Better Than Wolves Forum

Version 4.99999A0D Marsupial??!! of Better Than Wolves is ready for download!

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This release contains the following changes:

-Added gravel and sand slabs. This was done mainly for the sake of making gravel a more effective early-game road building material, with sand also being added for consistency and largely because it was a "free" addition in terms of development effort once the work for gravel was done.

-Added a new storage block for ender pearls made out of 9 of them in the crafting grid, which also replaces the functionality of obsidian within the corresponding beacon. The reasons behind this will become more evident as the end game is added to BTW, but part of it is that it's intended to give more utility to mob traps in the end dimension. This unfortunately also means that any obsidian beacons you may have in your world will cease to function and will need to be replaced with the ender pearl version.

-Added a new system for despawning items dropped on player death. Instead of using the regular item despawn timer, these items will disappear one Minecraft day after the player dies (20 minutes real time), regardless of whether the chunks they are in are loaded or not. This makes the behavior of these items more consistent regardless of whether you are near original spawn or not, and reduces the effectiveness of gamey behavior like avoiding the area in which you died so that the items don't despawn. It will also hopefully further encourage the building of infrastructure like road and rail networks to quickly return on death. Note that in single player if time advances to the next day due to a death, this is taken into account by the system and it does not cause you to lose the time in between in terms of item despawn. Also note that this change will not affect items dropped on death previous to installation of this version, so if you have any lingering in the world, they will despawn as normal.

-Added ambient sounds to blocks containing silverfish to provide warning to players that may be tunneling into infested areas. I became aware that it was possible (although rather rare) to get randomly ganked by silverfish in the early game if you happened to dig in the wrong place.

-Changed the restrictions on villager breeding slightly to be a little more forgiving: peasants will only breed to create peasants. Butchers & Blacksmiths will breed to create both their own type, and the other. Librarians and Priests function together in the same way. The chances are higher when breeding of producing offspring of the class of the parents, but occasionally a child will be born at the same social level, but of the alternate class. I changed this because finding a village with a librarian but no priest was potentially very frustrating in the late game given how difficult villages can be to find at times.

-Changed wolves to think that villagers are rather tasty and villagers to not think very highly of them as a result.

-Changed wolves to howl less frequently in general as the howling could get rather crazy if you were in an area with a large wolf population.

-Changed cows to sometimes spawn with distended udders (fair point Vioki ;) ).

-Changed (further balanced) a few of the villager trades, and fixed a couple that were buying for excessively high value.

-Changed the way the names of some items in the mod are capitalized for consistency both internally and with vanilla. Things like "Pile of Dirt" instead of "Pile Of Dirt".

-Changed the way the decapitation bonus for mobs trapped between a chopping block and saw works so that it should apply much more consistently.

-Changed the player's initial spawn location so that it won't occur in jungles due to the night impossibility of surviving there initially. This does NOT affect your respawn location after death with Hardcore Spawn, only original spawn, nor does it affect existing worlds, only newly generated ones.

-Changed the "/time" command to display both the current overworld time and the total overworld time. This is mainly a debugging tool for myself, but I thought it worth mentioning in case it causes any confusion. The total overworld time is an internal variable that isn't affected by such things as the time being set through server commands, or advancing due to HC spawn, and thus is useful for stuff like the item despawn after player death thing mentioned above.

-Fixed problem where child animals and villagers wouldn't be subject to possession while traveling through the nether.

-Fixed problem where the Buddy Block wasn't detecting the growth of wheat, carrots, and potatoes. Note that in the case of carrots and potatoes I also fixed things so that Buddy only reacts if there's a visible change in the plant's state, and it will no longer react to internal invisible changes. In other words, Buddy will react to 4 growth states with carrots and potatoes, not 8.

-Fixed a few out of place white pixels in the Chocolate Milk texture.

-Fixed a small problem with the collision volume on the fences the mod adds, when they are connected at a 90 degree angle.

Enjoy! :)

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If you'd like to say thanks for this release and help contribute to the further development of Better Than Wolves, please consider making a donation:

Aaaaaaaaaand, first! >.>

But, gravel and sand slabs... I think I love you FC.. I can't wait to play and build with all of this.

Good to see you back in the saddle. Thanks for the update, it was definitely worth the wait!

Rob wrote: But, gravel and sand slabs... I think I love you FC.

Hehe...yeah, that one was long overdo. I just avoided it in the past because I knew it would be a real pain in the ass to implement.

I wasn't wrong there either. Probably took be a good 8 hours or so of work to sort out all the details that go along with it :)

Anyways, made a great "warmup" task to get me back into the swing of things, and is rather cool in practice if I do say so myself ;)

Welcome back! An interesting batch of changes here. The beacon change makes me very glad I only build the single obsidian beacon needed to trigger silverfish spawning so far. Guess I'd better get to work on my Enderman farm soon.

Gravel and Sand slabs as well? Too cool, I love it! It will be interesting to explore the other changes.

Thanks as always for your hard work.

Woo, new update!! I'm hyped. :)

The new system for item despawning after death looks great.

Thanks for everything, FC!

Edit: Oh man, the silverfish sounds really creep me out. I can hear them in a patch under my road, and now I am going to have to locate and exterminate them or else my skin is going to crawl every time I walk by there. FC, you sure do have a talent for making the world feel more menacing. :)

A little bit of everything, this must have been a bunch of check marks on the list :)
Glad the bug got you FC, I will have to surrender my Sunday now.

Equitis1024 wrote:Edit: Oh man, the silverfish sounds really creep me out. I can hear them in a patch under my road, and now I am going to have to locate and exterminate them or else my skin is going to crawl every time I walk by there. FC, you sure do have a talent for making the world feel more menacing. :)

Hehe...thanks. Yeah, the effect when you tunnel into a heavily infested area is downright unnerving :)

Aaaaaaaaaah!!!!!
Awesome! Incredibly interesting and logical changes as always ;)

Gravel and sand slabs, ender pearl storage blocks: you know, even if you focus mainly in gameplay, some of the blocks you add are really fun for aesthetic purposes. Assuming the ender storage blocks are the same colour as the ender pearls, I bet they'll combo nicely with sandstone.

HC caste system changes: the way you did it is really sensible. Now worst hypothesis we can replace a lost villager profession we couldn't find, but then, to the expense of a bunch of diamonds, so exploring for it is still worthwhile... and interesting, it's resembling a lot the caste systems IRL, with their small professional mobility inside the castes and all.

FlowerChild wrote:-Changed wolves to think that villagers are rather tasty and villagers to not think very highly of them as a result.

Don't give them ideas! They already look at us like mobile chunks of meat! Time to lock Mr. Poopy back at the dung factory :D

And here goes my weekend...
Thank you, man!

EDIT: they even fall down and merge!

chaoticneutral wrote:Gravel and sand slabs, ender pearl storage blocks: you know, even if you focus mainly in gameplay, some of the blocks you add are really fun for aesthetic purposes. Assuming the ender storage blocks are the same colour as the ender pearls, I bet they'll combo nicely with sandstone.

Well, as I've mentioned in the past, I'm not opposed to aesthetics, far from really. What I don't like to generally do though is add stuff *strictly* for aesthetic purposes unless there's gameplay backing it up.

Once I'm convinced that's the case, if I can make something look good at the same time, and my limited artistic ability allows for it, I'm all for it.

FlowerChild wrote:-snip-

Well, after playing with it a bit, some feedback: I'll definitively want to use Ender Blocks as a building material for details, but then I guess I'll need an ender farm for that. :)

FlowerChild wrote:-Added a new system for despawning items dropped on player death. Instead of using the regular item despawn timer, these items will disappear one Minecraft day after the player dies (20 minutes real time), regardless of whether the chunks they are in are loaded or not. This makes the behavior of these items more consistent regardless of whether you are near original spawn or not, and reduces the effectiveness of gamey behavior like avoiding the area in which you died so that the items don't despawn. It will also hopefully further encourage the building of infrastructure like road and rail networks to quickly return on death. Note that in single player if time advances to the next day due to a death, this is taken into account by the system and it does not cause you to lose the time in between in terms of item despawn. Also note that this change will not affect items dropped on death previous to installation of this version, so if you have any lingering in the world, they will despawn as normal.

Again, some nice additions. Thanks FC!

This one above I think will either be the most awesome or worst, not sure which. I haven't tried it out yet but I could see it both enhancing exploration because simply you want to explore everywhere so when you die, you can get back there quickly. But also, I could see working the other way.

At least early game. I could see myself not exploring very much early one for fear of losing any stuff. I would think early on death, with HC Spawn, would make it very unlikely you will recover your stuff. Which makes death early on even that much more critical. ....

...which actually makes me more intrigued by this idea. So, maybe it is brilliant.

But it will make me more cautious even though I already am very cautious

So I had taken a long break from BTW, and I started playing again the other day. This was a very nice thing to wake up to! Thanks man.

So this came out and I only noticed this now, when it's too late to play it, probably for a week or two. Suffice to say:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH


In all seriousness (yeah, right), looking cool man. I have to play around with the changes to chopping blocks and villagers.

My "ooo, gravel!" factor was already high. Now it's better than diamonds

Thanks for the thanks guys. Feels good to wake up to this :)

jstu9 wrote:At least early game. I could see myself not exploring very much early one for fear of losing any stuff. I would think early on death, with HC Spawn, would make it very unlikely you will recover your stuff. Which makes death early on even that much more critical. ....

Well, that depends entirely on where you were actually. If you were near original spawn (which is a very reasonable place to build early game), you were essentially hosed before as items would despawn in 5 minutes since those chunks are always partially loaded. This actually gives you more time to get back if you find yourself nearby and/or have landmarks directing you back home. This is why I hope this will encourage the building of infrastructure as now despawn time is a very tangible and much more predictable problem that the player can work towards resolving as they progress.

If you were elsewhere, then yes, things just got harder, BUT, they also got a lot less metagamey in terms of considering the despawn mechanism. One thing I hated about the way thing worked previously was that whether you died "close enough" to original spawn was constantly one of the first things that would run through my thought process after death, and thus how much time I had to get back would often be up in the air.

Now, it's very straightforward: "I have a day". If you spawn in the middle of nowhere, then you know you are screwed and you simply move on, focusing on your new situation. There's no real gaming of the system there either, cause if you wait on your HC spawn location to shift, then you've also waited long enough for your items to despawn.

I've also always thought back fondly to the experience when I first started playing (vanilla) MC and before I understood how chunk loading and item despawn worked. I remember when I died I used to panic thinking I had five minutes to get back to where I had been to recover my stuff. Once I figured out that wasn't the case, I had an "oh...that sucks" moment, and always missed how death had felt before then.

Previous to that, if I was working at a location in my world, I *always* made sure to build a rail out to it so I could get back quickly (this was vanilla pre-beds).

Anyways, regardless: death is painful in BTW, and is intended to be. If this change makes people even more paranoid and fear death more: bonus :)

DaveYanakov wrote:My "ooo, gravel!" factor was already high. Now it's better than diamonds

Hehe...yeah, it has a nice impact on early game thought process doesn't it?

In my own world, it's naturally pushing me towards building gravel paths everywhere, which gives things a very nice vibe. Stone is obviously too valuable a material to spend in the early game. Dirt is also of very high value due to being able to block off caves with it effectively. Gravel would tend to stockpile though since it's harder to work with for fortifications, BUT it is extremely tempting for paths since it provides a movement bonus which you don't get with dirt.

Anyways, I think that's just awesome. When a gameplay mechanism encourages behavior that winds up making your constructions look cool in the process, I'm a very happy camper :)

Hype man!!! So glad to wake up to this. Its great to see FC stretching his tentacles again.

*sigh*
I just put BTW for a little rest to play Beyond Earth after going hard at it for the last couple months.
Are you trying to give me an aneurysm?
My AR is crying out for me to go fix things like this path:

-Changed the player's initial spawn location so that it won't occur in jungles due to the night impossibility of surviving there initially. This does NOT affect your respawn location after death with Hardcore Spawn, only original spawn, nor does it affect existing worlds, only newly generated ones.

I really could have used this a few versions ago, but it gives me a good excuse to start fresh. It's always a hassle when I spawn at the initial point, as I have to build a boat to get from the jungle island to my base, and each time I have to get wood that's closer inland. Jungle spiders are vicious.

On another note, I'm loving the wolf howl reduction. Before, it made me wish I were alone rather than surrounded by multiple packs of slavering, ravenous wolves.

HavokSCOUT wrote:On another note, I'm loving the wolf howl reduction. Before, it made me wish I were alone rather than surrounded by multiple packs of slavering, ravenous wolves.

You like being surrounded by murder wolves in any circumstances?

This is actually something I will miss. I have very nearly failed my sanity checks on several occasions living on the edge of taiga. There was always the pressure in the back of my mind to grab an axe and charge off into the night if only it would end the howls in the darkness

FlowerChild wrote:Version 4.99999A0D Marsupial??!! of Better Than Wolves is ready for download!

-Added a new storage block for ender pearls made out of 9 of them in the crafting grid, which also replaces the functionality of obsidian within the corresponding beacon.

-Added a new system for despawning items dropped on player death. Instead of using the regular item despawn timer, these items will disappear one Minecraft day after the player dies (20 minutes real time), regardless of whether the chunks they are in are loaded or not. It will also hopefully further encourage the building of infrastructure like road and rail networks to quickly return on death.

This release sounds really nice, I don't know where to even start. This talk of infrastructure and spawning seems to ring a bell... :P I can't wait to mess around with ender pearl blocks, and more compact storage of them is gonna be really nice. Thanks for all the had work on this update :)

Thanks for the release FC! It's been a while, but it is still very nice to see ;-)
The obsidian beacon change looks like one of your signature "small" changes that alter quite a chunk of gameplay. Really cool!

i came here to see what kind of necro this was and... WTF this is a new release! for realz!

i had to compare both version names digit by digit to notice what was the difference xD

off to the end, gonna build that ender mobtrap.

thank you, FC!

Recently got back into BTW, and this new release seems generally awesome. I already have a bunch of paths in my world that I know I'm going to be replacing wood and packed dirt slabs with gravel slabs to go with the gravel that they're mainly made of. That change to jungle initial spawns will be a relief in any eventual new worlds, too.

...and yeah, the silverfish sound is a really nice touch. I saved in the hilly mine near my taiga base, and, well, there's an area I'm definitely glad I didn't end up mining out just yet.

Thanks for the update, FC!