed on average from eating raw meat, and how expensive furnaces are in the opening. After a moment of testing, this is actually a bigger nerf to what I was doing previously than I expected: I thought I'd be losing roughly 50% of materials, in fact, one, it's not exactly consistent, and two, I appear to get 3/8ths of my materials back on average. That's a stone axe and a pickaxe I could be building instead of an additional furnace, every time I need a furnace. Pricey, but I suppose it doesn't make the way I was playing before unviable, just more difficult.

FC, am I misunderstanding how I'm intended (or, as stated above, "expected", if that's a better term, I actually don't know how you think about your mods changes) to play at the beginning of the game? Or was this a straight up early game difficulty increase?

Edit: Having done a bit more reading around the forum, I'm getting the feeling that this is not, in fact, the expected playstyle.

Apparently I should watch somebody else play the early game and figure out how the rest of you avoid starving.

[FlowerChild]

Apparently I should watch somebody else play the early game and figure out how the rest of you avoid starving.

IMO, going nomad is actually a much more difficult and time consuming way to play the game at start, so yes, I'm trying to gently nudge people away from that and indicate to them in game that settling down is a perfectly viable strategy, and that they in no way need to find a village, through providing a very visible cost to constantly roaming like that.

Personally, I basically never go nomad early game except for brief hunting trips (generally overnight with me setting up a temporary camp) that have me return to my base once I've gathered food, and I only do that if I haven't managed to setup a sustainable food supply by the time the local wildlife is exhausted.

To play sedentary, the main things you need to acquire early on are mushrooms, chickens, and pumpkins (for seeds to feed the chickens, or as emergency food, Hemp being an alternative source of seeds for chicken feed). Cows also provide sustainable food through milk, and will likely receive an additional bump in significance come next release. In real emergencies, you can also fish almost anywhere.

The problem with going nomad is that you're basically retarding your own progress through the tech tree while you're doing that. You're spending less time in one location, so you're mining less, acquiring less iron, you're unable to farm and thus likely aren't acquiring Hemp, anything you manage to gather is likely to be lost on death since you are unlikely to be able to find where you died if you wander far from spawn, and you are probably avoiding setting up permanent installations like wind mills and mill stones. What you're gaining in return is an abundant food supply, but once you know what you're doing in the early game, that's a relatively easy issue to resolve as a settler, and it then frees up more time to work on other stuff.

Historically, nomadic civilizations, while representing a perfectly viable survival strategy just didn't wind up being able to progress very far technologically due to basically spending most of their time on surviving, and the domestication of crops and animals was largely what kicked off human technological progress. BTW parallels this in some ways in that yes, you're alive and will have an easier time staying that way as a nomad (initially), but really, you're not progressing very fast either.

Living as a nomad can be fun and cool for awhile, but really, it's very hard to get anything done that way.

If you want to watch a series that demonstrates a sedentary lifestyle, I'd recommend checking out Vioki's. These guys hardly knew what they were doing when they started the series, basically learning the mod as they went, immediately settled, and got by just fine:

[Shengji]

IMO, going nomad is actually a much more difficult and time consuming way to play the game at start,

Cam94509: I love the nomadic way of playing and while through a lot of practice, I find myself developing quicker than I can whilst settled, you really need to see something about the type of player who enjoys the nomadic play style:

Spoiler

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That's my current civ game and yes, that's over 500 turns and I'm still not into the classical era yet...

If you don't play civ, for reference, that's about 5 hours of gameplay and I'm still at a stage of the game most players are passed before their monitor has warmed up properly.

[MAZD1X1E]

Edit:- Moved to the correct subforum, because I'm an idiot...

[CreeperCannibal]

-Changed the vanilla enchantment table to be crafted using Black Stone (nether quartz) blocks instead of obsidian, and an Ancient Manuscript instead of a book, to bump it up *slightly* in the overall tech tree as well as to increase the value of quartz.

Finally got the resources for this (dungeons were stubbornly refusing to provide an ancient manuscript) and discovered that the recipe appears to still be the vanilla one.

There's a bug report subfourm for these types of posts.