I don't even understand the point of this. Minecraft became successful because Notch made a little time-waster of a game that scratched an itch people didn't even know they had. It's not like the game is successful because he's a talented programmer (he isn't), or that Mojang AB is some kind of nexus of game developer talent (it's alright.)
Now, I've been impressed with some of the things some of the better-known modders have come up with (including but not limited to TerraFirmaCraft, Better Than Wolves, the various shader mods, and several Forge mods) and I'm interested in seeing if the general Minecraft concept ever makes its way into AAA games, but I don't necessarily see its success as being directly as a result of competence or incompetence on Notch/Mojang's part.
I mean, Notch and the rest of the Mojang people all seem like pretty nice people, and I'm glad they've found success, but they would not be on the list of big names in game development, and probably not even close to the top.
I'd be far more interested in a documentary on game developers which have had a definite, lasting impact on gaming as a whole - Looking Glass Studios, Black Isle Studios, Ion Storm, Blizzard, freaking Valve, and so many others that I'd wager many Minecraft players haven't even heard of.
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- PizzaSHARK
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Member for 12 years, 6 months, and 22 days
Last active Mon, May, 13 2019 23:50:06
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Fired up BTW for the first time in... man, forever? And while I'm amazed at how much it's all changed and pretty surprised it's still been updated so faithfully, I don't think it's a mod for me anymore. The last time I played (contemporary to the more recent "newbie guides" on Icynewyear's channel, I think) was at the edge of being a little too slow/hardcore for my tastes, and while I think the "new" early game is pretty interesting from a design perspective, it definitely doesn't feel as fun to play. But that's fine, because not every mod or game has to be for every person :-)
Thanks for all the fun over the years, FC. And I'm amazed you're still hard at work and still doing such good work. Best of luck to y'all in the future!
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BTW is definitely a unique experience, both in Minecraft and in indie gaming as a whole.
Vanilla Minecraft felt like a bit of a mess back in 1.5.4, and it still does for the most part. Lots of stuff to do, but not a lot of focus. I think that's just kind of natural for a project that started as just one guy with a hat screwing around with Java and ended up turning into a staggeringly successful juggernaut.
BTW feels more like what Minecraft would be if it was started from the ground up as a project with a plan and a goal - like Don't Starve and all the numerous, seemingly endless indie "survival games" that have come out since Minecraft first popped up. I'm not going to say I've always agreed with the direction the mod has gone (I never did like the whole mob farm thing, I always preferred stabbing things directly), but I can't deny that it presents what is probably the most concrete and focused experience in Minecraft and it's at least the equal to those other indie "survival games."
It does sometimes make me sad that we'll never get to see BTW interpreting things like the combat update and such, but I can't exactly fault FC for not wanting to more or less waste so much time basically redesigning and retooling Mojang's work, only for them to release another update and break it all. Even with all of the Forge mods out there now, it's still impossible to come close to creating anything remotely similar to BTW in modern Minecraft... for better or for worse. I do miss seeing people claiming they'd just "make BTW for Forge" themselves and then quickly end up eating crow when they realized it was a lot more difficult than they thought it'd be. Those people were always fun.
I don't really play Minecraft anymore, but BTW still sticks in my mind. It's an amazingly cohesive experience, and the feeling of progression really is hard to overstate. You quite literally start a round of BTW slowly, slowly punching trees and then hiding in a hole and digging rocks all night, terrified of fighting the monsters... and, hell, terrified of pissing off cows. You have to range farther and farther afield during the day to locate more food while you slowly work up a good pile of stone picks and stone axes to use to search for and obtain iron... which then must be laboriously smelted, bit by bit, over a series of in-game days and nights.
Eventually you'll have an iron pick and you can go a bit farther - but unlike vanilla, you probably don't have any real armor and HP recovery is very slow, so exploring is still incredibly dangerous. You get a little farther along the tech tree, then you get a little sloppy or a little cocky and now you're hiding in a cubbyhole and hoping Mr. Skeltal doesn't find you and you can escape. He finds you, you die a miserable death, and it starts over again somewhere else on the world. In a very real sense, BTW is almost like a single-player multiplayer game like that - you'll eventually come across the hidey holes and chests from your past lives, almost like randomly stumbling across another player's stash on a server.
I can't imagine what anarchy servers were like. I wish I'd had an opportunity to try them.
Anyway, BTW is pretty fantastic and while it's not the only way I'll play MC, it's definitely the "best" way to play it. BTW feels like how Hardcore difficulty SHOULD have been. You have creative for people that just want to build. Survival for people who want a relaxed experience. Hardcore for people who really want to SURVIVE.
Oh well. Thanks again for all the hours of entertainment, FC. Hope things are going well for you!
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Please turn off shaders for future example screenshots.
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Why were they added, anyway? Were jungles considered too easy to survive in, or was it just to make jungle biomes more interesting/frustrating?
It's really the hunger that makes them dangerous more than the poison. Gotta have milk on hand or prepare to eat like two days worth of food!
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Birch gives you the best return. If you find birch trees, try to save the birch logs for fuel and just use other woods for sticks and whatnot. I spawned pretty much right in the middle of a plains/forest border so I used all the birch trees for fuel and was able to stockpile the coal and use it for torches instead. You don't really need to worry about smelting the iron until you have enough to make your hoe or pickaxe, anyway
Endermen make a thunderclap noise when they teleport back to the End, you could be hearing that. You should be careful exploring during a thunderstorm. It reduces the light level more than rain does, which makes it pretty likely that monsters will begin spawning in places they normally wouldn't, and since it's raining, the skeletons are free to chase you instead of hiding under a tree.
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Pretty much. As you've found out, you'll quickly starve if you sit in spawn the whole time
I WILL say that if you spawn in a jungle biome, you may just want to kill yourself so you respawn somewhere that doesn't have poison spiders crawling out of the damn trees. Trying to explore and/or live in a jungle biome before you have a couple buckets of milk on hand is usually a great way to die. Spawns with wolves in the vicinity can also be troublesome because they'll start getting hungry after a couple days without animals to eat and dealing with a pack of wolves when you just have a couple axes can be difficult (but then again, wolfchops!) Wolves will also make animals near spawn die that much faster. I find that you can usually find a couple sheep/pigs/chickens alive after the first night, but if wolves are in the area, you'll be lucky to have even a couple of those mobs survive the combination of wolves+zombies. I wouldn't necessarily force yourself to relocate if you spawn near wolves, just it's something you need to be aware of. The nice thing is that you'll hear the aggressive sounds if they've gotten to the point where they're hungry enough to randomly attack the player, and those sounds are pretty damn loud, so you should know to expect them before you open up your hole.
I'll usually walk about 1/2-3/4 of a day's length away from spawn in a cardinal direction, noting useful things along the way (or gathering them if it's just a couple things, like if I find a pumpkin or two in a plains biome.) Dig yourself a little hideyhole, preferably near some surface ores like I mentioned earlier, and spend the night. Head back to spawn the next day with all the loot and food you can carry, cook your food and get the iron smelting, spend the night restocking your cobble supplies, and then do it again the following day, this time in a different direction. Try to avoid meandering too much until you have plenty of torches or other ways of creating markers so you won't lose track of where spawn is. I think the ultimate goal is to keep repeating this process until you have enough iron to make a hoe. Once you have the hoe you can lure some chickens with hemp seeds, feed them to create a renewable food source, and begin farming the hemp to begin advancing down the tech tree. As FC said, once you have shears it's not terribly difficult to shear sheep as you pass them by, as well as lure a few closer to home so you can have a renewable source of wool for armor (and you can always kill them for food if you're about to run out, and just find more sheep somewhere else.) I've explored mineshafts and caves down to the 2nd/3rd strata border without any armor, but it's certainly a lot safer with the 1.5-2.0 points of armor wool/leather will give you. I definitely recommend not doing extensive exploration without a sword, though. My iron typically goes hoe->pickaxe->sword->pickaxe, stopping for shears and maybe a bucket when it's convenient.
I have really awful luck with fishing, but once you have enough torches to make the surrounding area of your hideyhole safe, fishing at dusk, dawn, and during rain allegedly makes for an effective renewable food source. I've only ever gotten 2 fish at once from the same large 3-5 block deep river (which spawns squids at night), running across a 6ish chunk area, and most nights I'm lucky to even get one. I'm probably doing something wrong, though.
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I've got a question I can't seem to solve on my own. I love the sky background texture for this pack - the puffy clouds, the moons in the background, etc. It gives Minecraft a slightly whimsical feel and I love it!
Only problem is, I'm trying to "backport" that to a 1.5.2 texture pack I use for another mod, along with this mod's excellent lightmap and foliage coloring, and I'm having some issues getting it to appear. Foliage colors are working fine. Custom textures for sun and moon etc are working fine. A handful of other things I ported over (custom particles, etc) are also working, or seem to be. I basically took the 1.5.2 pack I was using and then downloaded the 1.5.x version of PP to use as a reference, to try and make sure folders are named and set properly, file names are correct, etc.
I've looked all up and down the most recent 1.8.8/3.3 version of the pack and can't find any textures that look like the "sky background" texture I'm looking for!
I also noticed that this sky background did NOT appear in 1.9 when I loaded up 1.9. Is this something that will only show up with Optifine? My 1.8.0 install is running Optifine, but my 1.5.2 cannot run Optifine (I use MC Patcher's features instead), and 1.9 is stock vanilla (no Optifine.) Any idea what texture I'm missing, or what I'm doing wrong?
EDIT: Alright, I've located the textures in the /mcpatcher/ folder. I tried directly transplanting them into the 152 pack, with 152 file structure (leaving the /mcpatcher/ folder in the main area, and as its own folder) and no dice. Is there a place I need to disseminate these textures and files to in order to get them to work in 1.5.2? Or is 1.5.2 incapable of handling it?
Lightmap also isn't working. Definitely still using Minecraft's default white lighting instead of PP's yellowish.
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I know exactly what you mean. A lot of times I come back to BTW after a long period away, make a new world, and encounter what you run into. I got lucky and had a pretty great spawn this time and it's kept me hooked. My advice:
- Find a safe place to spend the night. Best choice is usually a hillside, and ideally one that already has exposed stone (saves you the trouble of digging to stone, which makes getting that first stone pickaxe and a night's worth of logs much easier.) Block the entrance with 1 dirt block and 1 dirt slab. Ideally this lets in just enough light to prevent Gloom. If it doesn't, destroy the slab and keep an eye out for spiders trying to sneak in. Only use the furnace to cook food and have enough light to spend the night harvesting cobble. You probably won't have enough bark/sawdust to leave the furnace running all night. Try not to stray too far from your original spawn.
- Your second day should be spent murdering any surviving non-bovine wildlife for food (since they'll die to zombies during the second night anyway), gathering enough wood to continue mining through the second night, and ideally finding at least a little coal. I'll usually leave my little hole with a few stone axes, a few stone picks, and a couple of stone shovels. Having at least one torch will let you continue mining through the night without having to use up fuel in the furnace. If you can find a good block of coal, gather enough to have a few torches and plan on returning for it later; your priority for surviving the second night is food (you should have at least 5 edibles) and wood.
- Repeat this process until you have at least several edibles, a decent surplus of cobble and wood, and a dozen or so torches. Carry a small amount of wood and/or sticks and a bit of cobble with you, and most of your food. Stash the rest in a chest in your little hole. It's time to go caving!
- Roam around until you see a likely cave. Run in and drop some torches to check it out. If it goes decently deep, or you see a fair amount of coal or iron, get setup to mine it out. Dig yourself a little safety hole in a convenient location after lighting enough of the surrounding area to be relatively safe from monster spawns. Murder any chickens, pigs, and sheep in the area because you'll be spending the night and they'll get eaten anyway. If the cave has nearby openings, try to block them with dirt or another convenient block. With all of that done, you can freely mine throughout the night. If you get there later in the day, just spend the night inside your little safety hole like normal and wait until daybreak to mine out the ores. Listen for footsteps (****ing goddamn creepers...) before you open up your hidey hole, the last thing you want is a creeper blowing up half your ****.
- Repeat this process until you have a sizable stack of iron. I will typically just head in a single direction and not deviate too much to make it easier to locate my original home. I'll often stack dirt or cobble at least 3-5 blocks high and extend the top block 2-3 blocks to either side as little markers, leaving a torch on the face that's facing AWAY from home. Especially if placed on top of a hill, these should be visible from quite a ways away and make it easier to keep your bearings straight.
- Use your first iron ingots on a hoe. Use the hoe to till up some hemp seeds, and use those seeds to lure some chickens. You only NEED one chicken, but more is better. Throw it in a safe hole somewhere where monsters won't get to it, feed it seeds, and throw the eggs into the pit to either make more chickens or get raw eggs. Cook the raw eggs, and ideally combine them with cooked porkchops (1 egg + 1 porkchop = 2 ham and eggs, which restore as many shanks as a regular porkchop does, much more efficient than eggs/porkchops alone.) You could also make a bucket and go milk cows with it and combine the raw egg with milk to make scrambled eggs, but this will require you to have shears to cut tall grass with (to lure the cows to a safe place and keep them fed so they keep generating milk), or you get lucky and find some wheat in a dungeon chest or the like.
- Setup a safe little area for a small farm. Make sure it's near water (hemp requires wet dirt and sunlight to grow) and till it. A simple little 3x3 farm should be plenty to get you started. Go use up most of your hoe tilling grass for hemp seeds. Plant most of them, but keep a few on hand to continue feeding your chickens with. I would recommend saving the last couple dozen uses of your hoe in case a ****ing creeper shows up out of ****ing nowhere in the middle of the goddamn ****ing daytime when the entire local area is brightly lit and destroys your farm and everything in it.
- Use a few bits of iron to make a bucket, and another bit to make a fishing rod. You've probably got a whole pile of rotten meat and spider eyes by this point, and you can slowly turn them into fish with the rod. You'll want the bucket so you can milk cows, but you may want to wait until after you have shears (to cut tall grass with) first. No point in having a bucket for milk if there aren't any surviving cows in the area.
- Once you have some hemp growing and a couple of chickens safe in a hole somewhere, you should have things pretty well under control! You have a limited but renewable source of food with the hemp+chickens cycle, and once the hemp starts coming in, you can begin working towards your windmill and really beginning to advance down the tech tree! Use feathers from any chickens you kill (and you don't really need to leave any alive once you have a few safe and sound at home, feel free to murder every single one of the noisy pricks) to make arrows, and you can use the arrows to kill cows! Make sure to use your shears to cut the leather into, well, Cut Leather. You get 2 pieces of Cut Leather for every piece of Leather you cut, which gets you to leather armor that much faster. You can (and should) also shear sheep. Between the two you should be able to get a mixture of leather and wool armor reasonably easy, which will make deeper mining much safer for you
I find the toughest thing is just finding and luring some sheep and cows to safe places by the time I have shears etc. By that point all animals within a considerable area around spawn are dead so it takes quite a bit of travel to find them and bring em back!
If you die... hey, feel free to take a break for a while. The fun thing about hardcore spawn is that your effort is never truly WASTED. You're just temporarily delayed. Once you have a compass (four bits of iron and one bit of redstone), it's not too hard to get back to where you were before you died, assuming you built reasonably close to spawn
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No great loss, I imagine.
Honestly, the only thing I'd actually enjoy having from later versions of Minecraft is the resourcepack concept (so you can have custom sounds and other stuff like that, in addition to custom textures), and the later versions' more interesting default terrain generation. It'd also be fun to have access to the customized terrain generation option for BTW-specific challenge presets and stuff like that. The 1.9 combat updates could be interesting to have, too.
But considering the absolutely obscene amount of work it would take to either balance or outright dummy out all of the crap vanilla's added since 1.5.2, and the fact that every time Mojang releases an update (and 1.9.1's already coming out in two weeks after they get back from GDC or wherever?) it breaks everything and requires fixes... ****, I can't blame him. I respect modders for continuing to do their thing in Minecraft even though Mojang's so universally terrible at supporting modding (they've been promising the API for how many years now?), but I also don't blame them if they throw up their hands and say to hell with it, I'll find another game to mod that doesn't treat me like **** (or they might go try and create their own game instead.)
I do think it would be possible to add everything in vanilla to BTW and balance it, but it would take a monstrous amount of work, and finding uses for a lot of the new blocks beyond "they're for decorating!" would be extremely hard. Keep in mind that EVERY SINGLE BLOCK AND ITEM in BTW has a purpose beyond "it looks pretty." Or, rather, the ones that are pretty much solely for "it looks pretty" are byproducts of other processes that are necessary for tech progression (such as getting white cobblestone as a byproduct during the process to create Soulforged Steel.)
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I thought fences were changed to require mouldings/corners to create now, though. I mean, I've made cobble fences to protect my little farms, but I guess I never tried making fence gates. The chickens seem to be relatively okay with being stuck in a pit for the entirety of their existence so I guess there's no need to fix what isn't broken
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Damn, that feel when you start a new world and three pumpkins are sitting next to you. Caging chickens was kind of a pain in the ass. I ended up digging a small hole in the floor of the little cave I hide/harvest cobble in at night. I made it 2 blocks deep and placed a ladder on the uppermost block that I can jump and climb out of the hole with. Previous attempts to cage the chickens with dirt or other stones just caused them to panic and run around and frequently out of the cage when I tried to put it back together after collecting the eggs. Is that about how most people do it or is there an even simpler way? Getting out of the hole without a ladder just resulted in them typically jumping onto the dirt I was placing and running away.
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Mostly due to changes like resource packs vs texture packs, the Custom world option, etc. It'd be interesting to see if the various things added to vanilla since 1.5 could find a place in the BTW tech tree but I don't blame him for not wanting to spend such a massive amount of time on that.
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Holy crap, the nervous animals thing makes penning animals a pain in the ass when you're trying to do it with dirt. Was so damn happy when I found some wheat in a dungeon, then when I finally got the damn sheep to follow me home, they ran off when I tried to close the dirt "door."
Oh well, next time I'll just throw them in the pit from the top. Lazy jerks, I'm only trying to enslave you and force you to breed for my amusement out of concern for your well-being!
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Any idea how you'd go about creating a custom BTW world using the various terrain gen changes? Was thinking it'd be interesting to try doing a BTW version of the common survival island types, and stuff like that. Problem is, while there's actually a pretty solid world gen mod for 1.5 that includes some pretty awesome survival island generators, and it's certainly possible to create a map using that mod, it will be missing the many different changes BTW makes to terrain gen (including but not limited to stratification.)
It seems like it'd be an interesting way of having a different kind of BTW experience, but I'm not sure how you'd go about generating the baseline map, before you even go into going about and balancing the map to accommodate the BTW playstyle. I don't think tools like WorldPainter can be set to use a given mod's terrain gen changes, can they?
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I kept thinking sheep were kicking me when I first played with hoofsies, but I guess it was just a nearby cow. Sheep have hooves though, don't they?