Thalius

Greetings. I'm working on a version of a mod that makes drifters more dynamic in their attack and behavior. One major feature of the mod is that higher tier drifters have a very small chance to spawn anywhere in the world from surface to mantle. Basically I treat the surface and underground as two halves to the world. Surface drifters spawn anywhere above ground, and deep drifters are the lower world counterpart to surface drifters, spawning anywhere underground down to the mantle. Tainted through nightmare drifters can spawn anywhere where there is a light level of zero. Tainted are more common (though still pretty uncommon compared to surface and deep drifters), corrupt drifters are rare, and nightmare drifters are very rare. This sort of makes corrupt and nightmare drifters sort of a mini-boss that shows up from time to time. The issue is, I want them to show up more often underground while remaining rare on the surface. For that, I need to add code to the mod that enables higher spawn chances underground (and increasing spawn chances the deeper you go, if that does not prove too hard to accomplish). If this parameter could be configurable, that would be fantastic. I can modify .json files, but I can't write code. If any of you code wizards would be interested and willing to collaborate with me on this particular feature in the mod, I'd be grateful. ~TH~ Editing to add some additional info to give an idea on what I'm working on and why this is such a desired feature for the project: Via .json editing I've been able to develop drifter attributes that give the following changes: Faster in various, specific ways Unpredictable, with balanced, random leaping attacks that vary by type, Much harder to dodge if one gets too close, but still avoidable if you can learn the timing of the various drifter types' attacks. Running through a pack of drifters without damage is near impossible, and carelessly getting to close to one has a much increased chance of their landing a hit, but even with all that I have worked to keep a balanced feel to combat with them, Drifters have a slightly higher vertical reach, making the two-block high "nerd poling" tactic, as some call it, obsolete, Some drifters have had an unused animation in their shape file added to them, causing them at times to crawl rapidly toward you (quite creepy coming at you in the dark out of brush and tall grass), Added "Rage Mode" sort of behavior that can be triggered if you tick them off enough (do enough damage), Reduced spawn sizes and greatly reduced spawn chances for top three tier of drifters, but encounters with them are much more memorable, Adjusted loot drops to make more rare and more dangerous higher tier drifters more valuable, Mr1k3's vision and reworking of the way drifters look in his Better Drifters mod (of which this is a branch I've been working on for my server, with permission), has rendered them much larger than their vanilla counterparts and quite terrifying and intimidating to encounter. The only edit I've made is to make corrupt drifters much larger. Lowered light level requirements for all drifters, making it easier to prevent spawning via using light sources, Spawning parameters that make encountering all drifter types likely regardless of your elevation in the world, though corrupt and nightmare drifters are very, very rare anywhere (which is one thing I am hoping to change the deeper you go below ground, which is what the op request here is seeking to address). This feels like one last element I'm looking for in my vision for how drifters will work in the game world, but it is beyond my abilities to implement, since it requires code work.

Ah, nice. Tells you how many trees I’ve seen planted in pots or planters so far.

And on that note: Allow trees to be planted in small clay pots and buckets or large clay pots or barrels and grow small to medium sized bonsai versions of trees.That would make for some fun ornamental gardening features.

You mean like if they grew under conditions ( right soil/nutrients/lighting/shade etc. ) best suited for the tree type, you could have a chance to grow taller trees than default sizes? That would be fun. One could cultivate a forest of trees larger than you'd otherwise find, or try to grow something special in a desired location.

Lands of Chaos, a new mod that is in alpha phase, enables you to configure larger trees. I have it set to trees that are 25% larger and it looks fantastic, and with no lag unless you set the default cave size modifiers too high.

Perfect.

Is the “returnthings” feature configurable? We want to add the mod to The Wilderlands server, but the option to simply “return” your items to yourself via a command is not an option for a server that aims to be more immersive and challenging.

I like the idea in principle, but this has been discussed before and the issue is one of performance. You are talking multiple hundreds of trees (potentially) in every single loaded chunk on a server that has growth/entity/behavior mechanics (if trees "behave" differently by growth stage in wind and various weather conditions), that the game would have to keep up with. To my understanding, it would take quite a machine to be able to process all of that and not kill performance. If they could find a way to make handling such things much simpler so as not to be a heavy load on a standard pc, I'd be all for it. As I recall, there has been discussion about trees as block entities "growing" over time, as if the tree would generate/spawn into maturity one stage at a time, but even that had performance concerns and was not feesable. Wish I could recall where I saw that discussion, but it was several years ago at least, and is buried somewhere deep in the forums.

I have a bit of a different view on torches. The whole way they work in this game and Minecraft and others is odd. We are talking flaming sticks, yes? Up to 64 flaming sticks per inventory slot, held in our hands/inventory or packed into a backpack or reed basket of some kind that we have a bunch of other stuff packed into with them.... I think we should only be able to carry one lit torch in our hand or off hand at a time. No lit torches in any pack or inventory slot at all- only unlit torches at the ready. If you need the hand with the torch free, put the torch down or switch hands. If you need both hands free or to use for other things, put the torch down. If you want to put a torch on a wall or stick one in the ground, place the lit torch, or place an unlit torch (which you could have a stack of up to 64 of), and then light the placed torch with the lit torch you are holding (or use the fire starter). (Making this make sense would mean making other things make sense too though, like how in the world do we hold multiple stacks of lit lanterns or oil lamps at a time, or many multiple trees' worth of logs, or what amounts to tons and tons of stone and dirt? That is part of a larger discussion on adding inventory volume and weight mechanics and such... but I digress.) So, given we will likely always be able to carry huge stacks of flaming sticks in our inventory or backpacks and such without issue, I think the least I can suggest is that water should, in all fairness, extinguish any and all flaming sticks/lamps/lanterns you may have on your person if you decide to take them swimming with you. Just my personal take on the issue. ~TH~ Edit: Maybe have a special container you can place in a backpack slot that alone carries a bundle of lit torches, but something along the lines of 8 or 16 instead of 64. Spare unlit torches can be safely packed en mass into your backpack along with everything else. Alt-mouse wheel scrolling over to the torch bundle allows you to right click-place one. Doing this would add having to manage inventory capacity into the mix, which to my mind sounds like a fair compromise given we are dealing with juggling things that are on fire. Just how baddly do you want to have a stack of lit torches on hand? Enough to fill up a pack slot and forgo inventory space or some other special pack slot inventory expansion? (They should all still go out though, if you take them swimming.)

One more thing. After posting the last comment, it occurred to me that I'd not tried turning off the cavesExtraBranchy setting. I loaded a new world with default cave width back at 1.3 and all other default settings at 1.1, and the extra branchy setting turned off. (NoiseCaves turned on as well). The game runs fine. No lag, and no problems re-spawning or saving and exiting the game. Played for a while and it was so smooth I could almost forget that I was checking the mod out. Conclusion on my end would be, whatever is causing high memory usage and lag issues on my system is tied to how the cavesExtraBranchy code is working itself out. Oh, and on a side note: Mine cave-ins are horrifying. Well done!

I have been generating multiple new worlds, testing out this mod's cave settings as I fly around and explore in creative mod to load as much of the map as I can to see how performance works. I have noticed a pretty consistent problem on my system when I have default caves enabled and even slightly modified with settings at 1.1 and more branching enabled. Lag and freezing in single player is pretty common within 5-10 minutes of having the game loaded, and when I try to save and quit the game it often takes a VERY long time to close down, or just acts stuck in the process, even when trying to force quit. I've had to open task manager quite a bit and close the game down that way. This has happened whether I've had noisy cave gen enabled or not. Having default caves on just seems to eat memory and locks things up. That being said, turning off default caves and just using the noisyCave gen setting has the game humming along just fine, and the caves look fantastic. The only thing I noticed was that with only the noisy caves on there seem to be very few if any cave openings at the surface. The few I found that seemed to look like cave openings only cut into the side surfaces of mountains, and none went into the ground or very deep at all. I dug straight down into the ground and dropped into a huge cave system and explored it and several others it connected to, but never found a cave tunnel heading to the surface. Is this intended with the noise cave gen mechanic?

Sent you a pm, @goaliemagics. It is a pretty cool map. It has a lot of striking mountains mixed with plenty of plains and many very large lakes.

I'd seek a mod that disabled the hud clock/calendar features if we had astronomy that worked in the ways suggested here.

Found an out of place looking ore deposit- alum in sandstone. Looks as if the mod did not effect it's generation in the cave system formed around it.

Makes sense, and explains the additional lag and freezing I have been seeing. I have been running a game with setting at 1.5 since I made the last post, and no unusual lag flying around fast in creative, and no buggy caves. Seems to be reflecting what you explained. For those that don't understand how all that works on the technical side, (like me ), it might be worth it to add a comment in the config file explaining that anything higher than 1.5 on default cave settings will result in buggy cave and world generation, and poor performance. Otherwise someone is going to think: "Cool! I can double the size of my caves!" and punch in a value of 2 or more without thought of the unexpected consequences, then think the mod broke things, (also like I did. ). If I can help test anything else out, let me know. Love what you are doing with this one, and want to see it working for a long time to come.

Found this one pretty quick. I included a screen shot of the larger map, so you can see the drastic change in world gen over a large area in general along with the bugged cave gen issues. Close to spawn, as you can see from the mini map/coords in the upper right. World seed: 1761319223 Standard World settings. 512 world height.

I did alter a few of the settings, but not by much. At least, it did not seem like much to me. Here is a copy of the settings I'm using: As for the seed, I deleted the world. It lagged so bad after a number of chunks loaded in that manner that it became unplayable. I started up another world and found the same terrain gen feature with the same lag shortly occurring, but thought it was tied to the noisecaves feature. I closed the game and turned the noisecave setting off and logged back in, but saw no change. Makes sense then, if it is tied to changes in the default cave gen settings. I did not think I was increasing them by much though- just making them wider and a tad higher, from the look of the settings I adjusted. I'll play around with it later and duplicate the problem in a new world, and post screenshots with the seed and coordinates for the location.

The map and mini map makes navigating the world simply too easy and not very immersive as it currently works, so we opted to turn it and coordinates off on our server. That leaves us with very few options for navigating the game world though. Astronomy would be fantastic- A dynamic night sky with starts, planets and constellations that changed and moved with the seasons, and perhaps another moon or two that moved in their courses as well. Maybe even add a smaller second sun that rose and set in it's own course, but slow enough that perhaps it was not visible every day, and sometimes led to shorter, less dark nights. One could learn to navigate by such things if there was a consistent pattern to their movement in the sky both day and night. Would also be neat to tie temporal storms to the movement of a second sun and moons and such. Maybe even have larger temporal events when certain things aligned.

This is adjacent to it though, and looks great! I imagine these are the new "noise generated" cave systems the mod adds. One thing that came to mind exploring them is to suggest finding a way to greatly reduce the amount of water sources that spawn in them. The noise is very irritating and you can't get away from it. Either need less running water sources underground, or find some better running water noise mechanics. I'd suggest very, very few water blocks being allowed to spawn underground over-all. Rare underground pools and lakes would be better than running water blocks all over the place.

Greetings once again, @jakecool19... Been doing some exploring in creative mode and came across this, which I do not think is generating as intended:

I am encountering a problem with respawning after death when this mod is enabled. Upon dying I select respawn but nothing happens. The respawn button looks as though I pressed it, but the game just sits there. The game is not frozen. The respawn button simply does not seem to work. I have to select Rage Quit, and when the game closes out and returns to the client screen, I have to disable the mod, load the game back up, select respawn (which works as normal at that point), close the game back out after respawning, and then turn the mod back on and then log back into the game world to keep playing with the mod settings. I've tested this nearly a dozen times with the same results. The issue seems pretty clearly tied to the mod somehow. Running the latest VS unstable release version.

Oh, lol, beautiful! Seems I overlooked those.

Greetings! I've been playing around a bit with the mod, (pretty sure I was the first download ), and I have to say I'm very excited about the direction you are going in with this! Various mine-gas issues, configurable chance for mine cave-ins, mining support structures, a new variety of locust entities related to the added underground environmental elements, BREATHING, configurable tree gen sizes, a boss entity... all great stuff that I've hoped will find it's way to being part of the core game in the future! Really love the new dynamic it brings to working and exploring underground. I think it would pair well with the way I'm re-envisioning drifters in a mod I'm working on that makes drifters more of a full-world entity (with most drifter types showing up both above and below ground), with drifters over-all being a bit less common but more challenging and higher tier drifters serving more as very rare boss-type entities that could show up anywhere there is a complete lack of light. The changes leave the underworld feeling a little less special, but this mod certainly adds a lot to deepen that part of the game. I still have to play with the new locusts and gas issues. Looking forward to checking those things out tomorrow or this weekend. I can't comment on those specifically yet, but I did see two other things right off that I thought odd and worth mentioning. First- If there is any way to ensure that a player spawns over land at world gen, that would be helpful. In the first few games I've started with the mod, I spawned in the middle of the ocean every time, and ultimately used teleport to jump around to find land. I jumped 10k in every direction from spawn in one world, and landed in one corner of that grid on the edge of land. Oceans are HUGE, and I'd have been swimming for at least half an hour or more to get to that land mass if I'd even known which direction it was in the first place. When we get decent boats and ships that allow us to travel faster and live on water, the oceans this mod adds will be sweet to have! At the moment though, their size is daunting, even with a raft from Primitive Survival mod to use on them. For now, I have them disabled. The second thing- Could you add a config option for allowing or disallowing sea grass and the new kelp to spawn in the world? Adding mods to a multiplayer server is something I consider carefully and really don't want to do if the mod adds a lot of new blocks to the game world, in case the mods ever have to be removed. I want to consider using this mod on the Wilderlands server, but it adds a lot of mod-dependent blocks (sea grass and kelp) to most bodies of water. Water physics don't yet fill in the voids the missing blocks would cause if the mod had to be removed for some reason, and we'd have a mess. Another option might be if there is a way to have those blocks revert to existing vanilla sea-plant blocks if the mod is ever disabled or removed. Not even sure if or how that could be done, but it was a thought. Those were my only two concerns after playing with the mod content for a bit. Main concern is the large number of new blocks the mod adds to the world's water bodies. Certainly will use this in my single player games, but on the fence at the moment as to whether I can use it on my online server. Everything else looks fantastic so far! Looking forward to seeing where it goes from here! ~TH~

As the title indicates, I’d like to have the option to set spawn chances by depth. it could look something like this: spawnChanceByDepth: { “0-.2”: 2, “.2-.4”: 1.75, “.4-.6”: 1.25, “.6-.8”: 1.25, “.8-2”: 1 } Value in “ “ is percentage of vertical world height from mantle, and number value given is a modifier for the set spawn rate in the entity’s spawnChance property. In the example given, spawnChanceByDepth property doubles the spawn chances for all entities that are set to spawn at a depth within 20% of world height from mantle, chances are 75% higher within 20%-40% height from mantle, and so on. Wanting more dynamic drifter spawn condition options, and thought this would be interesting to play with if we had it… ~TH~

I heartily approve of this suggestion. Mortar and cut firewood and/or logs, for different looks. All the supplies already in the game- just need the graphics work to be done for the finished building blocks.