First of all, thank you for your input. I wish everyone would break down their thoughts with this much detail. Second, I feel as if I could release this mod after fixing some of the issues that you've highlighted and the mod would be good to go. Amazing. Thanks again and I'm going to get to work immediately. (P.S. I've got a few of the configs in place to disable some of the more annoying features, but I won't disable them as I think they are what takes the word "cheating" out of this mod.)
Glad it was useful. I'm a vanilla automation fiend, so here's some observations from that point of view. (Not criticisms, I know most people don't play this way, just food for thought.)
Fisher:
I love this thing. Fishing by hand is slow, even with good rods. I could be building something instead! Now, as long as I keep it supplied with rods and clean out the chest regularly, I don't have to hunt, farm, or scavenge for name tags or saddles, and I even get some nifty enchanted books. It's a keeper.
Crop farmers:
I can build large, high-speed water flushed farms with hopper collection. Just add pistons to break the melons and pumpkins. All I need to do is press a button, wait for the water to wash things down, then re-plant. I probably won't use these blocks much.
Tree farmers:
I build 2x2-trunk tree farms over flowing water for automatic sapling collection. Stair-step chop up, chop back down, re-plant. If the cutter had a no-shears option, I'd integrate one into my farm, but otherwise I don't really have a use for it.
Breeder:
Sure, toss one of these on a cow pen. Limit overpopulation by only adding so much wheat at a time. I don't really have much need for this, though, especially since I can auto-fish for leather.
Crushing mill:
I always have leftover cobblestone, and I hate wrecking deserts and beaches for glass and sandstone. Problem solved! This one's a keeper.
Metal extractor:
I can build an all-wood iron golem farm that takes no further effort on my part in a couple of hours. No redstone, no moving parts, no player interaction, and it spits out two stacks of iron ingots every hour. I can do nearly the same thing for zombie pigmen and gold, it just takes obsidian (portal-based farm) or a visit to the nether with a stack of snowballs (pitfall-based farm). Since this isn't a "dirt to diamonds" machine, and everything it puts out can be farmed in vanilla with no interaction and a cheaper building cost, you might want to consider increasing the drop rate significantly. By the time an "average" player can afford this thing, they can mine for iron and gold faster than this machine produces them.
Thanks again. When I have time, I'll have a new version that will be configurable and hopefully all of the blocks will be sought after
Sounds like fun. Until then, the crusher and fisher are my favorite new toys to play with. Pair them up with some basic automation (filters, pipes, etc) and they're extra fun. This mod makes me glad you went the chest route, as I can add an almost-vanilla filtered hopper underneath them, leaving the tools inside and just pulling out (some of) the drops.
For the fishers, I pull off the edible fish, books, saddles, and bottles (common and non-stackable, so they clog the chest), then just visit the chest every once in a while to check the rods. For the crusher, I like to stack two eight-packs, pulling the output of one into the next layer's chest. Dump cobble into the top end, get sand out the bottom at almost full hopper-speed.
Oh, here's a block request: a non-cheaty quarry/stone breaker I can attach to a smooth stone or cobblestone generator. Maybe use smooth stone and redstone blocks for the recipe, and have it look for smooth stone and cobblestone either in a 3x3 ring or just at the face an arrow points to? Do the usual "you must have a pickaxe in the chest" thing, etc. I've found a simple block breaker mod, but it has the usual "infinite pick, break anything" cheatyness.
Oh, here's a block request: a non-cheaty quarry/stone breaker I can attach to a smooth stone or cobblestone generator. Maybe use smooth stone and redstone blocks for the recipe, and have it look for smooth stone and cobblestone either in a 3x3 ring or just at the face an arrow points to? Do the usual "you must have a pickaxe in the chest" thing, etc. I've found a simple block breaker mod, but it has the usual "infinite pick, break anything" cheatyness.
Hi there, your mod is very useful and my favorite blocks are the fisher and the tree farmer & sapling planter. They are real timer-savers.
I have a couple suggestions though:
Crop farmer - as other people already have stated, it is underpowered because of its small radius. I saw in the poll that you consider changing it, so my suggestion for this is to add a possibility to upgrade the radius. Maybe with something simple like blocks of iron, gold or diamand put in the chest; an iron block would increase the radius by 2, gold block by 4, diamond block by 6 or something like this.
Tree farmer - the shears are beeing used up very quickly. Maybe you could introduce a new item (leave cutter or so) which has a longer durability. Also is it possible to configure the chest to collect apples that sometimes fall off the trees?
New block - in addition to the breeder there should be a new block, which kills grown up animals in a fair radius. The required tool would be a sword and the chest would collect dropped items.
Would be great, if you let me know what you think of it.
I'm currently working on balance and some of the suggestions. Thanks for all of the input. I'll weigh every suggestion and everything that I believe fits into the mod will be presented in the next update.
/*
* NEW: Any ItemFish (excluding the poisonous Pufferfish) work as Bonemeal while in the Crop Farmer's Chest. The delay between uses is 30 seconds.
* NEW: Redstone Oscillator - Hard mode crafting item. Recipe is one Diamond surrounded by Redstone.
*
* CONFIG: Added Processing Factor to Configuration to allow for processing speed tweaks.
* CONFIG: Added No Shears option for the Tree Cutter.
* CONFIG: Added the ability to increase the Crop Farmer's radius by 1, tripling the number of maintained crops.
* CONFIG: Added ability to enable "hard" recipe mode that uses Redstone Oscillators in place of Redstone Blocks.
* CONFIG: Added option to change the Breeder's population capacity.
*
* FIXED: Sapling Planter will no longer try to plant on invalid blocks.
*
* REVISED: Sapling Planter now plants in a 3x3 area 1 block away from the pointing face to allow for 2x2 tree growth.
* REVISED: Breeder will now check for over-population. 20 animals is the default capacity, and is configurable.
*
* UNDER REVIEW: Increase chances of Gold and Iron in the Metal Extractor. Change from chance to counter and then random item when counter reaches zero.
* UNDER REVIEW: Breaker - New block that harvests Stone or Cobble directly in front of it's "facing."
* UNDER REVIEW: Butcher - New block that kills breedable animals and collects their drops. 120 second timer.
*
*/
About the crop farmer: can it use bonemeal as well as fish, or just the fish? Does it work on one square per 30s, or each square? If one, how does it decide which? Anyway, between this and the optional radius increase, that removes my concern over how slow it would be. Plus, it gives me something to do with my extra fish. =)
Hooray for the tree system fixes and options!
Possible concern with the butcher: animals breed no more than once per 300s per pair. Babies take a further 1200s to reach breeding age. Players will need to ensure they have enough animals in place to keep from getting depopulated before placing the butcher. That's more of a "think this through before you place it, guys" issue than a development issue, though, unless you want to put a minimumAdultPopulation check in place or something.
If you decide to add the stone breaker, that'd be great. I'm currently using a stand-alone block breaker. It has a reasonable cool-down between hits, but it's a one-time cost, and that feels cheaty. Not cheaty enough to make me want to harvest from a stone generator for hours, though. =)
Possible concern with the butcher: animals breed no more than once per 300s per pair. Babies take a further 1200s to reach breeding age. Players will need to ensure they have enough animals in place to keep from getting depopulated before placing the butcher. That's more of a "think this through before you place it, guys" issue than a development issue, though, unless you want to put a minimumAdultPopulation check in place or something.
I think I am going to just add redstone capability to the butcher if I add it at all. Still under revision.
Fixed all of the "This image is missing" images from Photobucket by transferring them all to Tinypic. I hope this change will allow for longevity. Also, I changed every image in the post to clean it up a bit. Looks cleaner to me. Let me know what you think.
LittleHelpers 1.3 : Update is finally here!
In this update we've got a lot going on. First there is a new configuration file that will allow players to alter the mechanics of the mod to their liking. I've tried to only allow for changes that didn't destroy the original intent of the mod. Plus, the only (possibly) extreme option allows players to significantly increase or decrease the processing times of the Crushing Mill and the Metal Extractor.
Here's an updated and detailed change list.
NEW: Any ItemFish (excluding the poisonous Pufferfish) will work as Bonemeal while in the Crop Farmer's Chest. The delay between uses is 30 seconds. NOTE: Bonemeal will not be recognized for automation.
NEW: Redstone Oscillator - Hard mode crafting item. Recipe is one Diamond surrounded by Redstone.
NEW: Breaker - New block that harvests Cobblestone or Stone in its immediate area. To harvest Stone the Breaker requires a Silk Touch Pickaxe.
CONFIG: Added Processing Factor to Configuration to allow for processing speed tweaks.
CONFIG: Added No Shears option for the Tree Cutter.
CONFIG: Added the ability to increase the Crop Farmer's radius by 1, tripling the number of maintained crops.
CONFIG: Added ability to enable "hard" recipe mode that uses Redstone Oscillators in place of Redstone Blocks.
CONFIG: Added option to change the Breeder's population capacity.
FIXED: Sapling Planter will no longer try to plant on invalid blocks.
REVISED: Sapling Planter now plants in a 3x3 area 1 block away from the pointing face to allow for 2x2 tree growth.
REVISED: Breeder will now check for over-population. 20 animals is the default capacity, and is configurable.
REVISED: Metal Extractor now utilizes a "random counter" to determine if a block of sand will render ore or a nugget.
- NOTES: Every failed extraction will increase the chances of a successful extraction with the maximum fail rate being 10.
- NOTES: Once an extraction is confirmed a weighted-random item is chosen and placed in a nearby chest or into the world.
REJECTED: Butcher - New block that would have killed "breedable" animals and collected their drops.
As always, -when- you find a bug, please report it here so I can get to work fixing it. THANKS!
I see the fish-fertilizer picks a crop at random each time? That's fine. After messing around for a bit, the only non-default setting I'm using is the wider crop radius. You actually have the rest of it balanced quite nicely, so I'll leave well enough alone.
A few minor bugs or works-as-intended:
The crop farmer uses the hoe each time it uses a fish for fertilizer. Intended balancing, or bug? It certainly runs through the hoe much faster this way.
The breaker appears to use the wood chopping sound for breaking stone. No big deal, just something I noticed.
If a non-vanilla crop exists in the crop farmer's radius, it can fertilize it just fine, but when it's ripe, the farmer spams the "break plant" noise while sitting in a loop, doing nothing. It also can't plant non-vanilla crops. Assuming you don't want to mess with non-vanilla crops, is there a simple way to restrict the fertilize and harvest checks to the vanilla crops as well? Or should I just keep them well separated? If you need to test the functionality, I'm using Pam's Weee! Flowers.
Very, very nice!I see the fish-fertilizer picks a crop at random each time? That's fine. After messing around for a bit, the only non-default setting I'm using is the wider crop radius. You actually have the rest of it balanced quite nicely, so I'll leave well enough alone.A few minor bugs or works-as-intended:The crop farmer uses the hoe each time it uses a fish for fertilizer. Intended balancing, or bug? It certainly runs through the hoe much faster this way.The breaker appears to use the wood chopping sound for breaking stone. No big deal, just something I noticed.If a non-vanilla crop exists in the crop farmer's radius, it can fertilize it just fine, but when it's ripe, the farmer spams the "break plant" noise while sitting in a loop, doing nothing. It also can't plant non-vanilla crops. Assuming you don't want to mess with non-vanilla crops, is there a simple way to restrict the fertilize and harvest checks to the vanilla crops as well? Or should I just keep them well separated? If you need to test the functionality, I'm using Pam's Weee! Flowers.
I'm glad most everything is in order.
I'll find a way to fix the non-vanilla plant issue. I'll change the Breaker's sound to stone (done).
As for the fish, they are "hoed" into the ground Also, this is a balancing act for basically free bonemeal.
EDIT: For now, just keep the non-vanilla flowers out of the crop farmer's range. I can't find a way to reference Pam's mod in my workspace to reference and disregard her flowers/plants. For now, I'll be adding a workaround in that will check each block instance to ensure it's vanilla only. I'll hopefully find the info on how to do this before I get the next update out that will adjust the speed of certain blocks depending on the provided tool's material.
/*
* NEW: All blocks broken by the mod will now show their breaking particles.
* NEW: The Tree Cutter and Breaker will have their speed augmented by the supplied tool's material. Wood slow, Diamond fast.
*
* FIX: Stone and Cobblestone should now have the correct Stone sound when broken.
*
* MOD MECHANIC NOTE: When fish are used as Bonemeal in the Crop Farmer, the hoe is used to chop and mix them with the soil which decreases the hoe's durability. (Automation Balancing)
*/
Variable harvest speed on the cutter and breaker, eh? Can you tell us which tool material will have the current speed? I ask because, combined with the Hopper Ducts mod, I've made a few automated plants that work at full efficiency. Just for fun, here's my test-world quarry:
This beast collects and sorts (in order) sand, gold, iron, and stone. All I have to do is turn some iron back into magnets, and keep the breakers supplied with picks. Before you start worrying about how OP this is, that's 160 redstone oscillators / blocks you're looking at, plus a whole mess of iron for the ducts and hoppers, on top of the upkeep.
When using carrots or potatoes, the small farmer often gets stuck trying to harvest, failing, and looping, just as if I had a non-vanilla plant in there. (No mods are affecting those crops.) I haven't seen it do that with wheat, and haven't tested with netherwart.
The tree cutter doesn't ever seem to get apples from oaks. Did you disable that intentionally? (Again, no mods are messing with apples.)
First of all, thank you for your input. I wish everyone would break down their thoughts with this much detail. Second, I feel as if I could release this mod after fixing some of the issues that you've highlighted and the mod would be good to go. Amazing. Thanks again and I'm going to get to work immediately. (P.S. I've got a few of the configs in place to disable some of the more annoying features, but I won't disable them as I think they are what takes the word "cheating" out of this mod.)
Glad it was useful. I'm a vanilla automation fiend, so here's some observations from that point of view. (Not criticisms, I know most people don't play this way, just food for thought.)
Fisher:
I love this thing. Fishing by hand is slow, even with good rods. I could be building something instead! Now, as long as I keep it supplied with rods and clean out the chest regularly, I don't have to hunt, farm, or scavenge for name tags or saddles, and I even get some nifty enchanted books. It's a keeper.
Crop farmers:
I can build large, high-speed water flushed farms with hopper collection. Just add pistons to break the melons and pumpkins. All I need to do is press a button, wait for the water to wash things down, then re-plant. I probably won't use these blocks much.
Tree farmers:
I build 2x2-trunk tree farms over flowing water for automatic sapling collection. Stair-step chop up, chop back down, re-plant. If the cutter had a no-shears option, I'd integrate one into my farm, but otherwise I don't really have a use for it.
Breeder:
Sure, toss one of these on a cow pen. Limit overpopulation by only adding so much wheat at a time. I don't really have much need for this, though, especially since I can auto-fish for leather.
Crushing mill:
I always have leftover cobblestone, and I hate wrecking deserts and beaches for glass and sandstone. Problem solved! This one's a keeper.
Metal extractor:
I can build an all-wood iron golem farm that takes no further effort on my part in a couple of hours. No redstone, no moving parts, no player interaction, and it spits out two stacks of iron ingots every hour. I can do nearly the same thing for zombie pigmen and gold, it just takes obsidian (portal-based farm) or a visit to the nether with a stack of snowballs (pitfall-based farm). Since this isn't a "dirt to diamonds" machine, and everything it puts out can be farmed in vanilla with no interaction and a cheaper building cost, you might want to consider increasing the drop rate significantly. By the time an "average" player can afford this thing, they can mine for iron and gold faster than this machine produces them.
Thanks again. When I have time, I'll have a new version that will be configurable and hopefully all of the blocks will be sought after
Sounds like fun. Until then, the crusher and fisher are my favorite new toys to play with. Pair them up with some basic automation (filters, pipes, etc) and they're extra fun. This mod makes me glad you went the chest route, as I can add an almost-vanilla filtered hopper underneath them, leaving the tools inside and just pulling out (some of) the drops.
For the fishers, I pull off the edible fish, books, saddles, and bottles (common and non-stackable, so they clog the chest), then just visit the chest every once in a while to check the rods. For the crusher, I like to stack two eight-packs, pulling the output of one into the next layer's chest. Dump cobble into the top end, get sand out the bottom at almost full hopper-speed.
I'm currently working on balance and some of the suggestions. Thanks for all of the input. I'll weigh every suggestion and everything that I believe fits into the mod will be presented in the next update.
See you all then!
About the crop farmer: can it use bonemeal as well as fish, or just the fish? Does it work on one square per 30s, or each square? If one, how does it decide which? Anyway, between this and the optional radius increase, that removes my concern over how slow it would be. Plus, it gives me something to do with my extra fish. =)
Hooray for the tree system fixes and options!
Possible concern with the butcher: animals breed no more than once per 300s per pair. Babies take a further 1200s to reach breeding age. Players will need to ensure they have enough animals in place to keep from getting depopulated before placing the butcher. That's more of a "think this through before you place it, guys" issue than a development issue, though, unless you want to put a minimumAdultPopulation check in place or something.
If you decide to add the stone breaker, that'd be great. I'm currently using a stand-alone block breaker. It has a reasonable cool-down between hits, but it's a one-time cost, and that feels cheaty. Not cheaty enough to make me want to harvest from a stone generator for hours, though. =)
I think I am going to just add redstone capability to the butcher if I add it at all. Still under revision.
Wow. I've never had that happen before. What's the best free image hosting site? Maybe I'll just go back to tinypic.
Fixed all of the "This image is missing" images from Photobucket by transferring them all to Tinypic. I hope this change will allow for longevity. Also, I changed every image in the post to clean it up a bit. Looks cleaner to me. Let me know what you think.
LittleHelpers 1.3 : Update is finally here!
In this update we've got a lot going on. First there is a new configuration file that will allow players to alter the mechanics of the mod to their liking. I've tried to only allow for changes that didn't destroy the original intent of the mod. Plus, the only (possibly) extreme option allows players to significantly increase or decrease the processing times of the Crushing Mill and the Metal Extractor.
Here's an updated and detailed change list.
I see the fish-fertilizer picks a crop at random each time? That's fine. After messing around for a bit, the only non-default setting I'm using is the wider crop radius. You actually have the rest of it balanced quite nicely, so I'll leave well enough alone.
A few minor bugs or works-as-intended:
The crop farmer uses the hoe each time it uses a fish for fertilizer. Intended balancing, or bug? It certainly runs through the hoe much faster this way.
The breaker appears to use the wood chopping sound for breaking stone. No big deal, just something I noticed.
If a non-vanilla crop exists in the crop farmer's radius, it can fertilize it just fine, but when it's ripe, the farmer spams the "break plant" noise while sitting in a loop, doing nothing. It also can't plant non-vanilla crops. Assuming you don't want to mess with non-vanilla crops, is there a simple way to restrict the fertilize and harvest checks to the vanilla crops as well? Or should I just keep them well separated? If you need to test the functionality, I'm using Pam's Weee! Flowers.
I'm glad most everything is in order.
I'll find a way to fix the non-vanilla plant issue.
I'll change the Breaker's sound to stone(done).As for the fish, they are "hoed" into the ground Also, this is a balancing act for basically free bonemeal.
EDIT: For now, just keep the non-vanilla flowers out of the crop farmer's range. I can't find a way to reference Pam's mod in my workspace to reference and disregard her flowers/plants. For now, I'll be adding a workaround in that will check each block instance to ensure it's vanilla only. I'll hopefully find the info on how to do this before I get the next update out that will adjust the speed of certain blocks depending on the provided tool's material.
This beast collects and sorts (in order) sand, gold, iron, and stone. All I have to do is turn some iron back into magnets, and keep the breakers supplied with picks. Before you start worrying about how OP this is, that's 160 redstone oscillators / blocks you're looking at, plus a whole mess of iron for the ducts and hoppers, on top of the upkeep.
When using carrots or potatoes, the small farmer often gets stuck trying to harvest, failing, and looping, just as if I had a non-vanilla plant in there. (No mods are affecting those crops.) I haven't seen it do that with wheat, and haven't tested with netherwart.
The tree cutter doesn't ever seem to get apples from oaks. Did you disable that intentionally? (Again, no mods are messing with apples.)
A wide variety of blocks, including smooth stone, sand, sandstone, cobblestone, planks, and logs are treated as valid blocks to plant saplings on.