4.64 Balance Observations & Discussion

[FlowerChild]

I don't want to make a suggestion (so this isn't.. I hope.. merely an observation) but Jungle wood is normally "hardwood" and wouldn't hardwood be harder to chop down.. IRL Mahogany is much more tricky to fell than nice "soft" Pine wood.

Hehe...actually man, you're too late ;)

A couple of days ago when I rebalanced the furnace burn times for wood so that they make more sense, I came up with an idea and that task mutated into something a bit larger.

Anyways, it's a relatively small feature in terms of the overall scope of the rest of the release, so I don't mind mentioning it, but I also rebalanced furnace fuel so that the different types of woods have different burn times to give them more of an actual gameplay role (instead of being almost exclusively aesthetic in differences), and to provide more biome-specific flavor.

One of the things I did there was make jungle wood the worst of the lot (by far), which runs contrary to them potentially being hardwood, but given it's some unidentified wood on an unidentified planet, I decided that it being either softwood or so damp as to really suck as fuel, wasn't much of a stretch. Either way, jungle wood sucks for burning. Primarily, I did that to balance the extreme abundance of wood, and the ease with which it is harvested, in jungle biomes.

So yeah man, already covered ;)

As an aside, I've rebalanced pretty much every block or item burn time in the furnace so that they all make a bit more sense relative to each other. The only exceptions I didn't touch were coal, which I used as a frame of reference for the rest, and buckets of lava, since they aren't really a part of BTW anymore.

But yeah, please avoid the suggestions. As this case demonstrates, stuff like "jungle wood is too abundant as a furnace fuel" serves me far better than specific ideas about how to resolve that.

[ScubaPlays]

I can't wait for what sounds like FC's Hardcore Wood!

[0player]

I can't wait for what sounds like FC's Hardcore Wood!

Damn, and now my roommates are asking me what was this insane laugh for...

[ignika42]

Prior to joining Foxy Boxes's server, I'd been away from both Minecraft and BTW for quite a while, so in addition to hardcore hunger, and the torch changes, and the iron changes, things like hardcore spawn and hardcore movement are all new for me as well. While I had continued to lurk here, reading about them isn't quite the same as experiencing them, and now that I've experienced them, there is only one thing I can say about these changes.

They are fucking brilliant.

For the first time since I started playing back in alpha, exploring at night or in caves is actually terrifying. Skeletons are the bane of my existence. Armor is not only a necessity, but difficult to acquire, since I can no longer just breed more cows without finding wheat from a village, even full leather is a challenge. I doubt I'll see any iron armor until I get a mob trap. I'm finally using stone tools for more than the three hits it used to take to get three iron, and for the first time since they were introduced, I actually crafted and used a map!


The only things that really feel "off" are jungle wood and nethercoal, but as usual you've already got both of them covered.

TL;DR: I love the recent changes, and hope that when I get further into game design, I'm even half as good at it as FC.

[Rob]

FC, I've recently been on a Don't Starve kick, as you stated you were recently on, which gave you inspiration for some of your new content. I love it. I love all of it. I also see where you pull your ideas from when you hint at future features. That being said, things I've noticed about BTW (hopefully it's from v4.64, I've skipped a few updates.) are the great idea with animals, and being unarmed. My Wooden Sword broke mid pig slaughter, and I thought to myself: "just punch it a few times". Which ended in me thinking to myself in a very Don't Starve-ish way "It's a pig." I laughed a little, switched to my Wooden Axe, and finished the pig off. Bravo FC, I love it. :D


Edit: The above is only half true. Came to this conclusion after breaking a sword mid cow murder, and was able to punch it. I was all like, "Awe.. :(". Then, went in to I gotta figure this out! mode. I ran up to a sheep, punched it, then a chicken, successful hit. Searched for a pig, took a minute, found one, punched it. Then I thought, "Was I at full hunger before?" Ran around jumping like a nut to lower my hunger, punched something at every meat stick. It seems you can't punch an animal when you are 3 meat bars or lower.

So all in all, I feel a little silly for my first statement, but the end effect was also great. It's like a brand new game FC, thank you.

[FlowerChild]

Well guys, if I can make a comment at this point, I think balance observations (unless they are entirely new and unrelated to anything previously said), are likely null and void at this point.

I've been working like a maniac on the next release since the last one came out, and so much has changed about the early game, that's it's practically a whole new game...again :)

I'm going to lock this thread down until next release as a result, and because any comments made now will be almost entirely lacking in context given everything I've done and which you guys don't know about. Thanks for all your help in this thread. Despite it being a rough road at times, the information here has been extremely useful to me as I work on this, and I'll likely start up a new thread along these lines once the next release is out.