Minecraft Forums

Ok, so I just wasted about 1.5 hours of my life reading this thread. The last 3 pages or so seemed to denegrate into a flame war pretty much, but I stuck with it. For the record, here are my quick opinions:

Cows should drop more leather.
As much as I'd like a use for Rotten Flesh, and as much as I liked it at first, it's illogical now that it's explained. I can't back it.
Zombies shouldn't drop leather, that makes no sense.
I don't think leather should drop from pigs and sheep. It's always been cow domain.
I think that the book crafting formula should make more than 1 book

Ok, so more detailed explanation:

I spent three or four days recently building a library in an SMP world. Real life days, ~4-6 hours per day I think. Here's a few pics:

I did some rough calculations and calculated that there are roughly 300 bookshelves in here. That translates to 900 books, and using the previous estimate of a 3/5 chance of dropping leather, that equates to some 1500 cows to make this again. How long would it take to breed 1500 cows? According to the wiki, they take 20 minutes to grow to maturity. Starting with 2 cows, and not killing a single one until 1500 cows are present, (AKA the fastest method, though certainly not the most practical,) this would take 6 hours of continuous interaction with the cows, feeding them and breeding them. This is assuming a perfect speed of reproducing the cattle with no accounting for travel time or feeding time. After you have the 1602 cows that is the result of all that breeding, how long does it take to kill them all? Assuming it takes maybe 2 seconds per cow, that's 53.4 minutes of cow killing. I don't care how much you love killing things, after a half hour, it gets pretty boring. Again, this does not account for making new swords or anything. It would also take 3198 wheat bushels, or about 50 stacks, to even do the breeding in the first place. For the sake of the "start from scratch" mentality, I'll add in the requirements for the wheat growing as well, though we're already up to ~7 hours. Lets assume for simplicity that your wheat farm nets 2 stack of wheat per harvest and that it is in the optimum arrangement and thus is fully grown in ~40 minutes according to the wiki. For 50 stacks, you will need a whopping 16 hours and 40 minutes.

I'm not sure if you went through the calculations above, but feel free to check them. The approximate total playing time needed to build that library would be ~24 hours of continuous grinding for materials at an absolutely perfect speed, in addition to the time required to mine out the structure and design the place. Given an average playing time of 3-5 hours per day, it would be about 6 days of continuous grinding before I could even start to build. With my clan supplying all the resources required, It still took me 4 days to make the place.

Now how long would it take if 1 drop of leather was guaranteed and the average was 2? Well, we'd only need 450 cows to have our leather, which would STILL require 5 hours of cattle breeding. However, it would require 1068 less wheat, saving us ~17 stacks and another 5.5 hours of farming. In addition, given our calculation of a cow dead every 2 seconds, it now only takes 15 minutes to mow them all down. The total time required is now 10.75 hours of continuous work. Still a mighty achievement, still quite a lot of work.

Zoran, you say you like farming, is 10.75 hours of farming enough? Must we be inflicted with 14 more mind numbing hours?

Also, redstonevet90, for your diamond block pleasures, I've calculated this out for you: given purely random mining at level 12 in a straight line, there's a 0.0846% of any block being diamond. Since I've done enough math, I'm not going to calculate the fact that there are veins, and that you can see the walls around you, so WITHOUT all that, it would take ~20 minutes per randomly placed diamond to be mined from DIRECTLY in your path. This means that to acquire each diamond block would take ~3 hours. So in the time it takes to gather the resources for the library, you've mined up enough diamonds for 8 diamond blocks. They're pretty darn rare.


-Sigh-
I didn't really mean this post to end up being a wall of calculations, but all this reading made me want to figure it out for myself. On a more personal note, my clan on the server has made an emergancy reed farm and are mass producing books in preparation for this change. We have ~45 stacks of books so far and every ten minutes or so we can check up on the reed farm and get another 2 stacks. This tells me that books are pretty easy to make, and could use a little something extra to make them a bit more difficult. But tacking on an extra hour or two to the book making process strikes me as extreme.

EDIT : What the heck, I don't want to do this essay. I grabbed some stats from the Phoenix eXpandable mine, which, granted, is not the MOST efficient mine. However, it will serve. You're supposed to average 23 diamonds per hour using an iron pick. Thus, redstonevet90, after the resources to make my library are acquired, given 24 hours of perfect grinding, you will have mined almost a stack of diamond blocks. Decorate all you want. Unless you want to build something like a library with all those blocks, you're pretty set for simple decoration.

As for your jukebox example, Zoran, in the time it takes me to make 300 bookshelves, (~24 hours), you will be able to make 552 jukeboxes. So this?

Quote from zoran

I don't fully understand. You asked me to, specifically, provide examples of a non trophy item that was more difficult to obtain than bookshelves. You specifically said that there were none, yet there are.

I think you'll have to find a different trophy item. Bookcases now take longer to make than jukeboxes.

Everything that Jeb and Jon are doing for this game exceeds any expectations I may have had.
Let's take a look at what they've done IN THE LAST WEEK, let alone since they teamed up.

- Finished up "Anvil". I thought that Jeb was "merely" increasing the world height by 128 whole blocks, but nooo... Biomes are organized by chunks, making things SOOO much easier for everybody who has complained about biomes overlapping other biomes and structures. Just think of how many complaint threads will be negated, both on the biome front, and the build height front! Even so, Jeb went a step FURTHER! There is room for a TON more block IDs, the state of empty space isn't saved, chunks are better compressed: Performance is going to significantly INCREASE in the same update that the world height is DOUBLED! Not to mention the possibilities for mods to add more blocks. :biggrin.gif:

- Villagers. Everyone hated these things when they were first introduced, because they were literally less dynamic than the farm animals. Just look at them now! They are one of the game's MORE dynamic features, and it's only been a few snapshots! They open and close doors, go into their homes when it's dark, sprint away from zombies (who actively chase and kill them!), and turn around to stare at passives (including the player)! Not only that, but Jon is implementing: A way for villagers to protect themselves from zombies, a way for villagers to reproduce and sustain their numbers, and when lamps are introduced, I have a feeling that villagers will interact with those.

- Zombies used to be the generic, everyday mob. Sure, they had a little bit more health than other mobs, but now they're so much better than that. They hide from the sun, break down doors to get at you, and even attack villagers! So many players have suggested or asked for a "blood moon event", where zombies swarm the player en mass and bust down your doors, and with Jon working on "zombie sieges", those hopes may soon become reality!

- Lamps. Some people were worried when they noticed that AI and biome code were being worked on, more so than new blocks and mechanisms. Just the other day, I wanted lamps to be implemented, and now they're going to be! So great.


In conclusion, Jeb and Jon are the best. Minecraft is becoming better than it ever has been. I love this game.

Wow, just wow, he was asking a legitimite question and you call him a noob?

Honestly...

Make no assumptions on a game you are not developing. And make no judgments on game mechanics you haven't actually played with yet.

It's cool to speculate and all that, but none of us know the real specifics of how it's actually going to work.

This is probably close to my final design for expandable, efficient mining. Technically a spiral is more efficient, but is harder to return to the central hub, more difficult to do correctly, and quite frankly, not as cool. :smile.gif: The benefits of this system are:

[*:1f1wlp94]Fully Expandable. With traditional branch mining, if you want initially make every branch 20 blocks deep, but later want to expand, you will spend more time walking to each branch end to continue mining. This system always gets you to the end of your mine in the shortest distance possible. And unlike my previous design, you don't have to decide how large your mine will be beforehand.

[*:1f1wlp94]Increasing Efficiency. The more you put into the mine, the more efficient it becomes. For example, by the time the return path(shown in green in the third image) becomes 150 meters long, you will have mined over 16000 blocks, and exposed over 64000 blocks.

This image shows the blind spots of the system. The further into each branch you get, the more sparse these blind spots become.


And finally, how to mine this method without needing to count. The green blocks are blocks you mine to keep the shortcut path going. After you mine the 2 meters for the shortcut path, turn 90 degrees right, and mine 6 meters. Then, turn 90 degrees left and mine 3 meters. Mine 2 more blocks at head level(not a tunnel, just a window, shown by the red blocks), this will be the marker for your next leg. Then, turn 90 degrees left, and mine until you join with your previous window, then mine 6 more. The image shows it better, but after every window you mine 6 more meters and turn, no need to count the legs.


I've also included this screenshot of the red-block 'windows', in case anyone is confused. Looking through the window is looking back to where I was standing when I dug it out. Now that I hit the window, I know I need to dig 6 more meters, then turn.


One common question is, what layer to mine at. Normally, the recommendation is to mine at layer 12. This is a solid recommendation, unless you are concerned with finding lapis lazuli. Lapis lazuli is actually between 2 and 3 times as common if you mine at layer 14 instead of layer 12, while diamond, gold, iron, and redstone are just as common at that level as they are at level 12. If you come across a lava lake, you will almost always be 2 blocks above it. Just dump water on the lava, and explore the cavern for exposed ore, before continuing.

For bonus points, build your base/mine in the SW direction from the (0,0) point on your map to take advantage of the higher mineral percentage there(however, I see this glitch being fixed before release, so it's not as important).

The last point is, what material pickaxe to use. This depends on what you are mining for.

If your goal is to find diamond, there are 2 options. Either mine with an iron pickaxe(if you don't mind losing approximately 3 iron for every diamond you find), or mine with a stone pickaxe. Mining for diamond with diamond is inefficient.

If your goal is to find iron, there are again, 2 option. You can mine with diamond, if you don't mind spending 1 diamond for every 10 iron you find, or mine with stone. Once again, mining for iron with iron is inefficient.

If your goal is to find as many materials as possible(iron, gold, redstone, lapis, diamond), then the best option is to mine with diamond. You will find more diamond than you spend on average, but you will gather the other resources at a tremendously higher rate than using iron or stone.

VARIATION COURTESY GRIZDALE

Explanation coming later. This uses the same number of blocks mined, but reduces 'blind spots' by about 10%