Shafts and (Mill)stones

[Nelgoth]

It's been a while. I hope everyone is doing well!

I converted 2 brand new players to BTW a few weeks ago and we have been playing a lot over the past few weeks. Both of them had never played minecraft at all and they are loving everything. (FC, I really wish you could hear these guys play the game, they are constantly raving about how much fun they are having and all the features they talk about are yours) Anyway, having said that, I have heard them make a few observations from a clean slate perspective, and one that stuck with me is, why do you chop wood down to planks, but then smash them together to make sticks? I thought it a fair observation, and I did not have a good answer for them.

Also, I am having a hard time convincing them to move on to the mechanical power phase (namely, the step of grinding hemp in the millstone for a wind mill.) They do not seem to see the value of a windmill intrinsically. I feel that this is largely due to the fact that the millstone is not a requirement of day to day early game life (Smelting, mining, building, etc.) There simply isn't anything early game that you have to do with one, that makes you stop and wonder "Is there something that would keep me from having to do this manually?" Largely, the benefits of a windmill are only discovered after building one for the fuck of it. That being said, I do know this stuff takes a lot of your time and it would most likely be too extensive of an addition to warrant the investment on your part. I think we all would rather get our hands on a copy of RTH than have these types of things in BTW. I did, however, want to voice the observation in the off chance there is some tiny thing you can tweak to make this happen (as you often do.)

I really like the extended smelt/processing times. It seems like a very small thing, but has altered my early game significantly, for the better. I did have one question, and this goes back to hardcore wood, why does burning an un-chopped log burn longer than the sum of its parts?

Thank you again for all of the wonderful updates and game play!

[FlowerChild]

You pointed out a couple of things above that I've considered myself in the past. Planks to shafts first of all, is just a leftover from vanilla. I've contemplated changing the recipe to just be a single plank block in the crafting grid several times and just never got to it. Given most players come over to BTW from vanilla, it's what they already expect, so no big deal.

Incentivizing the Mill Stone early game is something I've put quite a bit of thought into, but I have yet to come up with a solution that I'm satisfied with and that didn't feel artificial. For example, I was toying with the idea of pumpkin mash for awhile as a way to improve the food value of pumpkins through using a mill stone but that's just "meh" given there's no reason you couldn't do that by hand. In the end though, the Mill Stone DOES become a requirement as it's necessary to progress any further into the tech tree, and there's plenty of reason to do so whether that be recycling your iron or grinding up wheat into flour once you hit those points. So yeah, I'd like there to be a little bit more of a push towards the Mill Stone early game, but have yet to come up with a decent way to make that happen.

Note: the above is NOT a request for suggestions :)

As for logs burning longer than the sum of their parts: they don't. You've just yet to hit the Saw level of the tech tree, and thus you are losing a lot of the wood in the process of chopping it up with an axe.

[DaveYanakov]

For the record, have you ever tried pulling shafts off of a chunk of log with your hands? It works a lot better if you pick up another chunk of log to give yourself some mechanical advantage. That is the way I have made kindling out of windfall firewood in the past (usually with a knife to wedge in and smack...) and it is the way I always saw the double plank method in minecraft