As always, rules for this thread:
-DO NOT post suggestions.
-DO NOT critique unreleased features. Wait until you've had a chance to try them before passing judgement.
With that out of the way:
My apologies for being a a day late on this thread. I was determined to get the Bellows blowing functionality wrapped up yesterday and get the changes to Hardcore Buoy released to minimize breakage to people's builds.
Here's my weekly screenshot from my world:
Well, with the recent changes I've made with Hardcore Buoy, this thing is now completely broken to the point where I think it may be time for me to finally move on to a new main area, and leave this one as a shrine to the early development of the mod. As a result, I thought it worth posting this screen to say a final RIP to this area of my world as I move onto bigger and better things :)
As I'm sure many of you have noticed, BTW has been undergoing some rather radical changes as of late due to my bold new direction in modifying pretty much anything about vanilla behavior that I feel could really benefit from it. This process isn't over by a long shot, but I think we're getting close to the point where I'll be satisfied enough with the way things work overall to start moving onto new things.
I still have a few big changes on the way mind you, namely Hardcore Villagers, Hardcore Spawning, and Hardcore Endermen, all of which I've discussed elsewhere. Once those are done, I figure I'll build yet another nether-rail network out to an ungenerated portion of my world, and start building up a new main base from scratch, playing through the tech tree for a final round of balancing on all these new gameplay aspects. It may not be all that noticeable when we look at each feature individually, but with all the changes I've made as of late, and with those to come, I believe the early and middle BTW game experience has been pretty drastically altered, and I think a full round of play-testing is in order.
On the topic of Hardcore Endermen, I believe that feature is mutating into something larger, which I'm thinking of as "Hardcore Mobs". I've realized that Enderman behavior is only a portion of what I would like to address as part of this.
Today, I am once again on a bit of a development tangent. I've had a feature idea floating around for awhile that finally crystallized for me when I woke up this morning, and I decided to dive right into it. I won't provide too many hints on it, but I will say it is related to mob traps. I don't suspect it will take me too long to develop (I'm hoping to get it all done today), so you guys shouldn't be looking at too long a wait to get it into your hands and worlds :)
Otherwise, still moving forward on SMP optimizations and adding in hooks for add-on developers a bit at a time. As always, that kind of stuff is a fair bit of drudgery for me, so I like to intersperse it with new feature development to keep my spirits up.
Anyways, there you have it on the current state of BTW's development :)