Direction of Better Than Wolves and progress to date

[xXAfterBiteXx]

Hi all,

I realize this may have been asked before, but by the sheer number of changes happening to BTW recently I figured FC's goals with the mod may have changed. This is for the BTW veterans out there, as well as FC himself.

I haven't played the mod in a while now, the new changes put me off for a while but eventually I got back into playing it. I played vanilla MC from beta 1.2.1 to the 1.8 official release, whilst I started playing about with mods in beta 1.3, all the way up to whichever release the Tekkit and FTB packs were running on but when BTW caught my eye I dropped all other mods because they weren't challenging at all really. You just spent hours collecting resources to make a few blocks which then did it all for you, no exploring, no initiative required. Better Than Wolves required you to actually think rather than placing a block and letting it do all the pre-programmed actions it was supposed to do.

I remember when FC was explaining how he implemented the filters for hoppers, whilst SpaceToad and all the other mainsteam technical packs out there were using a ghost item system where the objects clicked with an item and it'll then filter out that specific item, FC manually programmed the hopper filters to filter items based on their supposed physical properties. For example, leather will fall through slats whilst cobblestone won't, just as sand will go through a mesh whilst leather won't. FC put a lot of effort into very small features which are commonly overlooked and I think that's what pulled me into BTW. Everything required a different perspective to figure out, auto farms didn't use a machine which automatically moves around and harvests the blocks, you had to manually design something using water flows, hoppers, gearboxes, axles, waterwheels, block dispensers (well, just look at Battosay52's Phoenix world!) everything was more of a challenge, mentally, not from luck or how fast you could swing your axe at a mob.

I was transfixed with the old Better Than Wolves, the one where you had to think to advance, not to survive. I personally think BTW is turning into more of a survival game then the cognitive challenge I loved which is why it's taken me over a year to finally settle down and start playing again. I understand FC has a select way he likes to play a game, like everyone. When I play splinter cell, I go in stealthy whilst my friend goes in with a light machine gun... Everyone has their own play style and I think what annoyed me was it felt like all these new hardcore modes were being forced upon us. Like the first time I found hardcore spawn... I rage quit. Didn't play for weeks XD Every release we see new hardcore modes implemented, it's both a good and a bad thing. Whilst it's fun to play with them, having to start again for the 4th time because of a savage wolf is VERY frustrating, especially when you barely have any free time to play the game! It just feels like you're never making any progress... I work full time in engineering so I don't get much time at all to play games nowadays and it's just off putting to have all your progress wiped repeatedly.

Personally, I'd like to have the hardcore modes set as optional for us to be able to play our own way... Hardcore buckets are now forced which means I've shut down minecraft for a while... Until I can accept the change enough to make a very awkwardly placed hemp farm so I can start work on the tech tree.

Now, the main reason for this post is just to ask:
Where exactly is Better Than Wolves going? What's the goal of the mod now? Is it to create the most complicated, automated farms out there, or is it more focused on becoming a survival game where you have to create a very well lit fortress with vast quantities of automated farms just to feed your pets so they don't savage you and you aren't driven insane from being afraid of the dark?
Is opinions of the players taken into consideration when implementing features or is it just FC's decision? (not being sarcastic, I'm just out of FC's development loop since I stopped playing).
Is there any chance of the HC modes being enabled or disabled though a GUI ingame in the future?
Would we be able to craft some kind of book which automatically stores crafting recipes when an item is crafted for the first time since having the book on your person? (rather than having to refer back to the wiki every 2 minutes after forgetting the recipe for the 5th time looking through chests for the different resources haha. If not, no worries. I'll just stick to the wiki)
It might just be me, but I always find the struggle between harvesting wood and food is very difficult with the new HC mode making wood drop a plank or two when mined with your fist. I only seem to have enough time to do one, not another. Whats the best way to start out on a new world? It takes me ages to get properly started on a world.

Thanks for all your work on a very enjoyable mod FC (when I'm not being hoofed to death by a cow, mauled by my pet wolf, starving to death in a mineshaft, unable to climb out, being driven insane by being in a mineshaft with no light and so on and so forth... This mod does seem to be full of death haha) It's provided me with hours upon hours of entertainment and frustration and will no doubt be providing more in the next few months or years to come.

Cheers,

- Will

(p.s, sorry this post is so drawn out...)

[Mesh]

Well, I don't want to speak for FC but I will answer a few of your questions based on what I've been able to gather over the last few years of playing the mod.

• First of all, nothing will ever be made optional in the mod. Ever. It has been designed as a fully integrated cohesive experience and trying to design for multiple settings would effectively ruin it.
• The mod is a few releases away from being finished so technically the direction is largely complete, FC is just working on the endgame parts of the mod, wrapping up and fixing the few bugs that may be left.
• From what I can gather, since the mod is nearly finished, player opinions, or rather suggestions for changes to the mod from players are largely unwelcome. FC certainly welcomes positive feedback and stories of people's specific experiences with the mod, but as far as suggestions go... I wouldn't :P
• No GUI system to enable or disable HC modes will be added (see above)
• For your problems remembering recipes, Craftguide mod fixes this. It's a fantastic mod, highly recommended. Google it :)
• From your problems surviving, it sounds like you just need to get into the mindset of the challenge aspect of the mod. This isn't vanilla, especially with the HC modes, the quicker you let go of vanilla and play this like a standalone game the better off you'll be. I recommend watching a tutorial video. I'm sure someone will have done one on YouTube for the first few days in BTW. Icynewyear probably has something like that.

Anyway, hope I helped clear a few things up

[icynewyear]

Ok. I''m gonna take a crack at the parts of this I think I can answer :)

Is there any chance of the HC modes being enabled or disabled though a GUI ingame in the future?

No.

Would we be able to craft some kind of book which automatically stores crafting recipes when an item is crafted for the first time since having the book on your person? (rather than having to refer back to the wiki every 2 minutes after forgetting the recipe for the 5th time looking through chests for the different resources haha. If not, no worries. I'll just stick to the wiki)

Check out Craftguide. I believe its still compatible. That should help a lot.

It might just be me, but I always find the struggle between harvesting wood and food is very difficult with the new HC mode making wood drop a plank or two when mined with your fist. I only seem to have enough time to do one, not another. Whats the best way to start out on a new world? It takes me ages to get properly started on a world.

I would check out the youtubers out there. Theres several that have a good system down. For a bit o self promotion I'm uploading a day one guide as I type. It'll be out there in 15 minutes or so.

[FlowerChild]

Just to add to what was said above in response (which is all correct), I just want to mention that the survival elements are not just about survival itself, but also about providing motivation to build and a context in which to do so.

It provides the "why?" as to why anyone would ever want to automate a system or build something like an elaborate road or minecart network.

I think it's also useful to not view a hardcore spawn as "starting over", as you put it, as that's really not what's happening. With each death you're slowly building out your world and making each future death easier to recover from, assuming you're planning in advance and taking the time to do stuff like setup landmarks and leaving basic supplies in different locations for future use.

Having said that though, I do think the mod requires a significant time investment to really appreciate, and that is entirely by design. If you don't have a lot of time at your disposal than this may not be the right mod for you.

[Gilberreke]

Having said that though, I do think the mod requires a significant time investment to really appreciate, and that is entirely by design. If you don't have a lot of time at your disposal than this may not be the right mod for you.

This is important to some degree. I've found the last year or so that I don't enjoy BTW anymore, unless I have the time to invest. The times when I try to play it on a schedule of 2 hours a week, I just get stuck in the necessary tedium of the mod, while the times when I can invest in 5 hour play sessions, spread a few days apart, I'm having the time of my life. I assume this is something that will be similar for a lot of people, but the metrics may vary. I know of a bunch of people that play 2 or 3 hour play sessions about twice a week and it works fine for them.

[FlowerChild]

Yup, BTW certainly doesn't constantly send small electrical shocks to your pleasure centers so that you feel like you're constantly having fun. It's all about the build-up and sense of accomplishment that you get through long term play.

Nothing against having electrodes inserted in your brain every now and again, but it does get old after awhile in mainstream gaming.

[agentwiggles]

I think about BTW frequently, often independently of playing, as kind of a fun mental exercise and also as a way of sharpening my eye for good game design. The design lends itself to deep analysis, as even seemingly discrete features are tied into all the various systems and subsystems of the mod.

The early game survival phase is one of my favorite parts of the mod as it stands today, and this is coming from someone who started playing the mod when beds still reset the spawn, and someone who cringed at every spike in difficulty since. There have been so many times where I though "FC has gone too far, it's one thing that I can't have a bed, now I spawn anywhere? Now food matters, and is hard to find? Now I need to find 9 blocks of iron for every ingot?"

But every time, I gave it a chance, and every time, I was surprised and impressed by the depth of the resulting gameplay.

I've said this from day one - BTW is the game I thought Minecraft would become. It just expands all the things that made Minecraft great to begin with. The vMC of today is hugely different from the one that I started playing 5 years ago. There was a time when BTW wouldn't have seemed so controversial with its difficulty, because the magic that makes Minecraft so good is that you have to work for what you get. Something about that added dimension makes the game addictive, it makes you want to spend time digging tunnels for the stone to build your castle, it makes you want to take on bigger and bigger projects, it makes you want to conquer the world, to extend the control that you have over it.

The problem is that in vMC, you're given too much control to begin with. This is why creative is no fun. Now you're just playing with legos. And you have infinite amounts of them. Shit, even with legos there are rare pieces, and a limited number of them. In creative, you can build a giant castle out of diamond blocks. Or dirt. It really doesn't matter, creative makes materials a non issue. Obviously, survival isn't quite as bad, as much as we bitch on this forum about the direction of vMC, there's still a very strong game under all the fluff and bullshit, it's just that the people Notch put in charge, and maybe even Notch himself, didn't know what direction to take the game in. FC's changes poke down into the roots of vMC, changing the way entire systems work, even the way the world and its' inhabitants behave. Most of the recent vMC changes are superficial, they just sit on top of the base Minecraft, you can choose to ignore entire features and it makes no difference. FC makes the whole thing cohesive.

This is what it's all about. To take that raw potential, and that disjointed, stilted gameplay, and redirect it as necessary to make the whole game work together as a whole. There is almost nothing in Minecraft or BTW that is worthless. There is a reason for everything you could possibly do. Why keep a farm when animals respawn and food is plentiful and hardly matters? Why bother building a wall, or lighting up your base when dying sends you back to your bed in your base? Why mark the landscape with roads, and bridges, and signs and arrows and watchtowers - when dying sends you back to your base? Why build a railroad system when everything you care about is in walking distance?

If you're not sure about why something is the way it is in BTW, take some time to try to think about the way that change is different from vMC and try to understand why the game is more fun, and building and surviving in the world is more rewarding with that change in place. This is what FC means when he says the changes provide motivation to build. Building is the core of Minecraft. If you're not building, you're playing the game wrong, and even in vMC your ability to modify the world is the central feature of the game. BTW gives you reasons to build. It makes you modify the world and rewards you for doing so. The survival phase is your first lesson in how important that concept has become.

The Survival phase of BTW (and related concepts like Hardcore Darkness and Hardcore Hunger, and Hardcore Spawn) are good examples to talk about because they represent a big hike in difficulty and a major shift in direction from vMC, not to mention that they're the player's introduction to life in BTW. The survival phase is where you get your first foothold in the world, it lets you get to the point where you can start to explore the world and the tech tree. It is punishingly difficult and you will be forced to master the basics, but apart from being fun gameplay, that brutal difficulty is there to remind you constantly to press your advantage (your ability to modify the world, another major theme of BTW), and the game keeps you rewarded with steadily nicer toys and abilities to remind you that YOU can make the game easier for yourself by establishing good habits and by building and building and building some more.

Everything you build is a permanent advantage in your world that will not go anywhere. Again, modifying the world is important - and so is the fact that your modifications are persistent. Every time you die, and spawn somewhere else, you build another little base, lay a couple more meters of road, make markers that lead to that base, or to ones nearby, and, eventually, you get to the point that you have landmarks, little bases you can hole up in for a night, roads that take you to important places, all over your world. And that is the fucking coolest thing you can do in Minecraft. Nothing feels more real than a world that is covered in functional buildings that you created. FC used to talk a lot about "world reset syndrome" where players would spin up new worlds really often because they were getting bored with theirs. In BTW, your world is a treasure, it's got real history and you truly feel like the master of the world as you conquer it and make it look cool. Eventually, all this stuff does add up and you will get out of the Survival phase - it just gets to the point where you know your way around a bit, and can find your way back to certain bases by your landmarks and stuff. But I think this part of the game really drills in some of the main themes of the game - your ability to permanently change the world, and real life examples of the dangers your up against - and gives you a taste of how powerful you can become.

I could rant on and on about this, and probably will again in the future, but I'll finish with this for now:

What is BTW? In short, it's everything you like about Minecraft, but better. It ties together the gameplay and adds much needed challenge. It extends Minecraft's good ideas, and prunes or fixes the bad ones, and adds a consistent, deeply layered design vision, creating structure while still preserving the freedom that makes Minecraft great. You will work hard for your rewards, you will invest tons of time, you will spend a month on a world before you get to steel. You will fall into lava, explode, be torn to bits by zombies, catch fire, be electrocuted, drowned by squid, and starve to death in a pitch black hole. But none of that will matter, because you can modify the world around you, and you're smart, and can use your advantage wisely. And eventually, you will travel to different dimensions, and slay monsters, make unbelievably powerful magic weapons and tools, and build castles and towers, aqueducts and roads, and an array of machines that produce food and raw materials for you to use to shape the world in your image (with some of the most flexible and fun aesthetic features in any of the mods I've ever seen). BTW makes every different part of Minecraft fun, challenging, and cohesive. There's awesome gameplay to be had at every level. Shit, I didn't even get into the middle and late phases of the game and I just wrote a goddamned novel about the mod. It's just the natural extension of the concept in my mind, and the quality of the whole thing has me really excited for RTH.

[Rawny]

For me, the best, short, description of BTW is... what I use as a signature. (Pasting it in case I change it one day). I could explain why I find its a great description but it's all right there bellow.

<"Quick and Easy" is incompatible with Better than Wolves. Try using the patch, "Sense of Accomplishment".>

[chaoticneutral]

Since I was ninja'd by pretty much everyone, FC included, I'll just comment about some things.

I personally think BTW is turning into more of a survival game then the cognitive challenge [...]

But the survival game isn't replacing the cognitive challenges - it's adding more and justifying the ones in place.

Just check gearboxes for an example - they used to be really cheap, so you could just spam them everywhere. Now, scratching your head and trying to connect builds in an efficient way to reduce gearbox usage is justified by the fact they're as precious as if they were made of gold.

Or check the steel requirements for things as block dispensers and such - a BD is really convenient, but being forced to automate things without it is a challenge by itself.

Whilst it's fun to play with them, having to start again for the 4th time because of a savage wolf is VERY frustrating, especially when you barely have any free time to play the game! It just feels like you're never making any progress...

Play smart and you will progress, even if you die a lot. All those small temporary bases will continue in the world after you died - use them to your advantage. All the roads you built will eventually help you find your way back home. Let some food in the chest in those temp-bases and it'll save you another life.

[EtherealWrath]

I feel the survival phase is a cognitive challenge in its own right.
Albeit its a very different challenge to the late game building; but pulling a last ditch shelter out of your arse with almost no material and designing it to keep you safe takes a fair bit of skill.
Likewise when it comes to defending yourself, taking initiative and thinking laterally to outsmart an opponent is often a lot safer than running in and bludgeoning it with an axe.

If you can fight smart, then you might find a free suit of armour walking around; rather than a ride into the outback.