Minecraft Forums

The old "too many java.lang.NullPointerException" server list bug again:

http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding-java-edition/minecraft-mods/1294284-minecraft-is-too-easy-mite-mod?comment=6269

I'll delete the public server folder to reset when you say it's ok to do so.

Avernite, would it be possible to add Knoxx/Chronnis's public server (and only that server in thel ist, since its the only official mite public server we have for now) in the public server default list ?

Knoxx, please send Avernite an image that is representative of the server (ideally, some point of view straight from spawn), along with a short single paragraph description. The image needs to be 427x240 pixels. You also can choose a "background color" representing the "server".

The following would be an example of the full html paragraph that would then be added in the public_servers.txt file of a next release.

server_address=###.###.###.###:25565|world_name=New Avernia|start_date=Late Summer 2017|description=This is the MITE official public server./Spawn in the Extreme Hills,/then explore around to find forest and more!/ThenTextLine4/UpToTextLine5|website=mite.chronnis.com|image_url=http://minecraft-is-too-easy.com/public_servers/New_Avernia.png|theme_color=FF00FF|backdrop_opacity=0.4

It would make your server more well known.

;-)

Quote from Avernite»

MITE 1.6.4 R193 is now available.

Changes
- Experimental branch release (compatible with R192)
- Fixed bug that caused negative level stat to be displayed for high level players in multiplayer games
- Fixed bug that caused hoppers to dispense infinite XP orbs
- Chicken manure and feather production rates halved
- Bats have an extra spawning restriction that prevents them from spawning above lighted areas
- Blood moon crop blighting is now disabled on dedicated servers

Quote from Avernite»

Disabling blood moon blight on dedicated servers would be an easy fix for the problem, yeah. How about re-enabling time forwarding on dedicated servers instead? That appeals to me a bit more because it would bring it more inline with SinglePlayer.

Having Single Player & Multiplayer offer the same gameplay is good.

However, in this case here of Time Forwarding, such a simple solution just won't work. Here's simply what would happen:

- "Gee whiz. unless I play for 10 hours straight in a row, when I log back in today after having played yesterday, a blood moon (or two) occurred already, and all my crops have super mega ultra blighted !"

It would just become 100% impossible to have crops.

I'm currently designing an algorithm that I call "ITF" (Improved Time Forwarding) that is designed to allow a "fairer" Time Forwarding without taxing the server's CPU too much. Basically, it applies Time Forwarding accumulation in a number of regions around each player, using a few "tricks" to reduce CPU load by orders of magnitude.

I'll post it when it's ready. My only question is: how many open file handles at the same time can java easily support? That will determine which one of 2 versions of the algorithm I'll have to aim for.

Bug:

Leashed-to-fence-posts animals get freed when logging back in, instead of staying attached to their fence-post.

About what PuraVidaServer said on the time forwarding mechanic and Blight, I've been thinking about this a lot, too.

Presently (MITE R192), Blight is like this:

- During the normal days of a “32 days season”, there is a very low amount of Blight;

- Blighted crops don’t last long before actually dying (typically only a couple days!);

- During Blood Moon days, there is an insane amount of Blight and even more crops deaths;

- Time forwarding occurs only in single player.

The original goal of the latest batch of blight changes was to prevent player from having to feel too pressured to “do crops farm rounds” every couple days in order to avoid crops losses. i.e. it was too much “overhead”. You couldn’t do a big mining trip or a building project without being constantly interrupted by the “need” to do farm rounds again. However, this had a few probably unintended consequences.

First, it does not really address the underlying mechanic of the actual problem: players are still quite strongly encouraged to “do their rounds” of their farm often in order to minimize Blight propagation and crops losses. Less than before, true, so some players can just “accept to live” with the now a bit more tolerable losses, especially once the farm reaches a really big size. But it’s basically the exact same mechanic, just half of what it was before, so the underlying issues remains the same. Players still have to keep their farm rounds at the forefront of their mind at all time and still can’t do extended mining or building sessions. The” overhead hassle” is still "high", it's simply just not as "extreme" anymore.

Second, it removes variety of choices in which biome to set up in. Previously, player had to take into account both the biome temperature (faster crops growth) _AND_ the biome humidity (more Blight). But now, _ONLY_ biome temperature count! The “during the normal days of the season”, the amount of Blight is low enough that Biome Humidity is not that huge of a factor anymore. And during a “Blood Moon”, the amount of Blight is so huge that, again, Biome humidity doesn’t really count. But most of all, the Blood Moon crop losses are so huge, that the Biome Temperature, ergo the "crops base growth speed", becomes the single extremely dominant factor here. Basically, the player wants almost all crops to reach maturity before the Blood Moon, so crops growth speed is at a huge premium. So until everything is manured, establishing your farm ANYWHERE but in an at least temperate or, much better, a hot biome, is really asking for trouble. Thus colder biomes (taiga, icy plains, and even extreme hills) and technical biomes (rivers, ocean islands, ocean shores) become "bad farming places". In other words, players lose half of the (already tiny number of) biomes choices to choose from to set up into. In multiplayer, they can’t even set up their houses in a nice biome that they like the "look" of, and then farm a little bit elsewhere, because there is zero time forwarding. Presently, the only criterion is almost "find a desert next to somewhere that has lots of easy to get dirt, and make your farm there". But it would be better if most biomes were quite viable instead.

Third, it just makes the single player game a VERY different experience from the multiplayer experience. In single player, once you have a farm, going to do a very long trip of exploration away from home is a bad idea and you will lose much more crops (if not all if you cross the Blood Moon limit), while in multiplayer your entire farm will remain perfectly pristine and "frozen in time for as long as you are away". In solo, you can have dedicated secondary farms here and there to grow say blueberries in a forest, cocoa pods and jungle trees in a jungle, and so on. That is impossible in multiplayer. Or you just want to place your house only 300 blocks away up that extreme hill which has such a super nice view, while your farm is nicely only 300 blocks away growing around that big lake in the middle of the nearby desert. But in multiplayer, that won't work, and you are really, really confined, and you have to put EVERYTHING, not just your crops farm but all your animals too, in the very limited radius of “loaded chunks” around you and thus around your shelter, which end up limiting setup spots choices a lot. In single player, you really have to manage the occurrences of Blood Moons. In Multiplayer, you just log out and wait 10 minutes for it to pass "safely". In single player, you have a real 32 days of playtime to harvest until the next blood moon. In multiplayer, the only way you can do that is by playing in unhealthy duration gaming sessions that do cover non-stop those entire 32 days, which requires non-stop playing for 8 to 10.66 hours almost uninterruptedly, depending on how many night skipping occurs. But people have real lives!

So I really think that we should look at what are the actual true goals here, and _THEN_ decide upon mechanics that _DO_ follow those goals and actually truly encourage players to play the intended way along these goals.

So, addressing these goals:

#1 – Same overall experience whether it is single or multi player

This means a completely new time forwarding mechanic that applies equally in both modes and in a fair way that avoid obvious exploits. I’ll talk about that later in a separate post.

#2 – Reasonable Farming Overhead

This means that the player should “do the rounds” of his farms at a reasonable frequency, without feeling ripped off by Blight. Basically, making blight much less dependent on so many frequent farming rounds.

IMHO having to do your rounds 4 times per season should be more than enough: planting, and from 1 to 3 times to control Blight.

This means the following mechanics changes:

- A lot more time available to unblight crops before they die. A player doing his rounds every 8 days should face off only a tiny minimal amount of dead crops, seeing them still blighted instead. The extra “surviving Blighted crop” time means Blight spreading speed should be lowered by the same factor.

- Currently unless you check your farms nearly every day, about ¾ or more of the blighted crops come from Blight spreading to the next crop in the row, instead of random Blight. So a much bigger percentage of the Blighting should be not dependent on the player leaving the field alone for short vs long periods: This means even less Blight propagation speed, but compensated by more of the Blight being “fully random”.

- To preserve the “looks” of Blight occurring in “patches”, random Blight could “spawn” in patches. First off, a a single Plant catches Blight, and it immediately gets spread to say 0-3 others nearby crops in a 9x9 area, starting with those closest to the first one. This ends up with overall the same amount of Blight, but not a mechanic that forces the player to “check his farm” almost daily. Note that the bigger the initial Blight “patch”, the less. Also note that it is not an “area” fully becoming blighted, because that would be too dependent on how spread out the crops are. It is “all nearest crops in that area but only until reaching the randomly rolled number”. Thus, the amount of Blight is much less dependent on how "compact" their corps fields are.

- It also needs more" time to react" to be available for players before being "forced" to do something about the Blight. Basically, once a crop is blighted, it would have a few "hidden growth stages". Thus, a "recently blighted" crop won't start actively spreading even more Blight until these "blighted ages" have been gone through. This creates a kind of "time buffer" in order for the player to react: without this, players are instead pushed too hard to do tons of farm rounds to avoid the extra loss from "blight spreading". Sure, some of the blighted crops will go through the required number of "steps" very fast, and thus a blighted crops could in theory start spreading more Blight very soonish, but overall the pressure will be much reduced: the player will instead feel that there is some time to react, so he doesn't need to go "every day", and can go on mining or whatever for a little while without feeling that he'll be extra-punished with even more blight losses because of that. Same thing for Blight death: the odds of the crop dying could start occuring only until a later stage, with a 100% chance of crop death at the last blight stage.

#3 – Planting crops in rows

Because crops die so fast, players are too strongly encouraged to harvest any mature crop “soon and often”. This means the farm field gets harvested and _QUICKLY_ becomes “not really crops in rows anymore”, losing the crops growth bonus right there more and more as the season advances. In other words: planting crops in nice rows isn’t all that much important in the first place, especially in the second half of each “Blood Moon”.

If planting crops in rows is actually important, then it should be important for the entire month, and there should be a way to have this being a viable approach during the entire season, not just in the early month. This means a way to keep your crops healthy during the entire season, and _THEN_ harvest, without feeling extra cheated.

32-days-cycle:

Instead of:

Plant, then repeat a lot of “unblight and harvest” steps.

Basically checking at most every 4 days.

We would instead have:

Plant, unblight, followed by a tiny number of unblight steps (1 to 3), and THEN have a nice bountiful harvest.

So the following mechanics could work well:

- Once a crop reaches full maturity, it becomes much more resistant to Blight spreading (but maybe not the random Blight);

- The odds of Blight depend linearly on the farming bonus. Crops in isolated farmland blocks would thus catch blight a lot more than crops surrounded by 8 farmland. Crops alongside the “border” of a farm field are typically surrounded by 5 farmland blocks instead of 8, and thus would have some more blight but not outrageously. Ideal farm fields would alternate crops rows with empty stripes of farmland.

- The odds of Blight would ALSO depends on whether the crop in “in a crop row” or not. Crops at the “end of a row” would still count as being in the row, provided the row is at least 3 long.

Basically, players would be much more encouraged to LEAVE their mature crops there and keep their farm field rows “full” until the end of the season, spending bonemeal to cure those crops that Blight, or replanting to keep the row whole, until the end of the season, and then make on big harvest. Plant, keep healthy, then harvest.

The player choices would be between “minimal” upkeep (one single middle of the season unblighting and replacing a few dead crops), “normal” upkeep (unblighting twice about every 10 days to save on bonemeal because of blight spreading and get a lot less dead crops), and “extreme” upkeep (every 8 days: even more bonemeal saved, with next to no blight spreading, and dead crops only very rarely).

#4 – Keeping most Biomes as valid setup choices

Both Temperature and Humidity should be important.

Let’s say there are these “biome metrics levels”:

- Temperature: Cold, Cool, Temperate, Warm, Hot (desert, underworld), Inferno (Nether).

- Humidity: Wet, Damp, Normal, Dry, Arid, Dessicating (Nether).

Each crop could have both minimum and maximum temperature and humidity ranges in which to “ideally” grow, and "tolerance" for being outside the ideal range. Every step “away” from this range, the crop should grow slower AND have a bit more chance to Blight and also, when already Blighted, would go from Blighted to dead faster too, all according to it's tolerance (so some crops could not endure well at all being outside their favorite temperature and humidity). Thus some crops would be simply be more biome tolerant than others. Some crops would grow BETTER in cold or wet biomes than in hot or arid ones, etc.

Biome-specific crops (and trees) should be avoided. Plant anything, anywhere! This is important if only for decorative purposes. However, there is a difference between planting, and having an efficient farming out of it! For example, trees outside their biome could grow very slowly, and naturally-generated tree leaves that are broken outside their biome could have reduced drop rates. Again, all according to the min-max temperature-humidity ranges and the "per step of deviation" tolerance. So yeah you could a jungle tree and grow cocoa pods on it in an Icy Plain. If would just take next to forever, and the Jungle Leaves and Cocoa Pod drops would be so low as to make such clearly unviable as a farm, but ok for decorative reasons. Other crops could be quite resistant, "if you are only slightly outside the range, you can still farm ok, and will see a small bonus for having the "perfect" biome for that specific crop, neither too big of a bonus or penalty.

For blueberries, I suggest the following: Outside forests, blueberries require their grass block to be adjacent to gravel to grow. The more gravel, the better. with a full circle of gravel, it's nearly as good as in a forest.

Having each crop gets it's own ideal climate range and tolerance specifications would also adding new biomes without redoing an every increasing size table of "crop vs biome growth times".

Because yeah, having only oceans, plains, forest, taiga, icy plains, swamp, jungles, and deserts = only 8 biomes, 2 of which are impossible to survive at spawn unless moving to another biome, is very small, especially in a mod that says "early on your should live nomadically". I'd just copy some of the new features of recent vanilla versions. It's much more interesting to explore with a bit more varied biomes.

All of the above constructive criticism being said, I really think that Avernite made some incredibly good additions and changes all along and that the mod is really standing out at a very good position in the "overall list of superb mods" category. :-) My hat off to you ! :-)

Perhaps MITEmod can adjust the degree of difficulty by calculating the survival time of a single player individually in the server .

For example, when two players are near, the neighborhood is two times more difficult for a single player.This will allow the server to be more friendly to new players

Herb understood what I meant.

I like that british expression :-) but for boats, maybe it works for others, but for me it's a lot more "roundabouts" and next to no "swings". Previously, all I had to do to look around was just stop accelerating and look around and I could look around 360 degrees very easily. And when I wanted to go somewhere, pointing to it was stupidly easy. Sure, you can just press only the forward key, but that won't make you go where you want unless it just happened to be perfectly straight ahead, so now I've got 3 keys to deal with to try to go somewhere instead of only one, and "lining up" with the direction where I actually want to go is next to impossible because you constantly overshoot your turns. Now it's a limited field of view with controls that are disconnected from the actual view. i.e. "micromanage your arms movements to paddle" instead of a "character-overview type of control", just point and the character does what is necessary, no matter what that action (turn, acccelerate, whatever) may actually be". So they basically downgraded the efficiency of the interface by an entire indirection level. It's basically a boat UI done by people with zero idea what ergonomically designing an interface is all about.

Having 2 or 3 digits required to be on the keyboard all at once is a real pain for me. As in: Literally. Same for "constantly needing to press more keys to adjust course". Wheras slightly moving a mouse is, ergonomically speaking, much less stress on the wrists. Especialyl considerign that the hand on the keyboard is not the same as the hand on the mouse, so the wrist stress is also spread out more evenly. So with a sprint toggle, instead of "hold an additionnal key down", you'd not even need to "hold" that extra key in order to sprint: your Steve would keep on trying to sprint no matter what happens. i.e. actually making the interface as painless and be as "not in the way" as possible, that is the only real way to go for any serious game design to go.

Given that boating and spriting are 99% of my way to travel, these new user interface choices completely "killed" Minecraft for me. Luckyly, the launcher allows me to play the older versions. Better to pass on all the new blocks, than having severe wrist pains after only a mere hour of playing. Too bad the mod I play is the only one I know of that uses a toggle for sprinting. Is there a tiny mod out there to "turn sprint button into a toggle" ? That sure would help me a whole lot.

Colors changes: all minor changes to me.

New blocks: yay, always like having more decorative choices.

Gameplay ergonomics: SIMPLY even more HORRIBLE than what they already were.

The combat is more "balanced", true, but it simply not very simple & fun anymore. Basically, you have to constantly fall back when in battle. For a combat based game, ok, but for a mining & building game, it just detracts from the enjoyment. I'd have gone with slowing down a LOT the "swiping and then pulling back" movements for striking with sword or tools. Not having such a ridiculous "timer".

But even worse are the boats. Instead of "being in control" and just targeting where YOU want to go, you have to actively "paddle" left and right. This would be similar to say playing say a puzzle game where instead of simply clicking the part of the screen with the item you want, you,d have to use arrow keys to slowly move the mouse to the item. Or an RPG where you have to alternate left and right to make your character walk. It is just very unwieldy, It just makes boats VERY imprecise to use, and the player,s attention moves away from "just being able to enjoy the scenery" and towards" click festival micromanagement.

Carpal tunnel syndrome simply won the game. It seems Mojang doesn,t have an ergonomic gameplay user interface designer in there.

I stopped playing the more recent versions because of this.

Another example of bad User interface design:

Vanilla: must double-tap then hold forward to sprint. Automatically stopping sprinting when you pass too close to anything or even sneeze.

After only a couple hours playing, I usually get severe carpal tunnel syndrome pains in my wrist joint.

MITE Minecraft Is Too Easy: sprint key is a TOGGLE. You want to sprint? You sprint. You want to walk? You walk. Simple enough. Must less strain in the

Needing to micromanage EVERY movement your character must make = SIMULATION = BAD

Simpler "Higher level" controls where the UI uses ther bare minimum to *GET" the *intention* of the player, and then works with that = GOOD.

As another example, let's compare Parasite Eve controls vs Spiro the dragon controls:

PE: left = rotate left, right = rotate right, forward = move forward. Can't move while turning. Can't move while shooting.

Very annoying and the UI is always getting "in the way" of what thep layer actually really wants to do. Sudden camera switch and Eve is now near top of screen and you want to turn to shoot at a monster on the left orf the screen? Gah, remember then to press to the right to shoot towards the left of screen then !

Spyro: just just pick a direction and the game will make thel ittle dragon brake, accelerate, turn, breath fire, whatever, and all at once, in order to reach the desired and specificed vector of action.

Super simple even a 5 years old gets it intuitively, players's brain is 100% on the game itself, not on the interface.

UI should be as simplified and unobstructive as possible, almost "invisible".

Thanks for fixing the server.

But with zero animals around, starting can be a nightmare.

A few ideas:

- Current Day displayed along with the hour in the server selection screen.

Because I logged in the morning but.. right during the storm day, right before a blood moon ! Can you say OUCH ?

- Whenever a new player logs in for the first time, he enters not directly in the game, but in a kind of "waiting room" screen that is similar to the "death screen", but no red tint (or any other tint color for that matter). The player can wait there as long as he wants before actually logging in and starting playing. Player can turn the camera around, but not actually move (or even see himself). Basically, each player can be sure to start playing at a "right" time. Day 1 can be way too horrible otherwise. And it's way less boring to be able to look around a bit, than waiting for 6AM to come in the server select screen.

- Whenever a new player actually start playing in the world for the first time (not the "waiting room" but actual play), but it is not the first player ever in that world, then a few animals will always immediately spawn near spawn, and maybe also a reasonable amount of tall grass will try to "grow back", no matter what time it is. Otherwise it's zero string + zero sinew = making the experimental branch TOO though to even be able to start properly!

- Alternatively, if there are not enough animals around spawn anymore, then start player with a single Wooden Bowl.

For performance reasons, bugs should be rendered as mere tiny particles, not 3D models, and visible only when relatively close enough (same range as for seeing dropped items). They should be so tiny as to be just "generic bugs", not distinctive multi-pixels textures for all kinds of bugs from mosquitoes to bumblebees etc. Personally i have not much interest in adding such bugs. Birds and fishes seem much more interesting.

Fireflies however seem very cool, but they pose another layer of complexity because they'd radiate light.

They probably should work like this:

- One pure-Air block becomes the "center", and that it the block emitting light.

- The fireflies, maybe looking like yellow-white XP orbs, would roam about randomly in the 3x3x3 area that is centered on the light emitting central air block. The fireflies particles themselves just look bright, but don't actually radiate light. Sometimes the particles might roam a tiny bit further, but will quickly come back within the 3x3x3 area.

- More rarely, the "lighted up center" block will move 1 block to another adjacent air block, and never more than 3 blocks away from the ground.

- They could be slightly attracted to torches, tending to have their center stick right adjacent to a torch.

- They disappear come morning.

This would allow only a few simple particles to move reasonably without constant and numerous light levels updates.

Atlernatively, you can also restore only the region file(s) at spawn instead of the whole thing.

Note to Avernite: maybe add a command, only for multiplayer server admins, to display the current region file name. That would help fix these kind of issues on a per-region basis without revealing the exact XYZ coordinates.

There was some kind of weird crater right at spawn, so yes maybe the region file containing the spawn area is corrupted.

You can backup and rename player files in order to make some tests, even though I doubt it is the player files which are corrupt, it could lead to some insight. Ask the players where they were in the game world the FIRST time it happened. Then checking which region files are accessed (read access timestamp, not write/modify) most recently can help locate the problem. But it's probably safer and faster for you to just go back to a working backup rather than try to find each and every corrupted region file. However, going per region will prevent players that did not have problems from losing anything (if they are setup elsewhere).

When I spawned, there was some weird looking square shaped "crater" right at spawn, as if a madman had been digging part of a chunk or two semi-randomly. So yeah maybe it got corrupted.

Just updated to R192 and it works fine in solo play.

About half an hour ago, I tried to login on New Avernia (mite.chronnis.com) for the 1st time.

Played ok, gathering some seeds, for, what, about 1 minute? Then the server crashed and then I get "Can't Reach Server".

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/mite.chronnis.com

says that the website is working ok.

So.... what should I do ?

-How far apart do crops have to be to keep from getting blight? Is it the same for all crops? Even my precious pumpkins?

Pumpkins are immune to blight so you can plant them as compact as you like, just make sure each stem has it's own '+' shaped area for where it's fruit will land, without overlapping, because the stem has chances to die at each attempt to grow the fruit: Planting in nice rows with 1 stem every 2 blocks would mean each stem has on average only 3/4 the normal odds of actually growing while the stems still die at the same rate. In other words, you'd lose 1/4.

Blight has been changed a lot:

- Blight has been reduced in both odds of "catching" and odds of "spreading" (about half of what it was before, I think);

- Crops that are planted in a line grow faster;

- Blight is not specific to each crop type anymore, and can spread to, and from, all types of crops (but still only wheat and the 3 veggies);

- Crops remain blighted only a short time before actually dying;

- Blood Moons will cause super-mega-blight, ruining almost your entire field.

Basically, you should plant crops in rows, but put not make each row touch each other row. Yes, you will get SOME Blight, but it will remain a reasonable amount.

Since the growth rate also gets the standard vanilla bonus for amount of "being surrounded by farmland", the ideal "farmlands" are like this:

- Early farms: WHEAT: 3 wide and very long non-manured farmland field, plant only in the middle row. The other rows remain empty. If you are" super" early, and thus don't have lots of metal, you can convert only the central row to farmland at first, but your wheat will grow half as fast. Most important, check your farm often. FIRST FEW VEGGIES: 3 wide and very long, single row, same as wheat, but plant veggies completely isolated from each other (i.e. surrounded by empty farmland). Plant right after a blood moon and MANURE only the spots with the veggies. If you are right after a blood moon and the next special moon is a blue moon, or you are starting to have LOTS of veggies, then you can plant like wheat, in complete rows.

- Later big farms: Find a nice really big and very shallow lake (only 1 deep ideally). Put down stripes of farmland fields: each 7 wide, as long as you can, with only 1 line of water in between each stripe. Put wooden slabs ABOVE the water, and around he stripes. Each stripe is good for 3 rows of wheat or veggies.

-Does anyone have tips for a good mushroom farm?

Brown mushrooms are easy: anywhere in any underground tunnels and caves. They grow even better than in vanilla for some reason.

Red mushrooms need a lot more work but typically you'd need to have access to a forest or swamp biome.

- Early red shrooms farm: plant 1 or 2 red shroom under each tree, always to the same '"side" of the trunk, let's say "north" or "away from shelter". You simply don't harvest those. When trees are in a compact bunch, you plant only 1, and when tres are more widely separated, you plant 2, on opposite sides of the trunk.

- Later shrooms farm: terraform flatten a wide area. Plant trees every 5 blocks, keeping only normal trees and cutting down again giant trees (and their extraneous leaves) and replant sapling until you get a nice canopy. Plant 2 red shrooms under each tree on both sides of the trunk.

If there aren't a lot of trees around, you'd have to get more creative. For example, build a huge roof of snow blocks with a hole every 4 blocks and a Leaves block placed in the hole. The important thing to know is that red shrooms will grow only in a very small range of light levels.

-How big should chicken farms be these days? anything I should be on the look out for, other than making a glass ceiling?

Well, I have a tiny chicken farm with 10 chickens in it and it already provides lots of eggs, but bigger is better. I all depends on what kind of food you want. A 20x20 farm sure is more than big enough to give enough eggs for 1 player to stop worrying about food.

But with chickens the real trick is to start SUPER TINY AND SUPER EARLY and then expand later.

- Securing chickens: find a spot with flowing water. You'll need to use blocks to be able to be able to turn on/off the water flow, then you dig a 2 deep hole, push a chicken in there, then put a slab on top of the chicken, then let the water flow above that. During blood moons, zombie go aggro even against chickens, so that water flow makes sure they won't dig to the chicken. The chicken WILL get sick, but that is easily fixed: just let it out and feed it enough seeds and water bowls.

- Primitive "only until the next blood moon" chicken farm: place 4 slabs on ground 1 block apart from each other. Dig 2 deep the 5x5 area under the slabs. Plant a couple Tall Grass (obtained by breaking Grass blocks that are right Tall Grass) in order to speed up grass propagation. Add chickens.

- Pre-pickaxe early chicken farm: Away from trees (because wood spiders). Find a tiny 2-deep pond. Put rows of slabs at ground level every 2 blocks to prevent spiders from getting in. If you're low on wood, pillar up gravel to be able to put slabs every 2 blocks instead (each slab completely floating isolated from the other slabs), that will double up as your gravel grinding. Square off the pond and use the dirt to make the center of the pond only 1 deep and fill up the rest in order to give the chickens some flat area on which grass will grow for them to feed. 6+ blocks away from the pond, fence it all off (square shape) and put enough torches around. Add 2+ chickens. Later, you can expand if you wish but remember always fence or wall off 6 blocks away from the animals enclosures, otherwise zombies will eat all your animals at next blood moon.

-Do buckets place source blocks now, or are they still temporary flows? Is there another way to manage source blocks?

Control + Right-click a Water or Lava Bucket + 100 XPs = place water/lava source block. Not sure but I think you must target a pure-air block.

Otherwise the liquid flow is temporary. WAY simpler than before.

Earlier I suggested two things:

- This 100 XPs kind of thing turned into a bucket enchantment, because because able to place sources anywhere and anyway you want is a huge bonus.

- Water spreading naturally if there are 3 sources blocks at the same level, even diagonally. Would allow Castle Moats and Water Roads, but always starting from existing water, without needing bajillions XPs.

But that is only dreaming :-)

-Is a swamp, once the trees are cleared out to cut down on wood spiders, a good biome for farming? Is there a better one? or do biomes not make a big difference in crop growth now?

Biomes definitely make a big difference.

Things grow super slow in Cold biomes.

The wetter a biome is, the more blight it has, too, but that is much more secondary since blight was cut down during the moonth, but is beyind extreme at blood moon, so time to grow, and thus biome temperature, really is the only factor you should look at.

- Very Cold: Taiga, Icy Plains,

- Cold: Extreme Hills, and near Rivers, Ocean (including shores).

- Temperate: Plains, Forests.

- Hot: Swamps, Jungles.

- Very Hot: Deserts.

Swamps are an early farming nightmare for one very simple reason: Slimes ! These guys will destroy tons and tons of your crops. Basically, you're forced to properly wall off everything. Early on, that is a massive investment in resources, right at a time when you don't have many blocks or food or good tools to work with.

IMHO the best biome for growing crops is desert. Hot = fast crops growth (not pumpkins though), and Dry = less blight. However, it can be lots of work to "import" all the needed dirt from elsewhere. However, desert lakes are often "perfectly" shallow, only 1 deep, so it's easier to make stripes of irrigated farmland. Bonus: it doesn't rain in deserts - rain is so annoying. Not much wood around, but you can use cactus to make "external walls".

However, desert is more for when you set yourself up properly at a final spot (ideally, you take possession of an NPC village and wall it off), than for an early farm.

So Plains is probably the best biome to start farming early. Tons of seeds around in order to grow wheat very easily.

I have to say that I am a bit curious about the following:

We have seen Avernite post some world maps showing players by region. Nice.

What I'm curious about now is, how many players there are not by world region but by... MITE Release ?

For example, how many players still play the older releases such as say... R104 ? I know my private world is stuck at R170, so that is mainly what I play nowadays, albeit the new public server is attractive.

This kind of data would also help see the Main Branch vs Experimental Branch adoption rates, and see if one is massively more played than the other (like, 95% or more of all MITE players), or if they both have solid player bases. Most players that I've seen seem to prefer to play the "harder" Experimenal Branch, but my data set is, well, tiny, maybe even baised. So that kind of "all players" data could tell us if it's time to get back to only one branch again or not ?

IMHO, in any case, both of the branches have been there for quite a while now, and since neither of those branches seem to be "temporary", maybe it could be a good idea to fuse both of these branches into a new single branch combining both, the exac5t functionality to be used differing by some world-gen mode flag.

For example, to make things very simple, in the create world options screen, maybe the "Difficulty" setting could be between 2 choices:

- "Extreme" (using "main branch" functionality) or

- "More Extreme" (using "experimental branch" functionality).

After all, the 2 branches differ only by 2 things:

- Some (all?) of the basic flint tools recipes (aka "needing string or sinew to attach tool blade to tool handle")

- And the nature of the crafting furniture (a single crafting Table to craft them all vs Tool Benches according to material type).

In the long run, such a merge would probably end up being easier to maintain for Avernite, rather than having two completely separate code branches and having to add each and every new change to both branches all the time.