Early Game Difficulty and Hardcore Spawns

[Sarudak]

Now having played a fair bit of the post AAHHHHH early game I feel fairly confident in saying that the current balance is just a bit too punishing for me to enjoy. The easy possibility of instant death combined with how punishing a hadcore spawn puts me off wanting to play more. Given that I tend to fall on the hardcore end of difficulty preferences I can imagine this makes the mod almost entirely inaccessible to most. I think it would make sense to try to tune things a little easier. However it's important to do so without losing the sense of struggle for survival in the early early game and the fear of death and feeling of high stakes that hardcore spawn provides. The way I see it there are three ways to approach this adjustment

1. Reduce the likelihood of death for the player - This is the approach taken by yany's mod (viewtopic.php?f=12&t=9873) where the total health of the player is increased significantly. Based on my experience once you've learned the game most player deaths are caused by creepers while mining so one way would be to offer the player more tools to deal with creepers. Options such as an item that warns the player of a creepers approach or increased explosion resistance from wool and/or padded armor. The downside of this option is that it would make caving feel less dangerous and so less exciting.

2. Allow the player to mitigate HCS - An example of this would be a craftable item that causes the player to respawn at the spawn point instead of randomly in the HCS area. This item would need to have some serious drawbacks/costs to prevent it from essentially removing HCS. It should be an expensive item that breaks on use. Examples of possible drawbacks: The item only works in the hotbar. The item lowers max health while active. If you die with the item you suffer some permanent debuff until you do Hardcore spawn. The downside of this option is that it could trivialize death in the game and thus reduce the feeling of high stakes.

3. Make HCS easier to recover from - This would lower the penalty of a hardcore spawn. Currently a player needs to get to the third strata to retrieve redstone and produce a compass so that they can find their way back. This could be made easier by allowing the player to construct something like a stationary compass using only iron. Alternatively redstone could be made available in the second strata but this would require changing world gen. The downside of this approach is that the player will generally rush to whatever point it needed and then head home immediately. This means players are less likely to construct new bases on HCS and thus their world may be less interesting as a result.

Currently I'm favoring options 1 or 2. Make it so a player is likely to suffer fewer full HCS events once they've learned the game some but when it happens it continues to have a big impact. Clawing your way up from nothing is a ton of fun the first time and still fun the second, third and fourth time but by the eighth it starts to lose it's luster.

[dawnraider]

So one thing i think would help is tweaking HCS range. Personally i do not think that the increasing range on HCS is particularly constructive as every time you make progress it removes a significant chance of discovering old bases. I think the base range should be increased to go into populated village and temple range, but then should not change over the course of the game.

That way HCS remains around its most interesting post nether because there is stuff to find, but then development isn't invalidated by expanding the radius beyond where you possibly could've been.

[Hiracho]

I wouldn't change a core BTW feature like Hardercore spawn. The effect of it isn't to find your old bases, it's to force you to replay the early game as if roguelite. Changing that would break a lot. Not liking to start over is fair, but its sort of a core essence here.. The main issue with a high death rate is from people who can't even unlock these huge ranges, getting that far in the game kind of assumes you don't die constantly and can run through the early game relatively steady. reducing HC spawnrange increase would only serve that people who have established a lot try to gun for trying to find signs of life instead of starting over steadily. reducing HC spawn range is a bad design choice imo.

I would guess that adding an easy mode BTW described as just that would be beneficial most. BTW for noobs, practice for the real thing. don't fret too much.

Other than that, small tweaks go a long way in making the early game a tad forgiving but still hard and deadly.

I think the main issue as we talked about a lot on the discord is that HC spawn feels like a waste of time, now that is something that should be addressed constructively instead of trying to find a quick fix to have it happen less!

[gaga654]

One sentiment that FC would regularly express about Hardcore Spawn is that even if you die, you've still made progress because now you have a partially built-up base that you could find in the future, the "persistent roguelike" aspect. Personally I really like that - if we're going to make things easier, I'd like to see this aspect of Hardcore Spawn expanded upon more than finding ways to avoid it. There are a few things here that could be addressed:

• Previous progress you've made helps you in a very "all-or-nothing" way: either you get lucky and spawn near a previous base, or you don't and have to start completely from scratch.
• While some of your progress persists in the world - ovens, storage, farms, (unless they get killed by weeds), crafting stump, etc. - a lot of it, mainly iron tools, exists in the form of items that will be lost on death
• The road to renewable food is quite long these days, which means that if you're in a sufficiently built-up area it may get even harder to survive since there won't be as many animals around. I'm honestly not sure how much of an issue this is in SSP, but to me just the fear of this happening (even if unfounded) makes HCS feel a lot less fun. (Hell, that's the thing that drove me to make my first-ever post on these forums :p)
• You can spend a really long time in one spawn before dying and having to start over. Starting over after an hour isn't so bad, starting over after 5 hours is a lot more grueling.

I'm not sure which of these issues could be addressed, or how to address them. But death would feel a lot better if when I died I felt, "ah well, I died but at least I made progress" rather than feeling "well, I died and have to completely start over" or even "well I died and made a part of the world uninhabitable by killing the nearby animals and then losing the food I'd collected".

[dawnraider]

One sentiment that FC would regularly express about Hardcore Spawn is that even if you die, you've still made progress because now you have a partially built-up base that you could find in the future, the "persistent roguelike" aspect.

This is exactly what I don't like about hardercore spawning, as it devalues the idea of building up the world as you die.

Reducing HC spawnrange increase would only serve that people who have established a lot try to gun for trying to find signs of life instead of starting over steadily. reducing HC spawn range is a bad design choice imo.

That's why I'm saying to *increase* the base range for HCS, but just not make it expand with progress.

[EpicAaron]

Might I suggest a totally different direction?

The unspoken thing you guys seem to be pointing to is the idea that players just don't want to play out the very early game again and again. Ideally speaking, death should suck because there is a lot of loss involved in it, but it should also be exciting because it presents an opportunity to re-experience the primitive game play. After the initial shock of dying should come at least some pleasure in re-experiencing the more dynamic, action packed game play of the first few weeks.

Think about pre-hardcore BTW. You'd build up spawn base to steel tech and call it a day. When you wanted to do it again, you started a new world. HC Spawn is a truly awesome feature for long term players not only because it encourages us to iterate on early game strategy, but also because it lets us build up a sprawling and interconnected world. The landscape changes across a scale of thousands of blocks as you die and move around. It's the sort of feature that I would use in Vanilla Minecraft for pretty much the same reasons.

I know from experience that many players see the very early game as a slog. It isn't until crafting table that a lot of the excitement builds. This is because caving becomes a lot easier (arguably the most engaging activity of the early game) and also because the player gains ready access to cobble as a building material.

Rather than arbitrarily making players more durable or allowing players to skip out on HC spawns entirely (which they will do 100% of the time if given the option), my proposal is to buff the original tool set to allow players more room for creative expression while searching for those first scraps of iron ore and clay. The stone shovel could dig up full blocks and the stone hoe could be reintroduced to allow players the opportunity to start agriculture at a more meaningful pace. What if the axe could split logs into log slabs? I can picture a fun swinging animation that really hunks the block apart. The shovel change alone might be enough. Slabs are hard to come by even with clay digging as a supplement.

A more radical solution could involve just letting the player craft a stone pick very early on. I was thinking something more like a bone pick--a lower durability pick that could be crafted out of the ribs of a cow or something. That would give the player a very early goal of slaying a bovine. Lots of room for organic narrative (and stupid deaths) there. Regardless, letting players get to caving or at least the ability to dig out their holes at night and build up stronger infrastructure as soon as possible might make the prospect of starting over again a lot less lame.

I actually made an informal add-on that makes the hoe and pick accessible pre-crafting table years ago. I want to update it to the latest version and see if it resonates with anybody. It isn't my default preference personally, but sometimes I'm just not in the mood to play out the standard early game.

[yany]

... yany's mod ... where the total health of the player is increased significantly ... it would make caving feel less dangerous and so less exciting ...

I know your point here is not entirely related to my mod, but I'd like to address how my changes impact (early game) caving. Because I think caving with my mod is much more dangerous and scary, even in the top strata. While caving you'll inevitably have some encounters with hostile mobs, most notably skeletons, where you can't avoid taking at least some damage. So while you're caving, passive health regeneration is a very big thing keeping you alive, especially if you stop to mine out larger coal deposits. But I nerfed that thing to hell.

Consider a caving expedition with crude torches, where you spend 20 minutes in harm's way, and then head home before they burn out. In normal BTW, you start out with 10 hearts, and regenerate a maximum of 20 additional hearts over that time, for a total of 30 hearts of damage you can absorb on the trip, slightly less because HP penalties and time spent at max HP. With my mod, you start out with 20 hearts initially, but only regenerate 4, leaving you with a total of 24 hearts for the entire trip. That effect increases with longer trips, and 20 minutes is about the shortest of my caving trips.

That is, before you get decent armor and healing potions, but I don't remember ever dying in a cave once I had diamond armor in normal BTW anyway, so I don't think there's much of a loss to speak of there.

To make a maybe bigger point than "my mod not bad smh", I think it's entirely possible to decrease the frequency of sudden deaths while maintaining the overall level of tension through mechanics that only save you every once in a while. A creeper radar with a cooldown mechanic would be one of those things, though it might need some thematic gymnastics to give it a BTW feel. Low durability (possibly single use?), strong, renewable early game armor is another thing that I could think of here.

So one thing i think would help is tweaking HCS range. Personally i do not think that the increasing range on HCS is particularly constructive as every time you make progress it removes a significant chance of discovering old bases. I think the base range should be increased to go into populated village and temple range, but then should not change over the course of the game.

That way HCS remains around its most interesting post nether because there is stuff to find, but then development isn't invalidated by expanding the radius beyond where you possibly could've been.

I have mixed feelings about expanding HCS range. After nether access I like it, as the things you can find after spawning get more interesting. After end access, I also think it's a good thing, because it puts pressure on the player to complete the SFS beacon. Expanding it after the wither feels unnecessary to me. I wouldn't have put that in myself, and I see no problem with removing it. What I was actually surprised to see in the code when I found it was the minimum respawn distance. I think that's much more of a culprit behind not finding old bases, as it extends along with the maximum distance. I'm absolutely in favor of removing minimum distance, or at least making it not expand. But I'd even consider weighting new spawn locations closer to the initial spawn to make it more likely that you'll find an old base.

Another thing that I think about every now and then is to calculate the distance from the place where the player died, so that 1) you can't just die a bunch in a row to get back home and 2) making trips far away from your established bases gets a little riskier, and that could be an incentive for even more player construction and 3) to prevent situations where possible spawn locations have no animals left to hunt in the area. Though that would be an entirely different system.

Besides that, I mostly agree with the things that Hiracho and gaga654 have said. We should encourage player construction, and make progress in different locations more persistent, and mitigate the permanent damage that HCS causes. (I even did some of that in my mod already.)

...

I know from experience that many players see the very early game as a slog. It isn't until crafting table that a lot of the excitement builds. This is because caving becomes a lot easier (arguably the most engaging activity of the early game) and also because the player gains ready access to cobble as a building material.

...

I personally think that progression up to chisel/crafting stump tech is the best part of the early game, and my overall enjoyment of the mod only gets back to that level around the time I find my first few diamonds. The only times when I didn't enjoy that part of the game was when I got bottlenecked by spider strings. But even with that I felt low key guilty changing the balance of that part of the progression, it's just so good as it is. I can agree that death in that stage leaves practically nothing behind, and that part could be addressed, but I think the gameplay is fine as it is. Stone hoes in a 3x3 crafting would be a lot closer to something I'd like to see. I might even do that in my own mod.

[Sarudak]

I know your point here is not entirely related to my mod, but I'd like to address how my changes impact (early game) caving. Because I think caving with my mod is much more dangerous and scary, even in the top strata. While caving you'll inevitably have some encounters with hostile mobs, most notably skeletons, where you can't avoid taking at least some damage. So while you're caving, passive health regeneration is a very big thing keeping you alive, especially if you stop to mine out larger coal deposits. But I nerfed that thing to hell.

Consider a caving expedition with crude torches, where you spend 20 minutes in harm's way, and then head home before they burn out. In normal BTW, you start out with 10 hearts, and regenerate a maximum of 20 additional hearts over that time, for a total of 30 hearts of damage you can absorb on the trip, slightly less because HP penalties and time spent at max HP. With my mod, you start out with 20 hearts initially, but only regenerate 4, leaving you with a total of 24 hearts for the entire trip. That effect increases with longer trips, and 20 minutes is about the shortest of my caving trips.

That is, before you get decent armor and healing potions, but I don't remember ever dying in a cave once I had diamond armor in normal BTW anyway, so I don't think there's much of a loss to speak of there.

To make a maybe bigger point than "my mod not bad smh", I think it's entirely possible to decrease the frequency of sudden deaths while maintaining the overall level of tension through mechanics that only save you every once in a while. A creeper radar with a cooldown mechanic would be one of those things, though it might need some thematic gymnastics to give it a BTW feel. Low durability (possibly single use?), strong, renewable early game armor is another thing that I could think of here.

My point was not intended as criticism of you mod. My point is just that the changes should make caving a bit more of an endurance activity and it seems to me the player is less likely to die if they are playing smart (although this is my impression not having tried it). That is to say, if you do die it probably won't be because a creeper surprised you at full or nearly full health but because you kept going after taking enough damage that you probably should have turned back.

[TheGatesofLogic]

I have to agree in general with some of the comments made here. Yes, the point of HCS is to encourage replaying the early game, but it is also unique in that it is also intended to encourage developing the world. Before AAHHH and hardercore spawn I would spend an enormous amount of time building portal networks, distributing food banks in various locations, and building roads and landmarks. This was generally split about 50/50 between fresh bases and work I chose to do after returning to my primary base. After Hardercore Spawn was implemented I stopped doing that. The gaps became too large, the effort too much to effectively do. Larger regions were depleted of food, and without renewable food of high quantity I never bothered wasting food on scattered stashes for respawn.

Effectively, the "persistent rogue-like" aspect of the game that actually encouraged roads/landmarks/supply caches was gone because distances became too large. Mind you, the distances were definitely a bit small in original HCS and I'll freely admit that.

Believe me, I enjoy the early game and overcoming it, but it is very repetitive when it comes down to it. There's only so much you can do, and there's only so much that changes. What I enjoy even more, is when I am able to actively contribute to making that struggle easier. There's nothing better than knowing that you've built a network of bases and supply caches and landmarks such that you're able to quickly return to what you were already doing. That you've struggled so much specifically so that you don't have to struggle as much in the future. I think the opportunity to reexperience the early game at that point becomes a choice to start a new world and that's an okay way for a game to be designed. To me, HCS radius increasing with milestones diminishes any work you do to develop your world with each advancement, and honestly makes it feel like even trying is wasted effort any given stage. That's not a fun feeling.

[dawnraider]

One thing I do like is the minimum distances. My pre-AAHH post-steel world in 4.A2 I died 7 times I think, and 5 were within sight of spawn (3 spawned me directly in my base), and so I think the minimum distance is good to encourage the aforementioned building out the world.

Technical details:

Spoiler

Show

Exact distance measures:

• Pre hardercore spawning: 0-2000
• Pre nether: 1000-2000
• Post nether: 1500-3000
• Post wither: 2000-4000
• Post end: 4000-8000

Personally I think 1000-3000 or 1000-4000 would be the most interesting choices if we do end up deciding to go the route of fixing the HCS distance instead of having it change.

Also an important note on how HCS works: It is based on polar coordinates, randomizing an angle and a distance, which means that the chance of spawning at any distance is equal and is not weighted by the increased area in the rings further from spawn.

[EpicAaron]

After Hardercore Spawn was implemented I stopped doing that. The gaps became too large, the effort too much to effectively do. Larger regions were depleted of food, and without renewable food of high quantity I never bothered wasting food on scattered stashes for respawn.

I appreciate hardercore spawn because it means I never have to worry about running out of potential HC location when I want to play early game again. It does mean, however, that the infrastructure that players rely on in smaller spawn rings becomes less relevant. Well, sort of. I've stumbled on old bases while returning from the post-end ring.

I've played a lot of HC spawns and have rarely experienced one that didn't have any food whatsoever or was beyond my ability to find new terrain. It sucks when it happens, but I firmly reject the myth of the animal-barren BTW world. Especially in SSP!

[jakerman999]

I've seen players hardcore spawn, raid three temples and two villages on the way back and be better off from the death. Granted, that's very extreme, and not something I even dream of doing myself.

I put forward that there is merit in encouraging the build up of multiple locations in the world through HCS. Consider a world where once the nether has been breached, it is easier to breach again. Now climbing the tech tree to "fast travel" allows you to start a nether highway network organically, rather than as a proactive measurement against future deaths. Other possible additions might include more biome restricted farms, possibly paired with chunkloaders, to encourage bases in locations away from spawn. In this way death and rebirth becomes fuel for growth and expansion.

My other thought was to make HCS expand more granularly, and perhaps even go as far as fudge the angle roll a little bit according to a sine wave on larger distances, to encourage respawns to happen in proximity to areas that have been built up, but still further outwards to promote some exploration and fertile hunting grounds. I do however worry that this approach is a bit blunt.

Exact distance measures...

I know the mod is open source now, but do we as a community maybe still want to keep things like these in spoiler tags? I'm not sure how many still believe in not peeking behind the curtain, but I'd like to be courteous to them

[dawnraider]

From what I've noticed a general idea of HCS range seems to be common knowledge but sure i put it in a spoiler.

[Lockeofamber]

Honestly, I think a number of these solutions could be implemented by difficulty level. That way everyone can pick their preferred experience. For example:

-Hardcore mode in MC to be FC's default experience, with hardercore spawn. Does anyone even play hardcore mode with BTW? Seems like it would lose a lot of the fun if one did, and of course hardcore spawn is meaningless in these settings anyways.

-Survival -> Normal : Make this something MUCH more accessible to a newer and younger audience. My daughter loves MC, but will only play creative because of how punishing BTW is. I think in the long run, this community will die out without an influx of newer players and I can't think of a better way to help that along. Ideas:

-Re-implement beds, but make them harder to build and break upon use. "You thrashed the bed apart in your nightmare."
-Tweak damage/HP/regen numbers, or scale down the hardcore hunger debuffs, but otherwise try to preserve as much feeling of progression as possible so they can graduate to what the community does now.


-Survival -> Hard : Make some of the changes discussed above to keep the overall feel of HCS, but adjust to reduce tedium. Additional ideas:

-Implement some kind of player focused unlockable "easier" recipes for early game tech. Like, once you've done X, you can make early game item Y more easily. This kind of approach would help players recover from HCS faster if they've "earned it".
-Let dropping of certain items upon death have a chance to lodge into a nearby surface: Like a dropped iron shovel plants itself into a dirt tile it is touching, etc. Smaller chance for stone tools, etc. This helps the persistent progress feel more likely to be maintained.
-Revisit animal respawning mechanics: If chunk hasn't been visited in X hours, check for animal spawn chance (vanilla spawn chance multiplied by 0.X as percentage). This could also let HCS depleted zones have a chance to eventually recover, and enable "nomadic" playstyles for early game. I think something like this could still prevent cheesy animal spawner traps

[Whuppee]

Dying a lot can be frustrating, but it will happen a lot less if you work to understand why it's happening so you can try to prevent it. Please, less rush to fix what isn't broken. I get that this'll be opt-in, but most players don't know what they want and will contribute to/ unhappily lessen their and other's experiences if able or encouraged. Constraints and creativity, yeah? You don't need more tools; you need to use what tools there are—the impulse shouldn't be to rush out an addon to make creepers more survivable, say.

Blocking, for example, is enough to survive a point-blank creeper without armor. Shears are obvious. Sprint-attack knockback with any weapon can save you. Breaking line of sight for even moments can too: in a small open space without shears, I survived being cornered and even saved my ovens, by timing hits and ducking in and out of a + in the corner, with that adjacent face of dirt as my only cover. And if you're getting surprised by creepers, probably you didn't check your ceilings, left them places to climb, or didn't barricade. Better situational awareness and caving technique, for example, are things you can improve at, but they won't be learned if surprise creepers are routine and survivable. And they're already somewhat survivable.

—
I'm opposed in principle to any item that negates HCS because I think HCS is an overall good. "Balancing" very overpowered things with expense is always a bit shit, but especially in this instance where you're wanting this to be available to someone in the early game—anything they're likely to have limited access to will almost certainly be much more accessible to someone further along, and making something that vital require a hotbar slot just makes the hotbar one slot less.

If this must exist, the cost should be something that requires significant and repeated risks to gather, like 9 of those books you find in dungeons, and I hate to even put that out into the world so please no one run with it :( . But this probably fails your use-case, while being tedious for anyone more equipped to go do. It's a buffer—you either accrue more than you need over time and it trivializes what deaths you have, or it's too high a bar and those that most want it will rarely have any. Whatever the cost, it will cascade and incentivize things that are probably best not.

—
I am sympathetic to wanting to make HCS somehow easier to recover from, because the time it takes me to recover seems a bit much. Though much of that is down to my abilities, tactics and risk tolerances. I mind the trip to redstone less than the rare but awful cost when you have to cross an ocean, to the point that I've sometimes started hemp early just in case, because I once got all the way to redstone and a compass before I knew, and waiting for that sail was excruciating. In general though, I quite enjoy the change of pace. And while it should be acknowledged that I don't die often, that anyone is dying significantly more often, is maybe a problem that shouldn't be addressed by helping them recover faster. Dying and reexperiencing the high-risk early game again is the game encouraging you to practice.

[Mason11987]

Dying a lot can be frustrating, but it will happen a lot less if you work to understand why it's happening so you can try to prevent it. Please, less rush to fix what isn't broken....

I basically echo these Whuppee here.

I don't think any community edition or baseline version of BTW should mess with this too drastically. I think it's one of the best parts of this mod and it could easily go the way side into irrelevancy if the base version of the mod makes it more into a toggle.