Incredible work of effectively reviving the old mechanics and adding some new ones to boot.Quote from WildBamaBoy
Few things to think on, just so I add my piece of the community perspective of this project here:
1) I think the skeleton spiders should be coded differently. They are not attack spiders, they are more like sniping spiders designed to help you web things. The advantage of using them is that they have infinite webbing, and you the player do not. Make them cower away from danger, and only defend themselves if directly attacked. That way all they do is shoot web, back up, shoot web, back up. It would make their special ability far more utilized, and change up the game of how players decide which spiders to hatch into their brood. I also vaguely remember either these or the string-producing baby spiders being healers. If you go with A.I. behavior like this where the spider prefers to keep its distance and shoot webs with the player (as that will be the players go-to offensive at the stage of gameplay where these guys are playing a real role in the players brood), then it would make much more sense, not to mention they would live longer by deliberately avoiding direct contact with enemies at all times.
Either that, or make a new spider entirely just to get a bit more variety in what spiders you can create. For alpha, you could just steal the skeleton spider and give it a new skin with no level-up capabilities. Because, if you ask me, 4 and 5 and 6 mobs all producing the same type of stock teal-eyed spider is kind of a let down. The POINT of the mod, and what makes it so appealing to talk about, is the freedom the player has to build and actively maintain their own little army of monster spiders. The more spider variety, the better the mod is all I'm saying. I don't mean to sound ignorant of what kind of strain some of these suggestions would put on the coder(s) of The Spider Queen Reborn.
2) Poison webs should not do nothing to you. Now, obviously they should not poison or damage you, but they should cause nausea for 2 seconds upon contact. Meaning if you create a web made out of poison silk, you will have constant nausea and lose hunger much faster. This will prevent them from becoming the go-to webs in a later game where the player has nothing but resources for their nest. It needs to have a very subtle downside (other than the slightly more expensive crafting recipe, obviously) so that natural webbing is still valid when the player builds an empire of a hive.
3) Nightvision. It needs to be toned down or more manually coded. A fraction of the fun of being a spider is to make yourself a deep dark hole and build up a nest in it. If everything is fully lit at all times, it doesn't give as cozy of an atmosphere or as snug of a vibe to people building up their nests. Especially underground. Here is what you should probably do. You COULD increase visibility in the dark slightly, but the main thing would be, and picture this: Bioluminescence.
Like the lanterns were for the old spider queen, create an entirely new lighting entity that works like a very short-range but plenty-bright torch. Make it cheap to create, so players can essentially decorate their nests with little colonies of light, placing these spores perhaps around their spider-bed, or hatchery, or at the entrance, or simply on the ceilings for aesthetic appeal to their bug abode. Not only would this allow players to decide the lighting atmosphere of their own home, but if you felt like it, you could flesh this concept out REALLY well. Maybe even add bioluminescent spiders to hatch off of villagers (or another easily accessible mob of vanilla variety) which produce greater quantities of these little 'light spores' players can then place on any surface, be it wall floor or ceiling, in any cluster or quantity. (Yes, much like the glow-worms in Twilight Forest.)
Not only would this give an amplified decorative option to players (that would have a legitimate purpose, unlike paintings and such), but it could also be a very strategic fix for a few problems that even the old mod had.
For players who have large nests, how can they prevent unwanted mobs from spawning in their darkened areas? Simple (now). Code the 'glow spores' to have a sort of 'no random spawning' zone around them. Make the zone rather large (much larger than the light reaches) so players aren't forced to spam glow spores in order to solidify their territory (as that would reduce the 'decoration freedom' of these little blobs of light).
And as for the leveling up, I am very impressed. It puts even MORE emphasis on building up a swarm and maintaining it to achieve greater power and presence.
4) One small thought I had to make the creeper spiders make a bit more sense, though, is to instead of having them explode (but do no damage to the player or friendly spiders), have them burst a large explosive secretion out of their abdomen (backmost segment of the body). Just use the -player falls from great height- spreading particles effect to portray this, or maybe snatch something from the fireworks, just for alpha and what not.
This would easier explain why the spider can survive exploding multiple times, and why the goop does no damage to the player or other spiders in the players brood.
This could also be convenient for later levels of the creeper spider. Perhaps in level 2 or 3, the secretion blast from the abdomen will heal all friendly spiders in the blast radius by 5 or 10 hearts, or something.
If you aren't careful with how you make the creeper spiders, and you just make them suicide tanks that do no damage to the player or friendly spiders around them (like I'm assuming they will be in a steady alpha) then players will just want to spam these, as they are the most powerful in their weakest newly hatched forms, and would rarely die with the more things they attack as they leveled up. But at the same time, if you keep them as dangerous and annoying as they are portrayed to be in this WIP video, having a legitimately to-scale creeper blast radius, and doing damage to the player, other friendly spiders, and potentially itself, then NO player will EVER want to hatch these things in a real game. That was the issue with these in the old Spider Queen. They were so dangerous nobody wanted them around their brood. One stray foe mob, and they would explode and sometimes take out your entire hatchery, or worse, depending on if their explosions could damage blocks or placeables around them or not.
Mind the balancing with spiders like this, as cool as the concept may be, I think it needs revision deduced through some proper playtesting of the brood behavior and effectiveness.
5) For the ender spiders, I think simply teleporting around is not significant enough to make it worth hunting down endermen. They are essentially just stock teal-eyed spiders that can zip around. This sounds cool, but from a usefulness perspective, it really isn't and here's the main reason why. The teleporting mechanic of Endermen is only cool and fun because it's designed to be a challenge for players to adapt to. Minecraft A.I. does not need to adapt, it doesn't think like a human, which this mechanic was coded exclusively for.
Minecraft A.I. by default simply walks on a path-finding route to the mob it is after in a hostile state. Even if something teleports, the moment it rematerializes, that same mob goes straight after it, even if a 180 is necessary. Minecraft A.I. (which is what these spiders will be used to combat) doesn't think like a human. It doesn't get confused if its target vanishes and reappears behind it. It, again, simply turns around immediately, and continues the fight as though the teleport didn't even phase its concentration. If the spider teleports around during combat, a few things could happen, and only one of which might actually be useful.
A) The spider teleports too quickly, and its foe simply ignores the teleport, locking its focus on the entity that is the ender spider. This negates the purpose of teleporting, and gives NO advantage to the ender spider for its primary ability.
The spider teleports too slowly, and the player is too close to the targeted hostile mob. The mob will CHANGE focus from the ender spider who is now out of the picture, and will go straight for the player, doing unexpected damage, because the player was not anticipating for the ender spider to be gone for so long, or teleport at that exact moment. This would make the player have to keep its distance, which is rare to happen because the player often wants to fight along side his/her brood, not sit back and let them potentially die or take more damage than necessary. I understand if this is the exact concept you want players to utilize for these guys, but I just feel it could be done a bit better.C) The spider teleports at just the right duration, making the targeted hostile mob shift focus from the ender spider to another spider or the player, and then reappears just in time to get a sneak attack in when the mob is no longer focused on the ender spider.
Because the duration of an endermans teleport is dependent on the environment the target (player, in this case) is currently in, you cannot guarantee this will work perfectly everytime. Endermen are kind of difficult to kill, especially if you don't have too much experience with how to handle them. Ender spiders need to be more useful and rewarding to achieve in your brood as a hatchable troop.
Here's just one idea I thought might give it plenty of diversity from just another 'lunge and attack with a twist' function, like literally every single spider has right now.
Utilize the endermites concept recently introduced to Minecraft. Make enderspiders circle their prey, but keep a health distance, and teleport constantly. Everytime the enderspider rematerializes, it brings with it a miniature ender spider. A sort of endermite sized spider, even smaller than the silk producing nova spiders.
The ender spider would essentially create it's own little swarm as the fight went on, circling the victim and popping in 'enderlings' that charge and nip at the target. Its function is sort of similar to my suggestion for skeleton spiders, as it deliberately keeps its distance, but it stays within a set distance. It's goal is not to keep away, it's goal is to keep away but keep close enough as well while it constantly spawns in little minitroops to distract the target(s) as well as avoid my earlier foreseen problems of it teleporting in the wrong duration, and having a negative combat effect half the time based on the environment which ender teleporting is dependent on for functionality.
And finally...
6) Silk Spider Variety. Cocooning a blaze should create a silk spider that produces flame-webbing, meaning these webs can withstand lava and fire, which allows players to cancel out lava flows at a distance, or put out flames without having to run up to them and punch them like in vanilla Minecraft. They can also, obviously, set things on fire on contact (this may need balancing though, such as having flame-webbing deteriorate and disappear after setting something on fire, and also not being able to be stacked up for flame-web ladders or flame-web blocks. This nerfs them into an exclusively defensive mechanic)
The trick is, blazes burn regular webbing, and cannot be cocooned in regular webballs. Instead, you must craft flame-webbing to capture a blaze, effectively allowing players to unlock infinite (but still gradual) production of augmented webbing after crafting it themselves. Same principle as regular webbing; Have to make some yourself before you can make silk spiders to produce more for you over time.
This concept should be applied to poison webbing as well, obviously. Perhaps some string and red and brown mushrooms mixed with a bunch of spider eyes to craft 3 poison webballs (forcing players to attack enemy spiders to collect enough spider eyes, meaning you risk a bad relation with the evil spider queen in order to achieve poison webbing). And maybe the trick with poison webbing cocoons is that they are SIGNIFICANTLY weaker, and more designed to be like throw-placeable cacti or little poison mines. This means no mob can be cocooned by poison webbing except an infant version of certain weak or neutral mobs (baby villager, baby sheep, baby cow, etc). This isn't too easy to do but gives enough challenge to make it time-consuming but worth it for players to achieve infinite (but still gradual) poison webbing production through poison silk spiders.
This also can potentially force players to utilize the breeding aspect. Seeing as The Spider Queen Reborn will drastically change how players play Minecraft, this also means it minimizes certain mechanics, such as animal breeding. Granted you still need food, but requiring a baby version of a particular mob in order to unlock production of poison webbing would give breeding a new purpose. And while I'm on this topic, I also think neutral mobs should actively be afraid of you, and run from you on sight. This would sort of equalize the challenge between breeding a baby who can't break out of a poison webbing cocoon, and FINDING a baby naturally spawning that can't break out of a poison webbing cocoon.
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With all that touched on for some legitimate, thorough feedback, I'll leave it at that for now in terms of potential design direction.
This is looking quite fantastic and I'm thankful my map I started over a year ago which relies on the spider queen mod won't be all for nothing when it's finished. Keep up the great work, this is looking quite ambitious.
. If you inscribed the right pattern you will get a special scroll that will give the player some special fancy powers when right clicked
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A shame all the work on this is only being done on 1.10.2. There's so many things that need to be addressed in the 1.7.10 version.
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Another legacy mod down. Sad to see the modding community on the decline, but it had a pretty damn good run.
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Porting is a waste of time in my opinion. Finish the mod for the version it's been worked on for the past year.
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Already? Doesn't he have other mods to work on as well?
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I'd rather just stick to not trusting Minecraft AI to do anything intelligent.
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Your problem is having a Mac.
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Vote for the unelectable.