A mighty machine built within the wake
Of a long dead dream, little demon awake
The citizens sleep, never quite knowing when
The device will reawaken, hungry again.
BTW is definitely a unique experience, both in Minecraft and in indie gaming as a whole.
Vanilla Minecraft felt like a bit of a mess back in 1.5.4, and it still does for the most part. Lots of stuff to do, but not a lot of focus. I think that's just kind of natural for a project that started as just one guy with a hat screwing around with Java and ended up turning into a staggeringly successful juggernaut.
BTW feels more like what Minecraft would be if it was started from the ground up as a project with a plan and a goal - like Don't Starve and all the numerous, seemingly endless indie "survival games" that have come out since Minecraft first popped up. I'm not going to say I've always agreed with the direction the mod has gone (I never did like the whole mob farm thing, I always preferred stabbing things directly), but I can't deny that it presents what is probably the most concrete and focused experience in Minecraft and it's at least the equal to those other indie "survival games."
It does sometimes make me sad that we'll never get to see BTW interpreting things like the combat update and such, but I can't exactly fault FC for not wanting to more or less waste so much time basically redesigning and retooling Mojang's work, only for them to release another update and break it all. Even with all of the Forge mods out there now, it's still impossible to come close to creating anything remotely similar to BTW in modern Minecraft... for better or for worse. I do miss seeing people claiming they'd just "make BTW for Forge" themselves and then quickly end up eating crow when they realized it was a lot more difficult than they thought it'd be. Those people were always fun.
I don't really play Minecraft anymore, but BTW still sticks in my mind. It's an amazingly cohesive experience, and the feeling of progression really is hard to overstate. You quite literally start a round of BTW slowly, slowly punching trees and then hiding in a hole and digging rocks all night, terrified of fighting the monsters... and, hell, terrified of pissing off cows. You have to range farther and farther afield during the day to locate more food while you slowly work up a good pile of stone picks and stone axes to use to search for and obtain iron... which then must be laboriously smelted, bit by bit, over a series of in-game days and nights.
Eventually you'll have an iron pick and you can go a bit farther - but unlike vanilla, you probably don't have any real armor and HP recovery is very slow, so exploring is still incredibly dangerous. You get a little farther along the tech tree, then you get a little sloppy or a little cocky and now you're hiding in a cubbyhole and hoping Mr. Skeltal doesn't find you and you can escape. He finds you, you die a miserable death, and it starts over again somewhere else on the world. In a very real sense, BTW is almost like a single-player multiplayer game like that - you'll eventually come across the hidey holes and chests from your past lives, almost like randomly stumbling across another player's stash on a server.
I can't imagine what anarchy servers were like. I wish I'd had an opportunity to try them.
Anyway, BTW is pretty fantastic and while it's not the only way I'll play MC, it's definitely the "best" way to play it. BTW feels like how Hardcore difficulty SHOULD have been. You have creative for people that just want to build. Survival for people who want a relaxed experience. Hardcore for people who really want to SURVIVE.
Oh well. Thanks again for all the hours of entertainment, FC. Hope things are going well for you!
Oh well. Thanks again for all the hours of entertainment, FC. Hope things are going well for you!
Pizza, you accurately and thoughtfully described what makes up the first days in BTW, and how different it is from vanilla (vanilla could be anything to me right now, I stopped paying attention so long ago). Haven't played minecraft in a while too, but ostensibly its on my mind, and one day I'll return to my world and experience that feeling, as you put it, of being in a single-player multiplayer server spotting old holes and huts and caves you spent time in at some dusty old point long ago. I was going through what I disliked about the mod, and there's nothing. I can't point anything out where there's usually be nit picks... The biome generation is superior boring, though, which did come to mind when i thought of things to challenge the 'best mod ever!' Title I've given this, in my head. That's Jeb's fault, but
Have you tried enderman farming? If you wait for them on a mushroom island you can get them to drop one... hard and dangerous... just the way I like it
Just curious - for co-op multiplayer sake, is there any chance for an update to allow toggable hardcore modes, specifically spawning. Often times when playing we end up feeling in a single player world that we just lose interest unless we cheat in a soul forged steel beacon so we can have a defined spawn. It just sucks losing the co-op feeling on multiplayer, perhaps this is just my experience but that's what I have found, otherwise my pals and I love the mod.
Just curious - for co-op multiplayer sake, is there any chance for an update to allow toggable hardcore modes, specifically spawning. Often times when playing we end up feeling in a single player world that we just lose interest unless we cheat in a soul forged steel beacon so we can have a defined spawn. It just sucks losing the co-op feeling on multiplayer, perhaps this is just my experience but that's what I have found, otherwise my pals and I love the mod.
Thats part of the fun of BTW. Death actually means something! Eventually you'll find eachother just dont give up!
Just curious - for co-op multiplayer sake, is there any chance for an update to allow toggable hardcore modes, specifically spawning. Often times when playing we end up feeling in a single player world that we just lose interest unless we cheat in a soul forged steel beacon so we can have a defined spawn. It just sucks losing the co-op feeling on multiplayer, perhaps this is just my experience but that's what I have found, otherwise my pals and I love the mod.
The last server I played; hardcore death was something which really brought the community together. By the end of it we had a fairly substantial system of nether tunnels and overworld roads, landmarks, maps ect so whenever someone bit the big one, someone else could locate them via what landmarks our walking corpse mentioned in chat. Often followed by a rescue party bringing supplies, or directions to the nearest supply hole/portal home.
Its all about teamwork my friend.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
A mighty machine built within the wake
Of a long dead dream, little demon awake
The citizens sleep, never quite knowing when
The device will reawaken, hungry again.
So... in another round of btw with my brother on a self-hosted server, i noticed two bugs:
The shears multiplication bug is still in the Game and i found a way to exploit it in order to get infinite free iron.
How to reproduce:
- use up shears to the point where the bar has no red pixel anymore (is completely grey)
- use it to "shear" a creeper.
- the shears will not break and you'll get a bugged shears item
- throw this item on the ground and pick it up
- your inventory fills with bugged shears items
- take them with right click and put them into a crucible with right klick
- the crucible will turn them into iron nuggets
Increasing a maps size does not work with shift click. This might not be a bug in the mod but in vanilla but it is nevertheless annoying.
How to reproduce:
- try to increase the size of a map and take it out of the crafting table with shift
- you just voided 8 paper
Other things i did not like:
You can move and do things during the short "grace period" after logging in. Timers do still tick down. This can be used if you are on fire or have the wither effect in order to get no damage.
Most of my iron went into shears i needed for vines. For a medium-sized mobfarm you need nearly 30 iron ingots (at least in my preferred design). With all other things i really liked not getting back as much iron because it made the crucible feel much less op, but as there is no better tier of shears, this really annoyed me.
The experience values for mobs from vanilla are really bad and i think they should be balanced to fit better to the mobs difficulties. it is ridiculous that i get 20 xp from a blaze i can easily kill without danger for me in a early game spawner trap while i get only 50 from a whiter i need very good equipment to kill and nearly die in the progress. I get only 10 from a hard and costy to kill Ghast, the same amount i get from a zombie. This just doesn't feel fair and doesn't reward for taking on stronger enemies instead of punching blazes in a completely safe spawner. ( i assume you have not changed the vanilla values as there is nothing about it in the changelog and it fits my experience while playing.)
Additionally the "you can not transform villager zombies to villagers" change felt wired, as it makes "repositioning" villagers a very long and boring progress without adding anything to the game experience as you'd need to find and trade with villagers to get apples even if you could transform villager zombies. This makes this change feel limiting rater than challenging.
Apart from these small things i noticed while playing that appeared weird to me, i like the mod really much. The mod is much more coherent and better than Vanilla, and i want to thank you for all the time and effort you invested in this mod to make playing it such an amazing experience.
QuImUfu
I can't comment on the bugs since I have no experience in programming nor can I address any of your comments on game balance since only FlowerChild has the final say on what goes into the mod.
In regards to your difficulty in acquiring vines though, you may not know this, but saws can cut vines that grow down in front of them. Just stick a hopper down below the vines and voila, you have an automatic vine farm. It's pretty slow so you'll probably want quite a few saws working at the same time, but at least you'll have a steady income of vines while you're working on other things.
Have you thought about adding platform siding, moulding, and corners? Because I think that could be use to build better looking lifts/elevators.
If I remember right, FlowerChild doesn't want to mess with the elevator code anymore, so that's probably not going to happen. Especially if it would only serve a cosmetic purpose.
Is there any possible chance that you can add download links to the older versions of Better Than Wolves? I would like every single build of BTW for archival purposes.
Mojang / Minecraft... before the "time machine" was a thing. Oh, and Terraria. I want the versions for the sake of archival.
Rather you believe the archival of Minecraft mods is a good thing, is an entirely different story. I would rather get a response from the mod author himself as to why he won't allow the old links to be active.
FC answered this a few times before, from what I remember it is mostly due to tech support issues/bug stomping- basically if everyones running the same latest iteration, it makes life significantly easier for the dev.
If you really must find the answer from the dev himself- its archived in this thread
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
A mighty machine built within the wake
Of a long dead dream, little demon awake
The citizens sleep, never quite knowing when
The device will reawaken, hungry again.
Try installing with Multi-MC (tutorial)
or MCPatcher (tutorial)
A mighty machine built within the wake
Of a long dead dream, little demon awake
The citizens sleep, never quite knowing when
The device will reawaken, hungry again.
BTW is definitely a unique experience, both in Minecraft and in indie gaming as a whole.
Vanilla Minecraft felt like a bit of a mess back in 1.5.4, and it still does for the most part. Lots of stuff to do, but not a lot of focus. I think that's just kind of natural for a project that started as just one guy with a hat screwing around with Java and ended up turning into a staggeringly successful juggernaut.
BTW feels more like what Minecraft would be if it was started from the ground up as a project with a plan and a goal - like Don't Starve and all the numerous, seemingly endless indie "survival games" that have come out since Minecraft first popped up. I'm not going to say I've always agreed with the direction the mod has gone (I never did like the whole mob farm thing, I always preferred stabbing things directly), but I can't deny that it presents what is probably the most concrete and focused experience in Minecraft and it's at least the equal to those other indie "survival games."
It does sometimes make me sad that we'll never get to see BTW interpreting things like the combat update and such, but I can't exactly fault FC for not wanting to more or less waste so much time basically redesigning and retooling Mojang's work, only for them to release another update and break it all. Even with all of the Forge mods out there now, it's still impossible to come close to creating anything remotely similar to BTW in modern Minecraft... for better or for worse. I do miss seeing people claiming they'd just "make BTW for Forge" themselves and then quickly end up eating crow when they realized it was a lot more difficult than they thought it'd be. Those people were always fun.
I don't really play Minecraft anymore, but BTW still sticks in my mind. It's an amazingly cohesive experience, and the feeling of progression really is hard to overstate. You quite literally start a round of BTW slowly, slowly punching trees and then hiding in a hole and digging rocks all night, terrified of fighting the monsters... and, hell, terrified of pissing off cows. You have to range farther and farther afield during the day to locate more food while you slowly work up a good pile of stone picks and stone axes to use to search for and obtain iron... which then must be laboriously smelted, bit by bit, over a series of in-game days and nights.
Eventually you'll have an iron pick and you can go a bit farther - but unlike vanilla, you probably don't have any real armor and HP recovery is very slow, so exploring is still incredibly dangerous. You get a little farther along the tech tree, then you get a little sloppy or a little cocky and now you're hiding in a cubbyhole and hoping Mr. Skeltal doesn't find you and you can escape. He finds you, you die a miserable death, and it starts over again somewhere else on the world. In a very real sense, BTW is almost like a single-player multiplayer game like that - you'll eventually come across the hidey holes and chests from your past lives, almost like randomly stumbling across another player's stash on a server.
I can't imagine what anarchy servers were like. I wish I'd had an opportunity to try them.
Anyway, BTW is pretty fantastic and while it's not the only way I'll play MC, it's definitely the "best" way to play it. BTW feels like how Hardcore difficulty SHOULD have been. You have creative for people that just want to build. Survival for people who want a relaxed experience. Hardcore for people who really want to SURVIVE.
Oh well. Thanks again for all the hours of entertainment, FC. Hope things are going well for you!
Thanks for the help, guys! Using the old launcher did the trick. Now I just need to get my friend to give installing it a second shot.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!!
I beg that you release the Beta 1.7.3 version of this mod. Ive been looking everywhere but cant find anyone with it!
Here's a tutorial for installing BTW 4.A2 if you are having issues with installing it.
Cheers
Pizza, you accurately and thoughtfully described what makes up the first days in BTW, and how different it is from vanilla (vanilla could be anything to me right now, I stopped paying attention so long ago). Haven't played minecraft in a while too, but ostensibly its on my mind, and one day I'll return to my world and experience that feeling, as you put it, of being in a single-player multiplayer server spotting old holes and huts and caves you spent time in at some dusty old point long ago. I was going through what I disliked about the mod, and there's nothing. I can't point anything out where there's usually be nit picks... The biome generation is superior boring, though, which did come to mind when i thought of things to challenge the 'best mod ever!' Title I've given this, in my head. That's Jeb's fault, but
I used to have toes
Have you tried enderman farming? If you wait for them on a mushroom island you can get them to drop one... hard and dangerous... just the way I like it
So is this a forge mod and can this be used for 1.7.10 or are their any similar mods for 1.7.10 like this one?
Just curious - for co-op multiplayer sake, is there any chance for an update to allow toggable hardcore modes, specifically spawning. Often times when playing we end up feeling in a single player world that we just lose interest unless we cheat in a soul forged steel beacon so we can have a defined spawn. It just sucks losing the co-op feeling on multiplayer, perhaps this is just my experience but that's what I have found, otherwise my pals and I love the mod.
Thats part of the fun of BTW. Death actually means something! Eventually you'll find eachother just dont give up!
The last server I played; hardcore death was something which really brought the community together. By the end of it we had a fairly substantial system of nether tunnels and overworld roads, landmarks, maps ect so whenever someone bit the big one, someone else could locate them via what landmarks our walking corpse mentioned in chat. Often followed by a rescue party bringing supplies, or directions to the nearest supply hole/portal home.
Its all about teamwork my friend.
A mighty machine built within the wake
Of a long dead dream, little demon awake
The citizens sleep, never quite knowing when
The device will reawaken, hungry again.
I usually clear out an area and move back... they will spawn randomly but it works :D. I used to do this when they dropped end stone back in the day
I can't comment on the bugs since I have no experience in programming nor can I address any of your comments on game balance since only FlowerChild has the final say on what goes into the mod.
In regards to your difficulty in acquiring vines though, you may not know this, but saws can cut vines that grow down in front of them. Just stick a hopper down below the vines and voila, you have an automatic vine farm. It's pretty slow so you'll probably want quite a few saws working at the same time, but at least you'll have a steady income of vines while you're working on other things.
Have you thought about adding platform siding, moulding, and corners? Because I think that could be used to build better looking lifts/elevators.
If I remember right, FlowerChild doesn't want to mess with the elevator code anymore, so that's probably not going to happen. Especially if it would only serve a cosmetic purpose.
Is there any possible chance that you can add download links to the older versions of Better Than Wolves? I would like every single build of BTW for archival purposes.
Darn lol
Most of the old files are set to private, meaning they still exist, they just aren't public (for no really good reason).
Mojang / Minecraft... before the "time machine" was a thing. Oh, and Terraria. I want the versions for the sake of archival.
Rather you believe the archival of Minecraft mods is a good thing, is an entirely different story. I would rather get a response from the mod author himself as to why he won't allow the old links to be active.
FC answered this a few times before, from what I remember it is mostly due to tech support issues/bug stomping- basically if everyones running the same latest iteration, it makes life significantly easier for the dev.
If you really must find the answer from the dev himself- its archived in this thread
A mighty machine built within the wake
Of a long dead dream, little demon awake
The citizens sleep, never quite knowing when
The device will reawaken, hungry again.