Wild life and dynamic trees

[VSJohn]

Love the game so much but I always feel like the wildlife aspect of the game is lacking. I would love to see an update dedicated to this.

Horses - A Faster way to travel, can add storage and horse drawn carts sacrificing speed but allowing for large item transport.
Birds - Different birds for different climates, tamable and can sit on your shoulder
Cattle - For breeding and milk production
Expanded wolves - Can domesticate a cub, follow, sit, etc...  Can wander and kill small game. Can be used for hunting

This is just more of a sidenote, I absolutely fell in love with the dynamic trees mod in Minecraft when it came out. I would love to see a similar mechanic in VS, it would fit so well into its aesthetic. Lastly I hate the cloud visuals hahaha. I would like to see a smoother less blocky version, that's more preference though.

[Thorfinn]

I suspect the mapgen will have to be rethought before going to faster transport. You can already outrun  the mapgen on an i7 in singleplayer and an i7 local server has a tough time with more than 2 or 3 coop players if they are sprinting away from each other. It may well be that it could just generate down to the first stone block in any column, (maybe more with cave-ins) and leave underlying strata alone until you start digging or the CPU has some idle time. Carts and I think ships are planned, but require development of multi-block structures that function as a unit.

Someone did a mod for tree growth a while back. @jakecool19 maybe? Seems to me the issue with the forest becoming over-crowded was never resolved, and IIRC, it was a serious performance hit with all the trees in several chunks having to update constantly. Check it out and see if that's kind of what you were thinking. There are also several wolf domestication mods, but IMO they make the game way too easy.

[EDIT]

Oh, and I think maybe Featherstone horses mod might do that, but don't quote me. And @Rhonen's excellent mod Medieval Expansion includes aurochs, a large form of cattle. But again, the game is already easy enough. And with all the deer variants protein is easier to come by than berries.

[/EDIT]

Edited December 17, 2023 by Thorfinn

[Streetwind]

Yeah, the Dynamic Trees mod in Minecraft took dozens of iterations before it became more than a neat gimmick that started running out of bounds more and more as time went on. It's very, very complicated to do it right, and to this day the mod has to take shortcuts to mitigate the performance impact... which, by the way, is already lower in Minecraft than it would be in VS because Minecraft (1) has a noticeably lower average view distance, and (2) does not need to fast-forward entities in previousy unloaded chunks to match the current calendar when they become loaded again.

I'm fairly sure it can be done well and right in VS, too. I'd celebrate it as much as the next person. But the amount of work it would require...

[Thorfinn]

8 hours ago, Streetwind said:

I'm fairly sure it can be done well and right in VS, too.

I'd agree. Might involve something like a linked list for each chuck, ordered by when the next update to each particular entity (grass growing, crops maturing, etc.) happens. IOW, instead of a chance of some event, like progressing to the next growth stage, and checking that percentage every so many ticks, do something with a Poisson distribution to generate when a tree on a given x-y coordinate should be updated to the next stage. This means, of course, that any chunk which has been unloaded for a while might have several of its entities that update multiple times once they come into range again. Large entities like trees would likely have to happen many chunks away or it would look weird, but smaller or more subtle changes could be handled when the system has time. You are not going to be able to tell what growth stage the turnips are at more than 20 or so blocks anyway.