redram

Tossing things in a pit to despawn isn't sufficient?

As it stands currently, the frequency prospecting is needed to figure out if you're even in the right vicinity to find the ore you want. Because VS does not tie ores to rock type like TFC did. It allows you do do so with enough precision that you can fairly easily zero in on large deposit ores like iron and coal. Much harder for small deposits like tin and bismuth, and therein is the major problem. Direct indicating could be useful even within the current setup, in that once you're in a decent area, you could go around prospecting with a direct indicating tool, to actually find the ore. You could do a shaft/tunnel, direct indicating as you go, and have a much better chance than currently. This is because currently a vertical shaft only tells you 5 blocks at each cross section. The shaft, plus the four adjacent. A 6 block radius would tell you 169 blocks cross section (13x13). This is nearly a %3,400 improvement. Yet still only 1/4 what TFC propicking tells, in cross-sectional terms (1/8 of TFC in volumetric terms). If you have no frequency detection method in the current setup, then you're limited to blindly tunneling and prospecting, which would be hugely, hugely inefficient, or propicking caves and the surface - also inefficient give how rare ores zones are currently. So, within the current general ore scenario, even if ores have a great vertical component, both frequency and direct indication would be useful. I think that even if deposits turned into big spaghetti monsters, it would still be good to have frequency, because the world is just so vast. I've done blanket surface propicking in TFC. It's very time consuming - 4x as much so if the search radius is only 1/2 that of TFC. I'm pretty sure that right now you cannot dig 'anywhere' and have a 70% chance of hitting useful ores. If you include quartz, salt, and sulfur in 'useful ores', then maybe. As for copper, I'm pretty sure the plan is to reduce it eventually - I'm pretty sure it was said somewhere that it's only as common as it is for these early testing phases. There's no reason to tie the prospecting method to the ore vein generation. They don't have any direct necessary links. I'd propose more like: 1 - "What do you think of the current method of propicking (frequency detection) in VS? A) No good, throw it out and do something else (for instance TFC-like direct indication). B) It's good, but not enough on its own. Keep it but add other propicking methods. C) Its great, no other methods needed. I don't think anyone will pick C though. 2 - "How would you like to see ore veins work in VS? A) They're great as they are (flat discs of fairly small size relative to TFC) no change. B) size and distribution like now, but more forms (clouds, snakes, tentacles) C) rarer larger distributed clouds, similar to TFC (easier to hit from both above and the side) D) huge long snaking veins E) smaller tentacle-like veins leading to a dense core. F) Varied forms either randomly or based on ore type (kind of like Reasonable Realism mod for MC). Etc etc.

I don't think mixing prospecting and ore generation really helps the poll. They're kind of separate issues, or could be. Changing ore generation might make prospecting not so bad, for instance. To the first question, I'd answer both should be improved, which I think they will be. There's been discussion of other methods of prospecting. I think it's a little short-sighted to treat things as if the propick is the only tool that we'll ever have. To the second question I'd answer larger veins, but not for infrastructure purposes - I don't think it will help that. I think it would improve the chances of people finding exposed ores in caves, which should ease some of the bronze issues people have been having. I'd also like to see ores have more verticality to them, so that horizontal exploration tunnels can be used, rather than vertical shafts, which the current flat disc form encourages. If horizontal tunnels can be encouraged, that would set up a scenario where mine carts could become useful, with some other changes. It's harder to make minecarts useful when vertical shafts are the preferred exploratory method. Question 3 was the only one I could answer straight, but it won't let me submit just 1 answer. I like the current frequency mechanic, and I'd love it if the entire system could be arranged such that it stays in some way. But I realize there's a strong likelihood that too many people dislike it. But, frequency and direct indication are *not* mutually exclusive. In fact, your suggested range of 6 blocks for direct indication would still require some kind of frequency most likely, as that's a very short range of detection. I actually think they could complement each other very well. Expecting players to just use direct detection is a recipe for TFC's one-dimensional system, where surface ores get exploited, but nothing else because it's all too deep to be detected. Unless veins were extremely scattered.

Back from long vacation. So my late responses: - In game maps. Seriously. No seriously. People will miss these if they are not present. - Finalized prospecting. Personally I like it how it is, but in any case it needs to be 'finalized' before release. It's too huge a part of the game to go switching it about wholesale after release. - More content. Again, I really thing it should have at least a sketch of all the major TFC stuff. leather working, armor, basic cooking, more detailed farming, quern, animal domestication, fishing, etc. Also steel tech at least. Possibly also a better handle on how weapons are expected to balance, and how bows play into it all. Ideally a detailed hunting mechanic, if such is the plan. Also seasons and an accompanying nerf to berry bushes, and getting healing in it's final form. Don't release the game with the food and healing in their current stopgap state. - Some basic server protections for SMP play (both protecting the server, and claiming and protecting player property), plus whatever backend stuff. I don't know that stuff. Nice-to-haves: at least 1 mountable animal, some basic mechanical stuff (wooden cogs to power querns, at least). Also SMP prism of some kind, as Tony suggested.

Maybe mention that you can't change the order of the blocks in the list, or change their parent/child relationship. So it's worthwhile to consider that organization carefully so you get it right the first time.

So as far as hunting goes, from a practical standpoint, and my own personal playstyle, I'm not going to use a fire for mob safety. That requires me to carry fire components, or the tools, which is two inventory slots, and I have to maintain the fire. Instead, I can just carry 1 stack of cobble (as I always do anyway) and completely enclose myself and the kill. Unless the scavengers start appearing basically immediately. As long as cobble is as fast to take down as it is currently, it'll be easier, and cobble is also useful for caving and getting places, unlike fire components or the tools. So I'm just kind of saying, I'm not sure it'll be the best solution. But I guess that depends on playstyle. Also, not all mobs are going to be of a nature that they would be afraid of fire, so that mechanic should only be a thing for *animal* mobs.

Ya, making hunting and killing more of an event would probably help balance the food situation. In the current state of the game, I much prefer meat to crops, because meat gives so much more satiation. Of course we also used to be drowning in animals, that's getting less and less so, but wolves are still a great source of meat and I actively seek them out for that, preferring them over sheep and boar. I do think the hunting experience could used improvement in several ways. I think it would be a good idea if there were at least two kinds of meat: 'meat', and 'bush meat'. Bush meat would be gotten from any animal that's not an 'intended' meat source. So wolves for instance, would just drop bush meat. This meat might not be as filling as normal meat. Or, it would not be a valid ingredient in any cooking recipes (at least, none of the good ones). Now, maybe there could even be one or two further kinds of meat. 'choice' and 'excellent' or something like that. Those might be meats gotten from rare non-farmable animals, or, animals that have been bred to have meat above and beyond the norm. That would depend on having a compelling food system though, with quality that matters. Another suggestion I would make, is that the manner of killing the animal affects the meat drop. So if you kill the animal with a sword, you get very little meat. You tore it all to pieces and contaminated it with hair and viscera. Similarly, a blunt weapon reduces the meat yield due to massive bruising and trauma to the muscle. If we can get organs from animals, then the chance of getting various organs would also be reduced by these kill methods, as the organs are sliced or smashed. Piercing weapons should be the preferred method of getting good amounts of meat. This would encourage spear and arrow use, as opposed to right now where I just run after chickens and everything else madly hacking with my sword. I could even see poultry having a special execution method involving a log and an axe, but maybe that's a bit much... Eventually I feel like it'd be good if wild animals would run away from the player, so that it's not so easy to get at them with a melee weapon. This would also encourage spear and arrow use. I don't even use arrows currently - there's just no need. It might be interesting if the player could make camouflage clothing for themselves, to help them get a little bit closer. Also moving slower would help. I had been planning to make a butchering suggestion at some point, so I won't go too much into that here, but suffice to say I would love to see corpse drops, and the player actually having to dress the animal. I would make meat a more involved process, and if it required specialty tools, it might make the 'incidental' accumulation of meat not so easy, and raise the profile of crops for food. As far as fires to scare animals, it could be interesting, but I don't see it as a vital part of the hunting experience. Predators attracted by blood makes sense, but if all you have to do is go click on some water, I guess i'm not that excited about the mechanic. And especially in the current system it'd be more a feature than a deterrent, since the wolves will drop even more meat! What I do like about predators attracted by blood is it might encourage domestication of animals for food, so that they could be slaughtered in a safe environment. But I think it requires making wolf and other predator meat a third-rate food source.

To reiterate what copy said, for common and simple stuff there'd be no 'intellectual rights' issue. The guy who made the waterskin mod for TFC did not invent the notion of a waterskin. Any more than VS invented the notions of logs, pickaxes, or wolves. It would not be at all problematic for VS to subsume such things (albeit with their own assets and code). But for truly custom experiences on the level of Thaumcraft, well, that's a different matter, from a PR standpoint at least, if not legal.

I'd point out that there is always the option (and I'd say it's in fact likely) that *if* this gets implemented, it will only be in the Survival playstyle, as opposed to survive and build. And, it needs to be easily adjustable by the player/server admin, so they can make container durability be higher or lower than 'default', or even infinite (no wear). Players will have drastically different preferences for this kind of mechanic, and the default should appeal to the largest player base, but be adjustable. That said, within this mechanic, from the top I don't like the slot-by-slot wear. I want the entire bag to be available, or not. My reason for this is that it's just a bit-by-bit annoyance to do it slot by slot. I don't want to be constantly annoyed by repairs. If it's all or nothing, I can still watch the durability, keep spares, swap them out when needed, and not be hassled by having to repair my bag every time I go get an inventory full of chalk. I'd rather spend 4 leather once to get a whole new bag, than have to spend 1 leather 4 separate times to repair it. Also, like Milo, I have certain areas of inventory I put certain things, and I'd rather not have that messed with every trip or two. Instantly dropping items from inventory (whether 1 slot at a time or the entire) is bad. If it happens in dangerous combat or parkour, you're just going to tick off the player. I'd much rather see the slot(s) greyed out, the player can take the item(s) out, but not place new ones in. This lets the player determine when to deal with the issue. As far as durability damage, I lean towards item-moving, but movement based would work too, or even damage. I think for item-moving, it's per individual item, not stack. That avoids the quantity question. Overburdening I don't like. I don't like summed weight limits in general (whole 'nother topic), and this relies on that. I also am not particularly interested in 'load shifting'. Another annoyance for me. The good thing about this method would be that weight capacity would be another container stat that could be altered by skilled craft, and altered at a very fine scale.

Ya, it's definitely not realistic. But as always, there's so many other aspects of the game that aren't either. But I can guarantee players would love it.

Useful behaviors aside from attack? - Flush - can command the wolf to hunt up game from thin air. If successful a rabbit or pheasant or even boar, maybe deer, appears nearby. - fetch - they'll go and grab items in areas the player doesn't want to go, going through 1-high openings so the player doesn't have to. - guard - They stay in place and attack animals or mobs that come close. Useful in guarding crops. - truffle - If truffles were ever a thing, the dog could got indicate an area in a certain radius where truffles are (if pigs became trainable they'd be much better at it, having a larger radius) - herd - Targets a group of animals. causes them to follow the wolf, who is presumably following the player. Obviously this is the reverse of how it should be, but for code purposes I would assume easier. I think a tamable wolf mob would be much better if it also included the ability to get specific breeds of dog. It could operate off a simple recessive gene scenario (with maybe 1 in 10 wolves carrying a breed gene), so the player has to do a bit of breeding to successfully get a recessive gene to manifest. It could have 'tech trees' of breeds, so wolves would only carry the genes for certain near-wolf breeds (husky, german shepherd, whatever) but those sub-breeds, once created, would have a chance to have a different sub-breed gene. Some breeds would be better at some tasks, and also better at swimming, or faster, or do more damage. Some would be better at nothing, just 'for the hell of it' breeds (bulldog, pug, chihuahua). I could see such breeds being very valuable on SMP servers, purely as prestige/rp mobs.

I think it's worth the $12.50 and that's what I voted for, though I can also see logic in trying to keep it low to attract more players. I think the game still has a ways to go to demand more than this. There's no armor system, no animal husbandry, crops are pretty unrewarding, biomes are patchwork. It looks at first glance like it's on par with TFC but it's really not there yet. I'd say once feature parity with TFC is reach maybe 15. Then beyond 20? I don't buy games hardly at all anymore though, so I don't exactly have a lot to compare with. At the same time, I wonder how broad the audience is? There's just started to be some lets-play videos, and its caused a spike in interest for sure. I'd hate to see most of the 'natural' player base buy it too early on the cheap. But maybe that base is much broader than I think...

bony soil is useless - I think it should be able to be combined with medium soil to produce rich soil (btw did you know there is rich soil? It's *extremely* rare, usually in swamps or jungles) Most crops are just food right now. No alcohol or cooking system yet. Flax produces both edible grain, and flax twine, which is used to make string, which is used to make bows and cloth. Cloth is used to make ore bombs (<--you want these!) and sacks (an incredible costly version of a backpack) as well as maybe a bed type? Basically flax is by far the most valuable crop in the game. You'll want as much of it as you can possible farm, because of ore bombs. Food crops are honestly not worth the effort because berry bushes are better in every way right now. But I'm sure this will change down the road.

@Tyron Nice Update! That anvil mold can be a little tricky with the overhanging portions - I like it. I noticed that when I place flowers in the planter and flower pot, it does not remove them from my inventory, but does place them in the planter/pot. So effectively I can infinitely copy flowers in them.

Wow awesome update! Things are really looking survival-y! And OMG the pumpkins!!!!!

Oh, and just to be clear, since I see I typoed before, I meant ingot *molds*, not the ingots themselves. Which would be silly. It would be an avenue to keeping clay necessary.

Very nice update! Love the steam effect when pouring the metal. Is there or will there be a chance for ingots to break? Or are they permanent once made? Cane one make a 'bad batch' of metal? Or will it only output when you have a valid mixture?

Ok, community story area, that makes sense. As for my thoughts while reading the passage, it's just the technical side of me, which notices details like tense switches sometimes. And I wasn't sure of the reason for that particular spot. The switch to present tense overall is fine. It puts in my mind, the sense that the storyteller is leaning in toward his audience, perhaps whispering, or perhaps a more hurried pace. And then in the fine paragraph where it goes back to past tense, he's now backed away again, and is speaking broadly and louder, again to his audience and beyond.

So it's an allegory of the game I take it? The dream and awaking is the player starting the game? It's a little light on details, but if it's serving to illustrate a general story arc, I supposed it needs to be to some degree? Stories of our own could be a more personalized version, with details specific to our own gameplay experience? Or are you looking for stories that explain some aspects in more detail, or just kind of seeing what people come up with? I have some technical comments I'll spoiler below.

Just thought I'd upload a couple screenshots of landscape I thought was really cool. The one is a giant mountain with streams coming down, and a huge ominous cave opening at the bottom! Unfortunately the cave went nowhere, but it really looks neat from outside. A dragon could live there! And then also some pretty cool 'badland' formations, again with waterfall. I'm a sucker for waterfalls I guess.

Are you guys pretty set on your anvil implementation (presumably more or less like vintagecraft)? I had some suggestions for a different way of doing it, but it'd be a bit of an involved suggestion post, so I don't want to go to that trouble if your plan is pretty much set in stone.

Meaning they're made with crafting grid rather than anvil? If so, is that just temporary till anvils are implemented?