Stormweaver wrote:
I'm probably wrong, but I think that some part of flower decided to make the latest updates a bit more...out of the box than normal (lets grind up some souls for our tools) to reduce the chance of his features getting swamped by potential vMC updates.
Nah man, it had nothing to do with 1.8, but rather a series of reactions I had while playing the mod in combination with Buildcraft from start.
I didn't have access to slimes, so had to consider alternatives. At first I was thinking "well, I could just hand-crank my way up the tech-tree to get to glue".
Then thought "no, that's pretty frigging lame".
So, I decided to build a Wind Mill instead. While doing that, I realized the design considerations involved in doing so were pretty frigging cool in their own right, that hand-cranking enough hemp fibers really wasn't a big deal and only took a few minutes, and I began lamenting that the Wind Mill wasn't a necessary part of the tech tree.
Out of that came the decision both to prevent the Hand Crank from being used beyond a certain point in the tech-tree, and making the Wind Mill the first form of continuous mechanical power you have to build.
I had a similar reaction once I got to stoked fire. I wound up realizing the amount of time I had to spend in the nether to acquire enough Nethrrack to build my various fire-pits was trivial, which is a shame, because giving the Nether more value was one of the goals of the mod.
So, I began asking myself a long series of questions as to how I could make it more difficult to acquire the resources from the Nether necessary to get to Steel and the whole concentrated Netherrack idea came out of that. I also had some side-goals in that in terms of making the tech-tree more dependent upon other mod-blocks to encourage players to build their first one, which would hopefully lead to them experimenting with blocks they might not otherwise. Because of this, I decided to include the Hopper and Hibachi into the tech tree proper (which is something that I will likely do with other blocks as well in the future...requiring them to advance beyond a certain point).
As for the soul thing, that element has always been part of the mod to one degree or another, hence the screaming cement, and the old Soul-Boosters for Minecarts, so it's really not as much of a departure as might first appear.
Notch decided to include a hell-dimension in the game, and with all the little tormented faces everywhere, it's pretty apparent that the Nether itself is made out of souls. I think the rest of it flows fairly naturally from that, and the idea that Steve tries to use pretty much every single resource that he comes across to help him survive.
Admittedly, I've also found it kinda funny that Notch chickened-out at some point and decided to rename "Hell" to "Nether" to avoid pissing off the puritans, so I get a kick out of focusing in on that aspect in disturbing ways. As a modder I can get away with certain things I never could professionally, so I tend to have a lot of fun with that.
It may be slightly twisted (or massively so), but so are a lot of the other elements of the mod ;)
