My chief coder for ZooCraftia was going to do this, but he's fairly busy right now. I approached another potential coder but haven't heard back, so I thought I might post this and see if anyone is willing to put it together. The other half of this is over here, but I thought I'd separate them as they involve completely different aspects of gameplay.
Largely, this is based on the premise that I just got lost on a hike, or survived a plane crash (or spaceship crash), and now have to survive in the wild. (Because the first thing you do when you're lost in the woods is mine for coal, right?) I want immersion from the get-go. Here's how I'm hoping to achieve it:
Table of Contents
I. Hunger, Regen, and Mob Spawning (also a possible shift for Hardcore mechanics) II. Foliage Drops: Trees suddenly drop a lot more goodies. Mostly sticks. III. Foraging: Sheep drop mutton, and I'd like some berry bushes. IV. Campfires: 2x2 crafting recipe, can cook on it, burns out fast but can keep baddies at bay. V. Hand Digging: Dirt/Sand drop 2-4 balls (like Clay) that you craft into blocks; also may drop clay/flint. VI. Makeshift Flint Tools: 2x2 recipes, low-durability but otherwise like wooden tools. VII. Miscellaneous: Yeah.
The flint tools are something I've wanted for ages, but despite several promising starts I've never gotten a working mod for them. My nephew (8) also asks me about them constantly.
I. Hunger, Regen, and Mob Spawning
In the options menu, the ability to toggle Hunger and Regen independent of difficulty.
Possibly: A way to set how low your health can drop due to hunger, and maybe how quickly it harms you.
Likewise: A way to set how high your health can go purely due to regen, and how quickly it heals you.
Thus I should be able to say that my health can only drop to 3 hearts without direct damage, but a slow-speed regen from lack of hunger never heals me above 8 hearts (and for the other two I'd have to find healing potions). That sort of thing.
I'd also like to be able to adjust mob spawn rates, from 0 to say 200% (maybe higher), for individual mobs. If I want no creepers but tons of undead, I want to be able to make the world act that way. Mo' Creatures already does this and I don't know why it's not in vanilla yet. (If this is beyond your coding ability, I'm okay with it being left out.)
Also: I should be able to toggle it to override actual spawners (0 creepers means 0 creepers) or not (0 creepers unless you get near a spawner).
I.b. Hardcore
If this is too difficult to code, forget it; it's not such a big deal. But here's my thoughts for Hardcore:
For me, Hardcore is primarily about stakes: Losing my world. Having a locked-in difficulty is less important. But I'd like to be able to set a baseline for a new Hardcore level, and toggle settings that could never dip below the baseline.
E.g., say I start with regen off, hunger on, 150% undead, and 0% creepers. Later, I could turn on creepers, but I could not turn on regen, or turn off hunger, or drop the undead back to only 100%. And if I decide that the creepers are too troublesome, I could drop back to 0% creepers. I could also bump up undead to 200% and later bump it back down to the baseline 150%.
Again, this isn't crucial.
II. Foliage Drops
Tree foliage drops all of the following:
Sticks (commonly)
Twigs (commonly)
Saplings (less commonly, but still pretty common)
Walking Stick or Cudgel (uncommon; equivalent to wooden sword in stats)
Pitch (uncommon, but for spruce it's common)
Apples (uncommon, and exclusive to oaks)
Acorns (uncommon, and exclusive to oaks)
Macadamia Nuts* (common, but exclusive to jungle trees)
Eggs** (uncommon, but for spruce they're rare and for jungle they're possibly common)
*I'm open to other types of nuts. I'm not sure which would be the best choice as a common drop in the jungle, and don't want to bother looking it up right now. It would have to be a nut that can be gathered without harming yourself (unlike, what is it, cashews?) and eaten raw.
**It struck me that when you're hunting for food in the wild, eggs are a big thing. They should drop with a bunch of twigs to reinforce the idea that you just found a nest. I'm not sure if they should be just chicken eggs or if this mod should add a new type of egg so we don't get chickens from trees.
(I'd add eggs as a drop from tall grass were it not for inevitable conflict with Pam's Mod.)
Possibly: Hand-chopping a tree drops just the bark (and, for spruces, pitch) and leaves a slightly thinner, barkless trunk block (diameter of a chest or maybe just a cobblestone wall post).
Possibly: Can use the bark as a panel (like glass panes). All types of panels should connect to each other.
III. Foraging
Need a couple of new types of food in the wild, with certain biomes more generous than others:
Eggs can be eaten raw (slight chance of food poisoning)
Eggs can be roasted, or, with a bucket of water, boiled.
Mushrooms can be eaten raw (extremely low nourishment)
Seeds can be combined and cooked (porridge)
Berries of some sort, on bushes
Possibly have mussel blocks spawn on shores near oceans/rivers? Also this presupposes tides that Minecraft technically doesn't have....
For examples: Pam's Harvestcraft and Useful Food both have berry bushes, and the latter also combines seeds for oatmeal (though I'd combine just 3 sets of seeds myself, not 6).
To avoid too much overlapping, and just because they're a personal favorite, I'd like to see Huckleberries. The redkind.
In addition, sheep should drop Mutton.
Would be nice to have the red mushrooms renamed Truffles. If I'm remembering correctly that the red ones are rarer. Maybe they give slightly better nutrition when eaten raw.
Possibly: Poisonous mushrooms and poisonous berries, just a pixel or two different from the edible kinds. Poisonous berries give you food poisoning, but poisonous mushrooms give you a stronger poison. They have the same name as their respective edible kinds, so you have to tell them apart by looks (and the fact that they don't stack)... well, actually, if red mushrooms get renamed Truffles then poisonous red mushrooms could still be called Mushrooms and the inattentive player could miss that.
I can give info on a berry from a thorny plant that otherwise looks very like the red huckleberry; I'm not sure if it's poisonous but I think it likely is. It's a bit more football-shaped than the spherical huckleberry.
IV. Campfires
I've run across a campfire mod and the fireplace mod, both interesting and useful, and part of my current build. However, I want to make a fire before I make a crafting bench - and the campfire mod unfortunately takes crafting bench, pickaxe, cobblestone, and coal/charcoal, so it can't be first-night tech within my "lost in the wilderness" daydream here.
I want a 2x2 pattern. Specifically:
...where the wheat represents Twigs. Both would drop in copious amounts from tree foliage (as above).
This creates a block - I'd say a half-slab that looks like an A-frame fire - which you then have to light. Ideally, you couldn't access the campfire GUI until the thing was lit.
To light it, you hold a stick and hold down right-click on the fire. After a short time, the fire either lights, or the stick breaks into two Twigs. The chance of it lighting is pretty small, say 15% (higher if you replaced one of the Twigs in the original pattern with Pitch; much less if you're in the rain). In my opinion, firestarting by "rubbing two sticks together" should be inefficient and annoying, just to enhance the realism.
Note: Other sources of lighting things - flint and steel, or metallurgy matches, etc. - should work, it's just that I don't expect to have them when I'm resorting to a campfire.
Once the fire starts, you have the length of time it takes for a regular furnace to burn 1 piece of coal. During that time, you have to add some sort of fuel. If you don't add fuel at all, you go back to square one (hitting it with sticks to start it). If you add any fuel, then when it finally goes out, it breaks itself and turns into charcoal (say 1-4). The campfire burns through fuel faster than a furnace (it's inefficient)... I'll need to work out the numbers later, but I'd like for a full stack of logs to burn for the length of one full night (well, from the start of sunset to the end of sunrise), but that number might be way off.
You can cook (basic) food on the campfire, or turn wooden things into charcoal. Like with the Furnace mod, it has four slots; I'd like to have it cook faster than a furnace can. It should be able to cook stacks of wooden things (to make charcoal) but not stacks of food. Possibly the fuel itself, once it starts burning, has a chance of adding 1 to the counter of how much charcoal pops out once the fire burns out.
Possibly: A burning campfire poses the same threat of burning that an open fire does, including possibly setting fire to nearby squares of grass. Gotta clear that area!
Possibly: The campfire has a "keep baddies away" effect similar to cats repelling creepers, but for all baddies. Skellies can still shoot you from the outskirts. Letting the fire burn out becomes a bad thing, and keeping it full of fuel becomes a lifesaver.
V. Hand Digging
I love this ClaySoil mod I found: When you dig dirt, you have a chance of getting balls of clay. It seems more realistic. I've also seen one that I can't find offhand where when you dig dirt by hand, instead of getting dirt blocks you get balls of dirt that you then craft into dirt blocks a la clay.
I'd like to see you get 2-4 balls of dirt, some of which are occasionally clay, and have occasional (uncommon to rare) drops of flint from the dirt as well. (You ever notice how digging and refilling a hole never ends up with the same amount of dirt?)
And stone should drop Rocks, where 4 of them craft Cobblestone. But the higher-level pickaxe (Iron and better) gets cobblestone directly, and I'm debating about a diamond pick going straight to Stone.
VI. Makeshift Flint Tools
I've got 2x2 recipes worked out for flint tools, along with some of their stats. This is a big part of my mod, as it means I'm no longer chopping trees by hand or using wooden tools at all. I recently learned that flint actually becomes harder (and with a sharper edge) after you cook it, so for realism I'd also like a set of Hard Flint Tools (or Sharp Flint Tools?) using cooked flint, where the durability, damage, and speed go up (still not as good as regular stone tools, but better than wooden).
There's also plans for a sling and pebbles for ammo. And normal sticks should do more damage than hitting things with your fist (though less damage than a wooden sword or cudgel).
The idea is that I rough it until I find some flint, then craft a flint pick, mine exactly how much cobble I need for my basic set (furnace, pickaxe, axe, sword), and at that point make my crafting bench and go up in tech level. Because I never, ever, ever* make use of the wooden tool set except to immediately bridge to stone, and then I end up using the slower wooden pick out of a desire to not waste resources, which I realize is dumb. Reducing the durability of this tool will actively benefit my personal playstyle.
*Exception: Super Hostile series, where I can't find stone. And if I had flint tool and hardened flint tool recipes I could bypass the wooden set even then. Also, flint tools are historically viable tech. So meh.
VII. Miscellaneous
There are other things I would like to add, if by chance it is possible to add them without too much difficulty in coding/implementation. So consider these highly optional to the base mod:
Being able to trigger sleep next to a campfire if there are no enemies nearby and if the amount of fuel on the fire would last until sunrise. (If you fail to trigger sleep, it informs you that the fire needs more fuel.) And the fuel would be reduced appropriately during sleep.
If that mechanic turns out to work, would also like to see furnaces burn an appropriate amount during sleep, if you're close to them.
Some way to get a fishing pole without fighting spiders, buying string from villagers, or running across mineshafts/temples. Has no one read My Side of the Mountain? Even on Peaceful, fishing should be fairly basic tech! (My best idea so far is just "occasional cobwebs in surface caves.")
Bamboo/sugarcane craftable into tatami half-slabs and some sort of panel like glass panes but opaque (Japanese style rooms). Maybe also a bamboo fence or bamboo bars thing too.
An option when you start a world with structures on of having all villages abandoned, or villages having a certain probability of being abandoned. Also, the ability to craft 9 wheat into a haybale.
I'm sure there's more I could think of, but these are just what I come up with while thinking of a "lost in the woods" feel. Feel free to add more ideas along these lines!
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!
By the by, if you can easily put together a mod that gives part of this functionality, but either can't or don't care to make it all, I'd be happy to accept a sub-mod. I'm sure if I can get the rest of it made I can later see to making separate mods play nice with each other.
So, for example, something that just alters what trees can drop. Or something that just lets me make the makeshift tools. Or something that just does the thing where digging dirt by hand drops dirt balls, some clay balls, and occasional flint. Anything like that would be fine and much appreciated.
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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!
It's been over a week, and no replies. Is it that everyone's too busy with the new update? Is my idea too complex? Are modders all off having fun with other projects? Hmmm.
Anyway, here's hoping that someone responds eventually. My nephew keeps asking about the flint tools part and I hate having to tell him "not yet" all the time.
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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!
So that's Foliage Drops, Foraging, and Flint Tools. Awesome!
I do have textures (sprites? I think "texture" is just for 3d stuff) for the Flint Tools (as designed by ThEwOtSiT182who sadly appears to have not come on this forum since November 2012), but not for the rest. Let's see, that's:
For the Cudgel, I'd say go to Painterly Pack or Minecraft Customizer and grab one of the alternate Wooden Sword sprites. I'll try to contact my texture artists and see if one of them could come up with the others.
Since you're not doing the Campfire part (or at least not yet), go ahead and just give Twigs and Pitch some data for use as fuel. Twigs should burn fast - maybe you need 8 of them for just one item. Pitch should be less effective than Coal but more than Wooden Planks, so maybe 1 Pitch burns two items... or would 1 for four be better? Not sure.
Will you be doing the "hand-chopping a tree just drops bark" bit? That'd need a Bark sprite and a thinner bare trunk block... or maybe 4 of each. Bark probably burns 1 item. But this part is optional and I don't mind if you omit it.
Also, could you please include the Tatami half-slabs made from Bamboo (well, Sugarcane, same thing), and possibly Bamboo Bars and/or Shouji (paper walls with wooden borders, preferably like glass panes)?
Thank you so much for giving this a go!
ETA: Stats!
The Flint Tools are mechanically identical to wooden tools, with the exception of durability: The Hatchet and Pick last for 16 uses each, and the Spade and Dagger for 32.
The Sling doesn't charge like a bow does (if only because I dislike the charging mechanic - because I suppose it would make sense with a sling). It flies half as far as a fully charged bow and does 1/4 the damage.
Mutton should be on par with porkchops, I expect. Roasted Eggs should be perhaps 3/4 as effective as meat, while Raw Eggs should be maybe 1/4 as effective as meat, and both should have decent saturation. Porridge should be on par with bread? (Also, crafting-wise, porridge is 3 grass seeds and a bowl.) Acorns and Huckleberries provide little nourishment - perhaps 1 hunger (half a hunger icon) each - and little saturation, so you're hungry again pretty fast. Macadamia Nuts should provide a little more, say 2 hunger (1 hunger icon), and maybe a tiny bit more saturation than Acorns.
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!
Yes, the recipes are in the post I linked to in the original description of my request, which is this page here.
I guess hand-punching stuff is likely to be weird to code. It's okay - not a core piece of my mod anyway, and besides it ought to be together with the hand-digging bit too. Depending on how this mod goes, I might take the parts you haven't covered and put them into a new mod request thread.
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!
Acorns... I'd like to be able to plant them (they turn into oak saplings) and also to eat them (1 hunger (1/2 a hunger icon)).
Ooooh, feathers from nests! I like it!
Hand digging: Glad you figured that out. The idea is to have a dirt block only accessible to someone with a shovel (or, well, any tool, really), whereas when you hand-dig you get the components of dirt, which is randomly dirt balls, clay balls, flint, and pebbles or small stones (as if you found gravel but couldn't get gravel as a block - see below). Maybe there's other stuff that dirt could drop that I haven't thought of yet. But this way the player can craft a block of dirt or clay, if they get enough dirt balls or clay balls, but it's like a tech barrier: It's hard to get dirt blocks fast without having made a crafting table or at least a makeshift flint tool. I think this will make the game more fun for my playstyle.
Update on Gravel: I've thought this through a little more, and I'm thinking this: Hand-digging gravel should work like hand-digging dirt, in that you don't get a block but can build up the stuff to make a block. So you should get 2-4 Pebbles (a handful of tiny rocks), with common drops of Flint and Small Stone (ammo for Sling). Putting 4 Pebbles together makes a Gravel block. Note that with this, as with dirt, you will get fewer blocks than you dug; hand-digging is by nature inefficient (much as how, in real life, you can dig a hole and fill it back up and it seems like you don't have as much dirt as you started with).
I've got someone who's going to do the sprites/textures, but it might take a little while. In the meantime, try a tan-colored snowball for the macadamia nut and a brown-colored flint for the acorn, they're close enough.
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!
Though actually, another thing would be that a cudgel helps destroy leaves faster - and you're not wasting it because you're getting occasional new cudgels as well. Though I'm not sure if the numbers work out to that or not. Cudgels showing up should be a treat, not an expectation.
As for acorns, I hadn't thought about them being the same button. What say you craft it with bonemeal to make a sapling?
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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!
Okay, having thought this over a bit, I'm thinking this about hand-digging:
The blocks you can dig by hand (grass, dirt, clay, gravel, and sand) all split into roughly 4 pieces (as clay does in vanilla). These are up to 4 balls (dirt ball, clay ball, pebbles... sand ball, I guess), plus a certain amount of extra stuff. The extra stuff might replace some of the balls, or just show up alongside it; I'm not sure which is best.
Here are the specs I've been thinking about:
Dirt: 3-4 Dirt Balls, and occasional clay balls, pebbles, and flint. Rarely, sand balls.
Grass: 2-4 Dirt Balls, and occasional clay balls, pebbles, flint, grass seeds. Uncommonly sand and twigs. I've been debating about potatoes/carrots or maybe a roots item.
Clay: 3-4 Clay Balls, and common flint; occasional pebbles, sand balls, and dirt balls. Note: Digging up clay with any tool should give you the clay block, and there should be a crafting recipe to switch the upcoming hardened clay blocks into brick blocks easily.
Gravel: 3-4 Pebbles, and common flint; occasional dirt balls, sand balls, clay balls.
Also note: You should be able to throw Dirt Balls and Clay Balls like Snowballs, and do slight damage to mobs. Pebbles and Sand Balls are probably too loosely packed to work this way.
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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!
Update! for anyone who's actually watching this thread:
outcastjack has been working hard at this mod, and has already got the foliage drops working and some of the hand-digging drops working too.
Unfortunately, my copy keeps crashing whenever I hand-dig. So we've still got a ways to go.
But there's lots of content to this mod so far. I ran around chopping foliage down and getting tons of twigs, sticks, and nests (twigs, eggs, and feathers), plus a fair amount of acorns and, once I found a jungle, macadamia nuts. Pitch is a bit too rare at present, so I couldn't really make any torches; we'll be working on the balancing issues. Found a couple cudgels though.
We've got tatami mats and half-slabs, shoji paper-walls... you can cut the bark off a tree then cut planks off the trunk (the trunk has three stages including the bark), and you can make bark walls to use like glass panes. A bark house! Can you imagine?
All in all, coming along well. I'm looking forward to this!
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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!
Same, This looks like a very good idea, though many ideas you've made in this tread and the other are kinda already made in Better than Wolves. Not all of them, though
Many ideas you've made in this tread and the other are kinda already made in Better than Wolves. Not all of them, though.
I've looked at Better Than Wolves before, and it doesn't interest me (much). It's far too complex for what I want from my Minecraft experience. Besides the high level of tech, the progression doesn't make sense within Minecraft: You have to go to the Nether before you've even gotten out of The Age of Wood, Tier 1! How does that make any sense? It's like doing a revamp of Super Mario Bros. that requires you to retrieve something from the seventh castle just to beat the first level!
(I got that impression from a quick skim. I admit I may be overlooking factors that make this progression make better sense. It is labeled secondary goals, after all.)
What I'm trying to do with this mod is to break up the early stages (primarily) because they seem far too rushed right now. I don't care for advanced mechanical contraptions, I don't want to tan leather (well, maybe I do a little...), I don't want to construct power tools, I don't much care for their assortment of food, and I definitely don't want to be collecting dog poo just to further the game. I realize that all of this is technically "realistic" in that, yes, there are people in the world who have to collect dried poop just to make a fire, but it's the kind of realism that I have absolutely zero interest in experiencing, especially in a game. (I don't even like dogs. I'm a cat person. Gimme ocelots and foxes... and I don't plan to be making kibble.)
So... yeah. Better Than Wolves may be a fine mod and I have nothing against people enjoying it. It's just a mod that I have no interest in. If their ideas and my ideas overlap a little, well, so they overlap; I'm never going to download their mod and so I have to pursue the avenue of creating my own.
I am glad that you think some of my ideas are good. It sounds like you've looked at my other threads. I do tend to come up with a lot of ideas, some of which I honestly think should be in vanilla Minecraft (like some of the expanded villager trades, or the decorative gem blocks, or some different visuals for chests), while others, like this mod, are stuff that probably wouldn't improve the experience for the majority of Minecraft players. But it's going to improve the experience for me, and probably for my nephew (who's also interested in this idea), so we'll see where it goes
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!
Well lets see.... I have seen mods that already do some of that
Yup, I've seen mods that try to do a lot of the things I'm requesting.
There's usually some big flaw about the mod that makes me not want to download it. If I'd found mods that actually gave me the behavior I want, I wouldn't be requesting a new one.
I. Food
I draw the line at Pam's HarvestCraft. Other than Pam's, I do not want a large, involved food mod. I do not want modern food. I do not want crazy things like making fine desserts out of rotten flesh or finding ways to enjoy spider eye soufflé. I don't want my creative inventory clogged with a hundred items I'm never going to use, and I don't want to install a mod that's much, much larger than the part that I do use, even if I never see that in action.
So yeah, I know the foods I'm requesting exist, but I want these and only these foods, at least for now. (I would, however, like the links to the mods you've come across, because I'm pretty sure I haven't checked out 100% of the available options.)
Interactive Food Mod lets you put food on plates or in a mug, which I'm all in favor of. The visuals aren't... terrible, I guess. I like the idea. It's not about mutton/eggs/etc., though. And it lets you put raw food on the plate, which I see no need for, honestly. I'd prefer a thing like an item frame (or modified item frame that can support up to 3-4 items) that lies flat on a table. But thanks for recommending it, as I had not run across it before.
Never even went looking for this. Thank you for pointing it out.
III. Camping Mod
You should note that my requested campfire style is distinct from both the camping mod and the campfire/smoking furnace mod. At least, from the two I'm familiar with. I explicitly want to have a frustrating, difficult-to-start campfire that dies if you don't keep it stocked with fuel, which works with the items that drop from the Foliage Drops part of this mod request, and I want, if possible, the added bonus of scaring off monsters if I've made the fire right.
I seriously doubt that a mod exists that covers my desires in this area, though certainly I've borrowed ideas from several mods.
IV. "Flint Tools Are Already Out There"
The bloody hell they are not, pardon my language. I have been after this request for literally years, and this mod is the first time I've actually seen anything close to the flint tools I'm after.
TerraFirmaCraft, which has a rather vaguely named "" that... sort of does what I want, suppressing the ability to chop with your hand and requiring you to get sticks from foliage, so that's good... but it completely changes the landscape of Minecraft (in some ways that I like, but it goes way overboard for my tastes), probably will clash with Metallurgy and/or Biomes o' Plenty (my standard mods), and in general is something I might experiment with but likely won't stick with for very long.
Some others I can't find right offhand, but have seen before.
All the flint tool mods I have run across to date have one or more of these problems:
You have to make them on a crafting bench. This is the number-one deal-breaker: I want my flint tools to avoid tree-punching, which means you have to be able to make them before you get wooden planks.
They're not makeshift or temporary, they're better than stone. I want to replace wooden tools (which have never made much sense to me) with short-term flint tools, and they better not be as good as the first tier of tools I want to make on a crafting bench.
They add in extraneous content that offends my sensibilities, such a flint armor. Or several ranks of flint. (I am considering a hardened flint set, but that's because I recently learned that flint hardened by fire is actually an important step in the evolution of mankind's tools, and I'm not sure I even want to go there.)
They're part of a larger mod that I don't want. I'm keeping my mod interesting but fairly simple.
Well hope that helps
It was good of you to point it out in case I hadn't been around for years trying to find/create the functionality (because if you hadn't seen me around the forum before, then for all you know I could've been a newbie). I would definitely like some links to mods you think I haven't run across yet, so please do post them here; we can run a compare-and-contrast to better define where this mod is going.
And yeah, it did help
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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!
Yes, that one's actually a very good mod, and it's where I got my idea for porridge (oatmeal and trail mix are both fine choices for Minecraft, and ones I'd never thought of before encountering that mod).
On the other hand, since my general stance is "nothing that breaks immersion," let's see how many items he's got that you (probably) couldn't buy in the Middle Ages:
Ice Cream
Hot Chocolate*
Chocolate Milk
Marshmallows
Caramel Apples
*The chocolate drink of that timeframe, from the South Americas, is nothing like what we think of as hot chocolate. For one thing, they didn't sugar it, they salted it.
...I kind of have this problem with Pam's mod too, but hers is good enough that I overlooked the problems in favor of growing basic crops and finding berry bushes in the wild. If Pam's weren't available, I probably would get Useful Food instead. There's at least one similar mod that I can't think of off the top of my head, which is also a pretty good mod, and one I think I've gotten for my nephew before.
I'm also not happy with the "magic food" set (personal preference to stay fairly realistic and unmagical), although Magic Fruit Salad was pretty inventive and in keeping with what Minecraft started with. And let's break away from the negativity for a second: Pumpkin Bread is an awesome idea, Noodles in general aren't too out-of-keeping with the old world, and using lilypads to make sushi may be weird from a real-life perspective but was actually a great way to make use of what items Minecraft has lying around.
So yeah. Useful Food. It's not for me, but I heartily encourage other people to check it out.
Man I wish more mod posters would think about how they look to the new user.
When I'm browsing mods, I'm generally trying to sift through a large amount of data in a short time; by not giving me a quick-sift format, you are handicapping your presentation. At the very least there should be a feature list and feature-demonstrating screenshot (should be nearly the first thing in the post).
I should not have to load a video to figure out if the mod has deal-breakers or is worth a more in-depth look. Compared to a feature list, video demonstrations/reviews are routinely time-wasting:
Wait for the video to load - not inconsequential for our computer/internet setup right now.
Sit through an intro I can't skip because I'm not sure how long it is. Sometimes it's a guy blathering for two or three minutes before the details start.
Listen to a lot of blather in between the salient points.
Videos are never as efficient as text for this. However, a good demonstration/review is perfect if I've skimmed or read the text and want to know more about how the features got implemented. That is their strength, what they should be trying to do - not replace text and screenshots, but supplement them.
(I should also note: That video at the top of the page is twenty-three minutes long. This is inexcusable. Next to text and better screenshots, it might be fine, but there's no way I'm sitting through twenty-three minutes as my intro to your mod.)
This post has 3 screenshots, all of which demonstrate trees (one seems to demonstrate a type of bush), but there's no details about these things except in the changelog. The changelog indicates barley, berry bushes, and redwoods (all good, but I have them in other mods), nether trees (do not want), and clouds of ash and sulfur (intriguing! wish there was a screenshot; also, Metallurgy bypasses the need for these).
Far too complex for my interests, but it looks like a neat mod. You know those critiques I just made about the Natura post? This guy does most of them right. There's screenshots that give enough info for me to understand what I'm looking at, and even the videos sitting there double as screenshots that point out important things about whether I'm ever going to get that mod or not. The Development Outline also gave some decent information (the changelog did too, but it's huge and I only skimmed it). The thing he's missing is a decent feature list.
But yeah, again, not my taste, but check it out. I might even give it a try someday (on a separate Minecraft build, probably not together with my normal mod build).
III. Campfire
Fireplace Mod. It's a good one, but again, it's got too much stuff. That's my main complaint with a lot of mods, really: They go overboard. And yeah, I can disable stuff in the config files, which is a great upgrade, and I'm really glad that the guy did it after I brought it up, but still... I'd prefer less stuff.
Also, the details about how to make the fire and how to get it lit and such aren't part of his mod, nor would I expect them to be. Mine is explicitly to mimic the feel of camping, not just to add neat looks to your campsite or home.
So... yeah. If you come across any new mods that might be of interest, please do post them here!
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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!
If you stop to think about it, you're helping players who drop by this thread and maybe want something like my idea, but not exactly my idea. So just because I can't use the mods you've suggested doesn't mean it's not helpful or that it's a waste of time. Forum threads like these are a great place to collect information on (and links to) similar projects that serve different players in different ways.
It's like, if you're looking at the thread for Biomes o' Plenty, then maybe you don't like this or that about it, and someone posts a link to Extreme Biomes, so you head over there and that's exactly what you wanted (or at least closer than the other was). Some people are going to like Biomes o' Plenty (as I do), others are going to like Extreme Biomes, and still others are going to want a smaller assortment of biomes or weird magical biomes or what have you.
Same with Metallurgy and many of the other, usually smaller mods that add new minerals - some players are going to like Metallurgy, others are going to like other mods, and some may use more than one (even if they do overlap somewhat). Or how when my Harvest Moon mod was still in production*, we encouraged people to post links to other mods that were based on, or similar to, Harvest Moon - and that's where I first encountered information about Pam's HarvestCraft, for which I'm very grateful because it's now one of my standard mods. Similarly, it got me info on FarmCraftory and even led me to a certain Harvest Moon custom map that looks pretty cool (and which I will be testing out soon). Those links didn't subtract from the thread - they added to the value of the entire thread, and improved the utility for players of all sorts.
*Please note, the Moontown Mod may have ground to a halt somewhere along the line, but I haven't given up on the project. Some of the team members are still around and I would like to attract a new coder who'd be interested in a large project like that.
So yeah. This mod's coming along fine (mostly via PM between me and the coder), and I expect that I will soon make a new thread for it in the WIP forum, but in the meantime, feel free to post any links to anything similar, because it really does help
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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!
That mod seems like a good idea, but I can't really tell from the post what it's like. No screenshots or anything.
You discarded the idea of causing block updates just by walking on things. I don't know how much lag that might cause, but I do like the general idea, especially in conjunction with my Unstable Stone idea. Although I wouldn't actually want the stone to fall just because you walked on it; I'd like to be able to walk around and place torches without fearing for my life at every step. But causing nearby sand to fall just because you vibrated the ground a bit, that sounds neat.
Also it would disarm certain Vechs traps. >_> I'm looking at you, lava walkways of the East Commons.
I don't mind the idea of spear fishing... though honestly, I do think cobwebs in caves is a pretty decent way to grant string for early fishing. Not ruins, which break up the "I'm on a completely deserted world" feel, but just in caves. It makes sense because of the giant spiders. Maybe some in forests/jungles too (in or under trees). Not a lot, just some.
Your thread reminds me of the Mesa biome I'm looking forward to should our ZooCraftia mod ever see completion. Lots of tall flat-sided and flat-topped mountains made of red sandstone, like in World of Warcraft's Thousand Needles.
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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!
Cobweb mod Done. I have no idea how often they spawn in forests and jungles, but it's probably ok
That was fast! I'll have to check it out.
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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!
Hey, I cannot code but I had an idea, what if mobs or animals could drop Fat, which you could use to make some sort of Torch?
Perhaps Fat+Stick+Wool could make one Makeshift Torch? It would be more of a total overhaul based on real life survival stuff than a mod,
But it could fit with THIS particularly idea well.
Hey, what if mobs or animals could drop Fat, which you could use to make some sort of Torch?
Perhaps Fat+Stick+Wool could make one Makeshift Torch? It... could fit with THIS idea particularly well.
I hadn't actually considered what animals could drop to help with survival, but you raise a good point. Animals should drop more than just meat... fat, bones, and maybe fishbait (intestines etc.) would be useful. We could come up with a new use for bones, and throwing fishbait into the water should up the catch rate of fish for a few minutes (I prefer this to a "bait the pole" mechanic). It is certainly true that when you get lost in the woods or have escaped from a plane crash you can gather supplies via hunting.
The only thing that worries me is that this mod has already gained more than a dozen new items, and while I think all of them are necessary to the feel, it has always been my intention to remain fairly streamlined. I do not like mods that add dozens and dozens of items (with rare exceptions such as HarvestCraft and Metallurgy).
...if I were being a bit more pedantic, I'd say that killing an animal should leave a corpse, which you then destroy like a block to get the items, only it takes longer than destroying a regular block. This would feel more realistic. And if corpses existed, then cats killing chickens or wolves killing sheep should then sit there and slowly eat the meat. (Probably the corpse would have a 3- or 4-stage destruction, with the skin, the meat (possibly two stages), and the bones. So the animals would eat it one stage at a time and then leave the bones. Chickens would probably drop bonemeal instead of larger bones.)
But I don't think that's really necessary to the feel of this mod. And if we added the animal drops part, I think I'd want it as a separate, somewhat more complex module, whether or not the corpses mechanic got implemented.
By the by, in beta testing this mod, I've found that the number of torches from just pitch gives a pretty good feel... you have a few, but not many, and you're sparing with them (don't leave them all over the place). This increases the uneasy feel of the adventure at the start of the game, and makes it that much more of an achievement when you finally get some coal or charcoal.
Oh! And the cobweb generation in caves and forests is working great. It still takes a while to find enough for a fishing pole or a bow, which is just what I wanted. Actually, come to think of it, could we add in a tougher string (Bowstring) which takes 3 string to make? It'd be used for the bow recipe, so that a fishing pole is quick and easy but a bow takes longer. Also maybe a stronger fishing pole (using the new string) that catches fish faster and easier.
P.S. It is almost the end of the school year here (my nephew's just gotten out, and some friends are about to), so I expect that my texture artists will be available soon. I hope. I haven't heard from them since they agreed to work on this mod, so I'm hoping that's just schoolwork and/or computer problems. When we get some sprites/textures up and running, we'll move on over to a WIP thread.
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 would be the first sign that you don't really understand what I am trying to do.
According to the model you provide here, in order to craft a simple stuck-out-in-the-woods campfire, you not only need to construct a workbench but also to have lit up a portal to hell to gather materials.
That is not what I am after. However, I am not stingy with my ideas, and I enjoy seeing them branch out in various ways. There is room in the modding world for any number of neat campfires, and if yours is working then please make a thread for it and post a link here. I would like to see screenshots (recipes and what the campfire itself looks like in-game)
You might go check out a couple of the existing campfire mods because you seem to tread some of the same ground as the Campfire mod or the Fireplace mod. The main benefit you have over the latter is that your mod is (so far) tiny, whereas the Fireplace mod is pretty big for just a simple concept. The benefit over the former might be better balance within SMP, but I haven't thought over that first impression and I'm not going to since it's not my focus.
Still, your mod might benefit some players, so go ahead and make it, and post a link
You right click the campfire with this torch and it will magically become active, with fire in it.
That would be the second sign. Not trying for magical fire, but natural fire, and, in fact, this mod will be a big upheaval of the balance of the game as it stands. You may be trying to work with the idea of a campfire that can drive back mobs/creepers and still balance it against the game as it stands, maybe also thinking of its impact on SMP, which would mean it's high-tier.
What I want is low-tier (the kind you make your first night in the wild, before you've even got the materials to begin thinking of a table/workbench) and largely balanced against the mod as a whole and against my personal (largely solo) playstyle. I understand that this mod will probably suit a fairly limited audience, but as I've waited for several years to find the sort of mods that suit my desires, I'm finally just biting the bullet and getting people to make mine for me, and so far that's working marvelously well.
I've read through the whole thread and I love most of your ideas. I had an idea when you were talking about getting an oak sappling out of acorn. You could make it like combining a mud (dirt) ball with acorn and maybe then rightclicking on water (as I think you wouldn't like to add a water bucket to the recipe) OR first rightclick water with dirt ball to get mud ball and att the acorn then. You could also change the mechanics of pumpkins and watermelons this way.
Actually, there is now a bonemeal drop as part of the regular digging of dirt and such. I forget which block it drops most frequently from, but it's there, and you get a fair amount quickly. Were it not for that mechanic, I'd be happy to adopt the idea of mud+acorn=sapling. You don't really need separate water as mud is understood to be dirt+water anyway.
We do have a "fertilizer" item now, which is a combination of any three of dirt balls, mud, clay, or bonemeal, and which you use to make Soil blocks. I'm not sure of any other way to prevent recursive resource-gathering (digging up dirt repeatedly to get more and more goodies out of it), so we just went with dirt balls and fertilizer turning into a whole new block (that should eventually grow plants faster).
I should really update this thread with a list of what we've accomplished. I don't have time this week but might sometime after that. The mod is coming along quite well.
As for what you could do as a coder, yes, by all means take up the campfire part if you think you can get close to what I was aiming for. Outcastjack isn't skilled with GUIs yet and therefore is working on the parts he can reasonably accomplish.
The campfire could be constructed on the ground, but if you think about it this requires a multi-step physical object (block/entity) compared to one single block (craftable campfire). I suppose you could make it something like a cake... maybe... where a block gets "built up" over time? I do like the idea of putting sticks on the ground, in a certain order. The general idea I got from Girl Scouts or whatever back in the day was that a fire is composed of:
Tinder: Small shavings, or burnt cloth, easy to catch on fire
Kindling: Small sticks or twigs, which catch and amplify the flames
Fuel: Larger pieces of wood, such as logs, to keep the fire burning through the night
Ignition: A source of heat to start the fire at the tinder level.
There are two basic ways to stack it. The way I was taught (the A-frame) has the tinder near the bottom, kindling on top, fuel around it to protect it from the wind etc. The way I saw more recently was to have the tinder on the top, so that as it burns the hot ashes fall down and catch more things on fire. I'm not sure which is a better way to go but either would be fine for our purposes.
I don't think "fuel" should be Minecraft logs. If you're building from outcastjack's mod so far, then what you have available is Bark Chips, Twigs, and Sticks in abundance, plus Firewood (basically you mess up the tree while chopping it with your hands or low-quality tools) and then Rough Planks. You could use Bark Chips and/or Twigs for the Tinder, and Twigs and/or Sticks for the Kindling, then Firewood for the fuel. I'd suggest Bark Chips, Twigs, and Firewood, bypassing the Sticks since they're useful for tools etc.
I'd love to be able to make a Bow Drill, which is two sticks and a string (and now we've got cobwebs, which is perfect!). That should start the fire faster than if you just use regular sticks. But anyway, starting the fire should be a matter of hitting it with a stick (like breaking a block, probably taking a long time, like trying to break obsidian... well, maybe not that long), and sometimes the stick just breaks, but other times it gives off a spark, and other times it lights the fire. Poof!
Then, once the fire is going, you have a very short time to open the GUI and add fuel of some sort. It should burn most wooden things, charcoal and coal. If you let it go out then you need to light it again. And there would be a couple slots for cooking (I think I proposed four... ideally the top of the campfire would look a little like an item frame for four items, one to each quadrant). And they all cook at the same time, not in a queue.
But yeah, give it a shot and see what you come up with. I'm glad more than one person is interested in seeing this mod take life
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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!
Wow you are so detailed in explaining everything, Well done
Love the idea's, and for someone who said this is kind of like better then wolfs, well the only issue is his mod is not compatible with anything..... no point in just using 1 mod.
Largely, this is based on the premise that I just got lost on a hike, or survived a plane crash (or spaceship crash), and now have to survive in the wild. (Because the first thing you do when you're lost in the woods is mine for coal, right?) I want immersion from the get-go. Here's how I'm hoping to achieve it:
Table of Contents
I. Hunger, Regen, and Mob Spawning (also a possible shift for Hardcore mechanics)
II. Foliage Drops: Trees suddenly drop a lot more goodies. Mostly sticks.
III. Foraging: Sheep drop mutton, and I'd like some berry bushes.
IV. Campfires: 2x2 crafting recipe, can cook on it, burns out fast but can keep baddies at bay.
V. Hand Digging: Dirt/Sand drop 2-4 balls (like Clay) that you craft into blocks; also may drop clay/flint.
VI. Makeshift Flint Tools: 2x2 recipes, low-durability but otherwise like wooden tools.
VII. Miscellaneous: Yeah.
The flint tools are something I've wanted for ages, but despite several promising starts I've never gotten a working mod for them. My nephew (8) also asks me about them constantly.
I. Hunger, Regen, and Mob Spawning
In the options menu, the ability to toggle Hunger and Regen independent of difficulty.
Possibly: A way to set how low your health can drop due to hunger, and maybe how quickly it harms you.
Likewise: A way to set how high your health can go purely due to regen, and how quickly it heals you.
Thus I should be able to say that my health can only drop to 3 hearts without direct damage, but a slow-speed regen from lack of hunger never heals me above 8 hearts (and for the other two I'd have to find healing potions). That sort of thing.
I'd also like to be able to adjust mob spawn rates, from 0 to say 200% (maybe higher), for individual mobs. If I want no creepers but tons of undead, I want to be able to make the world act that way. Mo' Creatures already does this and I don't know why it's not in vanilla yet. (If this is beyond your coding ability, I'm okay with it being left out.)
Also: I should be able to toggle it to override actual spawners (0 creepers means 0 creepers) or not (0 creepers unless you get near a spawner).
I.b. Hardcore
If this is too difficult to code, forget it; it's not such a big deal. But here's my thoughts for Hardcore:
For me, Hardcore is primarily about stakes: Losing my world. Having a locked-in difficulty is less important. But I'd like to be able to set a baseline for a new Hardcore level, and toggle settings that could never dip below the baseline.
E.g., say I start with regen off, hunger on, 150% undead, and 0% creepers. Later, I could turn on creepers, but I could not turn on regen, or turn off hunger, or drop the undead back to only 100%. And if I decide that the creepers are too troublesome, I could drop back to 0% creepers. I could also bump up undead to 200% and later bump it back down to the baseline 150%.
Again, this isn't crucial.
II. Foliage Drops
Tree foliage drops all of the following:
**It struck me that when you're hunting for food in the wild, eggs are a big thing. They should drop with a bunch of twigs to reinforce the idea that you just found a nest. I'm not sure if they should be just chicken eggs or if this mod should add a new type of egg so we don't get chickens from trees.
(I'd add eggs as a drop from tall grass were it not for inevitable conflict with Pam's Mod.)
Possibly: Hand-chopping a tree drops just the bark (and, for spruces, pitch) and leaves a slightly thinner, barkless trunk block (diameter of a chest or maybe just a cobblestone wall post).
Possibly: Can use the bark as a panel (like glass panes). All types of panels should connect to each other.
III. Foraging
Need a couple of new types of food in the wild, with certain biomes more generous than others:
To avoid too much overlapping, and just because they're a personal favorite, I'd like to see Huckleberries. The red kind.
In addition, sheep should drop Mutton.
Would be nice to have the red mushrooms renamed Truffles. If I'm remembering correctly that the red ones are rarer. Maybe they give slightly better nutrition when eaten raw.
Possibly: Poisonous mushrooms and poisonous berries, just a pixel or two different from the edible kinds. Poisonous berries give you food poisoning, but poisonous mushrooms give you a stronger poison. They have the same name as their respective edible kinds, so you have to tell them apart by looks (and the fact that they don't stack)... well, actually, if red mushrooms get renamed Truffles then poisonous red mushrooms could still be called Mushrooms and the inattentive player could miss that.
I can give info on a berry from a thorny plant that otherwise looks very like the red huckleberry; I'm not sure if it's poisonous but I think it likely is. It's a bit more football-shaped than the spherical huckleberry.
IV. Campfires
I've run across a campfire mod and the fireplace mod, both interesting and useful, and part of my current build. However, I want to make a fire before I make a crafting bench - and the campfire mod unfortunately takes crafting bench, pickaxe, cobblestone, and coal/charcoal, so it can't be first-night tech within my "lost in the wilderness" daydream here.
I want a 2x2 pattern. Specifically:
...where the wheat represents Twigs. Both would drop in copious amounts from tree foliage (as above).
This creates a block - I'd say a half-slab that looks like an A-frame fire - which you then have to light. Ideally, you couldn't access the campfire GUI until the thing was lit.
To light it, you hold a stick and hold down right-click on the fire. After a short time, the fire either lights, or the stick breaks into two Twigs. The chance of it lighting is pretty small, say 15% (higher if you replaced one of the Twigs in the original pattern with Pitch; much less if you're in the rain). In my opinion, firestarting by "rubbing two sticks together" should be inefficient and annoying, just to enhance the realism.
Note: Other sources of lighting things - flint and steel, or metallurgy matches, etc. - should work, it's just that I don't expect to have them when I'm resorting to a campfire.
Once the fire starts, you have the length of time it takes for a regular furnace to burn 1 piece of coal. During that time, you have to add some sort of fuel. If you don't add fuel at all, you go back to square one (hitting it with sticks to start it). If you add any fuel, then when it finally goes out, it breaks itself and turns into charcoal (say 1-4). The campfire burns through fuel faster than a furnace (it's inefficient)... I'll need to work out the numbers later, but I'd like for a full stack of logs to burn for the length of one full night (well, from the start of sunset to the end of sunrise), but that number might be way off.
You can cook (basic) food on the campfire, or turn wooden things into charcoal. Like with the Furnace mod, it has four slots; I'd like to have it cook faster than a furnace can. It should be able to cook stacks of wooden things (to make charcoal) but not stacks of food. Possibly the fuel itself, once it starts burning, has a chance of adding 1 to the counter of how much charcoal pops out once the fire burns out.
Possibly: A burning campfire poses the same threat of burning that an open fire does, including possibly setting fire to nearby squares of grass. Gotta clear that area!
Possibly: The campfire has a "keep baddies away" effect similar to cats repelling creepers, but for all baddies. Skellies can still shoot you from the outskirts. Letting the fire burn out becomes a bad thing, and keeping it full of fuel becomes a lifesaver.
V. Hand Digging
I love this ClaySoil mod I found: When you dig dirt, you have a chance of getting balls of clay. It seems more realistic. I've also seen one that I can't find offhand where when you dig dirt by hand, instead of getting dirt blocks you get balls of dirt that you then craft into dirt blocks a la clay.
I'd like to see you get 2-4 balls of dirt, some of which are occasionally clay, and have occasional (uncommon to rare) drops of flint from the dirt as well. (You ever notice how digging and refilling a hole never ends up with the same amount of dirt?)
And stone should drop Rocks, where 4 of them craft Cobblestone. But the higher-level pickaxe (Iron and better) gets cobblestone directly, and I'm debating about a diamond pick going straight to Stone.
VI. Makeshift Flint Tools
I've got 2x2 recipes worked out for flint tools, along with some of their stats. This is a big part of my mod, as it means I'm no longer chopping trees by hand or using wooden tools at all. I recently learned that flint actually becomes harder (and with a sharper edge) after you cook it, so for realism I'd also like a set of Hard Flint Tools (or Sharp Flint Tools?) using cooked flint, where the durability, damage, and speed go up (still not as good as regular stone tools, but better than wooden).
There's also plans for a sling and pebbles for ammo. And normal sticks should do more damage than hitting things with your fist (though less damage than a wooden sword or cudgel).
The idea is that I rough it until I find some flint, then craft a flint pick, mine exactly how much cobble I need for my basic set (furnace, pickaxe, axe, sword), and at that point make my crafting bench and go up in tech level. Because I never, ever, ever* make use of the wooden tool set except to immediately bridge to stone, and then I end up using the slower wooden pick out of a desire to not waste resources, which I realize is dumb. Reducing the durability of this tool will actively benefit my personal playstyle.
*Exception: Super Hostile series, where I can't find stone. And if I had flint tool and hardened flint tool recipes I could bypass the wooden set even then. Also, flint tools are historically viable tech. So meh.
VII. Miscellaneous
There are other things I would like to add, if by chance it is possible to add them without too much difficulty in coding/implementation. So consider these highly optional to the base mod:
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!
So, for example, something that just alters what trees can drop. Or something that just lets me make the makeshift tools. Or something that just does the thing where digging dirt by hand drops dirt balls, some clay balls, and occasional flint. Anything like that would be fine and much appreciated.
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!
Anyway, here's hoping that someone responds eventually. My nephew keeps asking about the flint tools part and I hate having to tell him "not yet" all the time.
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 do have textures (sprites? I think "texture" is just for 3d stuff) for the Flint Tools (as designed by ThEwOtSiT182 who sadly appears to have not come on this forum since November 2012), but not for the rest. Let's see, that's:
Since you're not doing the Campfire part (or at least not yet), go ahead and just give Twigs and Pitch some data for use as fuel. Twigs should burn fast - maybe you need 8 of them for just one item. Pitch should be less effective than Coal but more than Wooden Planks, so maybe 1 Pitch burns two items... or would 1 for four be better? Not sure.
Will you be doing the "hand-chopping a tree just drops bark" bit? That'd need a Bark sprite and a thinner bare trunk block... or maybe 4 of each. Bark probably burns 1 item. But this part is optional and I don't mind if you omit it.
Also, could you please include the Tatami half-slabs made from Bamboo (well, Sugarcane, same thing), and possibly Bamboo Bars and/or Shouji (paper walls with wooden borders, preferably like glass panes)?
Thank you so much for giving this a go!
ETA: Stats!
The Flint Tools are mechanically identical to wooden tools, with the exception of durability: The Hatchet and Pick last for 16 uses each, and the Spade and Dagger for 32.
The Sling doesn't charge like a bow does (if only because I dislike the charging mechanic - because I suppose it would make sense with a sling). It flies half as far as a fully charged bow and does 1/4 the damage.
Mutton should be on par with porkchops, I expect. Roasted Eggs should be perhaps 3/4 as effective as meat, while Raw Eggs should be maybe 1/4 as effective as meat, and both should have decent saturation. Porridge should be on par with bread? (Also, crafting-wise, porridge is 3 grass seeds and a bowl.) Acorns and Huckleberries provide little nourishment - perhaps 1 hunger (half a hunger icon) each - and little saturation, so you're hungry again pretty fast. Macadamia Nuts should provide a little more, say 2 hunger (1 hunger icon), and maybe a tiny bit more saturation than Acorns.
Am I missing anything?
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 guess hand-punching stuff is likely to be weird to code. It's okay - not a core piece of my mod anyway, and besides it ought to be together with the hand-digging bit too. Depending on how this mod goes, I might take the parts you haven't covered and put them into a new mod request thread.
Looking forward to see how this works out
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!
Ooooh, feathers from nests! I like it!
Hand digging: Glad you figured that out. The idea is to have a dirt block only accessible to someone with a shovel (or, well, any tool, really), whereas when you hand-dig you get the components of dirt, which is randomly dirt balls, clay balls, flint, and pebbles or small stones (as if you found gravel but couldn't get gravel as a block - see below). Maybe there's other stuff that dirt could drop that I haven't thought of yet. But this way the player can craft a block of dirt or clay, if they get enough dirt balls or clay balls, but it's like a tech barrier: It's hard to get dirt blocks fast without having made a crafting table or at least a makeshift flint tool. I think this will make the game more fun for my playstyle.
Update on Gravel: I've thought this through a little more, and I'm thinking this: Hand-digging gravel should work like hand-digging dirt, in that you don't get a block but can build up the stuff to make a block. So you should get 2-4 Pebbles (a handful of tiny rocks), with common drops of Flint and Small Stone (ammo for Sling). Putting 4 Pebbles together makes a Gravel block. Note that with this, as with dirt, you will get fewer blocks than you dug; hand-digging is by nature inefficient (much as how, in real life, you can dig a hole and fill it back up and it seems like you don't have as much dirt as you started with).
I've got someone who's going to do the sprites/textures, but it might take a little while. In the meantime, try a tan-colored snowball for the macadamia nut and a brown-colored flint for the acorn, they're close enough.
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!
Though actually, another thing would be that a cudgel helps destroy leaves faster - and you're not wasting it because you're getting occasional new cudgels as well. Though I'm not sure if the numbers work out to that or not. Cudgels showing up should be a treat, not an expectation.
As for acorns, I hadn't thought about them being the same button. What say you craft it with bonemeal to make a sapling?
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!
The blocks you can dig by hand (grass, dirt, clay, gravel, and sand) all split into roughly 4 pieces (as clay does in vanilla). These are up to 4 balls (dirt ball, clay ball, pebbles... sand ball, I guess), plus a certain amount of extra stuff. The extra stuff might replace some of the balls, or just show up alongside it; I'm not sure which is best.
Here are the specs I've been thinking about:
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!
outcastjack has been working hard at this mod, and has already got the foliage drops working and some of the hand-digging drops working too.
Unfortunately, my copy keeps crashing whenever I hand-dig. So we've still got a ways to go.
But there's lots of content to this mod so far. I ran around chopping foliage down and getting tons of twigs, sticks, and nests (twigs, eggs, and feathers), plus a fair amount of acorns and, once I found a jungle, macadamia nuts. Pitch is a bit too rare at present, so I couldn't really make any torches; we'll be working on the balancing issues. Found a couple cudgels though.
We've got tatami mats and half-slabs, shoji paper-walls... you can cut the bark off a tree then cut planks off the trunk (the trunk has three stages including the bark), and you can make bark walls to use like glass panes. A bark house! Can you imagine?
All in all, coming along well. I'm looking forward to this!
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've looked at Better Than Wolves before, and it doesn't interest me (much). It's far too complex for what I want from my Minecraft experience. Besides the high level of tech, the progression doesn't make sense within Minecraft: You have to go to the Nether before you've even gotten out of The Age of Wood, Tier 1! How does that make any sense? It's like doing a revamp of Super Mario Bros. that requires you to retrieve something from the seventh castle just to beat the first level!
(I got that impression from a quick skim. I admit I may be overlooking factors that make this progression make better sense. It is labeled secondary goals, after all.)
What I'm trying to do with this mod is to break up the early stages (primarily) because they seem far too rushed right now. I don't care for advanced mechanical contraptions, I don't want to tan leather (well, maybe I do a little...), I don't want to construct power tools, I don't much care for their assortment of food, and I definitely don't want to be collecting dog poo just to further the game. I realize that all of this is technically "realistic" in that, yes, there are people in the world who have to collect dried poop just to make a fire, but it's the kind of realism that I have absolutely zero interest in experiencing, especially in a game. (I don't even like dogs. I'm a cat person. Gimme ocelots and foxes... and I don't plan to be making kibble.)
So... yeah. Better Than Wolves may be a fine mod and I have nothing against people enjoying it. It's just a mod that I have no interest in. If their ideas and my ideas overlap a little, well, so they overlap; I'm never going to download their mod and so I have to pursue the avenue of creating my own.
I am glad that you think some of my ideas are good. It sounds like you've looked at my other threads. I do tend to come up with a lot of ideas, some of which I honestly think should be in vanilla Minecraft (like some of the expanded villager trades, or the decorative gem blocks, or some different visuals for chests), while others, like this mod, are stuff that probably wouldn't improve the experience for the majority of Minecraft players. But it's going to improve the experience for me, and probably for my nephew (who's also interested in this idea), so we'll see where it goes
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!
Yup, I've seen mods that try to do a lot of the things I'm requesting.
There's usually some big flaw about the mod that makes me not want to download it. If I'd found mods that actually gave me the behavior I want, I wouldn't be requesting a new one.
I. Food
I draw the line at Pam's HarvestCraft. Other than Pam's, I do not want a large, involved food mod. I do not want modern food. I do not want crazy things like making fine desserts out of rotten flesh or finding ways to enjoy spider eye soufflé. I don't want my creative inventory clogged with a hundred items I'm never going to use, and I don't want to install a mod that's much, much larger than the part that I do use, even if I never see that in action.
So yeah, I know the foods I'm requesting exist, but I want these and only these foods, at least for now. (I would, however, like the links to the mods you've come across, because I'm pretty sure I haven't checked out 100% of the available options.)
Interactive Food Mod lets you put food on plates or in a mug, which I'm all in favor of. The visuals aren't... terrible, I guess. I like the idea. It's not about mutton/eggs/etc., though. And it lets you put raw food on the plate, which I see no need for, honestly. I'd prefer a thing like an item frame (or modified item frame that can support up to 3-4 items) that lies flat on a table. But thanks for recommending it, as I had not run across it before.
II. Mob Spawn Control
Never even went looking for this. Thank you for pointing it out.
III. Camping Mod
You should note that my requested campfire style is distinct from both the camping mod and the campfire/smoking furnace mod. At least, from the two I'm familiar with. I explicitly want to have a frustrating, difficult-to-start campfire that dies if you don't keep it stocked with fuel, which works with the items that drop from the Foliage Drops part of this mod request, and I want, if possible, the added bonus of scaring off monsters if I've made the fire right.
I seriously doubt that a mod exists that covers my desires in this area, though certainly I've borrowed ideas from several mods.
IV. "Flint Tools Are Already Out There"
The bloody hell they are not, pardon my language. I have been after this request for literally years, and this mod is the first time I've actually seen anything close to the flint tools I'm after.
To the contrary, these flint mods exist:
It was good of you to point it out in case I hadn't been around for years trying to find/create the functionality (because if you hadn't seen me around the forum before, then for all you know I could've been a newbie). I would definitely like some links to mods you think I haven't run across yet, so please do post them here; we can run a compare-and-contrast to better define where this mod is going.
And yeah, it did help
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!
Yes, that one's actually a very good mod, and it's where I got my idea for porridge (oatmeal and trail mix are both fine choices for Minecraft, and ones I'd never thought of before encountering that mod).
On the other hand, since my general stance is "nothing that breaks immersion," let's see how many items he's got that you (probably) couldn't buy in the Middle Ages:
...I kind of have this problem with Pam's mod too, but hers is good enough that I overlooked the problems in favor of growing basic crops and finding berry bushes in the wild. If Pam's weren't available, I probably would get Useful Food instead. There's at least one similar mod that I can't think of off the top of my head, which is also a pretty good mod, and one I think I've gotten for my nephew before.
I'm also not happy with the "magic food" set (personal preference to stay fairly realistic and unmagical), although Magic Fruit Salad was pretty inventive and in keeping with what Minecraft started with. And let's break away from the negativity for a second: Pumpkin Bread is an awesome idea, Noodles in general aren't too out-of-keeping with the old world, and using lilypads to make sushi may be weird from a real-life perspective but was actually a great way to make use of what items Minecraft has lying around.
So yeah. Useful Food. It's not for me, but I heartily encourage other people to check it out.
II. InfiCraft
Don't think I ever ran across this one, so thanks for pointing it out. Looks like it's split into different mod sets.
a. Natura
Man I wish more mod posters would think about how they look to the new user.
When I'm browsing mods, I'm generally trying to sift through a large amount of data in a short time; by not giving me a quick-sift format, you are handicapping your presentation. At the very least there should be a feature list and feature-demonstrating screenshot (should be nearly the first thing in the post).
I should not have to load a video to figure out if the mod has deal-breakers or is worth a more in-depth look. Compared to a feature list, video demonstrations/reviews are routinely time-wasting:
(I should also note: That video at the top of the page is twenty-three minutes long. This is inexcusable. Next to text and better screenshots, it might be fine, but there's no way I'm sitting through twenty-three minutes as my intro to your mod.)
This post has 3 screenshots, all of which demonstrate trees (one seems to demonstrate a type of bush), but there's no details about these things except in the changelog. The changelog indicates barley, berry bushes, and redwoods (all good, but I have them in other mods), nether trees (do not want), and clouds of ash and sulfur (intriguing! wish there was a screenshot; also, Metallurgy bypasses the need for these).
b. Tinkers Construct
Far too complex for my interests, but it looks like a neat mod. You know those critiques I just made about the Natura post? This guy does most of them right. There's screenshots that give enough info for me to understand what I'm looking at, and even the videos sitting there double as screenshots that point out important things about whether I'm ever going to get that mod or not. The Development Outline also gave some decent information (the changelog did too, but it's huge and I only skimmed it). The thing he's missing is a decent feature list.
But yeah, again, not my taste, but check it out. I might even give it a try someday (on a separate Minecraft build, probably not together with my normal mod build).
III. Campfire
Fireplace Mod. It's a good one, but again, it's got too much stuff. That's my main complaint with a lot of mods, really: They go overboard. And yeah, I can disable stuff in the config files, which is a great upgrade, and I'm really glad that the guy did it after I brought it up, but still... I'd prefer less stuff.
Also, the details about how to make the fire and how to get it lit and such aren't part of his mod, nor would I expect them to be. Mine is explicitly to mimic the feel of camping, not just to add neat looks to your campsite or home.
So... yeah. If you come across any new mods that might be of interest, please do post them here!
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!
It's like, if you're looking at the thread for Biomes o' Plenty, then maybe you don't like this or that about it, and someone posts a link to Extreme Biomes, so you head over there and that's exactly what you wanted (or at least closer than the other was). Some people are going to like Biomes o' Plenty (as I do), others are going to like Extreme Biomes, and still others are going to want a smaller assortment of biomes or weird magical biomes or what have you.
Same with Metallurgy and many of the other, usually smaller mods that add new minerals - some players are going to like Metallurgy, others are going to like other mods, and some may use more than one (even if they do overlap somewhat). Or how when my Harvest Moon mod was still in production*, we encouraged people to post links to other mods that were based on, or similar to, Harvest Moon - and that's where I first encountered information about Pam's HarvestCraft, for which I'm very grateful because it's now one of my standard mods. Similarly, it got me info on FarmCraftory and even led me to a certain Harvest Moon custom map that looks pretty cool (and which I will be testing out soon). Those links didn't subtract from the thread - they added to the value of the entire thread, and improved the utility for players of all sorts.
*Please note, the Moontown Mod may have ground to a halt somewhere along the line, but I haven't given up on the project. Some of the team members are still around and I would like to attract a new coder who'd be interested in a large project like that.
So yeah. This mod's coming along fine (mostly via PM between me and the coder), and I expect that I will soon make a new thread for it in the WIP forum, but in the meantime, feel free to post any links to anything similar, because it really does help
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!
That mod seems like a good idea, but I can't really tell from the post what it's like. No screenshots or anything.
You discarded the idea of causing block updates just by walking on things. I don't know how much lag that might cause, but I do like the general idea, especially in conjunction with my Unstable Stone idea. Although I wouldn't actually want the stone to fall just because you walked on it; I'd like to be able to walk around and place torches without fearing for my life at every step. But causing nearby sand to fall just because you vibrated the ground a bit, that sounds neat.
Also it would disarm certain Vechs traps.
I don't mind the idea of spear fishing... though honestly, I do think cobwebs in caves is a pretty decent way to grant string for early fishing. Not ruins, which break up the "I'm on a completely deserted world" feel, but just in caves. It makes sense because of the giant spiders. Maybe some in forests/jungles too (in or under trees). Not a lot, just some.
Your thread reminds me of the Mesa biome I'm looking forward to should our ZooCraftia mod ever see completion. Lots of tall flat-sided and flat-topped mountains made of red sandstone, like in World of Warcraft's Thousand Needles.
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!
That was fast! I'll have to check it out.
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!
Perhaps Fat+Stick+Wool could make one Makeshift Torch? It would be more of a total overhaul based on real life survival stuff than a mod,
But it could fit with THIS particularly idea well.
I hadn't actually considered what animals could drop to help with survival, but you raise a good point. Animals should drop more than just meat... fat, bones, and maybe fishbait (intestines etc.) would be useful. We could come up with a new use for bones, and throwing fishbait into the water should up the catch rate of fish for a few minutes (I prefer this to a "bait the pole" mechanic). It is certainly true that when you get lost in the woods or have escaped from a plane crash you can gather supplies via hunting.
The only thing that worries me is that this mod has already gained more than a dozen new items, and while I think all of them are necessary to the feel, it has always been my intention to remain fairly streamlined. I do not like mods that add dozens and dozens of items (with rare exceptions such as HarvestCraft and Metallurgy).
...if I were being a bit more pedantic, I'd say that killing an animal should leave a corpse, which you then destroy like a block to get the items, only it takes longer than destroying a regular block. This would feel more realistic. And if corpses existed, then cats killing chickens or wolves killing sheep should then sit there and slowly eat the meat. (Probably the corpse would have a 3- or 4-stage destruction, with the skin, the meat (possibly two stages), and the bones. So the animals would eat it one stage at a time and then leave the bones. Chickens would probably drop bonemeal instead of larger bones.)
But I don't think that's really necessary to the feel of this mod. And if we added the animal drops part, I think I'd want it as a separate, somewhat more complex module, whether or not the corpses mechanic got implemented.
By the by, in beta testing this mod, I've found that the number of torches from just pitch gives a pretty good feel... you have a few, but not many, and you're sparing with them (don't leave them all over the place). This increases the uneasy feel of the adventure at the start of the game, and makes it that much more of an achievement when you finally get some coal or charcoal.
Oh! And the cobweb generation in caves and forests is working great. It still takes a while to find enough for a fishing pole or a bow, which is just what I wanted. Actually, come to think of it, could we add in a tougher string (Bowstring) which takes 3 string to make? It'd be used for the bow recipe, so that a fishing pole is quick and easy but a bow takes longer. Also maybe a stronger fishing pole (using the new string) that catches fish faster and easier.
P.S. It is almost the end of the school year here (my nephew's just gotten out, and some friends are about to), so I expect that my texture artists will be available soon. I hope. I haven't heard from them since they agreed to work on this mod, so I'm hoping that's just schoolwork and/or computer problems. When we get some sprites/textures up and running, we'll move on over to a WIP thread.
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 would be the first sign that you don't really understand what I am trying to do.
According to the model you provide here, in order to craft a simple stuck-out-in-the-woods campfire, you not only need to construct a workbench but also to have lit up a portal to hell to gather materials.
That is not what I am after. However, I am not stingy with my ideas, and I enjoy seeing them branch out in various ways. There is room in the modding world for any number of neat campfires, and if yours is working then please make a thread for it and post a link here. I would like to see screenshots (recipes and what the campfire itself looks like in-game)
You might go check out a couple of the existing campfire mods because you seem to tread some of the same ground as the Campfire mod or the Fireplace mod. The main benefit you have over the latter is that your mod is (so far) tiny, whereas the Fireplace mod is pretty big for just a simple concept. The benefit over the former might be better balance within SMP, but I haven't thought over that first impression and I'm not going to since it's not my focus.
Still, your mod might benefit some players, so go ahead and make it, and post a link
That would be the second sign. Not trying for magical fire, but natural fire, and, in fact, this mod will be a big upheaval of the balance of the game as it stands. You may be trying to work with the idea of a campfire that can drive back mobs/creepers and still balance it against the game as it stands, maybe also thinking of its impact on SMP, which would mean it's high-tier.
What I want is low-tier (the kind you make your first night in the wild, before you've even got the materials to begin thinking of a table/workbench) and largely balanced against the mod as a whole and against my personal (largely solo) playstyle. I understand that this mod will probably suit a fairly limited audience, but as I've waited for several years to find the sort of mods that suit my desires, I'm finally just biting the bullet and getting people to make mine for me, and so far that's working marvelously well.
Actually, there is now a bonemeal drop as part of the regular digging of dirt and such. I forget which block it drops most frequently from, but it's there, and you get a fair amount quickly. Were it not for that mechanic, I'd be happy to adopt the idea of mud+acorn=sapling. You don't really need separate water as mud is understood to be dirt+water anyway.
We do have a "fertilizer" item now, which is a combination of any three of dirt balls, mud, clay, or bonemeal, and which you use to make Soil blocks. I'm not sure of any other way to prevent recursive resource-gathering (digging up dirt repeatedly to get more and more goodies out of it), so we just went with dirt balls and fertilizer turning into a whole new block (that should eventually grow plants faster).
I should really update this thread with a list of what we've accomplished. I don't have time this week but might sometime after that. The mod is coming along quite well.
As for what you could do as a coder, yes, by all means take up the campfire part if you think you can get close to what I was aiming for. Outcastjack isn't skilled with GUIs yet and therefore is working on the parts he can reasonably accomplish.
The campfire could be constructed on the ground, but if you think about it this requires a multi-step physical object (block/entity) compared to one single block (craftable campfire). I suppose you could make it something like a cake... maybe... where a block gets "built up" over time? I do like the idea of putting sticks on the ground, in a certain order. The general idea I got from Girl Scouts or whatever back in the day was that a fire is composed of:
I don't think "fuel" should be Minecraft logs. If you're building from outcastjack's mod so far, then what you have available is Bark Chips, Twigs, and Sticks in abundance, plus Firewood (basically you mess up the tree while chopping it with your hands or low-quality tools) and then Rough Planks. You could use Bark Chips and/or Twigs for the Tinder, and Twigs and/or Sticks for the Kindling, then Firewood for the fuel. I'd suggest Bark Chips, Twigs, and Firewood, bypassing the Sticks since they're useful for tools etc.
I'd love to be able to make a Bow Drill, which is two sticks and a string (and now we've got cobwebs, which is perfect!). That should start the fire faster than if you just use regular sticks. But anyway, starting the fire should be a matter of hitting it with a stick (like breaking a block, probably taking a long time, like trying to break obsidian... well, maybe not that long), and sometimes the stick just breaks, but other times it gives off a spark, and other times it lights the fire. Poof!
Then, once the fire is going, you have a very short time to open the GUI and add fuel of some sort. It should burn most wooden things, charcoal and coal. If you let it go out then you need to light it again. And there would be a couple slots for cooking (I think I proposed four... ideally the top of the campfire would look a little like an item frame for four items, one to each quadrant). And they all cook at the same time, not in a queue.
But yeah, give it a shot and see what you come up with. I'm glad more than one person is interested in seeing this mod take life
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!
Love the idea's, and for someone who said this is kind of like better then wolfs, well the only issue is his mod is not compatible with anything..... no point in just using 1 mod.