v1.20.5 - DoS protections, Performance & More

[TFT]

18 hours ago, Dark Thoughts said:

Good. The elytra in MC destroyed so many travel & exploration aspects, including horses.

To be fair, horses were really bad for travel. Forests are near impassable and steep inclines everywhere are a nightmare. MC also has minecarts, but that's resource intensive and you can only go places you've built up a track to. And then you have the nether which already exists as a great "fast travel" option made faster with the boat/ice trick and it doubles as a place worthwhile to explore. The elytra side steps the issue of cost and bad overworld terrain by being relatively easy to obtain and you can fly over bad terrain, fireworks then make it an infinitely superior option since it's easy to farm materials for a bunch of them; at that point you're basically at the "creative mode" part of survival.

The glider we have takes more investment and time to get to, takes a backpack slot, and doesn't go very far. A novelty reward from the archives at best. Personally, what I would do is make the glider more "glidey" to not lose speed so quickly, and place it's schematics at the second location with the damn bird, both to be somewhat thematic and to pace its value to later in the game. Elks suffer from the issues MC horses do which makes air travel very desirable, but there's ways to make gliders better without upstaging their land based counterpart. Mounts can be buffed via better worldgen, they would be a lot more valuable if I didn't have to navigate a perlin noise map with them. Even compared to MC horses, elks have their utility going for them that make current travel worth it.

I don't think you're destroying other options by making the glider good to use. They compete with elks, boats, and translocators as travel options and each has their own strengths and weaknesses. Elks—provided worldgen doesn't screw you—are the most versatile land travel option and good for hauling stuff. Boats are very expensive and require sizable oceans (and rivers if you have the mod), but they can haul a base's worth of goods and people along with the elk. Translocators are pricey and up to RNG, but if it works out in your favor you have the fastest long range transport, their usefulness only growing as you add more to the network. Gliders as they currently stand have a poor niche: they're story gated and reduce your inventory, they require either mountains or very tall towers to get distance out of them, and they still lose out to the elk in speed. If they had a longer flight time they could fit in between elks and translocators for being speedy and free in their movement at the cost of needing towers and sacrificing inventory. So long as you aren't giving a firework equivalent (at least not without great material investment and upkeep) you're not going to supplant other options.

[Dark Thoughts]

58 minutes ago, TFT said:

Forests are near impassable and steep inclines everywhere are a nightmare.

Yes, that was one of my complaints back then too. You can't even get through a lot of them on foot, let alone on a horse. I would've liked them swapping the spawn chances for regular trees & big trees, so that you had somewhat more accessible forests and not just dense shrubland. It's even dumber when you consider that they have a whole breeding feature for horses to improve their stats too.

One of the many things where MC went into the opposite direction of what I would've wanted it to go.

[Vratislav]

On 3/24/2025 at 8:46 AM, Brady_The said:

I consider the glider more of a slower-falling than a flying contraption

I see the glider as very underrated, because it is VERY useful device in one of the next story locations (you know, that cursed parkour tower). I was quite surprised that almost nobody did not take the hint "if some very special schematics is in the first chapter loot room, then it might be useful to take it to the second chapter boss location."  

(Also I did not, but after I got to the D. location, I was sure that it was intended for clever players to take the glider there...)

[Thorfinn]

Perlin noise always gets a bad rap, but I think that's largely because people who didn't understand what it was took to complaining about it, to the point that now almost no one understands it

At core, it's just the process of breaking the map into grids or hexes or really any polygon, defining the y-values at the perimeter of these regions, then interpolating all the intermediate y-values. The simplest is just averaging -- draw a line from one side of the region to the opposite side. Repeat all the way around a region and you have s surface. You can make it more interesting by making the equation something more than just a boring old linear interpolation. And it makes a lot of sense. If you look at the world around you, the elevation of any one point looks to have more to do with the elevation of its neighbors than anything else.

By defining a very small number of points, and applying mathematical transformations, you end up with a very lightweight means of generating repeatable, seed-based terrain. The problem is not Perlin noise. It's simply a matter of figuring out what kinds of y-values you want those perimeters to have, and how complex you want the interpolations to be.