The reason why wheat doesn't grow fast is because you didn't put near water.
It grows,but not as fast.
Put your wheat closely to the water or add more water to the farmland.
That water is plenty close to irrigate that wheat. It doesn't have to be directly adjacent.
-------------
What time scales are we talking here?
they never were, you always had a random chance to get screwed, maybe your entire world got unlucky, but that's no reason to suspect some outside change.
Considering the probabilities involved in an entire map generating much less diamond than normal, yes, there is reason to suspect outside change. Not enough to confirm it, but if I rolled a dice that many times and had heevily skewed results, I would be mighty suspicious about the fairness of the die.
Eh...Actually, it's pretty horrible. Horizontal lunar phases should be impossible with the moon being 180 degrees away from the sun at all times; the position of the moon is what determines how the sun shines upon it and thus the lunar phase. Therefore, looking at the moon is uber creepy; think of looking at something in the real world which has a changing shadow cast upon it without a visible source for the shadow.
However, there is good news: I've tested my new HD moon phases, and they scale properly (at least with MCPatcher). So, we can make lunar phases a change in how close the moon is (Majora's Mask, anyone?), the color (you can make every 10th day a blood moon, for example), the details (face on the moon changes appearance) or simply repeat an image to remove them altogether
The cosmology of minecraft has never made sense. Ever.
If you've ever spent 40 on an enchantment you have wasted your time. You realize that tool won't live forever right? I mean, even with super-unbreaking ONE day you will drop it in lava or a creeper will blow it up. If you honestly spend time trying to drop 40 on every enchantment, you have wasted your time. Not everyone shares your position. I think the average person spends closer to six to 10 when they want a more powerful enchantment. Additionally, they are optional. The game is still fully playable without enchanting everything. You are correct, you are wasting time trying to get Efficiency III on a pick ax you could've used to finish the job while you were grinding.
That just makes it worse. even if you do get lucky and get the value of your levels, it will go away after a while, and you have to repeat the cycle. Spending 40-50 levels on an enchantment is very expensive. But if you do, you should get something for it. Not maybe get something for it. Its too expensive and infrequent of an investment to amortize properly. Mining for diamonds is chance that occurs very frequently, near-continuously while spelunking or mining, and so the uncertainty levels out. With this system, there is no long-term to balance it out over.
You spend resources, and you are not guaranteed to get your value out of them. Imagine if you spent diamonds to make some equipment, and most of the time you just get iron equipment instead. That would be an awful mechanic. This is the same, only its put under the label of magic.
And this is even further compounded by silk touch. A very desirable, useful enchantment, that (as far as I have heard) you can only get in the 30+ range. If you are lucky.
And I have not said enchantments have ruined or harmed the game. Them being optional is completely besides the point. It is done poorly. The enchantments themselves seem fun and useful. The cost of the table is fine. Getting experience is fine. Spending the experience and not getting your proper value out of it is not fine.
Your levels aren't wasted. You have have a CHANCE at a good enchant, but no matter what you get a decent enchant.
Besides, this release has only been out a couple days. How do you know exactly what's worth the levels? Especially when the supposed "worth" will be changing once the other parts of the game are done.
Give it time and quit complaining.
Unless you're getting Efficiency III at level 1 somehow and randomly you got Efficiency I at level 40.. then shut up. Really.
but when you could be getting an efficiency III unbreaking V fortune II pick for that much, it IS wasted. You have to spend a lot to have a CHANCE to get something like that, but you get something that is only marginally better than a level 1 enchantment, those extra levels are completly wasted. What is the benefit of an efficiency III over an efficiency I? It mines slightly faster. the time it takes to get 40 xp is a lot more than the time you save, by several orders of magnitude. Hence, that time was WASTED.
Right, but.. you obviously do have better enchants the higher up you go.
Once the other systems are in place and potentially levels 30+ enchants are easier to come by. Say, through questing and defeating bosses.
At that point the random factor isn't nearly as bad.
They do get better... overall. if you are lucky. Somebody in another thread spend 40 levels, and got an efficiency III. That is nowhere near worth 40 levels.
The part we do have to play with works fine. Once we have more XP income in the game and they add more potions and enchants, which I'm positive they're doing. Then it should be even better.
Doomsayers in general are lame. You can't predict a game that's in a permanent development mode because they can't read minds.
I'm not even talking about the xp rate. I'm talking about the randomness. Its awful. You can spend 50 points on a sword and get something awesome, or something relatively pathetic. So if you spend the 50 poitns nad get something pathetic, you have wasted all of that effort getting the xp, and you have to try again. And this is made worse, because the first tie, the xp was probably gained organically while playing thrugh the game, adn the second time you will end up grinding for it.
Still this isn't an excuse for a feature to be poorly implemented. You could say the same thing about villagers.
Also I doubt it was designed to be an end-game feature, considering the wide range of enchants avaiable (1-49) and materials needed to craft a table are "mid-gamish", unlike alchemy where the moment you get the tools to make a brewing stand you already got all the materials to make every potion in the game.
It may be poorly done, but the doomsayers were still wrong.
What I see is that the people that said having experience would ruin the game are having the game ruined because of an experience system that: 1)looks like it's going to be here to stay due to feature-freeze and 2) looks like it's going to be a ridiculously un-fun grind-a-thon.
That's not irony, that's an accurate prediction of disaster.
To be fair, the doomsayers thought that it would ruin the basic gameplay, and you would have to grind to be able to get higher level tools and such. As it is, its a end-game bonus that allows for more boosts. Whatever flaws it may have, it doesn't damage anything else in the game.
And the feature freeze is only going last about a month. they feature freeze, bug fix and optimize, release, vacation, then continue development.
Really? Have you looked at all of the evidence?
1. Jeb's development of potions was very transparent, even having multiple different schemes before settling in on the current one. The first one was complex and had to have been designed, not just thrown together. If this was just a smokescreen for copying a mod, then they did MORE effort to copy the mod than to develop their own system.
2. The end result doesn't even resemble the mod. The only stimulatory is that potions are the typical flask-shape, which is itself based on tons of previous games. There is no brewing stand, potions are crafted normally, and the effects are completely different.
3. When Notch and Jeb do incorporate a mod, they are open about it. They talk with the mod creators, they credit them, and everyone knows that the feature used to be a mod. They where open about the pistons, the lighting, if you look on reddit he specifically mentions talking to the creator of the zipline mod after minecon.
4. Why would they they steal a mod when they are perfectly willing to officially incorporate it? What purpose would that serve?
I know I am replying to a post on the first page of five, but I just have to ask a question. Have you ever played a Roguelike? If not I would suggest looking them up. The reason I say this is because Notching looooooooooooooves these kind of games and has stated in multiple interviews that he wants Minecraft to be more and more like a roguelike. The original potion crafting was very roguelike, and having magic being completely unknowable as it is now is very much something you would find in a roguelike. I think it adds a bit of risk to the game play and keeps you fighting to gain levels to get that coveted silktouch enchanted diamond pick you always wanted. :smile.gif:
Let us all be happy that Notch hasn't added a random chance of choking on that pork-chop your character crams down his throat, potions randomly going bad in your inventory without telling you or a chance to trip down your steps and breaking your neck. :tongue.gif:
I have played rougelikes. They are an interesting mix of brilliant and horrible game design. Its really not the random aspect that bothers me so much as the likelyhood that you can spend a ton of resources and have it seriously flop on you. Even if you can't get precisely what you want, you shouldn't get something with a fraction of the value. A game that forces you to play through it repeatedly to get what you want is NOT good design. That is grinding,one of the worst game design elements ever conceived. Up till now, minecraft has managed to deftly avoid grinding, despite being built in a way that would be prone to it. If you want resources for something, you only need to harvest that many resources. You have a ton of options on how you go about gathering those resources, some of which are admittedly grinding, but those were never the only way, and never the best way. You also only needed to gather as many resources as you needed.
This enchantment system undermines that. you gather resources by killing mobs. To a certain degree, you will get experience naturally through the normal progression through the game. That is fine, and that baseline level of experience is what you should be able to freely work with. Moving beyond that level means you are now grinding for experience. If you have to be kept playing by having you keep fighting to gain levels to get the silktouch enchantment, the game design has failed. Yes, it is keeping you interacting with the game for longer, but it is keeping you from actually playing it. If I am playing minecraft, I am playing it to build and explore. I explore caves, thereby fighting mobs, and locating ores, there by feeding my need for resources. I use those resources to build, add in farms to increase my resources, and prepare for a journey to explore the nether. I delve into the nether, explore and conquer it, and haul back its resources. =At every step, I am actively advancing through the game, moving on to new experiences.
As soon as I try to make an enchantment and have it flop, that portion of my efforts are undone. I don't have the item I need. Those experience points are wasted. To recover, I have to go and grind on mobs. Instead of progressing through the game, I am now backstepping and redoing the work I have already done. I might be interacting with the game, but I am facing a roadblock to continue playing the game. I don't want to keep fighting to gain silktouch. I want the silktouch when I earned it, not to get stuck in a loop of grinding experience, trying to enchant, and failing to get what I need. Thats not playing the game. That is grinding, and its evil. That is just wasting my time. I, like many people, only have a limited amount of time I can spend on games. There are many games I want to spend my time on, so making me grind your game is bad. Its not fun. Its boring and repetitive, and it gets in the way of actually playing the game. If the game takes 100 hours to complete, it should have 100 hours of content, not 10 hours of content and 90 hours of grinding. Invalidating your efforts just extends the game time without extending gameplay.
Especially when the game is minecraft, and there are already hundreds of hours of gameplay in it, you don't need to artificially extend it.
A good middle ground would be great. If they made more restrictions on what can be gained at certain levels, to decrease the massive range of the randomness, while maintaining the fun aspect of the randomness. So as a simple example, at 20+ you no longer see Level I's, at 30+ you no longer see level II's, and 40+ you no longer see level III's. (Following the rules of course, since some can't get that high, but are clearly worth while) And then maybe every 5 levels in (25+, 35+, 45+) it's impossible to only receive one enchantment, minimum being two, before it hits the next tier. That would guarantee you wouldn't be wasting the levels, but maintain a very random outcome.
Again, just a simple example I came up with while writing the post, but it would do the job more or less.
That would be much better.
If we compare this to the binding of isaac, I think we can draw some interesting comclusions. For those of you who haven't played it, its essentially a rougelike arena shooter. you have random leels, and part of that is random loot. The random loot is both its flaw and its strength. One one hand, its fun to get random bonuses, and play through with a different set of abilities. On the other hand, its really annoying when it gives you 5 range upgrades(they really aren't that useful. 1 or 2 are good, but past that they are pointless), when you really need some more health.
What you need is for the magnitude of your bonuses to stay in the proper range to maintain balance, while maintaining the unpredictability of what it does to keep it interesting.
Your suggestion would seem to address it nicely.
Seriously? The materials required place it on the later side of the game's progression, but you aren't going to have a zillion xp to spend on things by that point
Also, you can spend up to 50 xp per enchantment, enchant 4 peices of armour, a sword, and pick (just as a basic set), and soend 300 skill points in one go. It does not take anywhere near that long to make an enchantment table.
If you have way too much experience before you can accumulate those materials, you must not be trying to get them very hard.
So a few facts that I have gathered from reading through this thread.
1) Names will always be completly random
2) Names have nothing to do with the enchantment you get, you can get "Cold Nose" 2 times in a row with different enchantment effects each time
3) Level requirements only give you a chance to have better enchants, you can still spend 40 levels and get a lvl 1 useless enchantment
Now a question would be, once the randon name and level price is generated, is that enchantment then set in stone for that button? Or is it randomized once you actualy click the enchantment button?
If the enchantment is generated at the time the random names are created, I bet there is a way to display the true enchantment you are going to get before clicking the botton.
AKA True Enchantment Name Mod
if you are modding it, you can make it show the enchantment regardless of whether it decided it before or after. You just mod it to decide first if it didn't already.
I spent a long time EXP grinding to get 50 levels, and I put them all into a pickaxe (after about ten minutes of sifting through the randomness). Its only property is Efficiency IV. What does the "IV" mean in this case? The wiki isn't clear. It says that Efficiency gives a 10% boost to mining speed. Does that mean Efficiency IV is a 40% boost?
Perhaps more importantly, is getting only Efficiency IV a good deal in this process?
I think I agree that though these should be random, there shouldn't be the question of higher levels giving better results. Higher levels should always give better results. If enchanting didn't require as much as it did, I'd be inclined to think otherwise. But as much time as is necessary, your efforts need to be rewarded. And you don't feel that if you get something you know isn't worth the levels that you paid.
Honestly, I wouldn't be as miffed with the randomness if it was at least reliable. Two high level enchantments can be all over the board in terms of what they give you, both in terms of total number of enchantments and their levels, and in terms of how useful that actually is.Ifyou could spend 50 levels and reliably get 50 levels worth of enchantment, it wouldn't be so bad. Thats the issue that started this thread, you don't know if you are going to get something worthwhile.
Then why don't you just get a **** ton of experience, and use NBTedit to get rid of the experience and give you a really powerful item.
I personally much much much prefer the random system. I think it's really the only way to accommodate the entire spectrum of minecraft players.
Seriously guys, this is a new mechanic of the game and it's difficult, which is good. If it were any less difficult, there'd be thousands of people (probably the same people who are bitching now) bitching about it being too overpowered. Additionally, consider how it was before. You'd kill thousands of monsters, get 0 XP, not be able to enchant ****, and you were perfectly content with your diamond tools. Now that you're able to make them stronger, albeit through much hardship, you're crying about it. YOU HAVEN'T LOST ANYTHING. THIS WASN'T A TRADE-OFF. Notch gave you an extra ability in the game without limiting any others. He just made the game easier for everyone (and a hell of a lot more interesting), and you're whining because it's not easy enough.
its not difficult. It is time wasting. BIG difference. You spend hours building up for a good enchantment, and then you buy one, get a poor enchantment, and all of that time was pretty much wasted. Thats not difficult, thats just annoying. It adds 0 challenge to the game.A game should never casually invalidate your effort.
echantments= gambling
it seriously is for all of those complaining you got crap enchantment. as they say "you roll the dice you pay the price"
But we don't want to gamble. Imagine if that how stored worked. You walk in, give htem$100, and hope you get some food in the pile of stuff they decide to give you.
0
That water is plenty close to irrigate that wheat. It doesn't have to be directly adjacent.
-------------
What time scales are we talking here?
2
Considering the probabilities involved in an entire map generating much less diamond than normal, yes, there is reason to suspect outside change. Not enough to confirm it, but if I rolled a dice that many times and had heevily skewed results, I would be mighty suspicious about the fairness of the die.
2
The cosmology of minecraft has never made sense. Ever.
1
That just makes it worse. even if you do get lucky and get the value of your levels, it will go away after a while, and you have to repeat the cycle. Spending 40-50 levels on an enchantment is very expensive. But if you do, you should get something for it. Not maybe get something for it. Its too expensive and infrequent of an investment to amortize properly. Mining for diamonds is chance that occurs very frequently, near-continuously while spelunking or mining, and so the uncertainty levels out. With this system, there is no long-term to balance it out over.
You spend resources, and you are not guaranteed to get your value out of them. Imagine if you spent diamonds to make some equipment, and most of the time you just get iron equipment instead. That would be an awful mechanic. This is the same, only its put under the label of magic.
And this is even further compounded by silk touch. A very desirable, useful enchantment, that (as far as I have heard) you can only get in the 30+ range. If you are lucky.
And I have not said enchantments have ruined or harmed the game. Them being optional is completely besides the point. It is done poorly. The enchantments themselves seem fun and useful. The cost of the table is fine. Getting experience is fine. Spending the experience and not getting your proper value out of it is not fine.
1
but when you could be getting an efficiency III unbreaking V fortune II pick for that much, it IS wasted. You have to spend a lot to have a CHANCE to get something like that, but you get something that is only marginally better than a level 1 enchantment, those extra levels are completly wasted. What is the benefit of an efficiency III over an efficiency I? It mines slightly faster. the time it takes to get 40 xp is a lot more than the time you save, by several orders of magnitude. Hence, that time was WASTED.
0
They do get better... overall. if you are lucky. Somebody in another thread spend 40 levels, and got an efficiency III. That is nowhere near worth 40 levels.
0
I'm not even talking about the xp rate. I'm talking about the randomness. Its awful. You can spend 50 points on a sword and get something awesome, or something relatively pathetic. So if you spend the 50 poitns nad get something pathetic, you have wasted all of that effort getting the xp, and you have to try again. And this is made worse, because the first tie, the xp was probably gained organically while playing thrugh the game, adn the second time you will end up grinding for it.
0
It may be poorly done, but the doomsayers were still wrong.
0
To be fair, the doomsayers thought that it would ruin the basic gameplay, and you would have to grind to be able to get higher level tools and such. As it is, its a end-game bonus that allows for more boosts. Whatever flaws it may have, it doesn't damage anything else in the game.
And the feature freeze is only going last about a month. they feature freeze, bug fix and optimize, release, vacation, then continue development.
0
Really? Have you looked at all of the evidence?
1. Jeb's development of potions was very transparent, even having multiple different schemes before settling in on the current one. The first one was complex and had to have been designed, not just thrown together. If this was just a smokescreen for copying a mod, then they did MORE effort to copy the mod than to develop their own system.
2. The end result doesn't even resemble the mod. The only stimulatory is that potions are the typical flask-shape, which is itself based on tons of previous games. There is no brewing stand, potions are crafted normally, and the effects are completely different.
3. When Notch and Jeb do incorporate a mod, they are open about it. They talk with the mod creators, they credit them, and everyone knows that the feature used to be a mod. They where open about the pistons, the lighting, if you look on reddit he specifically mentions talking to the creator of the zipline mod after minecon.
4. Why would they they steal a mod when they are perfectly willing to officially incorporate it? What purpose would that serve?
9
I have played rougelikes. They are an interesting mix of brilliant and horrible game design. Its really not the random aspect that bothers me so much as the likelyhood that you can spend a ton of resources and have it seriously flop on you. Even if you can't get precisely what you want, you shouldn't get something with a fraction of the value. A game that forces you to play through it repeatedly to get what you want is NOT good design. That is grinding,one of the worst game design elements ever conceived. Up till now, minecraft has managed to deftly avoid grinding, despite being built in a way that would be prone to it. If you want resources for something, you only need to harvest that many resources. You have a ton of options on how you go about gathering those resources, some of which are admittedly grinding, but those were never the only way, and never the best way. You also only needed to gather as many resources as you needed.
This enchantment system undermines that. you gather resources by killing mobs. To a certain degree, you will get experience naturally through the normal progression through the game. That is fine, and that baseline level of experience is what you should be able to freely work with. Moving beyond that level means you are now grinding for experience. If you have to be kept playing by having you keep fighting to gain levels to get the silktouch enchantment, the game design has failed. Yes, it is keeping you interacting with the game for longer, but it is keeping you from actually playing it. If I am playing minecraft, I am playing it to build and explore. I explore caves, thereby fighting mobs, and locating ores, there by feeding my need for resources. I use those resources to build, add in farms to increase my resources, and prepare for a journey to explore the nether. I delve into the nether, explore and conquer it, and haul back its resources. =At every step, I am actively advancing through the game, moving on to new experiences.
As soon as I try to make an enchantment and have it flop, that portion of my efforts are undone. I don't have the item I need. Those experience points are wasted. To recover, I have to go and grind on mobs. Instead of progressing through the game, I am now backstepping and redoing the work I have already done. I might be interacting with the game, but I am facing a roadblock to continue playing the game. I don't want to keep fighting to gain silktouch. I want the silktouch when I earned it, not to get stuck in a loop of grinding experience, trying to enchant, and failing to get what I need. Thats not playing the game. That is grinding, and its evil. That is just wasting my time. I, like many people, only have a limited amount of time I can spend on games. There are many games I want to spend my time on, so making me grind your game is bad. Its not fun. Its boring and repetitive, and it gets in the way of actually playing the game. If the game takes 100 hours to complete, it should have 100 hours of content, not 10 hours of content and 90 hours of grinding. Invalidating your efforts just extends the game time without extending gameplay.
Especially when the game is minecraft, and there are already hundreds of hours of gameplay in it, you don't need to artificially extend it.
0
That would be much better.
If we compare this to the binding of isaac, I think we can draw some interesting comclusions. For those of you who haven't played it, its essentially a rougelike arena shooter. you have random leels, and part of that is random loot. The random loot is both its flaw and its strength. One one hand, its fun to get random bonuses, and play through with a different set of abilities. On the other hand, its really annoying when it gives you 5 range upgrades(they really aren't that useful. 1 or 2 are good, but past that they are pointless), when you really need some more health.
What you need is for the magnitude of your bonuses to stay in the proper range to maintain balance, while maintaining the unpredictability of what it does to keep it interesting.
Your suggestion would seem to address it nicely.
0
Also, you can spend up to 50 xp per enchantment, enchant 4 peices of armour, a sword, and pick (just as a basic set), and soend 300 skill points in one go. It does not take anywhere near that long to make an enchantment table.
If you have way too much experience before you can accumulate those materials, you must not be trying to get them very hard.
0
if you are modding it, you can make it show the enchantment regardless of whether it decided it before or after. You just mod it to decide first if it didn't already.
Honestly, I wouldn't be as miffed with the randomness if it was at least reliable. Two high level enchantments can be all over the board in terms of what they give you, both in terms of total number of enchantments and their levels, and in terms of how useful that actually is.Ifyou could spend 50 levels and reliably get 50 levels worth of enchantment, it wouldn't be so bad. Thats the issue that started this thread, you don't know if you are going to get something worthwhile.
2
its not difficult. It is time wasting. BIG difference. You spend hours building up for a good enchantment, and then you buy one, get a poor enchantment, and all of that time was pretty much wasted. Thats not difficult, thats just annoying. It adds 0 challenge to the game.A game should never casually invalidate your effort.
But we don't want to gamble. Imagine if that how stored worked. You walk in, give htem$100, and hope you get some food in the pile of stuff they decide to give you.