No one is talking about realism here. Minecraft was never meant to be realistic.
That could also work, because you have to have fuel and a furnace to make bonemeal. But remember, it's a snapshot for a reason - it still needs some balancing. Dinnerbone(?) himself said that he is planning on balancing this nerf. By the release of 1.5, I highly doubt you'll need 7 bonemeals just for 1 wheat.
Great then.
I would HAPPILY have this, and I wouldn't mind spending a few of my small supply of wood on a new world doing this. Who else is OK with this idea?
Ok. If so, why was the hunger bar added? Why was food added? Why do you have a health bar when the only point of Minecraft is building? It's undeniable that Minecraft has a survival aspect. Just because you don't play that way, doesn't mean Minecraft is not supposed to be played that way.
I believe Hunger was added so that map makers could have another option at torturing the players.
If it were to add difficulty to the base game... then Mojang would not have made food the most common and easiest to obtain resource next to Wood (Which is true regardless of Bonemeal's existence, if I may add). Perhaps it was also to encourage people to make farms/provide a transition from the old despawning/respawning animals mechanic.
Does not provide difficulty? You need to kill more skeletons, which are now stronger, to get instant food. True that food is still easy to get, but this nerf made it a little bit harder. Not everyone has a skeleton farm nor want to build one because it takes away a huge bit of the survival aspect of the game.
This nerf does not make getting food any more difficult as there are many, easier sources of food in the game even if you take Bonemeal out of the game.
What it does is reduce the rewards the player gets from killing a Skeleton and discourages people to get Bonemeal to grow food in the first place, when it already happens automatically without player influence other than location of planting.
You're not improving difficulty. You're nerfing an item into the ground so people with false senses of difficulty and what is challenging can stop complaining about a convenience item that makes already plentiful resources (food and wood) less tedious to obtain.
It is more of an annoyance than a difficulty? Care to expand on that more? That can be said about anything. I could say it is more annoying than challenging that you have to dig down ~70 blocks just to get to the level where diamond ores spawn instead of just having diamond ores above ground. I could say it is more annoying than challenging that you can only put down one block at a time just to build a house instead of just using WorldEdit. I could say it is more annoying than challenging that you have to collect blocks and materials to build a house instead of just having an infinite amount of them. See what I'm saying?
I see what you're saying. There are many annoyances in this game.
But annoyances are not difficulty. Diamond being rare on low levels of the world is not challenge, and it would be the same if diamonds spawned much higher up at the same rates. It's an annoyance, and changing it has the same effect as how changing Bonemeal does, by not changing difficulty in the slightest. It changes the annoyance.
This nerf may just be an annoyance if you are just a builder, but if you appreciate the survival aspect of the game, it's definitely an increase in difficulty.
If you appreciate the survival aspect of the game, then go play variants of the game where the survival aspect is actually important.
The nerf isn't a bad idea, but it could be done better. While plants have the green particles around them from the bonemeal, they should just have much better chances of growing/advancing to the next step in their development. That way you could bonemeal a couple seeds and you might get lucky and have some go up several stages while others might only go up one or two. It would just increase the chances of the plant growing when it does the "Am I gonna grow?" checks.
No one is talking about realism here. Minecraft was never meant to be realistic.
That could also work, because you have to have fuel and a furnace to make bonemeal. But remember, it's a snapshot for a reason - it still needs some balancing. Dinnerbone(?) himself said that he is planning on balancing this nerf. By the release of 1.5, I highly doubt you'll need 7 bonemeals just for 1 wheat.
Smelting or anything to bring back the normal bonemeal but make it harder to get would be nice.
Why bones/bonemeal seen as worthless now? Simple: a combination of overabundance and of the fact that for usual usages you don't really need all that much:
- Taming wolves: Even to tame an entire wolf pack, you don't need to kill all that many skeletons. After all, once your initial taming is done, it's done, and it's easier to just breed more "already tamed" wolves that to go find new ones.
- Quick-growing of vegetation: Because of...
a- 1 bone gives 3 bonemeals, you easily get lots of it.
b- bonemeal targets 1 plant only (except when done on a grass block).
c- crops already grow quite fast anyway
... this simply means that bonemeal is usually used mostly only to "quick start" a new type of crop, say from a single zombie-drop carrot to having at least 10 planted carrots. Once that's done, it's done for good, and no more bonemeal is needed.
Bone meal is also used when you have a skelly grinder to have a "3 clicks per wheat on a single flamrland block" thing going, but the discussion of overabundance of stuff when players have mob grinders is entirely another problematic.
So here is how I think the bonemeal "nerf" should have been done:
(-A-) Adjust quantity before adjusting effect.
Items with special effects should try to "seem" rare/valuable. They're not building materials of which you'd need stacks and stacks and stacks of. So it's better to reduce the amount than to chop the effect into oblivion.
Thus, for bonemeal:
- Skeletons should drop only 0-1 bones instead of 0-2.
This would result in a x2 rarity effect for bones, so taming wolves would be less "immediate".
and
- Crafting Bone should yield only 1 bonemeal instead of 3.
Thus would result in a total effect of x6 rarity effect for bonemeal.
Combined with the new power of skellies (they're really hard now, and you must strafe to get at them), this would make bones, and especially bonemeal, much "rarer".
{ Parenthesis: In fact, I think they went a little bit overboard with the power of skellies now. Like another poster said, they're almost mini-bosses. Sheesh, I always hated using bow and arrow, and strafing is VERY hard on my carpal tunnel syndrome. I wouldn't mind if _SOME_ skellies were "uber", byut all of them? Given the _EXTREMELY LOW_ diversity of monsters in the game, making a very common monster like skellies this hard feels weird to me. I just wait for the sun to come up to grab the skellies's drop lol. }
(-B-) Make automatic grinders farming less uber powerful.
When a mob "shares" part of it's volume with another monster, it shouldn't drop anything when killed. in fact, past some point of "high concentration" of mobs overlapping in the same volume, a fraction of them should despawn immediately until the threshold is respected. That way, "monster towers" which cause server lag would be reduced, and mob farms couldn't "exagerate". to prevent players from simply modifying their mob farms so that its the monsters DROPS which accumulate in the same spot, I'd apply the same threshold principle ti the drops, too. When item entities are created, they get a flag wether they were created by direct player action of not, and when they "merge" together, there would be odds that some disappear instantly, with a limit. This way even if you create a uber humongous automatic wheat farm, or skelly farm, you wouldn't get insane amounts of drops in a very short time, simply by pushing a button.
Also, monster spawner created monsters should have lower drop rate. The more monsters of that type that are killed nearby recently, the lower the drop rate in the next few minutes. Wether the monster is killed by player hand or entirely automatically should also affect the drop rate.
In short, grinders would still "pay" more overall, but not WAY more. Maybe it' ok to let a player with an automatic farm posseess say 10 times more stuff than the guy doing it manuallly. But a 100 times more? A 1000 times more? Definotely not Ok. Because that's asking for trouble on any server worth its salt. the game should be dsigned for the multiplayer environment. If a player in single player w2ants to have multidouble-chests full of stackas of something, they should just use creative mode momentarily to do so (cheats are directly part of the game now anyway) instead of wanting to ruin the economy (such as it is) for the community.
(-C-) Make the effect useful not only when you "start" stuff, but also "continue" to be useful afterwards when "you "continue" to do the stuff that you started.
Wolves: Easy, just make it edible just like raw meat for healing and breeding purposes. Anyway it's much more fun to to have 2 different types of foods to use on wolves, especially for roleplay-oriented players "Here's a good doggy, here's a treat!" (give bones)"
Crops: The bonemeal should not act as a magical-thingy-of-instant-growth, but as fertilizer boosting the normal growth speed. Maybe then we could also have bonemeal as an ingredient to make an instant-growth potion or item instead.
This way, the usage would not be reserved for "starting" a farm, but could be useful for a long time afterwards.
(note that even with the last 13w04a update, you can still 'nearly' insta-grow wheat with bonemeal, all you have to do is click-spam the crop).
Example of how it could be implemented:
No instant growth, even when put directly on grass. Instead, a magical green sparkling on the block where the bonemeal was added. this aura lasts for some time, and you can't spam-stack more bonemeal in the same spot.
Effect: In addition to the normal random block updates they get normally, when a bonemeal-aura gets a random block update, it will also give all blocks of the prioper type in a 4x4 area (inclyuding diaginally) around it their get a chance to grow. This will thus add more chances of several random blocks in the overlapping area getting growth.
The nature of the block where the bonemeal aura is, determines the kind of aura:
Specific Crop Aura - If aura is 'around' a crop block, it enhances that type of crop only.
Specfic Tree Aura - If aura is 'around' a sapling, it enhances the growth of that type of tree in the area.
Specific Mushroom Aura - If aura is 'around' a mushroom, it constantly gives some chance that this kind of mushroom grows into a giant one, in the area.
Grass & Flowers Aura - If aura is 'around' around empty air above a grass block, or is around tall grass, dandelion or rose, it constantly gives some chance of creating mostly tall grass (not dead tall grass), some dandelions, and a few roses.
Grass & Flowers Aura - If aura is 'around' around empty air above a grass block, or is around tall grass, dandelion or rose, it constantly gives some chance of creating mostly tall grass (not dead tall grass), some dandelions, and a few roses.
Also, you couldn't add bonemeal if by doing so that would make two auras of the same kind adjacent (even diagonally), but you can add some more further away to stack the effect. Since each bonemeal would provide say the equilvalent of speeding up the growth by +200%, with 1 bonemeal you'd get triple normal growth speed, a 2nd bonemeal aura would make the overlapping area get x5 speed, it would become x7 speed with a 3rd bonemal, etc. For a maximum boost of x25 on some plant type. Grass and flowers would work a bit differently since they don't "grow" but "appear". Of course, the bonemeal has a maximum duration, too, but it should be sufficiently long.
Just ideas, really.
I agree with many of these ideas. What I like even more is the civil, organized way you present them. The rest of this page is dissolving into people flaming each other without actually making decent arguments.
Getting diamonds is a challenge. You must get down to the level by digging, light things up, avoid monsters, avoid lava, have an iron pick in hand, and this is not even counting FINDING them, which is often a bit of a task alone.
You are comparing this to making an item go from useful, but redundant later in the game, to just about useless.
Okay I think now that Mojang will not return bonemeal to it's former state. I still want normal bonemeal but how about just make it harder to get. Someone has suggested the following:
Okay I think now that Mojang will not return bonemeal to it's former state. I still want normal bonemeal but how about just make it harder to get. Someone has suggested the following:
Smelting bones
Making a new block called the grinder(8 iron)
Bones only giving one bonemeal each 1:1
Bone + Fish = Bonemeal
I think making the grinder is the worst of them, and smelting is the best. Still, the other ones I wouldn't mind too bad.
Okay I think now that Mojang will not return bonemeal to it's former state. I still want normal bonemeal but how about just make it harder to get. Someone has suggested the following:
Smelting bones
Making a new block called the grinder(8 iron)
Bones only giving one bonemeal each 1:1
Bone + Fish = Bonemeal
I think making the grinder just so you can get bonemeal is a bit excessive. unless you can grind other things with it. Also where'd the fish come from? Seems a bit random. Unless there is more to the post that suggested it and I just haven't read it. Which is highly likely as this thread is getting rather long and I don't think I have the patience to read through all of it.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Humanity is the creation of Logic and Emotion, Calculation and Imagination, Cold Analysis and Blind Faith. This is why I believe it is a strange Human that would prize one while shunning the other. For a calculator can do math just as well as you, but a calculator can not use math to make the world a better place.
They just need to extend bonemeal's effect to a 3x3 area for crops. 7 bonemeal = 9 wheat. You get less if you're using dispensers (due to positioning.) Problem solved.
I believe Hunger was added so that map makers could have another option at torturing the players.
No. It was clearly added for "Survival" mode... Ya know, so you could get food, build a shelter, fight monsters, and survive. There's a reason why you don't have a hunger bar in Creative.
You're not improving difficulty. You're nerfing an item into the ground so people with false sense of difficulty and what is challenging can stop complaining about a convenience item that makes already plentiful resources (food and wood) less tedious to obtain.
The nerf IS making it harder to survive by limiting you're ability to have instant food and is forcing you to plan ahead by building a larger farm and stock piling food.
They just need to extend bonemeal's effect to a 3x3 area for crops. 7 bonemeal = 9 wheat. You get less if you're using dispensers (due to positioning.) Problem solved.
That's even more OP than it was origionally. Before you'd only get 7 wheat with 7 bonemeal!
So then "Creative" is just a word too then right? You're not suppose to build things.
No. It was clearly added for "Survival" mode... Ya know, so you could get food, build a shelter, fight monsters, and survive. There's a reason why you don't have a hunger bar in Creative.
The nerf IS making it harder to survive by limiting you're ability to have instant food and is forcing you to plan ahead by building a larger farm and stock piling food.
Or, you could just play "Survival Mode" and build a larger farm so you survive and don't starve to death.
This doesn't make food easier or harder to get over all, this just makes bone meal worthless, and forces people to instead farm trees for apples. Or fish. How is this good, taking choices away?
I think making the grinder just so you can get bonemeal is a bit excessive. unless you can grind other things with it. Also where'd the fish come from? Seems a bit random. Unless there is more to the post that suggested it and I just haven't read it. Which is highly likely as this thread is getting rather long and I don't think I have the patience to read through all of it.
I got the fish idea from the fact that Indians used fish as fertilizer XD.
They just need to extend bonemeal's effect to a 3x3 area for crops. 7 bonemeal = 9 wheat. You get less if you're using dispensers (due to positioning.) Problem solved.
I got the fish idea from the fact that Indians used fish as fertilizer XD.
Oh I see. Well I personally would not be inclined to use that method as I fish all the time and am probably on of the few minecrafters that uses it as a regular source of food. However it could get more people fishing, which I see as a good thing. Though I think the use of rotten flesh as stated above might be a better idea seeing as rotten flesh isn't the best food source and this would give it another more helpful purpose.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Humanity is the creation of Logic and Emotion, Calculation and Imagination, Cold Analysis and Blind Faith. This is why I believe it is a strange Human that would prize one while shunning the other. For a calculator can do math just as well as you, but a calculator can not use math to make the world a better place.
That's even more OP than it was origionally. Before you'd only get 7 wheat with 7 bonemeal!
There's a higher initial investment than the old system. You need 3 bones to get started and you only get the full effectiveness if you've collected 9 seeds. Before you could start with one bone and one seed and go seed, bonemeal, seed, bonemeal, seed, bonemeal, bread.
You also don't get the full effectiveness with dispensers due to space constraints (in case they were allowed to plant seeds.)
There's a higher initial investment than the old system. You need 3 bones to get started and you only get the full effectiveness if you've collected 9 seeds. Before you could start with one bone and one seed and go seed, bonemeal, seed, bonemeal, seed, bonemeal, bread.
You also don't get the full effectiveness with dispensers due to space constraints.
nobody has explained why this was bad. It still takes effort to get the bones, unless you have a mob grinder. But if you do the OP bit is the grinder, not the bone meal.
Also, why should people be forced to fish? If they want to fish cool, but nerfing this "to make people fish" is a VERY poor reason.
Why not instead give the possibility to catch different stuff, or an improved fishing mechanic for this?
Oh I see. Well I personally would not be inclined to use that method as I fish all the time and am probably on of the few minecrafters that uses it as a regular source of food. However it could get more people fishing, which I see as a good thing. Though I think the use of rotten flesh as stated above might be a better idea seeing as rotten flesh isn't the best food source and this would give it another more helpful purpose.
Oh I see. Well I personally would not be inclined to use that method as I fish all the time and am probably on of the few minecrafters that uses it as a regular source of food. However it could get more people fishing, which I see as a good thing. Though I think the use of rotten flesh as stated above might be a better idea seeing as rotten flesh isn't the best food source and this would give it another more helpful purpose.
nobody has explained why this was bad. It still takes effort to get the bones, unless you have a mob grinder. But if you do the OP bit is the grinder, not the bone meal.
Also, why should people be forced to fish? If they want to fish cool, but nerfing this "to make people fish" is a VERY poor reason.
Why not instead give the possibility to catch different stuff, or an improved fishing mechanic for this?
Okay the fishing thing can be scraped but on a non-related note: There is a popular SMP plugin called McMMO and it has a cool fishing skill.
Getting diamonds is a challenge. You must get down to the level by digging, light things up, avoid monsters, avoid lava, have an iron pick in hand, and this is not even counting FINDING them, which is often a bit of a task alone.
Getting diamonds isn't a challenge. The hardest part is finding them, and that is just mining and getting lucky. All the rest apply to any exploration within a cave or player-dug hole, and Iron is extremely abundant so that isn't even a challenge.
when you start a new world, you don't have nothing, but some few days later you ended up with 300thousands bones that you don't need, so you throw it all. I barely use the bone meal to grow trees or wheat, I just leave them grow. so it doesn't bother me at all
Great then.
I would HAPPILY have this, and I wouldn't mind spending a few of my small supply of wood on a new world doing this. Who else is OK with this idea?
If it were to add difficulty to the base game... then Mojang would not have made food the most common and easiest to obtain resource next to Wood (Which is true regardless of Bonemeal's existence, if I may add). Perhaps it was also to encourage people to make farms/provide a transition from the old despawning/respawning animals mechanic.
This nerf does not make getting food any more difficult as there are many, easier sources of food in the game even if you take Bonemeal out of the game.
What it does is reduce the rewards the player gets from killing a Skeleton and discourages people to get Bonemeal to grow food in the first place, when it already happens automatically without player influence other than location of planting.
You're not improving difficulty. You're nerfing an item into the ground so people with false senses of difficulty and what is challenging can stop complaining about a convenience item that makes already plentiful resources (food and wood) less tedious to obtain.
I see what you're saying. There are many annoyances in this game.
But annoyances are not difficulty. Diamond being rare on low levels of the world is not challenge, and it would be the same if diamonds spawned much higher up at the same rates. It's an annoyance, and changing it has the same effect as how changing Bonemeal does, by not changing difficulty in the slightest. It changes the annoyance.
If you appreciate the survival aspect of the game, then go play variants of the game where the survival aspect is actually important.
Vanilla Minecraft is not one of those variants.
Smelting or anything to bring back the normal bonemeal but make it harder to get would be nice.
I agree with many of these ideas. What I like even more is the civil, organized way you present them. The rest of this page is dissolving into people flaming each other without actually making decent arguments.
You are comparing this to making an item go from useful, but redundant later in the game, to just about useless.
That analogy is horrible.
Smelting bones
Making a new block called the grinder(8 iron)
Bones only giving one bonemeal each 1:1
Bone + Fish = Bonemeal
I think making the grinder is the worst of them, and smelting is the best. Still, the other ones I wouldn't mind too bad.
I think making the grinder just so you can get bonemeal is a bit excessive. unless you can grind other things with it. Also where'd the fish come from? Seems a bit random. Unless there is more to the post that suggested it and I just haven't read it. Which is highly likely as this thread is getting rather long and I don't think I have the patience to read through all of it.
Mostly moved on. May check back a few times a year.
So then "Creative" is just a word too then right? You're not suppose to build things.
No. It was clearly added for "Survival" mode... Ya know, so you could get food, build a shelter, fight monsters, and survive. There's a reason why you don't have a hunger bar in Creative.
The nerf IS making it harder to survive by limiting you're ability to have instant food and is forcing you to plan ahead by building a larger farm and stock piling food.
Or, you could just play "Survival Mode" and build a larger farm so you survive and don't starve to death.
That's even more OP than it was origionally. Before you'd only get 7 wheat with 7 bonemeal!
This doesn't make food easier or harder to get over all, this just makes bone meal worthless, and forces people to instead farm trees for apples. Or fish. How is this good, taking choices away?
I got the fish idea from the fact that Indians used fish as fertilizer XD.
That..........sounds great!
Oh I see. Well I personally would not be inclined to use that method as I fish all the time and am probably on of the few minecrafters that uses it as a regular source of food. However it could get more people fishing, which I see as a good thing. Though I think the use of rotten flesh as stated above might be a better idea seeing as rotten flesh isn't the best food source and this would give it another more helpful purpose.
You also don't get the full effectiveness with dispensers due to space constraints (in case they were allowed to plant seeds.)
Mostly moved on. May check back a few times a year.
nobody has explained why this was bad. It still takes effort to get the bones, unless you have a mob grinder. But if you do the OP bit is the grinder, not the bone meal.
Also, why should people be forced to fish? If they want to fish cool, but nerfing this "to make people fish" is a VERY poor reason.
Why not instead give the possibility to catch different stuff, or an improved fishing mechanic for this?
Agree
Okay the fishing thing can be scraped but on a non-related note: There is a popular SMP plugin called McMMO and it has a cool fishing skill.
So... yeah. Annoyances =/= difficulty.