Wow. I had no idea there were players who valued space and wood, two things I consider infinite in MineCraft, so highly. That definitely explains this behavior of incinerating unwanted items. I hear you all loud and clear now; it's a radical difference of priorities.
I don't expect everyone to share my views; in fact, I can clearly see I'm in an almost-ridiculed minority, now. Though I don't practice destroying items, I've tried not to attack those who do. (I am sorry for you if you lack the wood to store materials you've gathered or the time needed to put them in a box, that is a fact, not an attack.) You came off a little harsh there. Also, I've already said above that I think having the option of instantly destroying any item that can be held in inventory to be an awesome privilege; I am happy we all have that option.
What I was seeking in this thread was an advantage of incineration. Judging by responses, the advantages were obvious from the start: less clutter, preserve wood that would be needed for boxes, and preserve space/time needed to construct a storage space. Without further revelations, I will have to assume that I was not missing anything in my evaluation of this practice. Thanks, all.
Not so fast. I can actually provide you with unbiased data which suggest your method is less efficient.
Below is a list of all of the blocks in the game listed by abundance, from top to bottom. I have taken the liberty of BOLDING the materials which have been mentioned most in this thread.
2 pieces of Log are directly required by crafting recipes (Including Log as a placeable block.)
59 pieces of Wood are directly required by crafting recipes (Including Wood as a placeable block.)
78 Sticks are directly required by crafting recipes.
59 / 4 = 14.75
78 / 8 = 9.75
14.75 + 9.75 = 24.5
Based on the quantity of sticks required compared to the yield of sticks per log, compared to the quantity of wood required compared to the yeild of wood per log, we can say that refined wood is 33% more valuable than sticks.
25 logs is enough wood to create 1 of each recipe which directly requires a log product. All you NEED to obtain logs, and therefore wood and sticks, is your fist, and a tree... However, logs are required by so many products that it's a fundamental and vital resource. No matter what public opinion suggests, a log's value is directly related to it's rarity.
Now, we compound this further by demonstrating that in order to collect ANY resource in the game, YOU NEED WOOD. (Fortunately, wood is a renewable and relatively effecient resource.)
Cobblestone and coal require wood tools.
Iron requires stone tools, and coal.
Redstone, Gold, and Diamond require Iron tools.
Obsidian requires diamond tools.
Diamond, and Iron make the best armor/weapons.
64 Iron is directly required by crafting recipes.
Creating workable iron requires the bare minimum of the following things:
Wooden tools to collect Cobblestone and Coal.
Stone Tools (Which require wood) to collect Iron.
Coal to Smelt Iron.
The fact that Iron is required in so many products and that it is required to procure more precious resources, (such as diamond, redstone, gold, etc), AND that it is NOT renewable, requires OTHER non-renewable (albeit common; ie - coal) resources to collect, AND that it is relatively uncommon all raise the VALUE of it. But as we know, the economy does not exist in a vacuum. If Iron is valuable, then it automatically raises the value of all of the resources that go into making it. (Coal, Wood and Stone.)
(Snip)
To be thoroughly clear on this, lets count the "uses" of Dirt, and Gravel.
Dirt can be used for;
-Construction
-Crops
Gravel can be used for;
-Construction
-Farming flint
Flint only has 2 uses in the game, as well. Flint/Steel, and Arrows. Arrows can be easily farmed through other methods.
Wood can be used for;
-Construction
-ALL OF THE TOOLS IN THE GAME
-THE MAJORITY OF THE RECIPES IN THE GAME
Wood also takes TIME to grow and TIME to farm. Collecting dirt and gravel however are nearly unavoidable. They aren't especially aesthetically pleasing, although admittedly they do have a few practical uses. (Block elevators, filling in lava/water, growing grass, etc).
So to counter your arguments point by point, in light of this data:
-"Destruction provides no gain"
Incorrect. Destruction of common materials with few uses saves you valuable time and resources. You are actually losing time/resources by saving gravel and dirt. This is not a matter of opinion or personal preference. This is fact.
-"Destruction may cause additional work later"
May. Assuming you keep 1 double chest full of gravel, and one double chest full of dirt and you do not suddenly decide to undertake a massive project involved one or both of these materials, then chances are you will never find yourself short on either one of them. If however you do decide that you wish to undertake a large project in the near future involving these materials it is quite easy to stop incinerating the materials in question and your surplus will grow effortlessly.
-"Storage as a beneficial by-product"
It's not beneficial in terms of time and resources. If you prefer the "look" of a lot of chests filled to the brim with common materials then that is a purely personal and aesthetic decision on your part. It isn't, however, a good logical reason to not build an incinerator of some kind.
-"Speed: from thought to construction"
See "Destruction may cause more work later". It's not difficult to plan ahead. If you get the idea in your head to create something massive out of dirt/gravel it's very easy to stop incinerating it at the exact moment you decide to undertake a project and still meet your construction material quota without changing your routine.
-"Storage is too... easy"
No. Spending hours a week dedicated to crafting axes, pickaxes, shovels, collecting wood, replanting trees, building chests, filling them with dirt/gravel and excavating an adequate amount of space to store all of the full chests with materials which are collected almost unavoidably is NOT easier than simply dragging and dropping a stack of 64 dirt out of your inventory and hearing it vanish with a satisfying sizzle.
Your argument is faulty and your logic is flawed. Please adjust your perceptions to better reflect reality.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Spark becomes a flame.
Flame becomes a fire.
Forge a blade to slay the stranger.
Take whatever we desire.
Move by will alone.
Gravel looks great for roads in the wild, and somehow I feel like I'm walking on a path/road when I hear the "crunch, crunch" underfoot.
Dirt is wonderful for walling off parts of caves you have already explored. I usually start off a spelunking adventure with at least 2-4 stacks of the stuff.
As with others, I do not throw away a single item. Well...don't tell anyone but I once tossed some stone axes into a hole and covered it up with cobblestone...just thinking about that day makes me feel dirty...
Okay, seriously? Incinerating might be easy, but say you're making a megafarm. Halfway through, you realize you're out of dirt. "Oh, that's OK, I can go mine some more." When you look across the landscape, you see that there are 7 strip mines across it, most dirt mined, and mountains torn down to get ores. "Oh, then where did all that dirt go?! I need that damn dirt!" You then glance at the incinerator.
You decide to travel extremely far from your area and find a land with normal amounts of dirt. Now, every time you want dirt, you must travel for 20 minutes to an area not destroyed. Then later you mine all of that dirt, and think it's worthless, and throw it all away. Then you come up with the best idea yet: An ultra-reed farm! And you just incinerated every last bit of dirt you had in storage (4 stacks).
You give up on the idea and realize you have 64 eggs in storage. "How stupid of me!" you exclaim, throwing them in the incinerator. The next day, Notch posts an unexpected update which makes eggs officially cookable and they heal 5 hearts. You have now lost 320 hearts that could have been used for spelunking. Now you spend 2 hours running around chickens trying to get eggs. In the end you now have 3 eggs.
Finally I have two points to make:
1. You're saying wood takes a lot of time to make. And to get a lot, you need a tree farm. NO. YOU CAN WALK OUTSIDE, AND CUT DOWN A TREE. REPLANT IT EXACTLY WHERE IT WAS. DO THE SAME WITH 9 OTHER TREES. GO INSIDE AND MINE FOR A BIT. GO OUTSIDE AND CUT DOWN REGROWN TREES AND REPLANT. I have 17 stacks of planks, 9 stacks of sticks, and 10 trees waiting for me to cut down every time I am done exploring or mining.
2. Incinerators DO HAVE A USE. They can melt records (won't ever have a new use) and gravel (flint doesn't have any new logical things it could be used for in future recipes). Sometimes cobble is OK, because cobblestone gens exist. People who say incinerators are useless are not thinking logically, but they do not need to be used for everything.
tl;dr Incinerators are useful, but don't need to be used for everything, because near all items might or do have a use.
I think there is a misconception that I am actively and greedily seeking to box up every block in the game, which is kinda funny the more I think about it. I'm merely containing all the materials I gather while mining and otherwise adventuring.
Also, I built an arboretum a while back so I could harvest trees in peace, day or night. Shortly thereafter, it produced so much wood in just a few cycles that I've stopped planting; even with increased use of it, my supply is tremendous. Just because something has more uses does not necessarily make it more valuable; typically, scarcity is what makes a material valuable. Diamonds are the ultimate example in this game: there's fewer of them, they occur deeper than other materials, they are potentially dangerous to mine (near lava), all of which means they're more expensive overall to pursue. Stone has more uses than Diamonds. Diamonds make better tools, yes, but obviously the number of recipes a material is involved in alone is not an accurate measure of its value.
Is there a "drop stack" command the incinerator people use? Because without this, Incinerators are just a waste of time. I can't be arsed to throw 300 cobblestone into an incinerator every time I come back up from mining.
Just place an incinerator near your spawn, along with some chests for storage. Put all EQ in the chests, fill your inventory with stacks of goods you want to destroy, then *throw yourself* in the incinerator. Much faster =D
Ultimately, this is a matter of opinion, taste, or fancy. There are rationales for incinerators, but they are utterly unpersuasive if you would rather hoard goods.
I think there is a misconception that I am actively and greedily seeking to box up every block in the game, which is kinda funny the more I think about it. I'm merely containing all the materials I gather while mining and otherwise adventuring.
Also, I built an arboretum a while back so I could harvest trees in peace, day or night. Shortly thereafter, it produced so much wood in just a few cycles that I've stopped planting; even with increased use of it, my supply is tremendous. Just because something has more uses does not necessarily make it more valuable; typically, scarcity is what makes a material valuable. Diamonds are the ultimate example in this game: there's fewer of them, they occur deeper than other materials, they are potentially dangerous to mine (near lava), all of which means they're more expensive overall to pursue. Stone has more uses than Diamonds. Diamonds make better tools, yes, but obviously the number of recipes a material is involved in alone is not an accurate measure of its value.
Did you READ my post? Obviously, the # of uses that an material has is NOT the only factor involved in how valuble it is. Scarcity/Abundance is also. I CLEARLY posted an entire list of materials...
Stone 42.65519711%
Dirt 4.14656151%
Gravel 1.22544409%
Trunk 0.02073722%
Look at that! Logs/Trunks are 207 times less common than dirt (And that's NOT counting the dirt with grass on it!), and 61 times less common than gravel!
Also, just as a matter of fact: 1 large chest requires 4 Logs to create. That's a little less than your average tree.
(Large Chest = 16 wood. 1 log = 4 wood, 16/4 = 4)
Quote from bobartig »
Is there a "drop stack" command the incinerator people use? Because without this, Incinerators are just a waste of time. I can't be arsed to throw 300 cobblestone into an incinerator every time I come back up from mining.
Stand infront of an incinerator, open up your inventory, now drag and drop a stack OUT of your inventory screen. It should go flying out of your inventory and into the incinerator if done properly.
Quote from kilozombie »
Okay, seriously? Incinerating might be easy, but say you're making a megafarm. Halfway through, you realize you're out of dirt. "Oh, that's OK, I can go mine some more." When you look across the landscape, you see that there are 7 strip mines across it, most dirt mined, and mountains torn down to get ores. "Oh, then where did all that dirt go?! I need that damn dirt!" You then glance at the incinerator.
You decide to travel extremely far from your area and find a land with normal amounts of dirt. Now, every time you want dirt, you must travel for 20 minutes to an area not destroyed. Then later you mine all of that dirt, and think it's worthless, and throw it all away. Then you come up with the best idea yet: An ultra-reed farm! And you just incinerated every last bit of dirt you had in storage (4 stacks).
You give up on the idea and realize you have 64 eggs in storage. "How stupid of me!" you exclaim, throwing them in the incinerator. The next day, Notch posts an unexpected update which makes eggs officially cookable and they heal 5 hearts. You have now lost 320 hearts that could have been used for spelunking. Now you spend 2 hours running around chickens trying to get eggs. In the end you now have 3 eggs.
Finally I have two points to make:
1. You're saying wood takes a lot of time to make. And to get a lot, you need a tree farm. NO. YOU CAN WALK OUTSIDE, AND CUT DOWN A TREE. REPLANT IT EXACTLY WHERE IT WAS. DO THE SAME WITH 9 OTHER TREES. GO INSIDE AND MINE FOR A BIT. GO OUTSIDE AND CUT DOWN REGROWN TREES AND REPLANT. I have 17 stacks of planks, 9 stacks of sticks, and 10 trees waiting for me to cut down every time I am done exploring or mining.
Firstly, you're an idiot. Your examples are stretches of the imagination and you don't take into account the fact that you can get dirt ANYWHERE, even though you point out that trees are "outside!" and you mention a tree farm. You also do not take into account the abundance of dirt compared to trees or the hundreds of uses for wood as opposed to the "few" uses for dirt. Including shovels which are, *gasp*, you guessed it... used to dig up dirt!
Wow, I am shocked that my logical argument based on facts and actual data was responded to (or, more than likely ignored/dismissed) with this kind of ill-conceived drivel.
Oh wait.. Just remembered, I'm on the minecraft forums. Average age: 15. Guess I'm not so shocked anymore.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Spark becomes a flame.
Flame becomes a fire.
Forge a blade to slay the stranger.
Take whatever we desire.
Move by will alone.
I burn gravel because screw gravel. Screw it in its big ugly face.
I don't burn anything else though, I never know when I'll want it or when Notch will make it more useful in later updates. Plus I'm currently replacing the floor in a cave system with grass so I need the dirt.
Why not dispose of stuff? If I come back from a mining trip with two stacks of gravel, why not just get rid of it? It looks ugly and building with it is kind of stupid. All you need it for is flint and you really only need a single bit of gravel to harvest it. I am probably going to pick it up by accident while digging anyway, so I might as well just toss it all when I get home.
And saying "but you have storage space, you can keep it!" is not a valid response. Just because you CAN build a chest and store something does not mean you SHOULD or WANT to. I don't want to have chests everywhere and the ones I do have I want to fill with things I will actually use, like wood, stone, and ore. If I stored every single thing I ever picked up I could build a house out of storage chests.
I also don't want to leave stuff lying around when I mine and I'd probably pick it up by accident anyway. I also don't want to open up my inventory every other minute and toss out the gravel. It's just easier to go about my business, then dispose what I don't want when I get home.
I never throw anything away. I might want it later.
I think a lot of the difference between viewpoints here is peripheral to the issue of throwing stuff away though-- it involves how much stuff you generate. I almost never mine-- that is, I almost never dig a hole in the ground and dig branches off of it and so on. I spelunk for materials, and generally only "mine" as much as necessary to get them. I dig dirt and gravel when and if I need them in caves, for scaffolding and elevators/lava filler respectively, and generally have about a stack or so of each on me at any given time. Pretty much the only time I cut stone, other than opening up passages and cutting steps and such, is around the edges of a lava pool, chasing the stray lava that's still there behind the walls and looking for diamonds. Other than that, since I don't actually "mine," I generally don't accumulate a whole lot of cobble anyway, so it's no problem to store whatever I do accumulate. And since I'd have to actually go out and actively gather it if I wanted it and hadn't stored it, I store it.
I would imagine that if I mined extensively, I'd accumulate more materials than I could use. I'm still not sure if I'd incinerate them though. It just seems a waste to use up that time and put that wear on a pick only to turn around and throw the stuff away. I have one world on which the caves tend to dead-end. After going down four different cave systems and never reaching lava pool level, I finally gave in and dug a mine. And on that one I did accumulate a lot of materials. So I'm building an enormous castle there, and between building the walls and towers and leveling and extending the cliffs on which it's perched, I've actually run out of materials and now have to mine specifically to gather more. But on the others, I don't bother with actual mining, so I never have a bothersome excess of materials. 'Course, I generally also have to go out and deliberately accumulate stuff if I do any extensive building.
It might be worth noting that I'm the same in real life. I'm not much of a consumer, and I really dislike packaging and avoid it as much as possible. I also recycle as much as possible. The upshot of that is that I put out a recycling bin every week, but only put out my garbage bin every couple of weeks or so, just because it takes me that long to even get close to filling it up. Most of my neighbors put out overflowing garbage bins every week, and I sincerely have no idea how they manage to go through that much stuff and generate that much garbage in that short a time.
Consider this. I have 64 string from killing those pesky spiders. I dont need 64 string, I already have THREE bows after all. Its taking up space in my storage, so i burn it. I do the same with eggs after I get alot, or any mostly useless item.
Plus, when I make my first wooden tools, I use them to get just enough stone t make stone tools, then I get rid of them.
Since my counter-points seem to be driving you mad, you can at least take solace in the fact that you're discussing MineCraft with a 25-year-old.
Though interesting, I do not care about your statistics; they are irrelevant to this topic. It hardly matters what percentage of anything the map generator generates; if one can manage to gather a few saplings, given the usual rate at which more saplings will drop, they ultimately will have access to infinite wood.
Scarcity is far more important than number of uses when determining a material's value.
Scarcity is more significant, too, than how many exist, on average, in a generated map.
Your reliance on these statistics almost asserts that no new trees will ever grow.
Also, can you "grow" dirt, gravel, etc? Because if you can, you should be teaching us how.
In all seriousness, any considerable number of trees will grow wood faster than you can fill boxes, even if you tried to deplete the wood supply. They grow WHILE you play, so the investment of time is minimal, almost negligible, particularly if you split that time consideration between both boxes and the tools you're so excited about making all the time. You were going to have to gather wood anyway. As someone said above, you don't even need to build an arboretum, just replant on site.
I am still interested if anyone has any new ideas, but the arguments presented thus far have been weak at best.
Honestly? This thread is reading like "I like Coke better than Pepsi. Will someone tell me why anyone likes Pepsi?" For the most part, it's personal preference. Look, the people that use incinerators do so because they just don't need the extra materials. Sure, dirt is not infinite, and if you dug it up enough then one day you'd be out. But I seriously doubt anyone has ever come close to using up all the dirt in their world. Not even a little bit close. When I first started, I hoarded every block/item I ever got. But over time, when I began having rooms full of chests full of stuff I hadn't looked at in weeks, I began to ask myself "why?" If you're not gonna use the stuff, then there is no reason to keep it. Period. If there is a chance you'll need it in the future, then keep some of it, but there's no need to keep everything you ever get. And that's why people throw the rest in incinerators. If you don't do this, then cool. It doesn't affect the way I play, and therefore I don't care what you do. Not everyone plays the game the same way. That's why Minecraft is so great, YOU get to choose how your world develops.
Since my counter-points seem to be driving you mad, you can at least take solace in the fact that you're discussing MineCraft with a 25-year-old.
Though interesting, I do not care about your statistics; they are irrelevant to this topic. It hardly matters what percentage of anything the map generator generates; if one can manage to gather a few saplings, given the usual rate at which more saplings will drop, they ultimately will have access to infinite wood.
Scarcity is far more important than number of uses when determining a material's value.
Scarcity is more significant, too, than how many exist, on average, in a generated map.
Your reliance on these statistics almost asserts that no new trees will ever grow.
Also, can you "grow" dirt, gravel, etc? Because if you can, you should be teaching us how.
In all seriousness, any considerable number of trees will grow wood faster than you can fill boxes, even if you tried to deplete the wood supply. They grow WHILE you play, so the investment of time is minimal, almost negligible, particularly if you split that time consideration between both boxes and the tools you're so excited about making all the time. You were going to have to gather wood anyway. As someone said above, you don't even need to build an arboretum, just replant on site.
I am still interested if anyone has any new ideas, but the arguments presented thus far have been weak at best.
Okay, here's the problem, and here's why your responses are "driving me mad".. Which, they aren't, btw.. But they are frustrating.
You named the thread "rationale", which implies that you want a logical, rational reason for why someone would use an incinerator. I have given you logic, facts, and perfectly valid arguments. You, however, are absolutely missing the point and keep falling back on your own personal aesthetic reasons for doing what you do despite logical reasons to do it otherwise.
Trees are infinite? So are gravel and dirt! They are not RENEWABLE, but they are INFINITE. There is no way for you to EVER run out of dirt or gravel, and the amount of time spent building chests to fill them with useless materials LIKE dirt and gravel far outweighs the amount of time it takes to simply travel to another area (or dig?), mine any dirt or gravel you happen to be short on IF you need it.
Your argument is INVALID. Just accept it. There's no good reason to have more than 1 chest full of gravel or dirt unless, as stated above, you have a large project involving those materials slated for the future. And that's not even mentioning all of the other materials (string, flint, etc), which you will NEVER find a use for more than having 1 stack at a time, that just takes up space otherwise.
Incinerators save you time and resources. That's the answer to your thread. That's valid "rationale", and I've made very solid arguments for it several times now. If you don't want to build an incinerator: DON'T. Waste your time. It's yours to waste.
No argument for incinerators has been weak. You've just been too dense to absorb the knowledge.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Spark becomes a flame.
Flame becomes a fire.
Forge a blade to slay the stranger.
Take whatever we desire.
Move by will alone.
wait, my offensive version of this question is:
why are you picking up garbage and brining it home with you?
okay, okay, i tease. but honestly, while i like incinerators for decorative purposes, if i'm mining and have filled my inventory, i just throw away gravel and feathers, even gold. if it means i free up slots for iron ore or even cobble, then yeah i'll throw it out so i can keep mining. the only things i have in excess storage are coal and cobble. almost everything else i keep fits in one double-wide chest
travel light? cool. massive hoarder? cool. incinerate things for fun? pretty cool.
getting all inflammatory about the idea, attacking people personally, bickering like you're married to someone, insulting them for any reason? not so cool...
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Quote from Gladosexe »
(this is a public service message brought to you by the PAIIWTCLLPWTCD (people against immature idiots who think creepers look like penises when they clearly dont)
I fail to see the need to even build an incinerator/cactus disposal. I keep a 2x2 infinite spring in all my houses (partly recessed into the wall) and I just dump unwanted junk into that. I won't take a swim in my spring and the stuff will be gone in 5 minutes anyways. Some people might think of that as "contaminating" the water, but that's not a game mechanic and you don't drink water in the game anyways. As I see it, bothering to build a separate disposal is a waste in itself.
Well, that's an unusual argument that boils down to:
"I fail to see the need for an incinerator because I use an almost identical structure."
Strange.
Ok. How about if I put it this way?
I don't bother to make an incinerator because I'm lazy and I already have something that I can dump my unwanted stuff into.
Better?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Try my mod Sparcs Tweaks Better dungeon loot, bones in dirt, Witch hut loot, ect
Not so fast. I can actually provide you with unbiased data which suggest your method is less efficient.
Below is a list of all of the blocks in the game listed by abundance, from top to bottom. I have taken the liberty of BOLDING the materials which have been mentioned most in this thread.
Now, for another factor in block value... The uses of given blocks. This is quoted from another thread:
To be thoroughly clear on this, lets count the "uses" of Dirt, and Gravel.
Dirt can be used for;
-Construction
-Crops
Gravel can be used for;
-Construction
-Farming flint
Flint only has 2 uses in the game, as well. Flint/Steel, and Arrows. Arrows can be easily farmed through other methods.
Wood can be used for;
-Construction
-ALL OF THE TOOLS IN THE GAME
-THE MAJORITY OF THE RECIPES IN THE GAME
Wood also takes TIME to grow and TIME to farm. Collecting dirt and gravel however are nearly unavoidable. They aren't especially aesthetically pleasing, although admittedly they do have a few practical uses. (Block elevators, filling in lava/water, growing grass, etc).
So to counter your arguments point by point, in light of this data:
-"Destruction provides no gain"
Incorrect. Destruction of common materials with few uses saves you valuable time and resources. You are actually losing time/resources by saving gravel and dirt. This is not a matter of opinion or personal preference. This is fact.
-"Destruction may cause additional work later"
May. Assuming you keep 1 double chest full of gravel, and one double chest full of dirt and you do not suddenly decide to undertake a massive project involved one or both of these materials, then chances are you will never find yourself short on either one of them. If however you do decide that you wish to undertake a large project in the near future involving these materials it is quite easy to stop incinerating the materials in question and your surplus will grow effortlessly.
-"Storage as a beneficial by-product"
It's not beneficial in terms of time and resources. If you prefer the "look" of a lot of chests filled to the brim with common materials then that is a purely personal and aesthetic decision on your part. It isn't, however, a good logical reason to not build an incinerator of some kind.
-"Speed: from thought to construction"
See "Destruction may cause more work later". It's not difficult to plan ahead. If you get the idea in your head to create something massive out of dirt/gravel it's very easy to stop incinerating it at the exact moment you decide to undertake a project and still meet your construction material quota without changing your routine.
-"Storage is too... easy"
No. Spending hours a week dedicated to crafting axes, pickaxes, shovels, collecting wood, replanting trees, building chests, filling them with dirt/gravel and excavating an adequate amount of space to store all of the full chests with materials which are collected almost unavoidably is NOT easier than simply dragging and dropping a stack of 64 dirt out of your inventory and hearing it vanish with a satisfying sizzle.
Your argument is faulty and your logic is flawed. Please adjust your perceptions to better reflect reality.
Flame becomes a fire.
Forge a blade to slay the stranger.
Take whatever we desire.
Move by will alone.
Dirt is wonderful for walling off parts of caves you have already explored. I usually start off a spelunking adventure with at least 2-4 stacks of the stuff.
As with others, I do not throw away a single item. Well...don't tell anyone but I once tossed some stone axes into a hole and covered it up with cobblestone...just thinking about that day makes me feel dirty...
You decide to travel extremely far from your area and find a land with normal amounts of dirt. Now, every time you want dirt, you must travel for 20 minutes to an area not destroyed. Then later you mine all of that dirt, and think it's worthless, and throw it all away. Then you come up with the best idea yet: An ultra-reed farm! And you just incinerated every last bit of dirt you had in storage (4 stacks).
You give up on the idea and realize you have 64 eggs in storage. "How stupid of me!" you exclaim, throwing them in the incinerator. The next day, Notch posts an unexpected update which makes eggs officially cookable and they heal 5 hearts. You have now lost 320 hearts that could have been used for spelunking. Now you spend 2 hours running around chickens trying to get eggs. In the end you now have 3 eggs.
Finally I have two points to make:
1. You're saying wood takes a lot of time to make. And to get a lot, you need a tree farm. NO. YOU CAN WALK OUTSIDE, AND CUT DOWN A TREE. REPLANT IT EXACTLY WHERE IT WAS. DO THE SAME WITH 9 OTHER TREES. GO INSIDE AND MINE FOR A BIT. GO OUTSIDE AND CUT DOWN REGROWN TREES AND REPLANT. I have 17 stacks of planks, 9 stacks of sticks, and 10 trees waiting for me to cut down every time I am done exploring or mining.
2. Incinerators DO HAVE A USE. They can melt records (won't ever have a new use) and gravel (flint doesn't have any new logical things it could be used for in future recipes). Sometimes cobble is OK, because cobblestone gens exist. People who say incinerators are useless are not thinking logically, but they do not need to be used for everything.
tl;dr Incinerators are useful, but don't need to be used for everything, because near all items might or do have a use.
Also, I use it ceremoniously burn the Golden Record.
Also, I built an arboretum a while back so I could harvest trees in peace, day or night. Shortly thereafter, it produced so much wood in just a few cycles that I've stopped planting; even with increased use of it, my supply is tremendous. Just because something has more uses does not necessarily make it more valuable; typically, scarcity is what makes a material valuable. Diamonds are the ultimate example in this game: there's fewer of them, they occur deeper than other materials, they are potentially dangerous to mine (near lava), all of which means they're more expensive overall to pursue. Stone has more uses than Diamonds. Diamonds make better tools, yes, but obviously the number of recipes a material is involved in alone is not an accurate measure of its value.
Just place an incinerator near your spawn, along with some chests for storage. Put all EQ in the chests, fill your inventory with stacks of goods you want to destroy, then *throw yourself* in the incinerator. Much faster =D
Ultimately, this is a matter of opinion, taste, or fancy. There are rationales for incinerators, but they are utterly unpersuasive if you would rather hoard goods.
Did you READ my post? Obviously, the # of uses that an material has is NOT the only factor involved in how valuble it is. Scarcity/Abundance is also. I CLEARLY posted an entire list of materials...
Look at that! Logs/Trunks are 207 times less common than dirt (And that's NOT counting the dirt with grass on it!), and 61 times less common than gravel!
Also, just as a matter of fact: 1 large chest requires 4 Logs to create. That's a little less than your average tree.
(Large Chest = 16 wood. 1 log = 4 wood, 16/4 = 4)
Stand infront of an incinerator, open up your inventory, now drag and drop a stack OUT of your inventory screen. It should go flying out of your inventory and into the incinerator if done properly.
Firstly, you're an idiot. Your examples are stretches of the imagination and you don't take into account the fact that you can get dirt ANYWHERE, even though you point out that trees are "outside!" and you mention a tree farm. You also do not take into account the abundance of dirt compared to trees or the hundreds of uses for wood as opposed to the "few" uses for dirt. Including shovels which are, *gasp*, you guessed it... used to dig up dirt!
Wow, I am shocked that my logical argument based on facts and actual data was responded to (or, more than likely ignored/dismissed) with this kind of ill-conceived drivel.
Oh wait.. Just remembered, I'm on the minecraft forums. Average age: 15. Guess I'm not so shocked anymore.
Flame becomes a fire.
Forge a blade to slay the stranger.
Take whatever we desire.
Move by will alone.
I don't burn anything else though, I never know when I'll want it or when Notch will make it more useful in later updates. Plus I'm currently replacing the floor in a cave system with grass so I need the dirt.
And saying "but you have storage space, you can keep it!" is not a valid response. Just because you CAN build a chest and store something does not mean you SHOULD or WANT to. I don't want to have chests everywhere and the ones I do have I want to fill with things I will actually use, like wood, stone, and ore. If I stored every single thing I ever picked up I could build a house out of storage chests.
I also don't want to leave stuff lying around when I mine and I'd probably pick it up by accident anyway. I also don't want to open up my inventory every other minute and toss out the gravel. It's just easier to go about my business, then dispose what I don't want when I get home.
I think a lot of the difference between viewpoints here is peripheral to the issue of throwing stuff away though-- it involves how much stuff you generate. I almost never mine-- that is, I almost never dig a hole in the ground and dig branches off of it and so on. I spelunk for materials, and generally only "mine" as much as necessary to get them. I dig dirt and gravel when and if I need them in caves, for scaffolding and elevators/lava filler respectively, and generally have about a stack or so of each on me at any given time. Pretty much the only time I cut stone, other than opening up passages and cutting steps and such, is around the edges of a lava pool, chasing the stray lava that's still there behind the walls and looking for diamonds. Other than that, since I don't actually "mine," I generally don't accumulate a whole lot of cobble anyway, so it's no problem to store whatever I do accumulate. And since I'd have to actually go out and actively gather it if I wanted it and hadn't stored it, I store it.
I would imagine that if I mined extensively, I'd accumulate more materials than I could use. I'm still not sure if I'd incinerate them though. It just seems a waste to use up that time and put that wear on a pick only to turn around and throw the stuff away. I have one world on which the caves tend to dead-end. After going down four different cave systems and never reaching lava pool level, I finally gave in and dug a mine. And on that one I did accumulate a lot of materials. So I'm building an enormous castle there, and between building the walls and towers and leveling and extending the cliffs on which it's perched, I've actually run out of materials and now have to mine specifically to gather more. But on the others, I don't bother with actual mining, so I never have a bothersome excess of materials. 'Course, I generally also have to go out and deliberately accumulate stuff if I do any extensive building.
It might be worth noting that I'm the same in real life. I'm not much of a consumer, and I really dislike packaging and avoid it as much as possible. I also recycle as much as possible. The upshot of that is that I put out a recycling bin every week, but only put out my garbage bin every couple of weeks or so, just because it takes me that long to even get close to filling it up. Most of my neighbors put out overflowing garbage bins every week, and I sincerely have no idea how they manage to go through that much stuff and generate that much garbage in that short a time.
:shrug:
Consider this. I have 64 string from killing those pesky spiders. I dont need 64 string, I already have THREE bows after all. Its taking up space in my storage, so i burn it. I do the same with eggs after I get alot, or any mostly useless item.
Plus, when I make my first wooden tools, I use them to get just enough stone t make stone tools, then I get rid of them.
I always keep a junk chest around, and if I for some reason need a couple of stacks of gravel, voila, it's there!
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Since my counter-points seem to be driving you mad, you can at least take solace in the fact that you're discussing MineCraft with a 25-year-old.
Though interesting, I do not care about your statistics; they are irrelevant to this topic. It hardly matters what percentage of anything the map generator generates; if one can manage to gather a few saplings, given the usual rate at which more saplings will drop, they ultimately will have access to infinite wood.
Scarcity is far more important than number of uses when determining a material's value.
Scarcity is more significant, too, than how many exist, on average, in a generated map.
Your reliance on these statistics almost asserts that no new trees will ever grow.
Also, can you "grow" dirt, gravel, etc? Because if you can, you should be teaching us how.
In all seriousness, any considerable number of trees will grow wood faster than you can fill boxes, even if you tried to deplete the wood supply. They grow WHILE you play, so the investment of time is minimal, almost negligible, particularly if you split that time consideration between both boxes and the tools you're so excited about making all the time. You were going to have to gather wood anyway. As someone said above, you don't even need to build an arboretum, just replant on site.
I am still interested if anyone has any new ideas, but the arguments presented thus far have been weak at best.
Okay, here's the problem, and here's why your responses are "driving me mad".. Which, they aren't, btw.. But they are frustrating.
You named the thread "rationale", which implies that you want a logical, rational reason for why someone would use an incinerator. I have given you logic, facts, and perfectly valid arguments. You, however, are absolutely missing the point and keep falling back on your own personal aesthetic reasons for doing what you do despite logical reasons to do it otherwise.
Trees are infinite? So are gravel and dirt! They are not RENEWABLE, but they are INFINITE. There is no way for you to EVER run out of dirt or gravel, and the amount of time spent building chests to fill them with useless materials LIKE dirt and gravel far outweighs the amount of time it takes to simply travel to another area (or dig?), mine any dirt or gravel you happen to be short on IF you need it.
Your argument is INVALID. Just accept it. There's no good reason to have more than 1 chest full of gravel or dirt unless, as stated above, you have a large project involving those materials slated for the future. And that's not even mentioning all of the other materials (string, flint, etc), which you will NEVER find a use for more than having 1 stack at a time, that just takes up space otherwise.
Incinerators save you time and resources. That's the answer to your thread. That's valid "rationale", and I've made very solid arguments for it several times now. If you don't want to build an incinerator: DON'T. Waste your time. It's yours to waste.
No argument for incinerators has been weak. You've just been too dense to absorb the knowledge.
Flame becomes a fire.
Forge a blade to slay the stranger.
Take whatever we desire.
Move by will alone.
why are you picking up garbage and brining it home with you?
okay, okay, i tease. but honestly, while i like incinerators for decorative purposes, if i'm mining and have filled my inventory, i just throw away gravel and feathers, even gold. if it means i free up slots for iron ore or even cobble, then yeah i'll throw it out so i can keep mining. the only things i have in excess storage are coal and cobble. almost everything else i keep fits in one double-wide chest
travel light? cool. massive hoarder? cool. incinerate things for fun? pretty cool.
getting all inflammatory about the idea, attacking people personally, bickering like you're married to someone, insulting them for any reason? not so cool...
Ok. How about if I put it this way?
I don't bother to make an incinerator because I'm lazy and I already have something that I can dump my unwanted stuff into.
Better?
Better dungeon loot, bones in dirt, Witch hut loot, ect