Brynn Bernstein

I used to have a mod/texture pack/datapack that only changed one thing, which was turning terra preta strawberry red so it was way more visible. I just updated to 1.16.4 after a long hiatus and now it's gone, and I can't find any reference to it literally anywhere. Does anyone else remember this datapack? Does anyone have a version that works on 1.16.4 that I could use?

I think a major change to berries that would reduce simply eating raw berries would be making the jam-making process more accessible by including sugar as an alternative to honey, making it a little more labor intensive (maybe fruits have to be smashed in a press first? maybe it needs to be moved to a glass jam-jar and then submerged in boiling water so it keeps?) and making jam itself not a meal but an additive to bread and meals. It's always been super immersion breaking for me to eat just a bowl of jam, I don't think I know anyone irl who just eats jam and nothing else for breakfast. Furthermore, berries should be available as an additive to more kinds of food, baking them into baked goods and using them in teas and deserts. The more players have a positive alternative in cooking with the berries, I think, the less they'll simply keep a stack of low-satiety food on their hotbar. It occurs to me that having a solid stackable food option between the completely no-cook option of berries and the kind of preparation-intensive bread (flour has to be milled in a quern, which either requires lots of time or a mill setup) would be a good idea to discourage eating berries raw after the stone age. Maybe this gap could be filled by a trail mix of some sort where you can combine a serving of nuts, a serving of berries, and then anything from nuts, berries, unprocessed grains, and fruits as your extra and rather than getting a pot of a meal you get 16 units of trail mix? or maybe the answer is a food bag similar to the mining bag so that carrying meals or even just one stack each of cheese, cooked meat, roasted vegetables (which they should add imo), and berries is more convenient if one is headed on a long trip and wants satiety management on the go.

I think maybe having bees nests have an automatically hostile option, and having simple bees nests spawn with that variable set, would be a good way to do this--both making a sudden danger to the player, and an opportunity to find bees outside of forests after the first year passes. This variable existing would also make it easy to make bee-based traps, if there was some way for the player to force set that value, maybe crafting a hostile bee nest with a skep and a beenade that became hostile as soon as there was no player in range and remained hostile until discharging. Even if it weren't possible to make hostile beehives, they would still be useful for map creators. I think adding wasps as a separate thing might be a bit of a load in the code, so maybe this is a more elegant solution? Poisonous spiders are a cool idea, maybe the nest can only appear in certain biomes(well, temperature humidity and height mixes, which is what VS actually has) and on certain blocks, so the player can avoid them (no one wants to unavoidably be poisoned at random intervals) or can be avoided by keeping up with a regular chore like burning a certain mix of chemicals on a fire, sweeping problem blocks with a broom or scrubbing them with a metal brush, or leaving out a little poison within 7 blocks of them. Other pests could work similarly, maybe rats or ants in cellars? Cellar pests could very slowly (like, 5%/irl hour) break storage vessels and crocks, requiring you to go into the cellar every now and then and right-click the vessel with anti-pest solutions if you don't have a long-term solutions like poison or a tamed cat for rats. You should always be able to figure out what the threat is in your area and defend against it though, once you're in the copper or maybe the bronze age, because living in the iron or steel age and unavoidably losing progress or health to environmental threats. Modern people may still have to put in a bit of effort to deal with pests, but we aren't losing all our stores of food or being stung/bitten within an inch of our life on the daily.

I think being able to relocate traders to your base would also be a satisfying objective if one wants to create a sort of town structure, like building a village in minecraft. I do think probably relocating in-world traders should be a time-consuming effort that's never certain, with traders only being willing to leave their homes after a lot of trades and needing to be transported in something like a horse-drawn carriage or other player-made transport, and moving traders attracting waves of drifters like a localized temporal storm that gets worse if you allow the trader to take damage. After bringing the trader home the storm would slowly fade if they had all the luxuries they needed--bed, table and chairs, food, chests, and a secure room with requirements kind of like aging bleu cheese where they need both a secure location and a window of some sort. In return for all this effort they would maybe have more trades the more luxury you gave them--for example, wallpaper blocks in the area, fur rugs on the ground, and tapestries or art pieces. Allowing the player to decorate is always a fun touch after all, and stuff like fur rugs would add a use for pelts after leather is available. That being said, I totally respect the design decision to have traders basically forced to stay in their untouchable houses, making the player have to be the one with a trade route that goes around several traders. Maybe that could be expanded on instead, with carts and wagons for the player and traders paying extra for wood or stone that isn't available in the local biome or vegetables that are hard to grow in the local climate.

All gravel and bony soil has a chance of dropping temporal gears. It's roughly 1/2200 for each layer of bony soil, 1/3900 for each layer of gravel. So on average you can expect one temporal gear from 275 blocks (4 and 1/3 stacks) of bony soil or 488 blocks (7 and 5/8 stacks) of gravel--definitely not a real solution to the rarity of temporal gears as drifter drops. Let me know if my math is wrong, I've done some rounding but those should be mostly accurate!

Maybe if there were like... recipe scrolls that you can get in ruins or from traders for these exclusive things? That way one could play as a potter to have access to lots of cool pottery stuff right at the start, or play as something else and make it a quest (or just a lucky surprise) to get the rare recipes. Something similar to finding blackguard exclusive gear in loot, but if potters have several exclusive recipes finding one piece of pottery at a time probably wouldn't cut it. Here's some ideas for potter recipes: -An improved crucible, maybe heating faster since existing crucibles have plenty of capacity in my experience -Similarly, an improved cooking pot that cooks meals faster or maybe can hold up to 8 servings (the 6 serving limit kinda annoys me since crocks hold 4, so I might play as a potter just for this!) -Planters, as noted -Storage vessels with the capacity of chests -Teapots that allow making medicinal teas? Maybe a special soothing tea could restore some temporal stability, or healing tea could restore HP, and hot tea could also help guard against freezing. -To go with that, cups or flasks could hold tea or soup at warm temperatures in the inventory for warming up during the winter. -Plates and vases, as a decorative thing? And this one is a little out there but: -A canopic jar that functions like gravestone mods in minecraft, holding all your items upon death to stop them from de-spawning as a single use item. This is a little powerful compared to the others, but maybe it could be an item that requires both a recipe from loot and a potter to craft it, and take half a stack of clay. I'm envisioning it would work that if it drops from your inventory when you die, it spawns in a canopic jar entity that can be broken to drop your items. It would even be a cool tool for map creators, who could hide graves with interesting items in them or have a cool new kind of storage that also stops the player from putting anything back in and gumming stuff up later.

There's a setting that's on in creative worlds that lets you chisel all kinds of blocks, and if you don't mind using cheats you can turn it on in survival too. type in "/worldconfig microblockChiseling all" to the chat, and then you can chisel any block you want--glass, dirt, and even ice!

Especially because butchering a sheep or pig corpse often means standing in the sheep/pig pen, and for several generations, they still want to mess you up for getting near them. Can't even say how many times my sheep have made me pay for thinning the herd by never letting me get near the body to get my meat, fat, bones, and hide. A faster knife would be amazing so I could grab the goods and go.

I'm not aware of one, but one easy fix you should check is to make sure you're placing pieces in order from the windmill to the quern. If you connect a powered component (like a windmill or something that is connected to it and rotating) to an already placed unpowered component (an axle or gear existing in the world and not rotating) sometimes a glitch causes it not to work. I read this on the wiki a while ago and since then I've always placed my components in order from windmill to output, so I don't know if it's still an issue, but you might try connecting piece by piece, making sure each newly placed piece turns, and see if that makes a difference or at least shows you where your problem is.

Here's what moving to the copper age gives you that you absolutely need copper for: -Chests -Buckets to help with farming -Doors that are actually convenient to use -Swords and decent armor, so you can survive wolves and drifters -Barrels for preserving food and making leather -Shelves for crocks -A better bed -Troughs to let you cultivate animals Of these, exploring far out enough to find a furniture trader will get you chests, barrels (although you can't make leather without a bucket to fill them, or preserve food without halite harvested by pickaxe), and nicer beds. Finding a commodities trader is another path to copper, since commodities traders will (eventually) sell copper nugget. Survival goods traders will (eventually) sell pickaxes, which will cut your total nugget need down to 20, since you'll only need a hammer. Breaking loot vessels can help, with ore vessels dropping copper and tool vessels giving you whole copper or even bronze tools! Talking about surviving the winter, all you really need is a supply of food, a fire with firewood, and a small room. Food can be cultivated from seeds with a stone hoe and any soil. Vegetables store for a whole year, and oiled crocks are well within your reach if you kill raccoons and foxes for fat. A fire and firewood are easy to keep going with nothing but stone axes, and can be easily located in a dirt hut, or a house made of ruins cobblestone, which you can harvest barehanded. You'll need to spend a LOT of time preparing--fill a storage vessel with oiled crocks of stew, stack peat or firewood to the sky, and prepare for a kind of boring winter (since going mining is out of the picture without copper, farming and hunting are practically useless, and going exploring will probably see you freeze to death). But don't panic! In an in-game year of play, you'll come across 38 nuggets without intentionally looking for them, as long as you keep your eyes open. ESPECIALLY if you're looking for traders. Don't worry about breaking every rock within a thousand blocks of your base, but keep an eye out for the orange and blue-green of copper as you go. You'll be fine, and honestly a stone age year sounds like a really interesting challenge! Do what makes you happy, and if it starts feeling like a chore, consider making a world with far more surface copper using the advanced world generation setting. But don't rush to abandon your world, play out the year and see how you feel with winter setting in.

I will point out though that panning has a decent chance to give you some other useful stuff, and there's no reason you can't do both--spending your nights panning is a solid way to avoid drifters too since they're terrible in water. Carry a stack of gravel and a pan in your inventory while you explore if you plan to be out after dark, and keep any bony soil you find. Bony soil has a chance to drop either copper spearheads or lamellar, which you can melt down, but it's a little lower on the earlygame survival stuff like clay, nuggets, and flint, so it's probably less pressing to pan it right away, but in general running through three blocks of bony soil will take about an in-game hour and a half tops so it's not much of an issue. It also drops bones as the common junk drop instead of rocks, which I feel like are less useful but since you should feel free to drop either into the water and walk away to save inventory it really doesn't matter.

If you do this, immediately mark on your map when you find copper, and leave a marker (put a block that doesn't blend in with the environment, so not a dirt block), because you'll need to dig down wherever you find copper nuggets on the surface to get to the copper ore deposits once you have a pickaxe and hammer. If you haven't got a map because you're in the mode where it isn't available, make your markers big and noticeable, and try to remember where they are relative to your base. Good cheap materials for markers are the cobblestone from ruins, hay bales (cut grass with your knife, then craft six of it in a 2x3 to make a hay bale), and gravel in grassy areas or grass in gravel areas. Another thing you can do is dig down to stone and use the hole as your marker, which is what I like to do, but doesn't work as well if you don't have a map to remind you where your pits are. Hope this helps!

Also not keeping inventory is a setting that already exists.

Just now I was thinking about the role of light as the player's mostly unique ability in the game and the primary way of defining and claiming spaces, and I thought it might be interesting to dive into that more with lighting that ties into the temporal aspects of the game. Having animals that die in the dark spawn a hostile mob would encourage players to keep caves permanently lit for fear of the vengeful ghosts of the rabbits driven in to die in the dark. The move from torches to permanent light sources should be an incredibly exciting change that keeps the player safer all the time. Having more ways of permanent lighting would be great--oil lamps are great, and it would be great to have traders sell full skeps to make it easier for the move to beeswax candles, but maybe a primitive candle and lantern could be made with animal fat, as tallow? These could even be locked to a single class like the primitive bow to encourage a lackluster class like the clockmaker. A way to improve torches with pitch or oil-soaked rags would be another welcome step, bridging the gap between a player who hasn't found bees yet and one who is ready to produce lanterns. These options, while they would necessarily be worse than our existing candles and lanterns, would help players be able to enjoy a fight to survive in a dark, monstrous, world. Later, there could be a temporal lantern that stabilized areas and reduced drifter spawns even during temporal storms, that required steel, lead cames, glass, gemstones, carved bone, string, candles, artifacts found in ruins, and temporal gears to bring together lots of different types of progression. This would be a capstone piece like minecraft's beacon--to make one, you would need to produce steel ingots and turn them to lantern parts on the anvil and turn lead (currently essentially unused!) into cames (maybe with a special technique?), both of which would require a robust forge and metalworking facilities; produce high-quality or even colored glass (which currently requires using colored quartz if I remember correctly) and prospect or pan to find gemstones, both of which require exploration and competent prospecting or hours of patient panning; carve bones harvested from wild animals with an a knife or specialized tools to make charms that would be tied on with flax twine or cotton string if that ends up in the game, which takes a decent animal and crop farms; find and farm bees for wax to make candles and raid ruins for their artifacts, which takes hours of patient exploration; and kill thousands of surface drifters or hundreds of more dangerous ones to get enough temporal gears to power it up. Once finished, it would complete a high-level base with temporal stability even at low y-levels, reduced temporal storm severity, and severely nerfed hostile mob spawns (probably just temporal mobs, wolves are on you still). What to do after you finish it? Well, guess it's time to complete that multiblock chiseled survival-only base with a massive stained-glass hall of mirrors. You've earned the peace to work on it through the night without interruptions!

Animals die if they enter a cave or dark space and cannot pathfind back to light higher light levels. Also in my experience they will not pathfind back to light if they have no way of escaping a cave at all (for example, rabbits regularly fall into holes I leave behind when clearing surface copper, since they can't use my ladder to leave so they run away from the ladder to the surface and deep in where I've cleared out to look for diagonal ore spawns and not bothered to open up back to the surface. They die in there so often that I turn copper digs into pit traps to farm redmeat and pelts, although I assume AI will be improved eventually so that animals are less stupid about running into dark caves to die). Animals will survive a night, but running into a cave at night and not leaving will kill them pretty fast, and animals you keep in your house need constant light either from a skylight or lanterns. I have an in-house chicken coop that I made because a family of chickens got into my house when I left the door open, and a single lantern keeps them all alive in the roughly 5x5 space. To tie this back into the topic of seraphs, maybe lasting light sources could explicitly be part of the lore? Having light be the domain of Seraphs, and sound the domain of the temporally disruptive mobs (like the bell, the distorted music of temporal storms, and anyone who's listened to drifters growl at them all night has learned that the sound of ever-present danger is part of their strength as enemies) would be an amazing thematic move, since sound is always all around while light is volatile. Days end, water drowns torches or they burn out, temporal storms clog your sight, but sound is always there to serve the lovecraftian horrors.