redram

There is no tracking of fuel vs items in the kiln. The fuel cost is the same if you have a bowl, or if you have stacked the kiln floor to ceiling with bricks. This may change in the future. But for now it is what it is.

I think it's somewhere in the 18-20 area, iirc.

1.20.4 is still a 'release candidate' version, meaning it could still have issues, and should be treated with caution. So you should probably make a backup of your save if you intend to try it out on a 'long term' world.

At some point we will add glazing, which will expand the color options. But this will be applied after the bricks are made, not mixed in with the raw clay. And it will use the types of ingredients one would use irl, so mostly metal and mineral powders. Possibly plant-based ashes. We'll see.

For folks having this problem recently, what version of the game are you using? 1.20.4 was supposed to have fixed the insta-firing. But 1.20.4 is currently in 'release candidate' mode, so your game probably won't auto-update to it, you'd have to do it manually. If you're on 1.20.4 and this is still happening, that would be good to know. Otherwise if you're still on 1.20.3, know that it will hopefully be fixed in 1.20.4. Aside from the insta-firing issue, some clarifications: - The kiln should do a block damage check every 168 hours (7 days) of burn time. So you should be able to run at least 7 batches before it does a check for damaging blocks. This may have seemed erratic previously, because the issue with insta-firing was that the kiln door was not properly resetting it's timer (I'm told - I'm not a coder). So it would be counting up hours when it should not, you'd go to fire a batch, it would already have counted up 168 hours despite nothing going on during that time, and then boom, insta-fire. iirc a batch should take about 16 hours or so (including warm-up time). The reason the check interval is 168 hours, btw, is because it inherited this from the cementation furnace. - The fuel piles do not have to be full stacks, you just have to have *some* fuel in all 9 spots. iirc you only need to fill them slightly over halfway to run 1 batch. If you over-fill the piles, you'll be putting hours on your kiln door (hence, advancing toward damage time) unnecessarily. - Yes, the doors' positions at the moment of finish check time is what matters. Trying to keep some running total of states on an hourly basis was deemed too complex for the time we had this update, and possibly a limitation of the game, due to chunk unloading, and moreover the possibility of hatches being in different chunks than the doors. And honestly, it's unnecessary. It's just meant to give a simple way to control the color result, without having to create a raw clay type for every single fired color. We unfortunately did not reach all our goals for the beehive kiln this update, so it is true that some functions are not optimal. We hope at some future time to make the mechanic more flexible in terms of fuels. So that you could mix fuel types, or run the kiln without having fuel in all 9 spaces. We may also distribute the block damage more over time, with the caveat that broken blocks would not fully halt the firing, but slow it down instead (up to a point, after which it would stop). These things probably will not happen any time soon, and when they do the cementation furnace will likely get the same changes. But I thought I'd clarify things for those of you who were wondering. And please do let me know regarding what version you were playing when you had the insta-firing issues.

The new header bricks (the smaller kind)

Yes, Thorfinn is correct on both counts.

Ya generally speaking, in any situation where the expected interaction is not working, it's best to try the alternate keyboard key. So if you were expecting shift-rightclick, try cntrl-rightclick. And vice versa. That's quite often the difference.

This is pretty much a matter of tuning. What was done, was that it was made so that mobs - upon being damaged, if the player is not in their detection range - they run in a random direction. This is meant to prevent what used to be the case, where they would just stand in place and get hit over and over. At least if they move immediately, you have to re-adjust your aim. So, it's kind of a matter of finding the perfect balance of detection range and targeting (in)accuracy. Right now our focus is still on getting the rest of the update (the story part) completed, so we're slower than normal on addressing the bug reports this time around.

Yep, still planned. Someday.

This is correct. Original plan was to require you to use a stick to get termites out. But it went the standard drops-when-broke route for expediency. Maybe someday the stick method might get implemented.

Yes, we have plans for more immersive glass mechanics. It's just not a priority right now as glass doesn't play much of a role in the game. Once we get to alchemy, it becomes much more relevant.

To address your concerns @Streetwind, it will not be a thing for *all* crops. Just some. For instance any crop whose seed is also the food, it will certainly make no difference (grains). At least some root crops will likely remain basically the same as they are now. The idea is for crops to not all just be essentially reskins of the same thing, with minor variations in temperature and nutrient and so forth. We want them to actually *feel* different to grow, as much as we reasonably can. So server players might avoid those crops which are trickier to grow, but not all crops will be like that - but on the flip side, having a dedicated farmer than can give the trickier crops the attention they need, hopefully will be rewarding. You may even get things like biennial crops that only produce seeds on a second year, but produce a lot of seeds then. We'd like to have varieties that produce better with trellising (tomatoes, cucumbers, peas), varieties that yield a little over time, rather than a large yield all at once (beans, peppers), and more. Right now there are technical differences between crops (nutrients, temperatures), but in the end they all still feel the same to grow - ya stick em in the ground and come back at the end. Variety is what we want, not same-ness. And it goes beyond the plants themselves, we have plans for all kinds of adjacent systems. In totality, it'd be an update on its own probably. Which is essentially why we've avoided much 'tinkering around the edges', so far.

Yes, going to seed will be a thing in the future. It's kind of toying around the edges though, and not really a priority right now, as far as implementing it by itself.

Traps should have a handbook entry now as of 1.19.2, explaining their functioning. It's worth reading. Did you know that if an animal is left too long in a trap it will die?