A new world to explore, new metals to obtain, and new foes to fight.
There's a couple things I've read here that worry me a bit, but this is by far the most concerning. This is exactly the kind of thing that I don't think has any place in a mod like Metallurgy. It's feature creep, plain and simple.
What is Metallurgy's goal as a mod? As far as I can tell it is (and has always been) to add new ores and metals to the game, not to add new world spaces or entities. It's the Unix philosophy: do one thing, and do it well. Do ores and metals, and do them right. Focus on the strong points of Metallurgy: it's not the crafting process or the way you find the new resources, it's the resources themselves.
Metallurgy has always been great because it did what few other mods do, it adds ore with no bloat and no gimmicks attached. There are already mods that add dimensions (Twilight Forest), there's already mods that add unique metal- and weapon-crafting systems (Tinkers' Construct, Iguana Tweaks, Thaumcraft, etc.), and there's already plenty of mods that add new mobs. And quite honestly? They do it better than you'll be able to do by tacking these features on to a mod about metals.
In fact, compatibility is what I'd be most worried about if I were in your shoes. With no mods but Metallurgy installed, you've been able to mine new metals and make weapons and armor using what is little more than the vanilla crafting system, and that's fine. But, compatibility with other mods using things like ExtraTiC or Another One Bites The Dust was what really made it shine.
And at any rate, if you're going to add some content outside the metals themselves, I really don't think it should be content involved in the acquisition of the new resources. There's nothing of value there. Who cares if the metal is hard to get if I can't do anything with it? Once I've got my fancy end-game gear, what am I supposed to do with the rest of the materials I'm accumulating? Iron always has a purpose. Gold always has a purpose. In mods that add things like copper or silver, those materials generally always have some purpose. What about hepatizon? Or pewter? Or heavy steel? What purpose do they serve? I don't think it's necessarily desirable to add metals just for the sake of adding metals.
Alloys and Ores are completely different in usage. Adding more ores for the sake of more ores doesn't make sense, because it adds bloat to the world and generation. Alloys on the other hand simply add alternative mixes of metals for various durabilities, stats, and modifiers for armor/weapons. We can also gate alloys behind machines, resource requirements, and tiers much better than we can gate ores, which are blocked simply by mining level (which is broken by other mods, and even our own sometimes.)
At its base, M5 Base Metals will only be adding one single new ore which is Lead so that we can do the branching biome specific ore ladders. (Bronze vs Iron vs Lead) but it will add a lot of alternatives for alloy choices. The vast majority of the changes are because of the biome/region specific spawn system.
Fantasy Metals is far down the line and be tackled last. 1.9 seems to be a "strong point" to sit at for awhile and will likely be the next 1.7-ish patch. The plan is to focus primarily on Base Metals and get it in a very solid base of play alone and then slowly work through the sets. Nether Metals (for instance) will primarily be used to add properties to weapons as opposed to being strict improvements on Base Metals, Precious Metals will see the return of some economic features and storage features and will add a series of new alloys and ladder branches in the biome spawn system, and Fantasy Metals (which is primarily set up in Twilight Forest for the /vast/ majority of our users) is getting its own dimension to gather metals in. Considering we have experience with Atum and our "par" for making a dimension is at least better than the End, I think we can easily set up an interesting dimension to provide the ores. We're also looking at "unlockable generation", akin to Terraria, where once you accomplish a goal in the dimension it might begin spawning one of the Fantasy metals back in the overworld or such. Its the kind of place you visit, its not going to be a super "multiple boss battle, tons of relics and artifacts" dimension, just a place to go, fight some challenging mobs, and possibly get some ores to kick back and upgrade your weapons/armor/tools with. Its still on the drawing board, its not locked in stone, but it was a concept for discussion since we can't simply dump fantasy metals back in the overworld again (we're trying our best to reduce how much is spawning in the overworld.)
Metallurgy has always been a metal mod, we're bloat to a point and its not going to be for everyone. Every metal will not have a unique use, no matter how hard we try that's just not feasible, but we will be catering to more decorative options, metal alloying "tiering" that instead encourages you to combine older metals up the chain to create new ones, and systems for consuming and slowing "metal profit" that occurs.
We provide a flat promise, more interesting mining and more metals/ores, and our fans have loved what we've created so far, and with M5 we're looking to fix some of the older issues and core design flaws we've carried for 4 iterations and expand some systems to make the delivery of the metals more fluid and fitting in the world. The good news is, with M5 its still all optional too, you can disable the metals you don't like, you can avoid installing submods you don't enjoy, etc.
The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Join Date:
11/1/2010
Posts:
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Minecraft:
mallrat208
Member Details
Funny story; I actually was on a server that used the coins as the items needed to fuel Railcraft World Anchors. it became a matter of sacrificing some precious materials to keep your base loaded or a load of more common stuff. Worked out well.
After a lot of discussion the last few nights with a lot of core fans, the dimension might not be on the table anymore. Fantasy Metals is far down the pipeline, so a hell of a lot can change by the time it comes out. It was just an idea I was floating since the core fan set seems to slap Fantasy Metals in Twilight Forest every time and I don't want to flood the overworld with more ores.
However with the branch system I suppose having Fantasy Metals create an extra branch alongside Base or something isn't too bad.
I'd like to do Chain Armors the big issue is that pound for pound Armor is the single most art intensive thing we can do. I'm still trying to hunt down someone to do the actual 3D armor renders for the sets for M5 because I don't want to have it be simply recolors like default armor is.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Lead designer and artist of Team Metallurgy (Metallurgy, Aquaculture, and Atum)
After a lot of discussion the last few nights with a lot of core fans, the dimension might not be on the table anymore. Fantasy Metals is far down the pipeline, so a hell of a lot can change by the time it comes out. It was just an idea I was floating since the core fan set seems to slap Fantasy Metals in Twilight Forest every time and I don't want to flood the overworld with more ores.
However with the branch system I suppose having Fantasy Metals create an extra branch alongside Base or something isn't too bad.
I'd like to do Chain Armors the big issue is that pound for pound Armor is the single most art intensive thing we can do. I'm still trying to hunt down someone to do the actual 3D armor renders for the sets for M5 because I don't want to have it be simply recolors like default armor is.
Well, if you're going to do chain armor, I imagine 3D renders are a must-have. The default resolution on armors seems like it's just too low to do anything neat with chain armor.
That sounds about right from my experience, last fall when the 1.7.10 packs were new I found one that worked well (that has metallurgy) and stayed with it, swapping out mods to customize worlds to generate with a more personal feel to them.
Having played TFC showed just how far worldgen could differ from vanilla, including ore distributions, and mining metals in the Twillight Forest was always comfortable, even with the TF mobs, especially in contrast with the nether. After realizing I was just digging up the nether metals just to hide them in chests because they sparkled so much, I went into the configs, turned them off, regenerated the nether and spawned in a fancy quartz and glass netherhub just to brighten up the place. Of course vanilla makes the nether very dark and extremely red, so there isn't a lot to work with if the vanilla theme for the nether is kept anyway.
Learning from all the little details from past iterations makes it better.
Well, if you're going to do chain armor, I imagine 3D renders are a must-have. The default resolution on armors seems like it's just too low to do anything neat with chain armor.
Honestly its why I dread doing 3D armor art, the renders are so low texture and only having two layers to work with never looks good.
I'm hoping to find a proper artist that knows what they're doing to set us up some better renders (higher resolution textures/pauldron support.)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Lead designer and artist of Team Metallurgy (Metallurgy, Aquaculture, and Atum)
That sounds about right from my experience, last fall when the 1.7.10 packs were new I found one that worked well (that has metallurgy) and stayed with it, swapping out mods to customize worlds to generate with a more personal feel to them.
Having played TFC showed just how far worldgen could differ from vanilla, including ore distributions, and mining metals in the Twillight Forest was always comfortable, even with the TF mobs, especially in contrast with the nether. After realizing I was just digging up the nether metals just to hide them in chests because they sparkled so much, I went into the configs, turned them off, regenerated the nether and spawned in a fancy quartz and glass netherhub just to brighten up the place. Of course vanilla makes the nether very dark and extremely red, so there isn't a lot to work with if the vanilla theme for the nether is kept anyway.
Learning from all the little details from past iterations makes it better.
I don't know, I've never been too fond of ore distribution mods. I think they're great in theory, but in practice I find hunting around for an ore deposit kind of tedious. This extends to biome-restricted generation, too. Emerald being restricted to extreme hills is annoying, imo. It's one thing for ore to be in larger, less common deposits, requiring some effort, but it'd be another thing entirely having to search around for literally hours in a world with large biomes just because you can't find a god damn snow biome. I can appreciate the idea, but I hope the feature is optional.
As usual we'll have configs to disable/enable it all.
We won't be doing targeted biomes though with specific biomes for spawning, instead we'll be using the BiomeDictionary keywords for it. So for example Copper/Tin/Bronze will be in Hot biomes, Lead in Cold, Iron in mid-range and that'd be randomized on world seed (it might be hot/cold/mid sometimes, or it might be wet/dry, etc.) its just a system we think will help spread out progress.
I'm not personally a fan of biome specific ores, ExtremeHills/Emeralds soured me to that. So I'm hoping it ends up playing well.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Lead designer and artist of Team Metallurgy (Metallurgy, Aquaculture, and Atum)
That's the plan, that progress is a little more visible with these metals. Full 16x length tools for instance are mainly endgame metals.
Lead designer and artist of Team Metallurgy (Metallurgy, Aquaculture, and Atum)
Join me on Discord, watch me on Twitch (every night!), or support me on Patreon.
There's a couple things I've read here that worry me a bit, but this is by far the most concerning. This is exactly the kind of thing that I don't think has any place in a mod like Metallurgy. It's feature creep, plain and simple.
What is Metallurgy's goal as a mod? As far as I can tell it is (and has always been) to add new ores and metals to the game, not to add new world spaces or entities. It's the Unix philosophy: do one thing, and do it well. Do ores and metals, and do them right. Focus on the strong points of Metallurgy: it's not the crafting process or the way you find the new resources, it's the resources themselves.
Metallurgy has always been great because it did what few other mods do, it adds ore with no bloat and no gimmicks attached. There are already mods that add dimensions (Twilight Forest), there's already mods that add unique metal- and weapon-crafting systems (Tinkers' Construct, Iguana Tweaks, Thaumcraft, etc.), and there's already plenty of mods that add new mobs. And quite honestly? They do it better than you'll be able to do by tacking these features on to a mod about metals.
In fact, compatibility is what I'd be most worried about if I were in your shoes. With no mods but Metallurgy installed, you've been able to mine new metals and make weapons and armor using what is little more than the vanilla crafting system, and that's fine. But, compatibility with other mods using things like ExtraTiC or Another One Bites The Dust was what really made it shine.
And at any rate, if you're going to add some content outside the metals themselves, I really don't think it should be content involved in the acquisition of the new resources. There's nothing of value there. Who cares if the metal is hard to get if I can't do anything with it? Once I've got my fancy end-game gear, what am I supposed to do with the rest of the materials I'm accumulating? Iron always has a purpose. Gold always has a purpose. In mods that add things like copper or silver, those materials generally always have some purpose. What about hepatizon? Or pewter? Or heavy steel? What purpose do they serve? I don't think it's necessarily desirable to add metals just for the sake of adding metals.
Just some things to think about.
Alloys and Ores are completely different in usage. Adding more ores for the sake of more ores doesn't make sense, because it adds bloat to the world and generation. Alloys on the other hand simply add alternative mixes of metals for various durabilities, stats, and modifiers for armor/weapons. We can also gate alloys behind machines, resource requirements, and tiers much better than we can gate ores, which are blocked simply by mining level (which is broken by other mods, and even our own sometimes.)
At its base, M5 Base Metals will only be adding one single new ore which is Lead so that we can do the branching biome specific ore ladders. (Bronze vs Iron vs Lead) but it will add a lot of alternatives for alloy choices. The vast majority of the changes are because of the biome/region specific spawn system.
Fantasy Metals is far down the line and be tackled last. 1.9 seems to be a "strong point" to sit at for awhile and will likely be the next 1.7-ish patch. The plan is to focus primarily on Base Metals and get it in a very solid base of play alone and then slowly work through the sets. Nether Metals (for instance) will primarily be used to add properties to weapons as opposed to being strict improvements on Base Metals, Precious Metals will see the return of some economic features and storage features and will add a series of new alloys and ladder branches in the biome spawn system, and Fantasy Metals (which is primarily set up in Twilight Forest for the /vast/ majority of our users) is getting its own dimension to gather metals in. Considering we have experience with Atum and our "par" for making a dimension is at least better than the End, I think we can easily set up an interesting dimension to provide the ores. We're also looking at "unlockable generation", akin to Terraria, where once you accomplish a goal in the dimension it might begin spawning one of the Fantasy metals back in the overworld or such. Its the kind of place you visit, its not going to be a super "multiple boss battle, tons of relics and artifacts" dimension, just a place to go, fight some challenging mobs, and possibly get some ores to kick back and upgrade your weapons/armor/tools with. Its still on the drawing board, its not locked in stone, but it was a concept for discussion since we can't simply dump fantasy metals back in the overworld again (we're trying our best to reduce how much is spawning in the overworld.)
Metallurgy has always been a metal mod, we're bloat to a point and its not going to be for everyone. Every metal will not have a unique use, no matter how hard we try that's just not feasible, but we will be catering to more decorative options, metal alloying "tiering" that instead encourages you to combine older metals up the chain to create new ones, and systems for consuming and slowing "metal profit" that occurs.
We provide a flat promise, more interesting mining and more metals/ores, and our fans have loved what we've created so far, and with M5 we're looking to fix some of the older issues and core design flaws we've carried for 4 iterations and expand some systems to make the delivery of the metals more fluid and fitting in the world. The good news is, with M5 its still all optional too, you can disable the metals you don't like, you can avoid installing submods you don't enjoy, etc.
Lead designer and artist of Team Metallurgy (Metallurgy, Aquaculture, and Atum)
Join me on Discord, watch me on Twitch (every night!), or support me on Patreon.
Looking forward to this.
We've got Base Metal Bows =D
Lead designer and artist of Team Metallurgy (Metallurgy, Aquaculture, and Atum)
Join me on Discord, watch me on Twitch (every night!), or support me on Patreon.
Funny story; I actually was on a server that used the coins as the items needed to fuel Railcraft World Anchors. it became a matter of sacrificing some precious materials to keep your base loaded or a load of more common stuff. Worked out well.
Very rough door designs
Lead designer and artist of Team Metallurgy (Metallurgy, Aquaculture, and Atum)
Join me on Discord, watch me on Twitch (every night!), or support me on Patreon.
Basic Trapdoor Designs
Lead designer and artist of Team Metallurgy (Metallurgy, Aquaculture, and Atum)
Join me on Discord, watch me on Twitch (every night!), or support me on Patreon.
Bar design basics
Lead designer and artist of Team Metallurgy (Metallurgy, Aquaculture, and Atum)
Join me on Discord, watch me on Twitch (every night!), or support me on Patreon.
Anddd
Today's progress:
Lead designer and artist of Team Metallurgy (Metallurgy, Aquaculture, and Atum)
Join me on Discord, watch me on Twitch (every night!), or support me on Patreon.
After a lot of discussion the last few nights with a lot of core fans, the dimension might not be on the table anymore. Fantasy Metals is far down the pipeline, so a hell of a lot can change by the time it comes out. It was just an idea I was floating since the core fan set seems to slap Fantasy Metals in Twilight Forest every time and I don't want to flood the overworld with more ores.
However with the branch system I suppose having Fantasy Metals create an extra branch alongside Base or something isn't too bad.
I'd like to do Chain Armors the big issue is that pound for pound Armor is the single most art intensive thing we can do. I'm still trying to hunt down someone to do the actual 3D armor renders for the sets for M5 because I don't want to have it be simply recolors like default armor is.
Lead designer and artist of Team Metallurgy (Metallurgy, Aquaculture, and Atum)
Join me on Discord, watch me on Twitch (every night!), or support me on Patreon.
Well, if you're going to do chain armor, I imagine 3D renders are a must-have. The default resolution on armors seems like it's just too low to do anything neat with chain armor.
That sounds about right from my experience, last fall when the 1.7.10 packs were new I found one that worked well (that has metallurgy) and stayed with it, swapping out mods to customize worlds to generate with a more personal feel to them.
Having played TFC showed just how far worldgen could differ from vanilla, including ore distributions, and mining metals in the Twillight Forest was always comfortable, even with the TF mobs, especially in contrast with the nether. After realizing I was just digging up the nether metals just to hide them in chests because they sparkled so much, I went into the configs, turned them off, regenerated the nether and spawned in a fancy quartz and glass netherhub just to brighten up the place. Of course vanilla makes the nether very dark and extremely red, so there isn't a lot to work with if the vanilla theme for the nether is kept anyway.
Learning from all the little details from past iterations makes it better.
Gillymoth Structures for Ruins <<< Folder containing my Structure-sets for Ruins mod.
Honestly its why I dread doing 3D armor art, the renders are so low texture and only having two layers to work with never looks good.
I'm hoping to find a proper artist that knows what they're doing to set us up some better renders (higher resolution textures/pauldron support.)
Lead designer and artist of Team Metallurgy (Metallurgy, Aquaculture, and Atum)
Join me on Discord, watch me on Twitch (every night!), or support me on Patreon.
I don't know, I've never been too fond of ore distribution mods. I think they're great in theory, but in practice I find hunting around for an ore deposit kind of tedious. This extends to biome-restricted generation, too. Emerald being restricted to extreme hills is annoying, imo. It's one thing for ore to be in larger, less common deposits, requiring some effort, but it'd be another thing entirely having to search around for literally hours in a world with large biomes just because you can't find a god damn snow biome. I can appreciate the idea, but I hope the feature is optional.
As usual we'll have configs to disable/enable it all.
We won't be doing targeted biomes though with specific biomes for spawning, instead we'll be using the BiomeDictionary keywords for it. So for example Copper/Tin/Bronze will be in Hot biomes, Lead in Cold, Iron in mid-range and that'd be randomized on world seed (it might be hot/cold/mid sometimes, or it might be wet/dry, etc.) its just a system we think will help spread out progress.
I'm not personally a fan of biome specific ores, ExtremeHills/Emeralds soured me to that. So I'm hoping it ends up playing well.
Lead designer and artist of Team Metallurgy (Metallurgy, Aquaculture, and Atum)
Join me on Discord, watch me on Twitch (every night!), or support me on Patreon.
Oh I don't suggest TFC distributions of ore gen, it's an example of how extremely diverse the possibilities are, exactly as it says above.
Gillymoth Structures for Ruins <<< Folder containing my Structure-sets for Ruins mod.
Biome Branching will likely be disableable like all of our spawn configs are.
Lead designer and artist of Team Metallurgy (Metallurgy, Aquaculture, and Atum)
Join me on Discord, watch me on Twitch (every night!), or support me on Patreon.
Lead designer and artist of Team Metallurgy (Metallurgy, Aquaculture, and Atum)
Join me on Discord, watch me on Twitch (every night!), or support me on Patreon.
Lead door is my favorite personally, I love giant flat doors that work for reactors/vaults.
The Angmallen door was supposed to be a proper vault door for sealing in your valuables, I think it turned out okay.
Lead designer and artist of Team Metallurgy (Metallurgy, Aquaculture, and Atum)
Join me on Discord, watch me on Twitch (every night!), or support me on Patreon.