Isn't the point of the game to take time to do things. To feel accomplishment of completing something. If I wanted everything handed to me I'd play PtW games. Taking the time to do things is what makes the game interesting and fun.
Yeah, but breeding enough cows to get 45 leather to complete an enchanting table isn't challenging at all, it's just very, VERY time-consuming unless you commit cow genocide. If it's not challenging, it's not rewarding. It'd be like if beating, say, Nethack was a matter of leaving the game up for several hours and coming back and winning. You may have spent a lot of time, but you barely accomplished anything. Same deal with breeding cows. You shove two or more cows into a pit, breed them, wait until the cows grow up, and keep repeating while occasionally slaying some cows until you have 45 leather. I may have completed something, but it was just an annoying chore that prevents me from progressing. I would have minded it less if it were challenging or if it weren't there.
I'd honestly rather just be handed 45 leather even though it'd be a lame solution to the problem simply because it cuts out on the worthless grind. And i'm the kind of person that likes challenge.
And as I've already said leather comes from horses to. So you already have multiple sources of leather. It's also fairly common in dungeon chests.
Leather isn't hard to find (cows are everywhere) and it's hardly time consuming compared to doing other things. Just breed cows it might take an hour or two of game play but that's nothing in the grand scheme of Minecraft.
Dungeons are rare and are therefore an (extremely) unreliable source of leather. Horses are also somewhat uncommon, may be undesirable to kill, and are definitely not worth it to breed compared to cows. And you have to get 45 leather, which is equivalent to killing 45 cows or horses (more if you're unlucky, less if you're lucky) which simply isn't reliable. God forbid if you waste some of that leather on armor.
And, yeah, once you get a cow farm going it's relatively easy to gain leather, but setting up a cow farm itself takes time and that leather will only really be useful for bookcases (as unless you're extremely lazy you'll have iron armor by then). Even then, there's no guarantee you'll be near cows (no, they are not everywhere).
Having read through several full pages, and skimmed a few of the rest, this is the conclusion I've drawn. For clarity, all references to cows include Mooshrooms.
-Cows should always drop 1 hide instead of leather, unless they're killed by fire, in which they drop none (Mooshrooms would also drop 0-2 mushrooms of either type, but not if killed by fire).
-Cows should drop 0-1 raw beef, or always 1 cooked beef if killed by fire.
-Hides can be crafted into 4 leather squares.
-Leather squares would take the place of current leather in all crafting recipes at a 1-for-1 replacement (this means it takes two cows to make just a leather chest piece, and 5 cows for a full set of armor).
-A single rabbit hide should craft into a single leather square (since currently it takes 4 to make 1 leather, this changes nothing about the rabbit's usefulness relative to the cow's).
-Pigs should breed using any food item.
-Cows cannot produce milk again until they eat grass (Mooshrooms also cannot produce mushroom stew until they eat grass or mycelium, and can only produce one or the other each time).
-Iron, and gold armor should require the appropriate piece of leather armor for whichever armor piece you craft (it's a bit off-topic, but at that point, Diamond armor should require a base of a piece of iron or gold armor).
The downside is only complexity, which is purely an opinion, and not a terribly valid one. As balance goes, it suffers from no issues any more than the current set up, and resolves the balance issue that Leather armor is worthless in a practical sense. The only alternative is to leave the system as it is, and simply remove leather armor from the game entirely. While they're at it, in such a case, they should remove gold armor also.
Having read through several full pages, and skimmed a few of the rest, this is the conclusion I've drawn. For clarity, all references to cows include Mooshrooms.
I feel this is a horrible "summary".
[quote] -Cows should always drop 1 hide instead of leather, unless they're killed by fire, in which they drop none (Mooshrooms would also drop 0-2 mushrooms of either type, but not if killed by fire).
No.
Two cows should be more than enough to fully armor one person. Maybe make it three if you want some "game challenge". Seriously, cows are *large*.
Having to kill 5 cows to get one set of leather is not good.
[quote]-Cows should drop 0-1 raw beef, or always 1 cooked beef if killed by fire.
Again, no. Cows are large. You should get more than one beef per cow.
Do not try to make one cow balanced with one pig.
Make a herd of cows (spawned at chunk creation) balanced with a herd of pigs.
Cows should be spawned in small groups -- say 3 or 4 max -- while pigs should be spawned in large groups -- perhaps 10-15.
[quote]-Hides can be crafted into 4 leather squares. This is ... interesting. I had not seen anything like this mentioned in this thread.
Why the intermediate stage? Are you trying to separate untanned cowhide from tanned leather?
[quote]-Leather squares would take the place of current leather in all crafting recipes at a 1-for-1 replacement (this means it takes two cows to make just a leather chest piece, and 5 cows for a full set of armor). ... and why introduce a new item that behaves identically to an old item?
[quote]-A single rabbit hide should craft into a single leather square (since currently it takes 4 to make 1 leather, this changes nothing about the rabbit's usefulness relative to the cow's). Rabbits providing leather ... maybe rabbits should provide a small leather piece, and multiple of these can be merged into a normal leather item.
Rabbits are tiny.
It might take 5 or 6 rabbits to equal one pig.
[quote]-Pigs should breed using any food item.
-Cows cannot produce milk again until they eat grass (Mooshrooms also cannot produce mushroom stew until they eat grass or mycelium, and can only produce one or the other each time).
Pigs breeding on anything? ... Maybe.
Cows needing to eat grass to milk again? Good.
Cows should need to eat grass to speed their growth; without grass, very very slow growth.
My understanding of real life cows is that they eat more grass per cow than sheep do.
[quote]-Iron, and gold armor should require the appropriate piece of leather armor for whichever armor piece you craft (it's a bit off-topic, but at that point, Diamond armor should require a base of a piece of iron or gold armor).
Leather armor as the "undercoat" makes sense. Where did "a base of iron" ever come from?
EDIT: Bleeping forums, they have been eating my quotes all morning.
(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?
Pigs are kinda balanced because you can only get one wheat per block, while you can get 4 carrots from one block. It makes the breeding aspect for pigs balanced.
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Having just read all 18 pages...
The original problem was that leather armor is irrelevant to the game, and it's irrelevant because we can make iron armor so soon after starting -- period. Nothing we propose to do to leather drops will lead me to waste time on leather armor when my first suit of iron is beckoning from the 2nd or 3rd game day into my future.
Therefore, logically, the very first change this problem demands (if any) must be to delay iron smelting and/or iron armor crafting. Several possibilities have been suggested: Make ore more rare, require leather to craft any armor, require the corresponding leather armor piece in the recipe for any better armor. Of these, I reject making ore more scarce. Maybe ore could be more difficult to work with, but don't mess with scarcity.
My suggestion is to introduce and then require a hotter furnace in order to smelt ore into iron. The hotter furnace would incorporate a bellows crafted from -- you guessed it -- leather (and planks). With leather sitting astride the path to iron, not only will iron be delayed, but leather will be in our crafting chests along the way. With leather's window of relevance thus expanded, a few secondary changes to leather's scarcity can make leather armor a natural stepping stone (and I also like the idea of needing leather or leather armor to craft iron armor).
So, the second change that this problem wants is to find leather sooner. Dropping more leather from each cow might give me more leather after I finally find a cow, but it won't help me find it sooner. To find leather quickly after joining a new world, I need to increase the probability that I start the game near a source. To do that, I need leather to drop from more different animals that spawn in many different biomes. Therefore, logically, the on-topic suggestions are to drop leather from sheep and pigs in addition to cows and horses. In addition, as many different biomes as reasonable should spawn at least one leather-dropping species. Thus leather will usually be nearby, much like wood is. I should add, that despite it's real-world rationality, adding a tanning step to leather production would make leather slower and more costly, so I must reluctantly reject it for playability reasons.
The quantity of leather drops is a tertiary issue. I agree that cows (and horses), being bigger than pigs and sheep, should drop more of everything. Pig differentiation/relevance is almost OT, but like a short circuit, I can't resist. Therefore, rather than nerf steak production...
The third change I'd recommend is to increase leather drops for cows (and horses), and then (for balance) vary growth rates, expand pig diet, multiply piglet births, and stick cows and horses with grazing requirements. I like the idea that a piglet matures to pig in one quarter of the time it takes for a calf to grow into a cow. I absolutely love the idea that pigs could be fed/bred with ANY food, including rotting flesh. In fact, breeding pigs from rotting flesh would by itself be enough reason to raise pigs! Getting 2 piglets from each breeding is also reasonable, especially if the multiple birth requires a special food (I'd still slop 'em with rotting flesh and be happy with singleton piglets). I also give two thumbs WAY up to the suggestion that calves need to graze grass into dirt for each step of growth (with 4 steps). Horses likewise. And, cows should graze grass into dirt for each milking, much as sheep graze to restore wool. Grazing would not only slow cows into balance with pigs, but require bigger fields / more fencing, which I would find more satisfying in game play. Pigs, like chickens, could be raised in stone pens or underground while cows and horses would need grass -- and lots of it.
The original problem was that leather armor is irrelevant to the game, and it's irrelevant because we can make iron armor so soon after starting -- period. Nothing we propose to do to leather drops will lead me to waste time on leather armor when my first suit of iron is beckoning from the 2nd or 3rd game day into my future.
Therefore, logically, the very first change this problem demands (if any) must be to delay iron smelting and/or iron armor crafting. Several possibilities have been suggested: Make ore more rare, require leather to craft any armor, require the corresponding leather armor piece in the recipe for any better armor. Of these, I reject making ore more scarce. Maybe ore could be more difficult to work with, but don't mess with scarcity.
My suggestion is to introduce and then require a hotter furnace in order to smelt ore into iron. The hotter furnace would incorporate a bellows crafted from -- you guessed it -- leather (and planks). With leather sitting astride the path to iron, not only will iron be delayed, but leather will be in our crafting chests along the way. With leather's window of relevance thus expanded, a few secondary changes to leather's scarcity can make leather armor a natural stepping stone (and I also like the idea of needing leather or leather armor to craft iron armor).
So, the second change that this problem wants is to find leather sooner. Dropping more leather from each cow might give me more leather after I finally find a cow, but it won't help me find it sooner. To find leather quickly after joining a new world, I need to increase the probability that I start the game near a source. To do that, I need leather to drop from more different animals that spawn in many different biomes. Therefore, logically, the on-topic suggestions are to drop leather from sheep and pigs in addition to cows and horses. In addition, as many different biomes as reasonable should spawn at least one leather-dropping species. Thus leather will usually be nearby, much like wood is. I should add, that despite it's real-world rationality, adding a tanning step to leather production would make leather slower and more costly, so I must reluctantly reject it for playability reasons.
The quantity of leather drops is a tertiary issue. I agree that cows (and horses), being bigger than pigs and sheep, should drop more of everything. Pig differentiation/relevance is almost OT, but like a short circuit, I can't resist. Therefore, rather than nerf steak production...
The third change I'd recommend is to increase leather drops for cows (and horses), and then (for balance) vary growth rates, expand pig diet, multiply piglet births, and stick cows and horses with grazing requirements. I like the idea that a piglet matures to pig in one quarter of the time it takes for a calf to grow into a cow. I absolutely love the idea that pigs could be fed/bred with ANY food, including rotting flesh. In fact, breeding pigs from rotting flesh would by itself be enough reason to raise pigs! Getting 2 piglets from each breeding is also reasonable, especially if the multiple birth requires a special food (I'd still slop 'em with rotting flesh and be happy with singleton piglets). I also give two thumbs WAY up to the suggestion that calves need to graze grass into dirt for each step of growth (with 4 steps). Horses likewise. And, cows should graze grass into dirt for each milking, much as sheep graze to restore wool. Grazing would not only slow cows into balance with pigs, but require bigger fields / more fencing, which I would find more satisfying in game play. Pigs, like chickens, could be raised in stone pens or underground while cows and horses would need grass -- and lots of it.
Genius. Create your own thread; your ideas are much more structured, logical, and most importantly, precise.
A suggestion I have is instead of leather requiring four rabbit hide to be crafted, simply allow rabbit hide to act as leather.
This thread is outdated. Pigs now drop more food than cows, and the leather drop rate has been adjusted.
Well I did come up with this idea two years ago, after all. Although you are wrong about the leather drop rate, it has not been adjusted. Cows still drop 0-2 leather.
All of this is great stuff. Other people in this thread have made various similar suggestions, but all together they paint a very convincing portrait of a better balancing solution than my initial suggestion. Tbh I was aware of the issue that simply making cows drop more leather wouldn't change the fact that you'd still have to find cows, but I decided to ignore that problem because I figured on survival worlds you'd spawn in or near the appropriate biome often enough (and the challenges caused by the deficiencies of living in different kinds of biomes is part of the game), and on servers finding the animals you need is generally as easy as asking someone where some are. This was also why my preferred suggested rate was set so high; I wanted players to be able to get the leather they needed even if they only found a few cows.
You are right, however, that setting back the progression to iron tech makes more sense. No matter how common we make leather, people are still going to forgo it in favor of iron because iron is just far too easy to acquire. I like the idea of requiring leather as a necessary step before iron (I especially love the idea of needing leather armor as a "base" on which to build iron, gold, or diamond armor), but only if it doesn't turn out as poorly as requiring leather as a necessary step toward enchanting did. But then, your second suggestion would fix that issue. Although personally, I think you didn't go far enough with that suggestion. Instead of a single leather-dropping species per biome, why not make all animals drop leather? After all, leather is simply tanned animal hide, and the type of animal doesn't particularly matter.
Personally, I love the idea that all animals would drop a generic "hide" item of some kind, which could then be broken down into leather sections, similar to the way bones are dropped from skeletons and then turned into bonemeal. You can't exchange it between "block form" and "ingot form" like you can with ores, but it still allows you to store much more of the stuff than you otherwise would be able to as long as you refrain from breaking it down before you need to. This would also make leather a resource nearly as common as wood, which was one of my original stated goals, and I think this would be it's proper place in the tech tree. it also wouldn't significantly increase the cost or slowness of leather as a resource, as you would be able to break it down in your inventory or at any crafting station. Perhaps large animals like cows and horses would drop multiple "hide" pieces, and small animals would drop less. This could be tied into the system described by your third suggestion.
You are right, however, that setting back the progression to iron tech makes more sense. No matter how common we make leather, people are still going to forgo it in favor of iron because iron is just far too easy to acquire.
You are also forgetting how powerful iron is, even more so for the only material I use for tools and armor - diamond - a diamond chestplate by itself provides more protection than FULL leather armor (32% vs 28% damage reduction) and thirty times the durability (factoring in average durability per piece and the fact that each piece loses one point per hit)! Not only that, you can get diamonds by just digging a hole in the ground - in total safety; requiring leather for higher armor tiers is redundant since I'd never bother actually wearing it, just a small extra step in making the armor, and if any animal could drop it I'd get enough with little effort.
Indeed, diamond is also the only material worth enchanting IMO, especially for regularly used items due to repair costs (which does depend on durability to an extent but only diamond tools really see a big difference, when repairing with new tools).
They also really could make iron less common without making it too hard to find; I regularly mine a dozen stacks of iron ore when caving; even a tenth of that (making iron as rare as gold) is still more than a stack (full armor, tools, and an anvil or a second set of armor/tools), for just a few hours of work; this would also encourage riskier cave exploration over branch-mining, which is less practical when the ore is spread out over a large area (less so for diamond only because the range is so small, only 6 layers exposed in caves as opposed to 50 or so for iron; by contrast, lapis is rarer at any one layer but more spread out and I find a lot more of it than diamond while caving).
Of course, this last can be easily solved with the new customized world type which allows you to make ores less common if you want.
Cow hide is a great idea. That should be implemented ASAP. 1 cow hide = 4 leather. I agree with the original poster that every item in the game should have its use. The reason why I love Minecraft is that there are very few "levels" of the same items. So it would be great if leather armor and gold armor had special properties so that it would be required for certain tasks. Great stuff, more adventure, sign me up!
However, if leather was made much easier to obtain, it would be feasible to make a cow farm instead of raiding villages and strongsholds for bookshelves. So I would like it if bookshelves required special books (full of ancient and unreadable runes) that could only be found in chests that spawn in fortresses and dungeons and buildings like that. Exploring is always more interesting than farming, in my opinion.
You can make many arguments why leather should have such a low drop rate or not. Ultimately, it might be a matter of aesthetics and immersion. Finding cows to get leather is a challenge. Breeding them to get enough is a chore. So I think gameplay is a very weak aspect of the issue. That leaves other qualities of the game like aesthetics and immersion. My best argument for a higher drop rate is that I want to craft every items in the game. I want armor racks with all 5 types of armor that I can look at and think about what I did to obtain them. I don't want to look at the least useful one and think how I killed 30-40 cows just to make that. It's cruel to kill that many innocent animals for a useless set of armor. It doesn't feel satisfactory. If it was useful and required less murder, I would get it.
No technical difficulties, better gameplay and more immersive? You know, being forced to roam the surface as a hunter/collector in the beginning instead of instantly being able to dig down, get 3 diamonds and commence the space age - that sounds very appealing. Makes me wonder: Getting an enchantment table up and running requires a lot of time, exploration and skill, but in the beginning, you can jump from pre-stone age to iron age in 2 minutes without going more than 10 blocks from your spawn. That's messed up!
They also really could make iron less common without making it too hard to find; ... this would also encourage riskier cave exploration over branch-mining, which is less practical when the ore is spread out over a large area ...
This sounds like "Custom Ore Generation" (which I use). It lets you (by default) set up ore veins that are best found by exploring caves and ravines. Ores are less common (the typical chunk will have 0, some chunks may have two veins running through in different locations), but found in large quantities when you do find them.
(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?
Yeah, but breeding enough cows to get 45 leather to complete an enchanting table isn't challenging at all, it's just very, VERY time-consuming unless you commit cow genocide. If it's not challenging, it's not rewarding. It'd be like if beating, say, Nethack was a matter of leaving the game up for several hours and coming back and winning. You may have spent a lot of time, but you barely accomplished anything. Same deal with breeding cows. You shove two or more cows into a pit, breed them, wait until the cows grow up, and keep repeating while occasionally slaying some cows until you have 45 leather. I may have completed something, but it was just an annoying chore that prevents me from progressing. I would have minded it less if it were challenging or if it weren't there.
I'd honestly rather just be handed 45 leather even though it'd be a lame solution to the problem simply because it cuts out on the worthless grind. And i'm the kind of person that likes challenge.
Dungeons are rare and are therefore an (extremely) unreliable source of leather. Horses are also somewhat uncommon, may be undesirable to kill, and are definitely not worth it to breed compared to cows. And you have to get 45 leather, which is equivalent to killing 45 cows or horses (more if you're unlucky, less if you're lucky) which simply isn't reliable. God forbid if you waste some of that leather on armor.
And, yeah, once you get a cow farm going it's relatively easy to gain leather, but setting up a cow farm itself takes time and that leather will only really be useful for bookcases (as unless you're extremely lazy you'll have iron armor by then). Even then, there's no guarantee you'll be near cows (no, they are not everywhere).
That could be changed pretty easily though to make it balanced. I mean saddles shouldn't wear out but armor definitely should if it were craftable.
Support~
-Cows should always drop 1 hide instead of leather, unless they're killed by fire, in which they drop none (Mooshrooms would also drop 0-2 mushrooms of either type, but not if killed by fire).
-Cows should drop 0-1 raw beef, or always 1 cooked beef if killed by fire.
-Hides can be crafted into 4 leather squares.
-Leather squares would take the place of current leather in all crafting recipes at a 1-for-1 replacement (this means it takes two cows to make just a leather chest piece, and 5 cows for a full set of armor).
-A single rabbit hide should craft into a single leather square (since currently it takes 4 to make 1 leather, this changes nothing about the rabbit's usefulness relative to the cow's).
-Pigs should breed using any food item.
-Cows cannot produce milk again until they eat grass (Mooshrooms also cannot produce mushroom stew until they eat grass or mycelium, and can only produce one or the other each time).
-Iron, and gold armor should require the appropriate piece of leather armor for whichever armor piece you craft (it's a bit off-topic, but at that point, Diamond armor should require a base of a piece of iron or gold armor).
The downside is only complexity, which is purely an opinion, and not a terribly valid one. As balance goes, it suffers from no issues any more than the current set up, and resolves the balance issue that Leather armor is worthless in a practical sense. The only alternative is to leave the system as it is, and simply remove leather armor from the game entirely. While they're at it, in such a case, they should remove gold armor also.
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Curse PremiumI feel this is a horrible "summary".
[quote] -Cows should always drop 1 hide instead of leather, unless they're killed by fire, in which they drop none (Mooshrooms would also drop 0-2 mushrooms of either type, but not if killed by fire).
No.
Two cows should be more than enough to fully armor one person. Maybe make it three if you want some "game challenge". Seriously, cows are *large*.
Having to kill 5 cows to get one set of leather is not good.
[quote]-Cows should drop 0-1 raw beef, or always 1 cooked beef if killed by fire.
Again, no. Cows are large. You should get more than one beef per cow.
Do not try to make one cow balanced with one pig.
Make a herd of cows (spawned at chunk creation) balanced with a herd of pigs.
Cows should be spawned in small groups -- say 3 or 4 max -- while pigs should be spawned in large groups -- perhaps 10-15.
[quote]-Hides can be crafted into 4 leather squares. This is ... interesting. I had not seen anything like this mentioned in this thread.
Why the intermediate stage? Are you trying to separate untanned cowhide from tanned leather?
[quote]-Leather squares would take the place of current leather in all crafting recipes at a 1-for-1 replacement (this means it takes two cows to make just a leather chest piece, and 5 cows for a full set of armor). ... and why introduce a new item that behaves identically to an old item?
[quote]-A single rabbit hide should craft into a single leather square (since currently it takes 4 to make 1 leather, this changes nothing about the rabbit's usefulness relative to the cow's). Rabbits providing leather ... maybe rabbits should provide a small leather piece, and multiple of these can be merged into a normal leather item.
Rabbits are tiny.
It might take 5 or 6 rabbits to equal one pig.
[quote]-Pigs should breed using any food item.
-Cows cannot produce milk again until they eat grass (Mooshrooms also cannot produce mushroom stew until they eat grass or mycelium, and can only produce one or the other each time).
Pigs breeding on anything? ... Maybe.
Cows needing to eat grass to milk again? Good.
Cows should need to eat grass to speed their growth; without grass, very very slow growth.
My understanding of real life cows is that they eat more grass per cow than sheep do.
[quote]-Iron, and gold armor should require the appropriate piece of leather armor for whichever armor piece you craft (it's a bit off-topic, but at that point, Diamond armor should require a base of a piece of iron or gold armor).
Leather armor as the "undercoat" makes sense. Where did "a base of iron" ever come from?
EDIT: Bleeping forums, they have been eating my quotes all morning.
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(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?
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Curse PremiumThe original problem was that leather armor is irrelevant to the game, and it's irrelevant because we can make iron armor so soon after starting -- period. Nothing we propose to do to leather drops will lead me to waste time on leather armor when my first suit of iron is beckoning from the 2nd or 3rd game day into my future.
Therefore, logically, the very first change this problem demands (if any) must be to delay iron smelting and/or iron armor crafting. Several possibilities have been suggested: Make ore more rare, require leather to craft any armor, require the corresponding leather armor piece in the recipe for any better armor. Of these, I reject making ore more scarce. Maybe ore could be more difficult to work with, but don't mess with scarcity.
My suggestion is to introduce and then require a hotter furnace in order to smelt ore into iron. The hotter furnace would incorporate a bellows crafted from -- you guessed it -- leather (and planks). With leather sitting astride the path to iron, not only will iron be delayed, but leather will be in our crafting chests along the way. With leather's window of relevance thus expanded, a few secondary changes to leather's scarcity can make leather armor a natural stepping stone (and I also like the idea of needing leather or leather armor to craft iron armor).
So, the second change that this problem wants is to find leather sooner. Dropping more leather from each cow might give me more leather after I finally find a cow, but it won't help me find it sooner. To find leather quickly after joining a new world, I need to increase the probability that I start the game near a source. To do that, I need leather to drop from more different animals that spawn in many different biomes. Therefore, logically, the on-topic suggestions are to drop leather from sheep and pigs in addition to cows and horses. In addition, as many different biomes as reasonable should spawn at least one leather-dropping species. Thus leather will usually be nearby, much like wood is. I should add, that despite it's real-world rationality, adding a tanning step to leather production would make leather slower and more costly, so I must reluctantly reject it for playability reasons.
The quantity of leather drops is a tertiary issue. I agree that cows (and horses), being bigger than pigs and sheep, should drop more of everything. Pig differentiation/relevance is almost OT, but like a short circuit, I can't resist. Therefore, rather than nerf steak production...
The third change I'd recommend is to increase leather drops for cows (and horses), and then (for balance) vary growth rates, expand pig diet, multiply piglet births, and stick cows and horses with grazing requirements. I like the idea that a piglet matures to pig in one quarter of the time it takes for a calf to grow into a cow. I absolutely love the idea that pigs could be fed/bred with ANY food, including rotting flesh. In fact, breeding pigs from rotting flesh would by itself be enough reason to raise pigs! Getting 2 piglets from each breeding is also reasonable, especially if the multiple birth requires a special food (I'd still slop 'em with rotting flesh and be happy with singleton piglets). I also give two thumbs WAY up to the suggestion that calves need to graze grass into dirt for each step of growth (with 4 steps). Horses likewise. And, cows should graze grass into dirt for each milking, much as sheep graze to restore wool. Grazing would not only slow cows into balance with pigs, but require bigger fields / more fencing, which I would find more satisfying in game play. Pigs, like chickens, could be raised in stone pens or underground while cows and horses would need grass -- and lots of it.
Genius. Create your own thread; your ideas are much more structured, logical, and most importantly, precise.
A suggestion I have is instead of leather requiring four rabbit hide to be crafted, simply allow rabbit hide to act as leather.
Well I did come up with this idea two years ago, after all. Although you are wrong about the leather drop rate, it has not been adjusted. Cows still drop 0-2 leather.
All of this is great stuff. Other people in this thread have made various similar suggestions, but all together they paint a very convincing portrait of a better balancing solution than my initial suggestion. Tbh I was aware of the issue that simply making cows drop more leather wouldn't change the fact that you'd still have to find cows, but I decided to ignore that problem because I figured on survival worlds you'd spawn in or near the appropriate biome often enough (and the challenges caused by the deficiencies of living in different kinds of biomes is part of the game), and on servers finding the animals you need is generally as easy as asking someone where some are. This was also why my preferred suggested rate was set so high; I wanted players to be able to get the leather they needed even if they only found a few cows.
You are right, however, that setting back the progression to iron tech makes more sense. No matter how common we make leather, people are still going to forgo it in favor of iron because iron is just far too easy to acquire. I like the idea of requiring leather as a necessary step before iron (I especially love the idea of needing leather armor as a "base" on which to build iron, gold, or diamond armor), but only if it doesn't turn out as poorly as requiring leather as a necessary step toward enchanting did. But then, your second suggestion would fix that issue. Although personally, I think you didn't go far enough with that suggestion. Instead of a single leather-dropping species per biome, why not make all animals drop leather? After all, leather is simply tanned animal hide, and the type of animal doesn't particularly matter.
Personally, I love the idea that all animals would drop a generic "hide" item of some kind, which could then be broken down into leather sections, similar to the way bones are dropped from skeletons and then turned into bonemeal. You can't exchange it between "block form" and "ingot form" like you can with ores, but it still allows you to store much more of the stuff than you otherwise would be able to as long as you refrain from breaking it down before you need to. This would also make leather a resource nearly as common as wood, which was one of my original stated goals, and I think this would be it's proper place in the tech tree. it also wouldn't significantly increase the cost or slowness of leather as a resource, as you would be able to break it down in your inventory or at any crafting station. Perhaps large animals like cows and horses would drop multiple "hide" pieces, and small animals would drop less. This could be tied into the system described by your third suggestion.
You are also forgetting how powerful iron is, even more so for the only material I use for tools and armor - diamond - a diamond chestplate by itself provides more protection than FULL leather armor (32% vs 28% damage reduction) and thirty times the durability (factoring in average durability per piece and the fact that each piece loses one point per hit)! Not only that, you can get diamonds by just digging a hole in the ground - in total safety; requiring leather for higher armor tiers is redundant since I'd never bother actually wearing it, just a small extra step in making the armor, and if any animal could drop it I'd get enough with little effort.
Indeed, diamond is also the only material worth enchanting IMO, especially for regularly used items due to repair costs (which does depend on durability to an extent but only diamond tools really see a big difference, when repairing with new tools).
They also really could make iron less common without making it too hard to find; I regularly mine a dozen stacks of iron ore when caving; even a tenth of that (making iron as rare as gold) is still more than a stack (full armor, tools, and an anvil or a second set of armor/tools), for just a few hours of work; this would also encourage riskier cave exploration over branch-mining, which is less practical when the ore is spread out over a large area (less so for diamond only because the range is so small, only 6 layers exposed in caves as opposed to 50 or so for iron; by contrast, lapis is rarer at any one layer but more spread out and I find a lot more of it than diamond while caving).
Of course, this last can be easily solved with the new customized world type which allows you to make ores less common if you want.
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Not really, wood is easier to obtain than stone, and it is obtained first. Leather is rarer and more difficult to obtain than iron.
However, if leather was made much easier to obtain, it would be feasible to make a cow farm instead of raiding villages and strongsholds for bookshelves. So I would like it if bookshelves required special books (full of ancient and unreadable runes) that could only be found in chests that spawn in fortresses and dungeons and buildings like that. Exploring is always more interesting than farming, in my opinion.
You can make many arguments why leather should have such a low drop rate or not. Ultimately, it might be a matter of aesthetics and immersion. Finding cows to get leather is a challenge. Breeding them to get enough is a chore. So I think gameplay is a very weak aspect of the issue. That leaves other qualities of the game like aesthetics and immersion. My best argument for a higher drop rate is that I want to craft every items in the game. I want armor racks with all 5 types of armor that I can look at and think about what I did to obtain them. I don't want to look at the least useful one and think how I killed 30-40 cows just to make that. It's cruel to kill that many innocent animals for a useless set of armor. It doesn't feel satisfactory. If it was useful and required less murder, I would get it.
No technical difficulties, better gameplay and more immersive? You know, being forced to roam the surface as a hunter/collector in the beginning instead of instantly being able to dig down, get 3 diamonds and commence the space age - that sounds very appealing. Makes me wonder: Getting an enchantment table up and running requires a lot of time, exploration and skill, but in the beginning, you can jump from pre-stone age to iron age in 2 minutes without going more than 10 blocks from your spawn. That's messed up!
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Curse PremiumThis sounds like "Custom Ore Generation" (which I use). It lets you (by default) set up ore veins that are best found by exploring caves and ravines. Ores are less common (the typical chunk will have 0, some chunks may have two veins running through in different locations), but found in large quantities when you do find them.
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(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?