Hardcore Mode with BTW: Anyone Do it?

[Mud]

I'm just curious if anyone here also plays in Hardcore difficulty with BTW. I understand why the thought may be off-putting as a BTW world requires a lot more time and effort to develop than a vMC world, but I'm a fan.

Has anyone else tried it? Also, made a LP?

[FlowerChild]

Huh. Interesting. I've never liked vanilla's hardcore mode and would have assumed that HC spawn had largely rendered it obsolete.

Out of curiosity, what do you feel it offers you beyond what's already in the mod?

[Mud]

It was actually my frustrations with HCSpawn that lead me to start playing in vHC as despite the death penalty HCSpawn brings to the game, I still found myself taking foolish risks that often lead to my death. Moreover when I did die I would often a new world rather than trying to find my base again.

In addition to this I, like many, am guilty of reflexively switching my difficulty to Peaceful when I find myself in particularly tight binds. As a result I let my impatience rob me of the BTW experience. Lacking the personal restraint to brake this habit, the planned implementation of a difficulty lock will fix this issue for me, and my hope is that by playing in vHC in the mean time, I'll get myself into the habit of a more cautious play style.

:edit: I'm also an oldie Diablo fan :P

[Sarudak]

So basically it offers you locked difficulty?

[Mud]

That's the second half of what I posted above, yeah.

[jkievlan]

...by playing in vHC in the mean time, I'll get myself into the habit of a more cautious play style.

I'm not sure I follow you. Isn't BTW much more geared towards a cautious play style than vMC? In vMC I find myself doing all sorts of crazy stupid things because, hey, if I die I'll just wake up in bed :)

I still found myself taking foolish risks that often lead to my death. Moreover when I did die I would often a new world rather than trying to find my base again.

So...each time you take a foolish risk you get more scared of doing it. And then, you stop. As for starting a new base when you die...that's pretty much how it works in BTW. You die, you start a new base, and if your old base was really important to you, eventually you develop to the point of having a compass and then you go find it. I know some players who consistently die in BTW because they make the mistake of thinking the only thing worth doing after a respawn is finding the old base. I mean, if you can find it quickly, more power to you...but don't forget that the more bases you build, the more likely you are to find a safe spot to hole up next time you respawn.

[jkievlan]

Also, here's a motivation to use a difficulty harder than Peaceful: if you don't have mobs, you can't fish, and if you can't fish, it's very hard to have renewable food sources. Nor can you tame wolves (you need bones to tame them), so you can't tan leather, so you can't advance to even the lower tiers of the tech tree. Peaceful+BTW do not mix.

[Mud]

@Jkievlan: I'm playing BTW in vMC Hardcore difficulty currently.

Also I didn't play in Peaceful before, I used it as a "creeper despawn button" and otherwise spend 99% of my play time in Hard difficulty.

[RalphKastro]

I think what he meant was turning on peacefull when in low health/in danger of dying and turning off again when safe

Edit:Ninja'd

[jkievlan]

Oh, my bad. I thought you said vMC not vHC. I get what you mean now. Yeah...I didn't think of using Peaceful mode to clear out the creepers before I run outside. That feels very...not how it should be to me. Lol I think I've got the self-control not to use it, but I could almost wish you hadn't even mentioned it :) Anyway, when FC puts in the update to lock difficulty, that will prevent it.

Um...I would say one thing. If you play vHC that means you never respawn (your world just gets deleted). HCS, as I see it, isn't intended just to make your life hard, but also to force you to build many different bases and "civilize" a large chunk of the world. In vHC, you have the difficulty part, but not the other part, which I think is more important. Since you never respawn, you never have to build another base. In fact, it's a huge disincentive to do so. So you lose out on one of the coolest features of BTW -- the process of gradually civilizing the wilderness.

[Vexalor]

I have to admit that I am also a bit guilty of this. I have never started a new world after dying in a normal world with HC Spawn simply because HC Spawn makes it like starting a new world, plus you have a chance of finding your old base, but I have played Hardcore because of the unchangeablility of the difficulty level and the absolute penalty that results from death. Even in BTW, I don't feel death is particularly fearsome: I mean you lose your base, but you spawn with full health and hunger! And you can easily rush your way through the early game to get home. However, in Hardcore, there is no chance of this, it gives it a more roguelike nature. This doesn't really fit Minecraft well, but I almost feel a yearning for more penalties resulting from death.

[Mud]

My luck often has HCSpawn drop me on an island in the middle of an ocean biome with no trees or in an area that I'd previously visited that is devoid of passive mobs. I'm also really good at dying underground during the night.

@jkievlan: I guess you've never heard the trick to enable cheats in a world that has cheats disabled either :P. The knowledge alone of things like this make the temptation a real challenge for some.

[jkievlan]

@jkievlan: I guess you've never heard the trick to enable cheats in a world that has cheats disabled either :P. The knowledge alone of things like this make the temptation a real challenge for some.

Oh, I know about the cheats. I never enable them lest I be tempted :)

[Vexalor]

Oh, I know about the cheats. I never enable them lest I be tempted :)

Yes, but he is saying that one can enable cheats in a world where cheats are disabled. You do this by: (I recommend not opening this spoiler for your own play experience)

Spoiler

Show

Starting a private LAN game and enabling cheats in the options menu or opening the Level.dat file and changing the cheats boolean to true.

[Mud]

Even if it's not to simulate a difficulty-lock or to combat temptation. I highly recommend everyone start a Hardcore world for the challenge of it, even if it's not a world you spend a ton of time on, it can be an interesting side project.


(seriously, are there no Diablo fans here?)

[jkievlan]

Yes, but he is saying that one can enable cheats in a world where cheats are disabled. You do this by: (I recommend not opening this spoiler for your own play experience)

No, I mean I do know how to do that. I just don't. Same thing with switching to Peaceful mode -- I just won't. After I've cheated I just get this disappointed feeling about my whole world. I can't help constantly wondering whether I would have gotten as far as I did if I hadn't done that. I run my server the same way...I refuse to use admin commands (except basic stuff like /list) and when players start getting mad because I won't help them with some "totally reasonable" request, I either ignore or ban them. But even so, it's just another temptation to add to the list of things I have to make sure I don't do. It's simpler if the game just forces everyone to play legit. So, when the difficulty lock gets added, I'll be glad to see it :)

[Kaitocain]

I'm a Diablo and Rogue-like fan myself, but vMC's implementation of Hardcore is utter rubbish, especially when played with BTW.

[Mud]

It's no different though; you die, you lose everything. The only difference is Diablo gives you some sort of monument/tombstone and a record of your progress.

[Vexalor]

No, I mean I do know how to do that. I just don't. Same thing with switching to Peaceful mode -- I just won't. After I've cheated I just get this disappointed feeling about my whole world. I can't help constantly wondering whether I would have gotten as far as I did if I hadn't done that. I run my server the same way...I refuse to use admin commands (except basic stuff like /list) and when players start getting mad because I won't help them with some "totally reasonable" request, I either ignore or ban them. But even so, it's just another temptation to add to the list of things I have to make sure I don't do. It's simpler if the game just forces everyone to play legit. So, when the difficulty lock gets added, I'll be glad to see it :)

Yeah, playing legitimately is really the only way to go if you actually want to have fun playing Minecraft for a long period of time.

I'm a Diablo and Rogue-like fan myself, but vMC's implementation of Hardcore is utter rubbish, especially when played with BTW.

Like I said above, roguelikes are fun, but it's not so much implementation as it is that roguelike gameplay just really doesn't belong in a game like Minecraft. Like I said, I play Hardcore occasionally because I feel the ordinary penalty for death is not adequate, even though Hardcore is slightly overcompensating. I mean even you guys must see something wrong with re-spawning with full health and hunger? It's like you're not even getting punished for dying, only being forced to go on a small vacation from your ordinary base and start fresh.

[jkievlan]

I mean even you guys must see something wrong with re-spawning with full health and hunger? It's like you're not even getting punished for dying, only being forced to go on a small vacation from your ordinary base and start fresh.

I don't know. It feels balanced to me. I see BTW as a mod designed to make the game interesting without making it pointless...and as I see it, having your game totally end (or be unreasonably difficult) just because you died is pointless. There's a certain sense of achievement in it if you survive, but very little you can proudly point to and say, "Look what I did!"

Like I said, I don't see HCS as a means to just make dying worse. It's a means to make dying *scary* and to force you to do something useful as a result of dying...but not to just make dying as painful as possible. Pain for its own sake doesn't carry much weight with me. Pain for the sake of making your world better...that makes sense.

Edit: to be honest, if I ever started to see BTW just as a way to make Minecraft as agonizing as possible, I would stop playing. I play it because when it makes things hard, it makes them hard for a good reason.

[Mud]

Hardcore Mode isn't about milestones or achievements, it's about seeing how long you can survive. Period.

Even in Diablo it was such a simple concept that people just loved to overthink.

[FlowerChild]

I don't know. It feels balanced to me. I see BTW as a mod designed to make the game interesting without making it pointless...and as I see it, having your game totally end (or be unreasonably difficult) just because you died is pointless. There's a certain sense of achievement in it if you survive, but very little you can proudly point to and say, "Look what I did!"

Yup, I agree with the above, which is why I've never liked vanilla hardcore mode myself. Losing your entire world is just way too much for a game like MC, where persistence is one of its biggest strengths.

There's a lot of pleasure to be taken from playing a world for an extended period of time and to see it grow as you play, which is why I've been playing the same world almost exclusively for over two years now (ever since I started playing MC, it's always been on the same world). *Knowing* that one day that world will simply be erased from existence removes much of the motivation to build big, build nice, or even build at all.

With BTW in particular, the mod encourages players to make a significant investment in their world building stuff like mob-traps and beacons both of which take a rather large investment of play time.

Now, for people with world restart syndrome anyways, I can see hardcore mode being a reasonable alternative, but really, that's a style of play I'm trying to ween players off of to begin with by upping the investment they have in their worlds by the time they get to the "end" of the mod.

Anyways, in short, for a game where player creativity is such an integral part of the fun, I think periodically reducing everything they've created to ashes is simply a bad idea.

[CycloneSP]

I can attest to what FC is saying about world restart syndrome/having your world turned to ashe.

I've been playing BTW off and on for over a year now, and in that time I've lost 3 worlds due to either the file getting corrupted, me flubbing something up and losing the file, or some other thing that resulted in the loss of my world. And every time I started a new world, I found that working my way up the tech tree became less and less enjoyable and my builds became progressively more and more utilitarian to the point that my current world has very basic automation, and absolutely no buildings worth mentioning. I also have very little desire to play in my ssp world now simply because I've lost my drive to build big and awesome things.

[Vexalor]

cut

I didn't necessarily mean that Hardcore was a very good alternative to the normal gameplay. In truth, I don't play it very often, and I have my own main world as well where I spend the majority of my time and have been playing for years now. In retrospect, my statements were a bit rash, but I have just never enjoyed the fact that death in MC is frequently only a minor setback and is sometimes even helpful (exploiting health and hunger). I feel that making a death have a greater punishment could add weight to your decisions and make building up your world(s) more of an achievement.

When I play Hardcore, it usually only lasts a few hours or days, before I tire of it or die. Again, I obviously don't really think destroying what a player has built up over time is ever a good idea, it's just that dying seems to me trivial to overcome in BTW and an absolute joke in vanilla.

I think what Mud was originally bringing up here was that Hardcore is fun as a little side game from ordinary gameplay for a brief roguelike experience, but what I'm talking about here is why that side game is not entirely obsolete in Minecraft/BTW by this point.

I simply feel that death should have more consequences, certainly not permanent ones (like destroying buildings, projects, or the world), and not ones simply to add pain to the game, but ones which add weight to one's in-game decisions. The reason why Hardcore even still exists is because I think some players, like me, feel this lacking level of temporary, hard-to-overcome consequence to death in the normal game. Hardcore vastly overcompensates in regard to consequences by making them permanent, and that is why it will never even come close to being my common mode of play, but its use is still there. Other players might play Hardcore for the roguelike value alone, but, to me, that just isn't the Minecraft experience I want.

[jkievlan]

I obviously don't really think destroying what a player has built up over time is ever a good idea, it's just that dying seems to me trivial to overcome in BTW and an absolute joke in vanilla.

Trivial? My God man. You must be an absolute god at BTW :)