New Release! (BTW V3.45)

[FlowerChild]

Version 3.45 of Better Than Wolves is ready for download!

Download Link

This release contains the following changes:

-Added the ability for the Block Dispenser to pick up the following block types without altering them: dirt with grass, book shelves, coal ore, lapis ore, diamond ore, redstone ore, giant mushroom blocks and Mycelium. This should allow it to function similarly to tools with the silk touch enchantment.

-Added the ability for the Refined Pick to function as both a pick and a shovel.

-Added ability to melt down the Cauldron in the Crucible.

-Added high-efficiency piston recipe involving wood Siding instead of planks.

-Changed the Anvil crafting grid to be 4X4 instead of 3X3, and changed all the recipes associated with the Anvil to require the larger crafting grid. This was done to resolve player confusion over which recipes require the Anvil as it will now be readily apparent from the recipes themselves, plus this method fits the overall vanilla design and tech-progression much better, and allows for much more costly recipes at higher tech-levels.

-Changed the following recipes to match the new 4X4 crafting grid of the Anvil: Refined Pick, Refined Hoe, Battle Axe, Armor Plate, Plate Helm, Chest Plate, Plate Leggings, Plate Boots, Broadhead Arrowhead, Stone Siding, Stone Moulding, Stone Corner, Obsidian Pressure Plate, Redstone Eye, Detector Block, Block Dispenser, Column, Pedestal, and Block of Soulforged Steel. Almost all these items are now more expensive to produce to help balance their power.

-Changed wolf behavior so that they'll only lean their head at you if you are holding food and they are either hungry or wounded. This provides a visual feedback mechanism as to when they need to be fed to supplement their whining. (Thanks to RaustBlackDragon for suggesting this!)

-Changed the Buddy Block internally for a slight increase in performance.

-Changed the Battle Axe to enchant as a weapon instead of a tool. Who really bothers to enchant axes to begin with?

-Changed the Battle Axe so that it can cut through spider webs.

-Changed the way enchantment levels are (randomly) selected on the enchantment table. First a maximum enchantment level is selected based on the number of bookshelves, capped by the player's current level (so that enchantments aren't displayed beyond the level currently possible for the player). The top slot will always display a random value up to the maximum level possible, the second slot will display half the maximum level (rounded down), and third slot will always display the maximum enchantment level possible. Additional fine-tuning can be achieved by placing or removing bookshelves (sticky pistons and/or Block Dispensers can be useful for this). This should save the player a TON of clicking when attempting to enchant items to a particular level.

-Changed the Block of Soulforged Steel so that it can be melted down in the Crucible, but can't otherwise be broken up into individual bars through regular crafting.

-Fixed problem with the mechanical system that allowed infinite power loops to be created.

-Fixed the Hopper being able to place items on the potion brewing stand, as it was not intended to be able to do this.

-Fixed problem with being able to pick up Light Blocks in their lit state using silk touch.

-Fixed problem with shovels not being effective vs Unfired Pottery.

-Removed crafting recipes for the Refined Shovel and Long Sword, as their functionality is entirely integrated into the Refined Pick, and Battle Axe. Your old items will still function, and can still be melted down, but these tools are no longer officially part of the mod.

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Considering the number of recipes that have changed in this version (a lot), I'll be updating the MCF OP to reflect all the new ones momentarily.

Enjoy! :)

[Gilberreke]

Was not expecting this! Nice :D

[FlowerChild]

Was not expecting this! Nice :D

Just a bunch of little refinements to make everyone's life easier :)

[Mr_Hosed]

Removal of shovel and sword. Finally! I always wondered what was the point of these two if part of the progression of the tree was to free up my inventory and the battle axe already worked as a weapon. :)

Look like good updates to me. Also seems I'll definately want to build my netherbase now that soul-forged steel items are more costly.

[BinoAl]

What's sort of funny is I was considering suggesting the BD picking up blocks as if it had silk touch (Mainly for grass). Very nice release, I love what you did with the anvil recipes :)

[Ethazeriel]

Awesome, a new release :)

BETTER THAN WOLVES (AND SANTA CLAUS) MOD!

This is true. while SC gives gifts one day a year, FC isn't so discriminating.



...I am going to leave now and build a museum for my shovel and long sword. Treasured antiques :P

[Gilberreke]

Just a bunch of little refinements to make everyone's life easier :)

No, actually, this is pretty big for me.

- Getting rid of the longsword and shovel finally fixed that irk I had earlier with the refined tools being a little off-key.
- Turning the anvil into the often suggested 4x4 crafting space is genius. This opens up a whole slew of new possibilities
- Making the BD act as a silk touch pick in terms of blocks is also tons of fun
- The enchantment stuff is obviously a life saver :)
- The shovel working on unfired pottery is really handy. I had problems with that earlier, don't know why I didn't think of suggesting that

Now I have to go and change the graphics on the pick, will be interesting :)

[Mr_Hosed]

@Gil Don't forget the battle axe. Make it more weapon like ;)

[Gilberreke]

@Gil Don't forget the battle axe. Make it more weapon like ;)

That's right in my first bullet point ;)

[FlowerChild]

I just changed all the recipes in the OP on MCF (I had all the screen-shots prepared before release), so they should all be up to date now :)

Now I just have to edit the little details related to the release so they don't stack up on me like last time ;)

No, actually, this is pretty big for me.

Well, glad you like it. There certainly was a fair amount of work that went into it, I just didn't expect this release to have a major impact on folks :)

- Getting rid of the longsword and shovel finally fixed that irk I had earlier with the refined tools being a little off-key.

Yeah, I felt the same way. I just had to cut the cord and take the final step away from the vanilla tools on a conceptual level. I'd been planning that part for awhile, but just had to get to it.

- Turning the anvil into the often suggested 4x4 crafting space is genius. This opens up a whole slew of new possibilities

Oddly, that's how I originally planned the Anvil, but decided to let it go due to the base-class mods it required and the time it would have taken me when I first released it. With all the people asking why crafting recipes weren't working recently, I was reminded of why I had originally thought the 4X4 was the way to go. It also gives me a lot more flexibility in terms of creating more elaborate (and expensive) recipes in the future.

- Making the BD act as a silk touch pick in terms of blocks is also tons of fun

Yeah, it fits the functionality to be sure. The only reason the BD couldn't pick those blocks up in the past is that there was no equivalent functionality built into MC for collecting them pre-1.0.

- The enchantment stuff is obviously a life saver :)

Big time. I'm not super into enchantments yet, so it hasn't been bugging me that much, but I could definitely see where people were coming from. I think the degree of randomness in selecting the enchantments themselves is entirely sufficient. Building the randomness into selecting the level as well was just a silly design decision as the only "gameplay" it introduced was crazy amounts of clicking.

-- The shovel working on unfired pottery is really handy. I had problems with that earlier, don't know why I didn't think of suggesting that

I think that was just a bug I accidentally introduced when I moved away from the Forge tool system. I had forgotten there were any mod-blocks that the shovel was supposed to function on, and was recently reminded of that while manually cooking up a bunch of pottery in my new 1.0 base :)

Now I have to go and change the graphics on the pick, will be interesting :)

Hehe...yeah, that one isn't obvious :)

[Robilar]

This is gonna throw my whole hotbar off, as well as mess with my head when I'm mining. Don't get me wrong, switching between a pick and a spade while mining shafts slowed me down a lot, but I don't know what I'm gonna do with those two extra slots now.

Mayhaps my companion cube shall earn a place where my spade used to be?

Also, I can see myself screaming at skeletons as I swing my axe into their skulls.

[FlowerChild]

This is gonna throw my whole hotbar off, as well as mess with my head when I'm mining. Don't get me wrong, switching between a pick and a spade while mining shafts slowed me down a lot, but I don't know what I'm gonna do with those two extra slots now.

Mayhaps my companion cube shall earn a place where my spade used to be?

Also, I can see myself screaming at skeletons as I swing my axe into their skulls.

Lol! Well, I was NEVER using the long-sword myself as I found the extra hot-bar space to be much more useful than the extra damage (pre 1.0) or the weapon enchantments (post 1.0). I also didn't think the enchanting differences were really enough to justify having a dedicated weapon in the mod, and once I took that decision, the one I had been humming and hawing over with regards to the shovel became obvious.

There's never enough hot-bar space man. I'm sure you'll find a use for it. But yeah, having tested it this way for a few hours, it's certainly an adjustment to squash the reflex to keep switching to the shovel :)

[Stormweaver]

And now to make a grass farm. And to find a mushroom biome to make a farm for that stuff too.

I'm quite happy with the pick tweak, since I've been using anything with efficiency II or higher as a shovel anyway. But now that it'll be worth sticking ~50 levels on something that likes to dig sand...that desert is going down. Screw torch quarries.

[Sarudak]

Looks great! If I ever figure out a way to get out of the end in my BTW game (No dragon spawned for me :( so I'm kinda stuck there) I'll be able to play this. I like the 4x4 crafting grid although it makes some of the recipes look kinda awkward I'm sure I'll get used to it.

[FlowerChild]

Looks great! If I ever figure out a way to get out of the end in my BTW game (No dragon spawned for me :( so I'm kinda stuck there) I'll be able to play this. I like the 4x4 crafting grid although it makes some of the recipes look kinda awkward I'm sure I'll get used to it.

Yeah, I'm not super-happy with some of the recipes either, but it's the kind of thing I can tweak with time. Oddly, having a crafting grid of even dimensions makes things less than obvious at times :)

[Sarudak]

Looks great! If I ever figure out a way to get out of the end in my BTW game (No dragon spawned for me :( so I'm kinda stuck there) I'll be able to play this. I like the 4x4 crafting grid although it makes some of the recipes look kinda awkward I'm sure I'll get used to it.

Yeah, I'm not super-happy with some of the recipes either, but it's the kind of thing I can tweak with time. Oddly, having a crafting grid of even dimensions makes things less than obvious at times :)

Yeah I was gonna say that. It would almost feel more natural if you just jumped up to 5x5... But then there would be sooooo much clicking....

EDIT: The thing about the 4x4 is that there's no natural core for the recipes and that becomes really painful with a block like the BD that seems like it wants the soul urn as its core.

[Stormweaver]

Yeah, some of the new recipes look a touch off - I wouldn't be against the block dispenser requiring 2 soul urns just to make it look nicer tbh - it's not like it isn't amazingly powerful anyway. Btw, is buddy supposed to still be a 3x3 crafting?

[razar51]

Nice. I won't be building dirt staircases to underground or floating bases anymore, just going to use a BD to get the grass.

And I agree the new 4x4 crafting recipes will take some getting used to, but it should eliminate the headache of putting a recipe in the crafting table only to realize later that it had to be on an anvil.

Really going to like the enchantment change, trying to get the exact level I wanted was such a pain.

I am curious as to what the increase in buddy block performance is.

[FlowerChild]

The MCF OP should be fully up to date now. Man, that's a lot easier when I don't put it off for several versions :)

Yeah, some of the new recipes look a touch off - I wouldn't be against the block dispenser requiring 2 soul urns just to make it look nicer tbh - it's not like it isn't amazingly powerful anyway. Btw, is buddy supposed to still be a 3x3 crafting?

Yeah, I thought about that, but Soul Urns are a real pain to produce until you automate the whole process. I'll give it some further thought, but didn't want to do anything drastic there until I had a chance to properly consider it. It's possible it might provide more incentive to automate, which would be a good thing, but as I said, I'll think about it more.

And yeah, I realized that I had forgotten to switch Buddy over to the new system as I was editing the MCF OP. I've already noted that for the next release.

I am curious as to what the increase in buddy block performance is.

It's strictly internal, and you shouldn't notice any changes. I just decided to optimize a few things when I got a bug report recently about a big drop in performance on someone's system when they created an endless loop with a Buddy and a Light Block. Mainly, it just minimizes the number of neighboring blocks it notifies of a state change.

[FlowerChild]

Yeah I was gonna say that. It would almost feel more natural if you just jumped up to 5x5... But then there would be sooooo much clicking....

EDIT: The thing about the 4x4 is that there's no natural core for the recipes and that becomes really painful with a block like the BD that seems like it wants the soul urn as its core.

Yeah, the problem with 5X5 is I already have future plans for that within the mod, and I can't see myself going 6X6 or 7X7 with those ;)

[Damion Rayne]

Great Stuff FC

[FlowerChild]

Great Stuff FC

Thanks! Glad you're still with us man :)

[hooktail154]

This looks amazing. For someone who usually doesn't play legit, but hates instamining, this is perfect. Now I can always keep my tools around, without juggling my mechanical, redstone, and building supplies around. I'm installing it now.

Yeah, the problem with 5X5 is I already have future plans for that within the mod, and I can't see myself going 6X6 or 7X7 with those ;)

WHAT!? I don't even. New surprises every day.

[Itamarcu]

Thanks!
What about the BUDdy block (as mentioned above me)?

About the crafting grid: what about non-square grids? for instance, replace the middle four with one, which can be the "core" of things (redstone, soul urns, etc.).

[FlowerChild]

WHAT!? I don't even. New surprises every day.

Hehe...my plans extend pretty far into the future man. Look at the technological gap between 3X3 and 4X4, and you'll get some idea as to just how far ;)

What about the BUDdy block (as mentioned above me)?

Already answered that above.