why is it so hard to find fire clay?

[fxizy]

ladies ladies calm down

[Zane Mordien]

7 hours ago, MKMoose said:

I'd be interested to know where that appears. Any paths in file contents should start from %appdata% or equivalent, any filesystem metadata should not be included when you upload the file (unless you upload the logs as a .zip or something of the sort, which may preserve some or all of it), and I haven't found any indication of embedded metadata in the log files (I would be very surprised if I did, because they're just text files). Under normal circumstances, according to everything I know, you don't have to sanitize the log files, or at least not for the purpose of your example.

Feel free to elaborate on the deeper issues as well.

Maybe if people turn in some logs where it shows their real name? Since the default installation location is under Users I've notice it shows my name. I'm actually interested myself if there is a real issue or just a tin foil hat issue. This file is probably not a good example of what you would turn in for a bug, but I know it shows up there. Would the properties still have your computer name or user name? I can't remember how that works.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

Why does it even matter if a person's username doesn't match their forum name? nobody cares who you are hiding behind your name.

[MKMoose]

4 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

Maybe if people turn in some logs where it shows their real name? Since the default installation location is under Users I've notice it shows my name. I'm actually interested myself if there is a real issue or just a tin foil hat issue. This file is probably not a good example of what you would turn in for a bug, but I know it shows up there. Would the properties still have your computer name or user name? I can't remember how that works.

That's interesting, because all of the paths in my logs and in multiple logs I've randomly checked off of GitHub appear as "%appdata%\Vintagestory\...", and frankly I'm not sure what could cause them to reveal the full path. Is it maybe because these seem to be related to a mod (do vanilla debug messages also have the full path)? Is it maybe because the appdata folder was chosen as the game's directory manually, causing the game to remember the provided path instead of accessing it through %appdata%? Maybe it's caused by an older installation of the game saving the full path instead of %appdata%? Tough to say more without a more detailed investigation.

Actual errors and not simple debug messages could potentially show some stuff in the stack trace as well (I've found what looks like Tyron's username in one of the log files, which was kind of amusing, though it's not like I learned anything new), but most of the time the paths they print will start from VintagestoryLib or VintagestoryApi and not anything that could contain identifying information.

The part I kind of don't get is that if someone really cares about privacy, then that username shouldn't correspond to their real name in the first place, and so there should be no real need to even remove it. Unless maybe that someone is really concerned over the same username appearing under multiple accounts that they have, allowing to link them together, but at that point it could probably qualify either as paranoia, or as using a sensitive work PC for the wrong things.

Edited January 4 by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

9 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

Maybe if people turn in some logs where it shows their real name? Since the default installation location is under Users I've notice it shows my name. I'm actually interested myself if there is a real issue or just a tin foil hat issue. This file is probably not a good example of what you would turn in for a bug, but I know it shows up there. Would the properties still have your computer name or user name? I can't remember how that works.

As far as I can tell, it's tinfoil hat. The name of the computer profile that's currently being used for the installation can turn up, but that doesn't really say much in itself about the PC owner or who was using the PC at that time.

 

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

That's interesting, because all of the paths in my logs and in multiple logs I've randomly checked off of GitHub appear as "%appdata%\Vintagestory\...", and frankly I'm not sure what could cause them to reveal the full path. Is it maybe because these seem to be related to a mod (do vanilla debug messages also have the full path)? Is it maybe because the appdata folder was chosen as the game's directory manually, causing the game to remember the provided path instead of accessing it through %appdata%? Maybe it's caused by an older installation of the game saving the full path instead of %appdata%? Tough to say more without a more detailed investigation.

The most I can tell is that there's some sort of "ID" generated when you load up a world, but I'm not sure that this "ID" remains consistent. It may vary based on login, not sure. I don't really see it being any massive information leak though. 

 

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

The part I kind of don't get is that if someone really cares about privacy, then that username shouldn't correspond to their real name in the first place, and so there should be no real need to even remove it. Unless maybe that someone is really concerned over the same username appearing under multiple accounts that they have, allowing to link them together, but at that point it could probably qualify either as paranoia, or as using a sensitive work PC for the wrong things.

Or why someone would go dig through the bug tracker for specific user logs, and then go posting about the user's supposed information on a public forum as some sort of weird flex. Like, what?

To get back on topic though--fire clay is easy enough to find or obtain, once you establish a workflow for it. In my experience, fire clay starts becoming a critical need once it's time to work steel, as refractories take quite a lot of bricks to build and said bricks break rather easily at tier 1. Something to consider in this case is trying to find a source of olivine and making tier 2 bricks instead. Tier 2 bricks will last longer, so while you'll still quite a lot of fire clay initially for the bricks, you won't need as much for repairs once the refractory is finished.

[Vexxvididu]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

As far as I can tell, it's tinfoil hat. The name of the computer profile that's currently being used for the installation can turn up, but that doesn't really say much in itself about the PC owner or who was using the PC at that time.

I have a confession.  My real legal name and PC name are not "Vexxvididu."  My PC name is actually "owner" which proves I am the supreme owner of all! (I'm just being silly, it's a silly thing to make a big deal out of)

[Teh Pizza Lady]

17 minutes ago, Vexxvididu said:

I have a confession.  My real legal name and PC name are not "Vexxvididu."  My PC name is actually "owner" which proves I am the supreme owner of all! (I'm just being silly, it's a silly thing to make a big deal out of)

I'm not really a lady. O_O

[Vexxvididu]

18 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I'm not really a lady. O_O

But you had better love pizza or I'll feel deceived!!!

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Vexxvididu said:

I have a confession.  My real legal name and PC name are not "Vexxvididu."  My PC name is actually "owner" which proves I am the supreme owner of all! (I'm just being silly, it's a silly thing to make a big deal out of)

I'm not really a blue aquatic mythical creature either. 

[Teh Pizza Lady]

55 minutes ago, Vexxvididu said:

But you had better love pizza or I'll feel deceived!!!

I gotchu there bro. i had pizza for dinner last night right after reminiscing about the last fire clay deposit I found deep into bear territory on my server I play on.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

Anyway to answer OPs question. Fire Clay is hard to find because it now only spawns near bauxite.  That's literally it.

[MKMoose]

19 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

The most I can tell is that there's some sort of "ID" generated when you load up a world, but I'm not sure that this "ID" remains consistent. It may vary based on login, not sure. I don't really see it being any massive information leak though. 

There is a playeruid which appears in quite a few places (I'm not sure if it's the same one that you're talking about), but I think we can quite safely assume that the devs wouldn't plaster it all over the logs and tell people to post it on the internet if it was in any significant way compromising. It even appears in server logs, which means that it's probably visible to the owner of any server you join. As far as I can tell, its primary purpose is simply to allow the server to identify different players, and allow those that leave and rejoin to access their position in the world, their inventory and so on.

 

7 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

To get back on topic though--fire clay is easy enough to find or obtain, once you establish a workflow for it.

I don't really know if that's unusual, but I've had zero problems finding fire clay, almost to the point of suspicion. On my longest-running world so far (~200 hours) I've found a large area of bauxite gravel and sand relatively easily (~10k blocks away), housing at least 5 large fire clay deposits, and I haven't even used up the first one. On the same world I've accidentally found three fire clay deposits underlaying coal without even deliberately looking for the coal.

And this also reminds me that the current fire clay generation seems a bit odd, because the small deposits that are supposed to be common have a minimum rainfall requirement of 0.27 while low fertility soil starts to appear at 0.33. This makes large deposits end up more common in certain areas despite a 20x lower spawn chance, as they only require 0.1 rainfall.

 

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

In my experience, fire clay starts becoming a critical need once it's time to work steel, as refractories take quite a lot of bricks to build and said bricks break rather easily at tier 1. Something to consider in this case is trying to find a source of olivine and making tier 2 bricks instead. Tier 2 bricks will last longer, so while you'll still quite a lot of fire clay initially for the bricks, you won't need as much for repairs once the refractory is finished.

The funny thing right now is that unless you're making steel armor, then a single batch of 16 ingots may quite feasibly last for an in-game year or more, at least for players on the more casual side. My recommendation actually tends to be to make the bare minimum of bricks required for a cementation furnace (I think it was 224 = 3 x 64 + 32 bricks, doesn't really matter if it's T1 or T2), then beeline for ilmenite and use T3 bricks from that point onwards. It's not a bad idea to locate an ilmenite deposit before you even have steel, and I think you can even use ore-blasting bombs to mine it (though it still requires steel pounder caps to pulverize).

T3 bricks have 99% heat resistance shown in the handbook, which is already much better than 90% for T1 or 95% for T2, but the actual value in the code is 99.9%, meaning that they break extremely rarely (assuming there's no rounding shenanigans, but experimental results support 99.9% from what I've seen). It's far from necessary to go for ilmenite as fast as possible, as all of the resources for T1 or T2 bricks can be obtained in large quantities quite easily either way, but it is something to consider.

[Zane Mordien]

19 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

It even appears in server logs, which means that it's probably visible to the owner of any server you join.

It is 100% visible to the owner of a server. It is stored in the playerdata.json along with the PlayerUID which I assume is the permenant tag for your character if they ever allow you to change your Playername.  

 "PlayerUID": "pYmaCfTTmphnf55TF/gZa7uA",
    "RoleCode": "admin",
    "PermaPrivileges": [],
    "DeniedPrivileges": [],
    "PlayerGroupMemberShips": {},
    "AllowInvite": true,
    "LastKnownPlayername": "Bobeatspizza",
 

[MKMoose]

4 minutes ago, Zane Mordien said:

It is 100% visible to the owner of a server. It is stored in the playerdata.json along with the PlayerUID which I assume is the permenant tag for your character if they ever allow you to change your Playername.  

Nice. And here's PlayerUID in the API:

/// <summary>
/// Returns the players identifier that is unique across all registered players and will never change. Use this to uniquely identify a player for all eternity. Shorthand for WorldData.PlayerUID
/// </summary>
string PlayerUID { get; }

[LadyWYT]

47 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

I don't really know if that's unusual, but I've had zero problems finding fire clay, almost to the point of suspicion. On my longest-running world so far (~200 hours) I've found a large area of bauxite gravel and sand relatively easily (~10k blocks away), housing at least 5 large fire clay deposits, and I haven't even used up the first one. On the same world I've accidentally found three fire clay deposits underlaying coal without even deliberately looking for the coal.

And this also reminds me that the current fire clay generation seems a bit odd, because the small deposits that are supposed to be common have a minimum rainfall requirement of 0.27 while low fertility soil starts to appear at 0.33. This makes large deposits end up more common in certain areas despite a 20x lower spawn chance, as they only require 0.1 rainfall.

It seems a little unusual, at least in my experience, but to be fair I don't really go looking for natural deposits of it either. If there's a bauxite desert nearby I'll happily take advantage of deposits that do show up; same with black coal/anthracite as I need the fuel anyway. But overall I've found it more efficient to just craft the stuff.

 

49 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

T3 bricks have 99% heat resistance shown in the handbook, which is already much better than 90% for T1 or 95% for T2, but the actual value in the code is 99.9%, meaning that they break extremely rarely (assuming there's no rounding shenanigans, but experimental results support 99.9% from what I've seen). It's far from necessary to go for ilmenite as fast as possible, as all of the resources for T1 or T2 bricks can be obtained in large quantities quite easily either way, but it is something to consider.

I do like to get T3 whenever possible, as that cuts down on the maintenance I have to do. However, T1 or T2 will always have to come first given that steel is required for processing ilmenite ore, as you've already noted. T2 I prefer to have, but unless there's a handy place to look for olivine I'll happily use T1 as I care more about producing the steel than cutting down on the refractory maintenance.

For what it's worth, I also tend to run two refractories at the same time, for a total of 32 steel per firing. Any more than that starts to feel like diminishing returns.