Minecraft Forums

Right away I know the initial posts are going to be people looking at the title and replying with "villagers are peaceful lol no support", without actually reading the post. Yes, the criticism that villagers are meant to be peaceful is valid, both because Iron Golems already exist, and because Villagers are meant to be interpreted as purely peaceful mobs as has been stated by Mojang multiple times. Now that I've gotten that out of the way, perhaps we can move on to actually reviewing the content of the post.

Quote from Agtrigormortis»

I would like a new update for villagers to come, a warrior class villager which helps fight off the pillagers

but when you enlist warrior villagers then the pillager attacks should be made harder and come in more waves, in my opinion

so the battle against them isn't made too easy as a result.

Me and friends have been wanting warrior villagers for some time, or at least 1 other friend I know for a fact does.

We already have clerics and farmer villagers, how about warriors who can actually fight back and defend against hostile mobs?

and I am not talking about iron golems, who have terrible AI, are slow and also don't last very long against monsters, not to mention they are expensive to make if villagers aren't spawning them.

Well for one, I agree that iron golems are ineffective but I think the solution is to make iron golems more powerful or to have some kind of secondary ranged golem. I also think that having lots of villagers with weapons would allow villagers to overwhelm their invaders, which I don't think is how the current setup is supposed to work. I think players are supposed to assist villagers during raids since they tend to be in villages any time that one happens.

A warrior class villager who you can enlist would allow players to build a fictional empire in the game and also add new dramatics of war.

While the pillagers shouldn't be allowed to destroy builds or steal chest items, they should be made tougher and require advancements to villages be made to effectively defend against them.

As much as I'd love to build a big multi-city empire and wage war against Pillagers in the reason, I think this extends beyond the scope of Minecraft. I also think this doesn't make a lot of sense because building an empire requires that you have authority over civilians, whereas this would be more like having control over a militia.

Also, seeing as you DMed me a link to this post, I think it's only relevant that I link my own post that proposes another interesting solution to this problem, though in the form of a mod suggestion: the Posse mod. (Granted, it's more oriented towards getting together a "family" or "gang" as opposed to a larger army, but to be fair Minecraft tends to lag with large numbers of entities.)

Also the newer warrior class villagers should offer trades like different kinds of flags, and take over the role of providing tradeable armor and battle equipment to players using emeralds, diamonds and gold ingots as currency.

I don't like the idea of alternate currencies, and I don't like the idea of taking armor and weapon trades away from blacksmith and armorer villagers. The flags sound interesting, though I'm not sure they'd really be different from banners. (Maybe they could trade banner patterns that represent certain shapes?)

Their breeding mechanics ought to be the same as the other villagers, throw bread at them in a location counted as a village and they reproduce.

Becoming the newer warriors when they reach adulthood.

In all fairness, I think Villager breeding is far too complicated and it never seems to happen in any situation outside of a player-built breeder, though I think this is a bit too simplistic.

If the player loses a fight with the pillagers however, then their dropped inventory items should then be stolen by the pillagers.

Forcing players to be extra careful about fighting them. There is a consequence for dying in a fight against them, but it isn't also made too annoying for people who spent a lot of time stashing important loot away in various chests across the map.

I guess I don't really have a problem with this since it essentially just means that death by Pillager is just as dangerous as death by Lava or death by Void.

I can't support a Warrior villager suggestion for the main reason I listed above (that villagers are pacifist mobs) but I think even putting that aside, I don't know that this is a great way to implement Warrior villagers. You also didn't really mention how powerful these warrior villagers would be against mobs and other players, which would be very important if I'm trying to determine how balanced the suggestion is.

Quote from Agtrigormortis»

I never said that, so don't even go there, if you're going to be like this then this is not a conversation I want to be in as this is spiteful.

I'm not being spiteful, I pointed to a specific context where I thought you were making this argument. The context was that you were saying "I don't understand why people complain about the aquatic update", then you specifically went to Drowned Zombies. I pointed out that this may not necessarily be the only argument someone has against the aquatic update or even Drowned Zombies. (Either way, it's not relevant to my post and I think you're derailing the argument by going off on a tangent, and I'd prefer if you responded to my criticisms directly.)

Quote from Agtrigormortis»

I understand what you're saying

but I feel if the survival experience isn't revamped then too many players would never be satisfied with it.

Some other players on here have been asking for particular changes to be made to survival and I am proposing something for them.

You're counterarguing my points by assuming that I do not agree with this idea that the survival game isn't hard enough. I guess I haven't really stated my opinion on it, and to be honest, I don't really have a hard opinion on whether it should be harder or easier. However, I specifically stated I would presume for the moment that the difficulty wasn't hard enough in my post.

This also seems like a weird thing to hinge upon since you're assuming that I'm not supporting this suggestion because the suggestion makes the game harder. That's not necessarily true, I just find this specific implementation to be ineffective.

I personally couldn't care less if natural predators were implemented into the game or not, we already have wolves and spiders, which technically already classify as predators. Spiders exist in real life, so do wolves.

This is true but, gigantic spiders do not exist in real life. I also didn't necessarily disagree with the addition of more natural predators, I just said that it wouldn't be an effective way of making the game more difficult.

But it would add something fresh and new to do, so the game doesn't become stale.

Again, I would argue that this isn't necessarily adding fresh new difficulty to the game. Now, perhaps if you suggested some kind of new combat mechanic that requires either skill or new dungeons that required puzzle-solving skills, that would be a good way of implementing some difficulty into the game. (Though the former would be more effective since the player engages in combat more often than they will with a random dungeon)

At most, this suggestion would require players to put large ugly lines of fences around their buildings or to create villages to protect themselves. I personally think this sounds very annoying to deal with since villages require villagers and these villagers would need to be tediously moved all around the world to create spaces safe from daytime mobs without the gigantic fence lines.

However I am also fully aware of another thing which games must follow.

Changing the rules of the game can ruin them, it wouldn't work for chess or poker, or sports, why would it work for any other game?

You're not necessarily changing rules though. While you are making the player deal with more mobs, you haven't actually changed a lot of core functionality of the game.

It's kind of like the "constitution of games" so to speak. There are some changes that work and some which don't.

I've never heard that term before.

Some people actually complained about the aquatic update, but I'm not sure why.

Drowned zombies don't bother me too much, sure the tridents do a lot of damage, but staying away from water if you're not wearing armour can avoid death from it. And if you kill drowned zombies there is a chance to drop a trident and a gold ingot, if I'm not mistaken.

I think you're assuming that players always complain only if the game gets harder. This is not true at all. People complain about changes that are not Minecraft-y enough, changes that are unrealistic, changes that make the game too easy, changes that remove content people are nostalgic for, and sometimes when there are no other good reasons, people will complain that the change just adds unnecessary bloat.

That being said, I've heard people say the drowned zombies are incredibly difficult to fight off and "staying away from water" is not really the advice I want to hear when I want to build my lakeside village near... a lake.

You go into this irrelevant tangent about the Phantom, there was only one line I thought I'd address.

..snip..if players are using beds and you forgot yours while you were traveling, ask them to log out so they can use theirs..snip..

This tangent had no real relevance to my post or to your initial post but I felt like mentioning that using a bed is not convenient for players, just as the gigantic fences or the village-in-every-chunk solutions to hostile daytime mobs would also not be very convenient. A lot of people would like to spend night-time continuing building things or mining without having to sleep every few nights. Sure, the ability to repair an elytra is useful, but I'm not going to Phantom Membranes on my fifth night in the game when I'm busy building my base and finding diamonds. (Which is ultimately the worst part of Phantom Membranes: there's no early-game use despite the fact that an early-game player is probably going to collect a lot if he doesn't actively go out and hunt spiders or sheep.)

I don't feel like you adequately addressed my arguments in my post. I think you should read my post again, figure out what I'm saying about the suggestion and then reply to me again.

Quote from Agtrigormortis»

This suggestion may receive criticism too, I fully understand that nothing is immune to criticism

I understand that you're new to the forum and you probably think that Mojang is reading this forum for ideas, but have you never read somebody else's suggestion before? The replies are all about criticizing and judging the idea.

There have been numerous suggestions on what to do to make Minecraft survival mode more challenging without breaking the game or wasting too much of people's time and effort.

But some of them in my view have been questionable at best, and awful at worst.

To be honest I don't understand this since I play like an idiot and I tend to die a lot. But we'll go with the premise that survival Minecraft isn't difficult enough.

What I would like to see happen is natural predators be the daytime hostile mobs, be it snakes, crocodiles, lions and grizzly bears.

Meaning even day time wouldn't be safe, while these new hostile mobs wouldn't be as dangerous as Creepers or Endermen, they would force you to fight them off from time to time if your area wasn't secure.

I'm not sure this would make the game more difficult, it would just mean the players have to fight more mobs than they usually need to. Even during the day, the player still has to defend his house from creepers and baby zombies.

The way to prevent their spawn would be simple.

Your location has to count as a village, and your territory has to have a fence of some kind to keep the predator mobs outside.

I think this wrongly assumes that I, the player, want to turn my base into a village. There are many cases in which I would like to build a base that does not resemble a village at all, however. I may choose to build a giant underground bunker with a piston blast door, or I may choose to build a glass dome in the sky accessible via minecart elevators and elytra. There are plenty of occasions where my base is not going to consist of lots of doors so that it would qualify as a village.

The fence idea sounds interesting if perhaps you meant to say enclosing an area with a fence would prevent these hostile mobs from spawning, but this requires that the game check the surrounding area for a large fence enclosure whenever it needs to spawn one of these mobs. And again, there are times when I don't really want to put a giant fence around my base.

I think a better way to handle this would be that chunks the player spends long periods of time in will become "domestic" chunks. (And for the sake of keeping Villages safe, when a new Village is generated it will make nearby chunks "domestic") In these "domestic" chunks, hostile mobs whether they be daytime or nighttime mobs will spawn about half as frequently unless the light level is zero. That way you may be able to domesticate the surface, but underground caves will still be dangerous.

[This] is a lot better than turning pillagers into thieves and vandals who smash apart player mansions and loot their chests for everything they earned legitimately and spent a lot of time collecting, when they previously never had to deal with such a threat in the current survival mode gameplay.

If you want vandals, play on an anarchy or grief server.

That's fair on the players who don't want these things in vanilla Minecraft, in my opinion.

I don't necessarily know that anybody supports this. I think someone in the past suggested something similar and got a lot of flak for it, but I'm not entirely sure. However, the fact that someone else's suggestion is worse does not necessarily mean this suggestion is good.


I like some of the ideas in this post, though in its current state I wouldn't support its implementation.

I'm really glad that you decided to make your own textures (I think?) but I don't really like this suggestion.

Knives seem to be only useful for making slices of bread. I'm not really sure why you decided to add knives when you could've just written it so you can craft bread into 4 slices the way you can with blocks of metal. For that matter, I'm not really sure why we need sliced bread either. I know that the texture is a loaf of bread, but I feel like we'd save on unnecessary items by just using one piece of bread in the recipe and implying that it's a hoagie/sub roll or whatever.

I like the idea of combining the little images to make a sandwich texture, though I feel like these sandwiches aren't very useful without the spreads, which I actually think are an interesting idea. Personally I think potions are underpowered, especially health potions. I feel like being able to spread health potion sauce on my sandwich would actually be a far better use for health potions.

That being said, I think perhaps there are other ways to implement this such as putting the potion in Mushroom Soup or using it as a dressing in a salad food item, and I feel like the sandwich on its own is rather pointless unless you're in a situation where you've let your hunger drop to 0 and you need to fill it immediately, otherwise those extra hunger points are entirely wasted.

I'm not sure I'm entirely a fan of this idea. Some of the aspects of gold-plated redstone seem useful, but...

• How do you apply gold plates to a pile of dust?
• Given the visual aid, how would this "gold-plated" dust repel water? I could understand if maybe the gold acted as a jacket or a pipe, but that seems not to be the case.
• It seems like while this could stop some accidents, a player intentionally trying to cause damage could mine the block underneath the gold-plated redstone or quite easily get an iron pickaxe.
• One gold ingot per redstone dust seems incredibly expensive.

I think a better implementation would be if redstone could be inserted into a block like obsidian, creating pipes for redstone dust. These pipes could float in the air, be waterlogged and could only be mined with a diamond pickaxe.

I see a simple solution to this:

- Crafting sticks in a 2x2 shape will give you composite wood

- Composite wood can craft doors, trapdoors, etc and has a hue in-between Oak and Spruce.

- Composite wood's doors and trapdoors would have a simple, generic feel to them. The door would be a bland flat door possibly useful for closets and bedrooms/bathrooms where something like Dark Oak or Spruce would look off.

While I think on their own some of these would be nice to plant in a giant field such as the corn, I don't think Minecraft really needs new food in its current state. The game does not encourage eating new foods, and in fact, it instead encourages eating the most powerful food item you can craft if possible.

Going through this list:

Corn is a food item I could see being very useful. The mod you stole a screenshot of actually makes those corn plants difficult to walk through like cobwebs, which makes them actually useful for corn mazes. I think it'd also be interesting if corn brewed a Thick Potion, which would then be used in brewing certain types of potions. (This would be in reference to Corn's use in High Fructose Corn Syrup)

Rice, while it might be nice for the Chinese audience that wanted the Panda, would not be as useful as a food item. We already have one grain crop, and while the idea of sashimi sounds nice, I don't know that it's enough to justify a new crop at this moment in time.

Fruit Trees are very unnecessary. While I like the idea of taking Apples off Oak Trees and having fruit tree leaves that could be reused as "leaves with Christmas Ornaments", I don't think we need 5 new kinds of fruit.

Using Garlic to fend off zombies sounds like an interesting idea, but crops need a consumable use and this isn't one.

We don't really need new berries, although it's worth noting that Strawberries grow on vines which might at least make it an interesting crop to farm.

I don't see a particularly good need for pineapples. Maybe if you could place them they might make a nice tropical decoration, but I think that's still a stretch.

Pumpkin Variants sound interesting, and I like the idea of the new torches, but I don't really see the point in purple melons or white pumpkins. At most I could see how a white pumpkin might be useful as a skull-like decoration in conjunction with some bone blocks, but I still don't know that I'd get a lot of use out of it.

I don't have a problem with new flowers. I do think it'd be nice if the game placed them nicely though. It might be nice if Minecraft would generate fields of flowers on plains out of complimentary colors.

I don't like having to use scarecrows to keep my crops safe. I think they might make a nice decoration, but I don't want to have to either find and grow corn or put my crops in a greenhouse in order to keep them safe, that seems like a dumb requirement.

I don't have a problem with cheese, but it needs to be more useful than you've presented.

I like palm trees, but I don't think the game needs coconuts at the moment.

I like the idea of candles, though I think it'd be more interesting if you made candles out of tallow dropped from pigs. This would give pigs an alternative use as right now their sole use is to provide meat when you can't find any nearby cows.

To conclude, I like some of the ideas presented, but I think you need to show that some of these new foods can be more useful than just sprites we shove in our face, whether this be by making the crop itself useful or by making the food item useful in things like potions or non-food crafting recipes.

I sort of like the idea albeit I think I can propose a bit of an upgrade to the idea:

Netherrack Furnace: Made from 8 Netherrack the way you would craft furnaces or chests. It allows you to smelt all items a furnace can cook.

Netherforge: Made from 7 Nether Bricks and 1 Gold Block. (Nether Scraps are kinda expensive for a blast furnace copy.) This would act as you suggest, smelting ores and Netherrack quickly, possibly with some additional crafting recipes or benefits. (Maybe smelting Netherite tools in the Netherforge would give them some kind of super-powered version of Fire Aspect for a brief period of time, doing additional damage?)

The benefit to either would be:

- Fitting in aesthetically with other Nether blocks

- Being able to craft them with materials found in the Nether, in the event you don't have Overworld materials on hand.

Support.

I despise this idea put out by Mojang that vertical slabs would "inhibit natural creativity", while at the same time they add blocks in all 16 colors of dye... four times. (Both Hardened Clay and Concrete were added because the previous 16-color block wasn't satisfactory)

Now, I won't pretend to not understand the argument that restricting what the player can do with his materials encourages creativity, and I agree with that. Building in Minecraft is more fun than 3D modeling in actual 3D modeling software, and part of that has to do with the fact that the player is placing down blocks in a first-person view, and that he needs to get creative when certain blocks can only exist in certain conditions, or when certain types of blocks are not available. (This is especially true of furniture)

That being said, it's not like Mojang is drawing a clear line in the sand between what stuff they will add and what stuff they won't add, and why they draw the line there. For example, Mojang claims that they don't want to add furniture, but we already have multiple pieces of furniture within the game, including non-functional items like flower pots and paintings. You could say that some of these are necessary such as bookshelves which no amount of "natural creativity" can really replace given all of Minecraft's other blocks, but I would argue that there are plenty of chairs, stools, tables, beds, etc. which also cannot be satisfactorily represented by the blocks provided in the game. Unfortunately, Mojang has drawn an arbitrary line where chairs, tables, stools, etc. cannot be added, but flower pots, paintings, bookshelves, etc. can be.

I would argue the same is true of vertical slabs. We already have horizontal slabs and stairs, it would logically follow that vertical slabs would be in the game. In addition, unlike chairs, stools, and tables, vertical slabs would be useful in tons of situations as opposed to the one or two that new furniture items would be useful for. Want to make rounder circles? Thinner walls? More detailed fake furniture? Want to add some extra detail to your wall? Perhaps you want to take your current house and build a sideways version?

There are plenty of reasons to add vertical slabs, far more than furniture or more 16-color blocks. (Though concrete slabs and stairs would be nice)

Support.

This is Jay the Mouse.

Jay just completed his big new house! It has two bedrooms and a big balcony for staring into the abyss:

Jay has a problem, however: his house is very big and he is very small. Jay tried asking other people to live with him in his house, but he had some issues with his potential housemates:

Standy the Stand:

Standy was very nice but also very quiet. To make matters worse, if you right-clicked her face it would pop off and you'd have to stick it back on. She never wants to follow Jay on an expedition or anything and just keeps making that confused blank face.

Villy the Villager

Villy was not as nice. He kept sleeping in Jay's bed and kept trying to get Jay to make some shady trading deals. He kept making grunting noises and when Jay wanted him to go on an adventure, he tried to offer him a loan on two pieces of redstone with a small down payment of 99.99 emeralds. Clearly he was not a fit roommate.

Jay tried asking other players to play with him, but nobody wants to play with the lonely mouse.

That's where a new mod comes in...

Posse: A mod for people with no friends!

The Posse mod would add a new mob, the Party Member. You might be tempted to call them an NPC, but that would be an inaccurate name as we'll see later.

Appearance:

The Party Member looks exactly like a player, albeit perhaps with a nametag colored light gray or yellow or in italics to remove some confusion.

In Survival Mode, the Party Member will spawn with a few included skins based on Steve and Alex and with some names included in a configuration file.

In Creative Mode, the player can customize the skin and name, either using some of the included skins or an online image. (Perhaps additionally, Party Members spawned in survival mode can also spawn with skins if the URLs are linked in the config file.)

Behavior:

What separates these Party Members from NPCs is that the player can swap places with them using a configurable keybind, similar to how one might do so in a Lego game:

On the technical side, the player will swap skins, inventories, and his position with this mob, giving the appearance that the player is now playing as the Party Member and the player's first character has become a Party Member.

In Survival Mode, Party Members can be instructed to either stay in place or come along with you. They act very similarly to tamed wolves when following you in that they attack hostile mobs and players that attack the player. If the player enters a boat, the Party Member will attempt to get in a boat in order to follow, placing one down from its inventory if necessary. If the player enters a Nether Portal, the Party Member will also attempt to enter the Nether Portal. Party Members will drop their inventory if killed (unless keepInventory is turned on) and respawn at their "Party Host's" bed.

If the Party Member cannot travel to wherever the player is or if the player dies, they will switch into "stay here" mode and alert the player that they can't pathfind to where they are. This is to make sure that Party Members do not act like portable ender chests.

In Creative Mode, additional options are provided allowing you to give more advanced commands to Party Members such as sitting down, sleeping in beds, saying certain lines of dialogue in chat when they are being interacted with by another player, or performing some kind of action, etc. You can also customize certain entity tags such as Invulnerability.

Spawning

In Survival mode, all Party Members are found in Villages in a "lonely" state. In this state, they will not respawn and do not have a "Party Host", and they act somewhat like Nitwit villagers. This can be changed by paying them a small price of a couple of emeralds to get them to join your Party, at which point they will immediately begin following you around.

In Creative Mode, Party Members can be spawned in via Spawn Egg and upon right-clicking on them, you need only click a button to get them to join your party, however, you may customize them without letting them join your party.

Bonus Points:

• It might be interesting if you could tell a Party Member to avoid common mob traps like pressure plates or open trapdoors if at all possible unless the pathfinder can't find a way around.
• In addition to this, it might be helpful if Party Members avoided some of the pitfalls that normal mobs tend to fall for, for example, they will not attempt to pathfind into another Party Member, possibly knocking them into a fall or lava. Party Members should actively try to avoid death in "Stay Here" mode too, trying to fend off mobs if they attack and fight for ground on small platforms if mobs try to push them off.
• It might also be interesting if the Party Member had the ability to jump over 1 or 2 block gaps.
• Party Members can be taught to prefer more powerful (Diamond/Enchanted Sword), less expensive (Snowballs), or less dangerous (Bow) weapons and whether or not to automatically attack mobs.
• In addition to the previous point, if a Party Member is using a sword, it might be interesting if they were able to intentionally try and get critical hits when possible.
• I feel like the ability for Party Members to mine blocks is overpowered, though potentially this could be allowed through a config. (This wouldn't be some kind of difficult-to-code intelligent system, more like "Please mine this area from coordinates ABC to coordinates XYZ")
• Support for some weapons, tools, and armor from other mods like Immersive Engineering or Simply Jetpacks might be nice. Elytra support goes under this heading too.
• MorePlayerModel support would be nice.
• Possibly limited to Creative mode, but it would be useful if you could configure which skin overlays are being displayed on a Party Member through a GUI of some kind, similar to how the player can customize his/her own.
• Seeing as this mod is called "Posse", which is a term often associated with cowboys... well... it only makes sense to add a new armor item.

Quote from GDog_0»

They added blast furnaces for ores only for a reason. They made the time faster, but lowered the experience. Regular blocks usually don't give much experience, so this would be an unbalanced suggestion. I don't really think there is a very good way to get around the unbalance of this.

No support.

What exactly is the balance problem here? That you'll earn less experience from smelting the same amount of sand, just in a faster period of time?

The Minecraft Wiki seems to say nothing about blast furnaces having XP loss, but a quick Google search shows other users saying that the blast furnace gives only half of the XP while cooking twice as fast. This seems balanced enough, you're getting the same amount of XP/unit of time, vs XP/unit smelted. (Personally though I don't see why it'd be so bad if it still rewarded the same amount of XP, unless this is what you want?)

The houses of the "inhabitants" (by which I assume you mean the Villagers) are meant to be simplistic. Not every house in the village is meant to act as a used, inhabited house because the Villagers are not programmed with an idea of property ownership, just a simple AI to hide indoors and sleep in a bed when darkness arrives.

Fortunately very recently, Mojang has changed villages to include more useful houses, as almost every house contains a workstation a villager needs to stand next to in order to restock their trade items. I think this is about as advanced of property management as we can hope for the intentionally simplistic Villager AI, unless you have a more detailed suggestion on how it could be better implemented.

Quote from SmugSmirk»

It's an aesthetic addition. What intelligent argument are you supposed to come up with?

Well for one, an argument that engages the counterarguments as my post did. An argument contains three things: a claim, evidence or reasoning for the claim, and a rebuttal to counterarguments. The argument here presents a claim, 'we should add furniture to Minecraft', but doesn't go into detail about the reasons for adding furniture or making a rebuttal of any the counterarguments. (It does try to compromise with the minimalism complaint a bit when it says "Designs for furniture don't have to be complicated...", but other than that it's not making a strong case.)

Quote from Wolftopia»

I think furniture should be customizable, but without hundreds of items. We can have "in-world crafting."

I would disagree a little bit here, I think better than 100s of complex variants consisting of lots of combinations, I think it'd be better to have a few chairs that suit almost all needs, for example a [future C1ff here: I accidentally skipped to the next point without finishing this sentence, sorry]

While not necessary, it's also nice when furniture serves a real purpose, such as beds letting you skip the night, chairs (in my suggestion) letting you skip the day, bookshelves enhancing enchanting tables, doors keeping out mobs, etc.

For the record, I would actually argue bookshelves are an example of a furniture item that should be in the game because of the limitations of 1x1 meter blocks, even if purely for aesthetics. They are the only block that represents a bunch of items on shelves. (I think more shelf blocks would be nice too, a bunch of glass bottles or plates or something would be nice)

I think it's okay to have a furniture item in Minecraft if it fits a relatively medieval to mid-industrial-age style and it's very difficult or impossible to represent with blocks on a player-scale. (And as long as it's something the general public would understand, obviously a vague unknown piece of machinery would be out of place)