CE Dev Diary (April 16th)

[dawnraider]

Man, it's been a while since I've really written anything on here about dev thoughts, hasn't it :)

There's a couple big things I wanted to talk here about, most of which being some design talk, then one more talking about modding platforms and addons.

The Loom
A way to automate weaving and other related tasks I think is long overdue. The loom is meant as a way to allow that to happen, acting similarly to a millstone ion that it takes items in, and when supplied mechanical power, will spit out finished products into the world. It will work on things like turning sugar cane into wicker, or turning wool into wool knit. I also want to expand the armor system, and I think having the loom available in the mid game would let me play around with more kinds of weaving for the early game, including making padding armor more accessible (at the cost of a bit of labor).

It'll also help ease some of the obnoxiousness of making platforms right now, as the amount of manual weaving required for that right now is absurd.

Animals
Automated animal breeding is still on my radar. I think being able to keep them alive is in a good spot right now, though I'm definitely open to tweaking further as necessary.

Breeding items I think are the next big ticket item for animals. Chickens I would call done, as chicken feed is a satisfactory item which can now be automated. I also quite like chocolate for pigs, and so the big thing there is just to make automated milking possible. Now that placeable buckets have made their triumphant return, that's one step closer to completion. Cows and sheep definitely need a lot of attention right now though. Pumpkin pie is actually not horrible for sheep, but isn't amazing either. Cake for cows is pretty awful though, especially with it not stacking.

Plants
Cocoa, potatoes, and cacti are all plants I definitely want to make a pass on to bring up to vegehenna standards. Maybe pumpkins and melons too, but those are currently decent.

No real concrete plans for cocoa or potatoes, mostly just vague ideas there. Cacti I do want to change to be similar to sugar cane in a way, where the main plant can't jsut be infinitely replanted. Instead I want to do something like have the top section occasionally flower, and that flower can then be planted to grow a new plant. I will also bring back cacti being plantable in sand, as planters only is quite ugly and this will inhibit cheesy early game cacti walls.

Death and Recovery
The last design element I want to touch on is the HCS experience, and recovering lost items. The 20 minute item timer was initially added by FC as a way to even out death locations. With the old system, if you died in spawn chunks your items would despawn in 5 minutes. But if you died outside spawn chunks, your items would be safe until you loaded those chunks, making deaths in the nether or end particularly safe. I think balancing that out is a good thing, but it had the unfortunate side effect of all but guaranteeing your items would be completely lost on death.

I think a good approach to fixing this problem would be doing something inspired by yany's addon and make items persistent until you die. This would make it actually reasonable to recover your items after death, and would also encourage people to play out an HCS instead of suiciding multiple times. One thing I will need to take a look at along with that though is making sure HCS does not spawn you in a jungle or ocean, as getting killed through no fault of your own due to bad RNG and losing your items would feel terrible.

I've also thought about porting vanilla's new recovery compass which points to your location of death as a way to assist in recovering items, likely crafted with a soul urn as it is both thematic and locks it behind at least some tech.

Fabric Support
This is the platform and addon update mentioned above. Arminias and Zhil over on discord have put in a ton of great work on getting BTW up and running with fabric. Note that this is only regarding the loader, and not the API (which doesn't even exist for 1.5). Addons will continue to use the internal BTW API.

Fabric is currently 100% functional with BTW and most existing addons. However, it still needs a bit more work before it'll be ready for proper release, namely a bit more massaging of the BTW codebase to make it work, as well as a proper user friendly build environment, as the current one is very alpha.

Once it is released, however, it will make addon creation and installation considerably easier, and help significantly with compatibility as well.

Conclusion
Well, that's all I had for discussion this time around :)

Unfortunately life has been pretty busy since I finished school and have a proper job now, but I'm hoping to find some more time soon to keep working on things. Hopefully it won't be as long before the next discussion :)

P.S. If you're looking for more in depth discussion about this stuff, come join us on discord! Unfortunately things are quite slow here on the forums (and I'd like to rejuvenate it a bit), but the discord is quite lively.

[Epsilon]

Thanks Dawn for the update.
And thank you all for keeping BTW alive through CE.
This has also, thanks to the amazing mod support built into CE and the assistance the active nodding community is willing to offer, sparked a new wave of new and revived mods for the new CE of BTW.

I'm especially impressed with how you and the others are able to continue CE honouring FCs perceived vision for BTW whilst in the other hand also expanding upon it with your own amazing mods for CE.

Admittedly I don't find the time to play much these days, and when I play it's often not Minecraft/BTW/CE but rather other games. However I love to follow this awesome Mod and its community just to see where it's going. And always "just waiting for that feature to be added" to finally start a new world with everything installed ;)
You gals, guys or other really come up with and implement awesome stuff.

I'm especially excited for the newest developments regarding accessibility for modding of CE, as I still have a dream of someday joining the ranks of people who missed their own ideas into what they've come to love for over a decade by now ;)

Be proud of what you've accomplished so far, and rest assured there is people out here that appreciate it :D

[dawnraider]

I'm especially excited for the newest developments regarding accessibility for modding of CE, as I still have a dream of someday joining the ranks of people who missed their own ideas into what they've come to love for over a decade by now ;)

Definitely getting there :)

Right now using MCP is a complete mess (though we've at least made a few steps towards improving the experience), but once the transition over to fabric is finished it'll be a lot easier to make addons, and it'll be a lot easier for us to work on the dev environment without having to deal with MCP's draconian license.

It just takes time, which unfortunately as I mentioned I haven't had a lot of. Lots of people have been putting in very good work on it so far though :)

[Epsilon]

It just takes time, which unfortunately as I mentioned I haven't had a lot of. Lots of people have been putting in very good work on it so far though :)

I'm not expecting you or anyone else on the team to accomplish wonders at a fingers snap :D - and I think there already have been achived quite some wonders.
Seriously, I'm impressed with the speed, quality and creativity of everything that has come out so far. And just hearing what is on your radar gives me enough confidence to be optimistic things will come together sooner rather than later ;) *at least from my "time perspective"

[Moldiworp2]

Yeah, I'm with Epsilon on this. No need to feel pressure time-wise. I think any decent fans of BTW are just happy the development is still ongoing and in good hands :)