CE Dev Diary (September 23rd)

[dawnraider]

Several years ago, FlowerChild used to have a regular post when he'd write up a dev diary to talk about the development of the mod. I really enjoyed that and so I figured I'd start writing something similar to talk about CE (though I will make no guarantees about regularity).

Most of this has also been discussed over on discord, so if you want to engage in discussion live head over there, there's a link in my sig. However, discord is not great for archival purposes as everything flies by and then is gone.

Also a reminder that the issue tracker is public, if anyone wants to follow development or engage in discussion with any of the issues: Issue Tracker

I would say that I am generally satisfied with the initial release of CE. A lot of the purpose of it was to have a solid foundation which cleans up bugs, adds quality of life features, and integrates the addon API. Now I want to move into more of the gameplay aspects for CE.

A couple big standouts for me right now are:
- Animageddon
- Vegehenna
- The "mid game slump"

These are all very large-scale issues and so it's going to be a slow burn towards improving on them.

Animageddon and vegehenna are both extremely involved systems released near the end of FC's development which I think have a ton of potential, but which never got the attention they deserved as FC was breaking away from the mod. Right now they feel incredibly clunky and unpolished, and I'd like to remedy that.

Animageddon
So I think the biggest issues with animageddon right now are breeding items and feeding mechanics.

Breeding items not being automatable feels like a huge affront to BTW's design philosophy. Dessert items are really weird to use for that, though FC did say that they were temporary, so I think the final product for that would be specific items like chicken feed for other animals with involved, but automatable, production. (Along those lines, chicken feed needs to be modified to be automatable).

Items as a whole are also really underpowered for feeding animals. It takes a few hundred wheat plants to keep a cow fed (up to over 1000 if you are only using straw), which is kind of absurd. I think buffing item feeding, but perhaps making it more involved would be the way to go. Someone on discord (I want to say it was Patchwork or Hiracho) had mentioned processing wheat and straw into hay bales which could be used to feed animals. I really like the idea of requiring more complicated designs to encourage player creativity.

Also as discussed in the thread on grass feeding over in the feedback forum, I think something needs to be done to make the system a bit more readable as to what the current status of your animals is.

I don't expect any of this to make it into the next version (with the exception of automated chicken feed), but it is something being actively considered.

Vegehenna
The immediate stand-out problem with vegehenna is that wheat is not currently automatable. Good news though, that has already been fixed for CE v1.1.0.

However, hemp and wheat are really the only crops to actually get the vegehenna treatment. Pumpkins and melons, carrots and potatoes, and sugar cane all need to be updated to vegehenna's standards and I think there is a lot of potential to make each crop have unique design considerations. That is all in pretty early stages of development though, so not much concrete to talk about.

The Mid Game Slump
The so-called "mid game slump" has been an issue in BTW for a really long time. I think the issue comes down to a combination of so much to do, with little gameplay variation within it. All the way from crucible to soulforge, very little actually changes about the play experience.

My initial thoughts after discussing this with Hiracho and several others on discord, is that villager trading should be slightly restructured. Changing the librarian to sell soulforge-based tech blocks, rather than buy them, will give early access to the items (they'll be expensive) before the player is able to craft them, in line with things like the soulforge itself or infused skulls. This obviously means though that the end needs to be gated behind the wither in a different way, which may also involve bringing the blacksmith into the required villagers (accompanied by a reduction in the blacksmith's greediness, as he is really hard to level right now). This would also serve to potentially space out the wither from the dragon. These changes together would help to smooth out some of the progression of the mid game, and more gradually introduce new options to the player.

The Near Future
So that's enough for long term discussion, here are some of the things coming for the next release (v1.1.0):
- Automatable wheat

- Automatable chicken feed

- An update to wolf breeding mechanics

- Changes to obtaining mystery meat to discourage cheesing steel beacons

- Name tags and diamond shears/chisel from deco

- Tweaks to the feather economy to hopefully encourage more mid and late game bow usage

- (Tentatively) A pass at squid farms to hopefully decrease how much they can be killed by any nearby water

[Gilberreke]

Github Issue Digest

• Hiracho talks about adapting pumpkins for vegehenna
• Should wicker weaving automation require a loom?
• Carrots and potatoes should have a changed growth cycle to match wheat
• Should it be possible to turn smouldering logs into charcoal?
• What did FC have in mind with milk buckets?

List of all open Vegehenna/Animageddon tickets.

[Sarudak]

Hey Dawn! I like to see the dev diaries coming back. I agree with most of what you said about the animageddon and vegehenna. I imagine the idea was to introduce new difficulties and problems to food management so that new systems and more progression could then be layered onto it to deal with the new issues created. There's no point in giving players new tech and abilities if there aren't problems to overcome.

Wrt to the mid game slump I feel like one of the big issues is that the mid game is when the survival pressure really dissipates. The early game feels very focused by the needs of survival and grasping for small pieces of progression so that survival can be maintained just a bit more easily. All resources feel scarce and death is constantly looming. The mid game (post crucible) really removes most of these pressures as you have permanent lighting, more abundant food, and essentially infinite good tools. Evening out the progression might help and I'm all for giving automation tools before the big automation tasks show up but for me the mid game slump has always been more about a loss of motivation. I think the only thing that would solve the mid game slump would be some kind of new pressure that progresses with you. Like new dangers appearing in the world once you open up the nether. But that's probably outside of the scope of a community edition and may not be to everyone's liking.

[dawnraider]

Yeah one other thing that I think needs to be looked at related to that is just how fast it is to go from nether access to crucible. It takes a while to get to the nether, but once you have that and enough hemp for a windmill, you can just slam through it and go from constant struggle to survive to very little pressure almost instantly. I think smoothing that process out would help a lot with the "...What now?" at the start of mid game. No idea on how to begin to address that as of yet though.

[Moldiworp2]

Thanks for doing Dev Diaries, I always loved these from FC. And factorio for that matter.

A rough breakdown of the time it takes to get to certain points in the tech progression, and then the options that open up at those points, might help visualize what needs to be tweaked? Just a thought.

[dawnraider]

Oh man, that's not an easy task lol. There's a lot that goes into it, and I do have a rather unconventional playstyle so a lot of the observations about the mid game have been in conjunction with other players and their experiences. The changes I talked about there are going to be a while before they come out, but it is definitely something that I want to have some more discussion about.