More realistic knapping

[Simon Stapley]

At present when you knap stone you can just cut out around immediately close to the final shape and it looks like you should be able to pick it up and leave the remaining stone on the floor. I think it would be better if to begin with you only had the edge of the square showing yellow voxels and as you chip away they expose more edges and then more yellow as appropriate.

Just quickly thinking it through I would have thought that making it have rules along the lines of you can knap if the outer voxel is exposed or the two on either side are either exposed or could be exposed. I have attached a quick diagram of how I see it working, but haven't checked that it would definitely would work without errors.

 

May need a bit more refinement but hopefully would be a bit more like how one would knap stone in real life.

 

Pieman

[Tyron]

That would make the current knife recipe impossible to knap. Might need to reduce it to knapping just one knife then.

[Erik]

I think just having the rule simply be that knappable voxels sides need to be exposed on at least on side would have a very similar effect and would allow every recipe to work.

Another change that might positively influence the new player experience would probably to reduce the grid size from the 16 by 16 to an 8 by 8. This would require new recipes, but make knapping less time consuming and fiddly, as the player will probably have to knap a lot of tools in the first hours of the game.

[Stroam]

I've watched a few knapping videos and have done some myself. Usually while knapping shards break off and those shards work great for cutting and can be used as for anything small and sharp such as arrow heads, javelin heads, and small blades. The pretty knapped stone tools such as large knives and hatchet heads you see is just someone showing off their skills and weren't commonly used. Anything produced from knapping is pretty brittle and any blunt force trauma had a good chance of breaking it. Things such as axes made for chopping down trees would have used knapping only to get a very rough edge before being ground down and polished.
So as far as more realistic knapping goes, I don't see a point. It's a game mechanic that is already pretty abstracted. The mechanic certainly lured me to the game and was fun when I first started out. Of course you do anything enough and you'll get bored of it eventually. If this mechanic were ever to be modified, I'd have an option for a more advanced version that produced higher quality stone tools.

[Theishiopian]

Knapping really could use some additional depth, right now its just inverse clayforming. And I personally think that only getting one knife is actually better for the early game, since inventory space is on a premium. As an added level of difficulty, maybe if you hit a non-knappable bit, it introduces a "crack". get 3 cracks and the flint shatters. you'd wanna make sure there was a brief cooldown on knapping after getting a crack though, so someone doesnt accidentally jitter-click their flint away lol.