Perhaps drop rates could vary based on difficulty? Though, in general, I'm a fan of having difficulty split into separate categories: Hunger, regeneration, mob spawn rates, and the like should not be dependent on overall difficulty level, because I might want to play Peaceful with Hunger, or Hardcore without Mobs, etc.
But suppose that drop rates, especially of food, went down as difficulty went up. Then you could easily get lots of food from animals on Easy, but on Hard you'd be living hand-to-mouth until you farmed or bred a good deal (or found a village).
Sheep need to drop Mutton, though, and Squid drop Calamari, and eggs be edible and/or cookable, because every time I notice the fact that they're not, I remember that I'm just playing a game with glaring design flaws. And there's no reason for leather to be this sparse - I'm all for horses and pigs dropping leather (and cows dropping a lot more than they do right now), and I could see sheep dropping Sheepskin or something (though having sheep drop Paper directly would be weird).
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My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
I don't think that leather is hard to aquire. If you land in the plains than you find a BUNCH of cows.
On my latest world, I have run around slaughtering almost all the cows I could find - several dozen of them - and just barely got enough for a half set of bookcases and a couple books to enchant, without using any for armor. "A bunch of cows" seems like a lot until you're getting tons of steak and very little leather, and it makes no friggin' sense that you could kill a cow without it dropping at least enough leather for a pair of boots. Maybe, maybe you ruined part of it with your attacks, which is why I'd say the minimum drop should be 3, but can you imagine killing a full-grown cow and not finding enough leather on the carcass to even bind a book?
...have I ever mentioned how annoyed I am that you have to kill animals (in large numbers) to make books? There should be an alternative binding material somehow. Or, at the very least, Butcher villagers should sell leather. (I tend to play Vegan runs, mostly because otherwise it's too easy to get food, but it kind of spoils the run when I've been happily living with the animals and suddenly the next tech-up requires me to slaughter a bunch of cows.)
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My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
Crafting iron and diamond armor with leather armor as a base is a good idea to force the players to obtain leather armor in the first place before moving on to iron, and also makes sense since you'd assume that there needs to be some kind of padding underneath the hard shell. I would support that alteration. But that's a separate, albeit related, issue to bring up. My idea here would be a much less drastic change and would greatly improve early game balancing with extremely minimal effort on the part of the development staff.
Good idea, actually. I guess that would make sense, considering you're hammered on by mobs all the time, some padding would help. I like it!
Instead messing with cows, make pigs be breed with seeds instead. Now, not only they use stuff that overflows our chests, but are breedable from the very start.
I really like this idea, as I have never seen the use for leather armor, as I must kill a LOT of cows, and iron is very common and makes much better armor. Another thing the more leather would be useful for, Freaking. Bookshelves.
Anyways, I do think that cows should always drop atleast 1 steak, maybe that being the amount they do drop. So here is what I think would be good
COW DROPS:
2-4 leather (like you said)
1 steak (so you always get atleast some food, just not as much)
PIG DROPS:
2-3 porkchops (so the amount difference is noticible, and the chance to always get atleast 2 would make pig faming much more worthwhile.)
So yeah, I hope you see these little ideas I had, as I like your 2-4 leather but think that you should get 1 food from cows. Pigs I think 2-3 food so you always get more.
so you always get atleast some food, just not as much
The problem with this idea is that a cow is much, much larger than a pig. It makes no sense for the pig to have less food on it.
Now, we've been approaching this with the idea of the beef and pork being identical, meaning there's no real way to balance a cow to a pig. But perhaps the nature of the meat could change. If pig meat were fattier, and had one benefit for that, while cow meat were leaner but more abundant, perhaps that would get rid of the problem.
So perhaps one would fill more of the regular (visible) hunger bar, while the other fills more saturation? Or perhaps they could have some sort of fullness effect that differed depending on what sort of meat you ate.
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My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
Lol I don't get it. If leather armor is the weakest and most time consuming to eat then just don't use it at all.
This is less about the value of leather armor vs iron armor.
This is more about:
1. Cows drop crazy little amounts of leather (seriously, one book per cow? 30+ cows to clothe one person? I consistently average less than one leather per cow) for their size,
2. Cows drop crazy little amounts of food for their size.
3. Making cows drop as much as their size would indicate, and nothing else, would imbalance cows vs pigs, giving no reason to use pigs.
4. So what can be done to make a herd of cows spawned at chunk creation as valuable as a heard of pigs, and visa-versa.
5. So what can be done to make breeding cows as valuable as breeding pigs for the time and resources expended?
(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?
There are two big balance problems here.
...
2) Most survival players do not take very long to get iron armour at all. Even if every cow dropped 24 leather, many players still wouldn't bother and the ones that did would not use it for long. Leather armour just isn't very good. A full set reduces damage by 28%, while iron reduces damage by 60% and diamond reduces damage by 80%. It needs a buff. I think it should reduce damage by 40-50% for the full set.
I agree that the damage change from leather to iron is too big.
I think that iron and diamond are too big of a jump from leather, and both need to be reduced without enchantments.
I think that enchanted armor doing more defense but wearing out faster is a good balance.
And NONE of that -- not even the issue of the food value of steak versus others -- is relevant here. I don't have good threads to redirect you to either.
EDIT: Ok, maybe the issue of armor value is relevant here. Do you think that "nerfing iron/diamond" belongs in "Leather is too weak for the difficulty in obtaining"? Should "Improve leather to be in line with iron/diamond" be the focus here, or should "chain" be both easy to make and the middle tier? Should iron/diamond require a leather undercoat? (just think of how rough the metal-on-skin would be, or how rough diamond-on-skin would be).
(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?
EDIT: Ok, maybe the issue of armor value is relevant here. Do you think that "nerfing iron/diamond" belongs in "Leather is too weak for the difficulty in obtaining"? Should "Improve leather to be in line with iron/diamond" be the focus here, or should "chain" be both easy to make and the middle tier? Should iron/diamond require a leather undercoat? (just think of how rough the metal-on-skin would be, or how rough diamond-on-skin would be).
I had a thought that may become a suggestion in the future, and is relevant to what you just said.
Two layers of clothing. Leather, chain, ( or clothes?) could be worn on the inside, while metal armour (or quiver?) could be worn on the outside. If diamond and iron is nerfed and leather is made more bountiful, this could make sure no type of armour goes underused, because iron is fairly very often used in the beginning, and chain mail is difficult to get, and would be precious.
I had a thought that may become a suggestion in the future, and is relevant to what you just said.
Two layers of clothing. Leather, chain, ( or clothes?) could be worn on the inside, while metal armour (or quiver?) could be worn on the outside. If diamond and iron is nerfed and leather is made more bountiful, this could make sure no type of armour goes underused, because iron is fairly very often used in the beginning, and chain mail is difficult to get, and would be precious.
I have a plethora of ideas on rebalancing armor, but given the minuscule amount of progression this game has, there's very little room to work with.
Let me put it this way: the player would be able to craft 3 different kinds of armor: light (e.g. cloth or leather), medium (e.g. chainmail) or heavy (e.g. platemail). Light armor would provide a bit of protection whilst leaving the player unencumbered (higher tiers might even give them a speed boost). Medium armor would give them a decent amount of protection at the cost of a minor movement impairment. Heavy armor would provide enough protection so that the player would not have to worry much about damage from their current tier, but would have a noticeable movement impairment and a few other side effects as well.
With the game in it's current state, the best thing to do IMO is to make the current iron armor recipe craft chainmail instead and make iron and diamond armor require a suit of the corresponding leather armor to create. Additionally, whenever iron or diamond armor break, they are replaced by a fully-repaired piece of leather armor, and if you desire you can craft a piece of iron or diamond armor into a piece of leather armor. This still leaves leather armor itself as pretty worthless, but at least the other tiers are balanced.
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Did something happen to you in your childhood to give you this unreasonable fear of rutabaga?
I think that chicken should keep its drop rate of raw (or cooked if killed with fire) chicken, but they should drop more feathers. Also, sheep should have the same chance of dropping mutton (essentially chicken, just for if you have too many sheep) as a chicken has of dropping chicken. Also, pigs should drop more pork (1-3), including babies (1-1). While we're at it, make steak identical to chicken and make cows have as much chance of dropping 0-2 steak as a chicken does to drop chicken. Leather should drop 1-4.
The problem is not leather, it's the frequency of iron.
When you have to kill more than 12 cows to make a suit of leather armor? (Heck, I'm lucky to get 18 leather from 24 cows.) When one cow only provides enough leather to cover one book?
(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?
The problem is not leather, it's the frequency of iron.
There are problems with both. Leather is too rare and too weak to use for anything but books, and even then you have to slaughter unrealistically large amounts of cows just to get a few bookcases. Iron is too common for how powerful it is, but that's an issue for another thread.
Indeed, I've been saying since beta 1.8 that I think the increased cave generation made iron far too easy to collect in short order. I prefered the old cave generation that had fewer and smaller caves on the whole, with the occasional large cave being a valuable and exciting find.
This issue may not exactly directly relate to the purpose of this thread, but I do think it's related to be sure. Along with a rebalancing of leather, I'd love to see a reduction in cavern-system commonality as well. Making both leather armor easier to acquire and iron armor harder to acquire would make survival much more challenging and rewarding in my opinion.
Though I am a bigger fan of the conservative drop rates.
But suppose that drop rates, especially of food, went down as difficulty went up. Then you could easily get lots of food from animals on Easy, but on Hard you'd be living hand-to-mouth until you farmed or bred a good deal (or found a village).
Sheep need to drop Mutton, though, and Squid drop Calamari, and eggs be edible and/or cookable, because every time I notice the fact that they're not, I remember that I'm just playing a game with glaring design flaws. And there's no reason for leather to be this sparse - I'm all for horses and pigs dropping leather (and cows dropping a lot more than they do right now), and I could see sheep dropping Sheepskin or something (though having sheep drop Paper directly would be weird).
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
On my latest world, I have run around slaughtering almost all the cows I could find - several dozen of them - and just barely got enough for a half set of bookcases and a couple books to enchant, without using any for armor. "A bunch of cows" seems like a lot until you're getting tons of steak and very little leather, and it makes no friggin' sense that you could kill a cow without it dropping at least enough leather for a pair of boots. Maybe, maybe you ruined part of it with your attacks, which is why I'd say the minimum drop should be 3, but can you imagine killing a full-grown cow and not finding enough leather on the carcass to even bind a book?
...have I ever mentioned how annoyed I am that you have to kill animals (in large numbers) to make books? There should be an alternative binding material somehow. Or, at the very least, Butcher villagers should sell leather. (I tend to play Vegan runs, mostly because otherwise it's too easy to get food, but it kind of spoils the run when I've been happily living with the animals and suddenly the next tech-up requires me to slaughter a bunch of cows.)
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
You're thinking chickens.
Anyways, I do think that cows should always drop atleast 1 steak, maybe that being the amount they do drop. So here is what I think would be good
COW DROPS:
2-4 leather (like you said)
1 steak (so you always get atleast some food, just not as much)
PIG DROPS:
2-3 porkchops (so the amount difference is noticible, and the chance to always get atleast 2 would make pig faming much more worthwhile.)
So yeah, I hope you see these little ideas I had, as I like your 2-4 leather but think that you should get 1 food from cows. Pigs I think 2-3 food so you always get more.
The problem with this idea is that a cow is much, much larger than a pig. It makes no sense for the pig to have less food on it.
Now, we've been approaching this with the idea of the beef and pork being identical, meaning there's no real way to balance a cow to a pig. But perhaps the nature of the meat could change. If pig meat were fattier, and had one benefit for that, while cow meat were leaner but more abundant, perhaps that would get rid of the problem.
So perhaps one would fill more of the regular (visible) hunger bar, while the other fills more saturation? Or perhaps they could have some sort of fullness effect that differed depending on what sort of meat you ate.
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
This is less about the value of leather armor vs iron armor.
This is more about:
1. Cows drop crazy little amounts of leather (seriously, one book per cow? 30+ cows to clothe one person? I consistently average less than one leather per cow) for their size,
2. Cows drop crazy little amounts of food for their size.
3. Making cows drop as much as their size would indicate, and nothing else, would imbalance cows vs pigs, giving no reason to use pigs.
4. So what can be done to make a herd of cows spawned at chunk creation as valuable as a heard of pigs, and visa-versa.
5. So what can be done to make breeding cows as valuable as breeding pigs for the time and resources expended?
* Promoting this week: Captive Minecraft 4, Winter Realm. Aka: Vertical Vanilla Viewing. Clicky!
* My channel with Mystcraft, and general Minecraft Let's Plays: http://www.youtube.com/user/Keybounce.
* See all my video series: http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-editions/minecraft-editions-show-your/2865421-keybounces-list-of-creation-threads
(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?
I agree that the damage change from leather to iron is too big.
I think that iron and diamond are too big of a jump from leather, and both need to be reduced without enchantments.
I think that enchanted armor doing more defense but wearing out faster is a good balance.
And NONE of that -- not even the issue of the food value of steak versus others -- is relevant here. I don't have good threads to redirect you to either.
EDIT: Ok, maybe the issue of armor value is relevant here. Do you think that "nerfing iron/diamond" belongs in "Leather is too weak for the difficulty in obtaining"? Should "Improve leather to be in line with iron/diamond" be the focus here, or should "chain" be both easy to make and the middle tier? Should iron/diamond require a leather undercoat? (just think of how rough the metal-on-skin would be, or how rough diamond-on-skin would be).
* Promoting this week: Captive Minecraft 4, Winter Realm. Aka: Vertical Vanilla Viewing. Clicky!
* My channel with Mystcraft, and general Minecraft Let's Plays: http://www.youtube.com/user/Keybounce.
* See all my video series: http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-editions/minecraft-editions-show-your/2865421-keybounces-list-of-creation-threads
(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?
I had a thought that may become a suggestion in the future, and is relevant to what you just said.
Two layers of clothing. Leather, chain, ( or clothes?) could be worn on the inside, while metal armour (or quiver?) could be worn on the outside. If diamond and iron is nerfed and leather is made more bountiful, this could make sure no type of armour goes underused, because iron is fairly very often used in the beginning, and chain mail is difficult to get, and would be precious.
I have a plethora of ideas on rebalancing armor, but given the minuscule amount of progression this game has, there's very little room to work with.
Let me put it this way: the player would be able to craft 3 different kinds of armor: light (e.g. cloth or leather), medium (e.g. chainmail) or heavy (e.g. platemail). Light armor would provide a bit of protection whilst leaving the player unencumbered (higher tiers might even give them a speed boost). Medium armor would give them a decent amount of protection at the cost of a minor movement impairment. Heavy armor would provide enough protection so that the player would not have to worry much about damage from their current tier, but would have a noticeable movement impairment and a few other side effects as well.
With the game in it's current state, the best thing to do IMO is to make the current iron armor recipe craft chainmail instead and make iron and diamond armor require a suit of the corresponding leather armor to create. Additionally, whenever iron or diamond armor break, they are replaced by a fully-repaired piece of leather armor, and if you desire you can craft a piece of iron or diamond armor into a piece of leather armor. This still leaves leather armor itself as pretty worthless, but at least the other tiers are balanced.
I scored 100% on the Minecraft Trivia Quiz. How much do you know about Minecraft?
When you have to kill more than 12 cows to make a suit of leather armor? (Heck, I'm lucky to get 18 leather from 24 cows.) When one cow only provides enough leather to cover one book?
Who makes these cows, micro machines?
* Promoting this week: Captive Minecraft 4, Winter Realm. Aka: Vertical Vanilla Viewing. Clicky!
* My channel with Mystcraft, and general Minecraft Let's Plays: http://www.youtube.com/user/Keybounce.
* See all my video series: http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-editions/minecraft-editions-show-your/2865421-keybounces-list-of-creation-threads
(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?
There are problems with both. Leather is too rare and too weak to use for anything but books, and even then you have to slaughter unrealistically large amounts of cows just to get a few bookcases. Iron is too common for how powerful it is, but that's an issue for another thread.
This issue may not exactly directly relate to the purpose of this thread, but I do think it's related to be sure. Along with a rebalancing of leather, I'd love to see a reduction in cavern-system commonality as well. Making both leather armor easier to acquire and iron armor harder to acquire would make survival much more challenging and rewarding in my opinion.