Early game suggestions

[adolfo]

Hi everyone! New player here.

I have recently started playing Minetest, I tried some mods and games and I decided to try Mesecraft in the survival server. I haven’t found Mesecraft to be particularly challenging. I mean, I have been dying a lot, particularly at the beginning, but I’d say that’s part of the game, and it is kind of fun. I am really enjoying Mesecraft overall.

There are some things that I have liked a lot in the early game:

• Smoke. I love it. It forces you to think about your buildings (adding chimneys or ventilation) so you can have furnaces and torches inside and keep breathing. I wish that there were more things like this, that forced you to design your buildings and rooms according to their use.
• Thirst/hunger. Simple yet effective mechanism to keep you on your toes. You just cannot go around exploring or mining with no consequence: you have to make sure that you have enough food and water to keep going. I even installed a small “swimming pool” on my first underground base.
• Depleting torches. Amazing, it’s so simple yet effective. Torches depleting means that now light becomes a resource that you have to care for. You go mining and you cannot put torches everywhere because they switch off. Torches are bad for your home because they generate smoke and they don’t work longterm. You have to find other more stable light sources (mese is a long way down the road), and that’s part of the fun.

From my first runs I have a couple of suggestions:

• Not-so-early game light. Without mese (and with depleting torches), you have very few options for stable sources of light: candles and oil lanterns. Oil lanterns are quite doable (you still need to dig a little but not too much) and it’s good that they don’t have so much light power. Candles on the other side are surprisingly expensive, because you need bee wax, and, unless I am missing something, for that you need a honey extractor that requires mese crystals. Wouldn’t it be possible to melt honeycomb on the furnace and obtain bee wax?
• Knowing more about tools. I am having a difficult time trying to grasp how to optimize the use of tools. I understand that there are many tiers of tools made of different materials, and it seems that some minerals can be more or less durable and more or less damaging to their corresponding type of block. Still, other minetest games have more information about damage, speed and durability. Do I go for bronze or steel? If I ever get arcanite, do I use it for tools or I use them for other varied uses because they’re not worth it? Do golden or fruit tools have any kind of advantage? Maybe it is just me, but in general (not only for tools or swords) I would appreciate a little bit of in-game information (just inside the tooltip of some inventory items).

In any case, I am having a lot of fun, and I’ll keep joining the survival server.

See you around!

[keihdra]

Welcome to Mesecraft, adolfo. Pumpkin lights are probably the easiest good light for early game. Something else to add to your garden. Let me know if you need seeds to get started.

As for tools, steel should be your early game target. Way better than wood, stone, iron, or bronze. Later game, mese tools are probably the most useful. Arcanite tools are good quality, but februm and egerum are better used in crafting magical items rather than tools. You’ll find the time of speed, staff of earth, and void chests to be extremely useful, among other items. Fruit tools are extremely expensive and really not worth it. Steel and then mese are the main tools that I stick to. Diamond is the top of the line, but unless you just have a huge excess just use diamond for armor and crafting.

[komodo]

That’s a helpful response from @keihdra. Steel is a great early game toolset until you can get to Mese,Diamond, or even Mithril. Tools need some more work to stand out from each other. I need to figure something out with lighting that works well. People tend to make MeseLamps and chop them up with the table saw to get more out of them. Pumpkins is kind of a player discovered workaround for now, it seems to work well if you can get a farm for them going. It’s a bit silly and really funny.

@adolfo, I really appreciate the feedback and the positive feedback is inspiring and motivating for me. Thank you. I’ve been getting a bit more time to work on MeseCraft lately, and I’ve been starting to make progress with it again. Help is always welcome too, I think I need to layout some areas that need work though because not everyone knows where to help out.

In game documentation is a thing that people bring up a lot. It needs to be added, but since there is a lot changing in the game right now it’s hard to prioritize it because a lot of it will change. I’ll get to that somehow. I was thinking books or maybe in game tips or a manual could be helpful.

 

If you get the time, please try to leave feedback for MeseCraft on the Minetest ContentDB as it helps the game grow in popularity too. Welcome to the MeseCraft community. I’m happy you joined us! 🙂

[komodo]

A good answer to your question about ores and tool strengths here: https://www.mesecraft.com/forums/topic/a-guide-to-minerals-alloys-rocks-and-crystals/ by @kiopythelma

[a5810]

I may add some more:

• Use a tool if you want to know its duration, damage and speed, for it depends on the block that you want to break.
• Permanent fire source seems to be better than temporary one, but the latter that gives dim light will help you create something interesting.
• In game documentation’s useful, but information in minetest wiki will help you begin your journey in the vision. It’s outdated though.

It’s strange that the fire place won’t make smoke, and burns without coals, and oil lantern gives permanent light without oil. But it’s another story.

[adolfo]

Thanks all! You’ve been quite helpful.

I am honestly having a very good time playing this, still a lot of things to do and explore.

It’s very good that everyone is so supportive and willing to help, it compensates the lack of in-game documentation and it is actually more fun 🙂

Best!

[gd2shoe]

I realize I’m resurrecting’s an old thread, but adolfo brought up an interesting point that I agree with.  Beekeeping shouldn’t just be for mid game and later.  Beekeeping was a low-tech artform for millennia before electricity was invented.  Honey extractors are a very recent invention.  But basic beehive tech is fundamentally low tech.  It also helps address the lighting issue.

The empty frames displayed are “foundationless frames”.  This makes good sense, but it also indicates that these frames are designed for low-tech, artisanal use, not high tech honey extractors.  Even with a dull wooden knife, you can easily cut the honeycomb off of the frame.  And wax is typically made (artisanally) by rendering it — aka, boiling comb in water.  Honey can be extracted by pressing and filtering through a cloth.

I think that the honey extractor should be the easiest and fastest way to extract honey and wax.  I don’t think it should be cut from the game.  But I do think that other recipes for wax and honeycomb should be included.  I would propose something akin to:

(Please note that I have not verified item names.  I’m guessing wildly; they’re definitely wrong.  Syntax typos likely.)

• Recipe for honeycomb:
  full frame ==> empty frame + honey comb
  { type = “shapeless”, output = “bees:comb”, recipe = { “bees:full_frame”, },replacements = {“bees:full_frame”, “bees:empty_frame”}, }
• Recipes for wax:
  water bucket + honey comb ==> wax in water
  wax in water -> in a furnace ==> wax + empty bucket
  { type = “shapeless”, output = “bees:wax_in_water”, recipe = { “default:water_bucket”, “bees:comb”, }}
  { type = “cooking”, output = “bees:wax”, recipe = “bees:wax_in_water”, cooktime = 15.0, replacements = {“bees:wax_in_water”, “default:empty_bucket”}}
• (I’m not including a recipe for honey from a juice press because I haven’t looked into the juice press yet… and I suspect that might be a bit of a headache to implement or maintain.)

This should be easy enough to use to provide some early wax, but finicky enough to encourage players to invest in an extractor, or look to other sources of lighting.

If there’s any interest, I may tinker with this at some point.  I haven’t written any replacement style recipes yet, so I don’t know where the pitfalls are.  But the API document indicates that you can do replacements when cooking… so… if furnaces support the feature, it should work. [fingers crossed]

Also, candles should burn out.  I personally don’t like the idea.  I don’t like that torches burn out… or that they burn out so fast.  But if torches do, then candles should too.  Candles seem expensive (2 wax+cotton), Maybe candles should last longer than torches?  Or you should get more of them per recipe?  [shrug]

[komodo]

gd2shoe, you sound like you know a lot beekeeping or are well-read.

 

So we make the honey extractor run on MeseCons and fix the issues you’ve laid out where it uses frames.  Then use a low-tech method that is maybe slower or yields less or involves more manual labor to operate.

I’m OK with candles burning out, but they should also offer something more unique than torches if they are to be included. I haven’t figured this one out.

I think your suggestions for the other bee related items are great. Bees definitely need more work and can be expanded upon. Just make sure the additions have uses or perhaps we can add that later or leave them as crafting materials for other things. I hope that helps answer some of your questions?

[gd2shoe]

I don’t have any hands-on experience with bees.  I know more about the topic than I have any reason to, but I’m certainly no expert.

The above recipes should be a piece of cake.  That doesn’t mean that they will be, per se.  I think it’s just a matter of fixing the names, inserting the recipes, and testing the thing.

I will probably go back to tinkering with bees soon then.  I was trying to get listring (shift-click) working, and it was proving to require a more extensive alteration than I anticipated.  That, frankly, should be seen as mandatory for nodes that require semi-frequent removal and insertion of items.  I’ve got it most of the way, but I want to make sure I’m not introducing new bugs before submitting it.

(I hate making code uglier in order to make it functional, but the api leaves me no choice.  It’s a limitation of listring.  I don’t understand why this is in the formspec and not handled as an action.  The render client doesn’t need to know where items are going; the server has to move the items anyway; and there’d be more flexibility if handling the shift-click event it was taken out of the DDL and moved into a callback.  [end rant])

I’m OK with candles burning out, but they should also offer something more unique than torches if they are to be included. I haven’t figured this one out.

Touché.  Near as I can tell, candles are currently very expensive torches that don’t burn out.  All I’m really proposing to do is make them somewhat less expensive (but still much more costly than torches), and make them accessible earlier in the game.  I agree with your sentiment, but I don’t have a good answer yet, either.

Oh, and bottles of honey crunch when you eat them.  Enjoy…  😆

[gd2shoe]

Status update and some questions

———————————————————————

I’ve got the proposed recipes working.  I think I’ve got listring (shift-click) working properly.  I’ve fixed 2 preexisting bugs, and found 2 spots that are probably also bugs.

I need to draw a texture for wax in water… unless someone volunteers.  I still have to update pipeworks support (didn’t know it was in there).  I need to write LBMs to update any worlds loaded with the new mod so that they’ll play nice (new node inventory structure).

I would like to implement swarming and hive splitting, but that’s going to need to be a whole project on its own.  I note that bees help flowers grow, but do nothing for crop yields.  That might be something to look into.

———————————————————————

Question 1

How expensive should wax rendering be (boiling wax)?  I currently have it set to 10 seconds, which is more than most recipes.  The real process takes hours, but so do a lot of the things that a furnace will spit out in seconds.  For reference, 10 seconds cost fuel to the tune of 1 charcoal, 1/4 coal lump, or about 1/2 a log of tree (depending on the tree).  I think most recipes take 3 seconds.

Question 2

The bees mod uses very small stacks comparatively.  I’ve already increased the queen bee stack size from 1 to 8, which is still irrationally small.  Bottles of honey are limited to 12, while juice bottles go to 99 (same bottle).  Frames are limited to 12 full or 24 empty.  Comparing these to stone, that suggests either that frames have a volume of 4 cubic meters, or weigh 13 metric tons apiece.  Absurd.

I’m inclined to lift the stack size restrictions.  There can still be a limit to the number of frames inserted into an extractor, if desired.  But what does everyone else think?  I don’t see any good reason for the current state, and I don’t think it’s a game balance issue, but I don’t want to just assume there is no reason at all.

[mesecraft]

lift it. seems arbitrary. i didnt set that. the original dev of bees did.

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