Better Than Wolves Forum

Ok, so I might as well get the ball rolling and share what I've found so far.

Tree stumps are super tough to dig up. Things I've noticed so far...

• Trees in current worlds are not affected, I created a new world to experience it. I haven't checked if new trees grown in existing worlds result in Hard Stumps (because I was too eager to wait for one to grow) but I assume of course, that they will.
• The four main trees have hard stumps, I haven't tested Bloodwood.
• Digging the stump yields 6 saw dust, 1 bark, but no plank.
• Bare hands, Stone Axe and Iron Axes seem to make no difference to the time it takes to dig them up. (I didn't try any higher tier tools)
• I haven't tested explosives :D
• The textures of the stumps are different to normal logs.

That's all I have so far. Loving the change, it should make red mushroom farms even more worth it, which is always good. From a texturing standpoint, I'm excited because now it seems I'll be able to make some custom tree trunk textures!

I do like that Stump Remover gives a purpose to items that I either don't use much (red mushrooms) or drops that I have too many of from my mob trap. I think I am still missing what it adds to the game. I know many have preferred to leave stumps as markers and landmarks. This is something that I never really found helpful. This may be because I know my map very well and don't need this kind of automatic landmark. I guess the question for me is whether the purpose is more than this. Is this to make tree farming require more land area, which would encourage more overland work? FC asked me to give it some time, and I absolutely will, and it doesn't ruin the game or anything, just not feeling it yet.

Leaving the bottom block always was something I did in worlds. I did it because I liked to know where the forest where that the world generated, so I could eventually replant the trees at the exact spot where they were in the beginning of the world. Also it reminds me of how much "damage" I have done to the enviroment.
I feel like the stumps should be removable with iron or higher tier tools, the stump remover feels to me an item that could be integrated into the feature of another tool. And needing a special item to remove stumps feels just a bit unnessesary for me. Nevertheless I haven't tried the stump remover out yet, maybe it's not that bad.
Just my few cents to the topic.

Here's why I love them:

Pre-stump:

- Slow tree growth just made my tree farms slightly bigger, it never really affected them, just forces you to make a tree farm early
- Almost never bothered with bloodwood farming, unless maybe really late game for SFS production

Post-stump:

- Worlds look cooler, your invasive nature really reflects on the world now
- Early tree farms just became impossible
- I finally have a reason to mess around with red mushrooms
- It gives bloodwood a reason to be farmed earlier

So yeah, just seems like this is one of those features that pushes me to do new things all across the tech tree. I love it.

I agree with sock. It's sort of weird not being able to break a stump with a tool. I suppose it lets me get rid of a lot of creeper oysters though.

We haven't tested diamond or steel yet. I have exclusively diamond tools in my world, the problem is that I have explored waaay too much of it. I guess if I just wait for a new tree to grow at my tree farm I can test it.

It makes sense that the stump doesn't drop much. Overall I think hardcore stumping is a cool idea.

Gilberreke wrote:Here's why I love them:

Pre-stump:

- Slow tree growth just made my tree farms slightly bigger, it never really affected them, just forces you to make a tree farm early
- Almost never bothered with bloodwood farming, unless maybe really late game for SFS production

Post-stump:

- Worlds look cooler, your invasive nature really reflects on the world now
- Early tree farms just became impossible
- I finally have a reason to mess around with red mushrooms
- It gives bloodwood a reason to be farmed earlier

So yeah, just seems like this is one of those features that pushes me to do new things all across the tech tree. I love it.

I was thinking that larger tree farms was a intended effect. And if bloodwood does not have the stumps that would make it much more usefull

I can confirm that creeper explosions will break a stump. Not surprising, but fun to test!

jackatthekilns wrote:I was thinking that larger tree farms was a intended effect.

Gil touched on this above, but my reasons for implementing this were largely thematic. It provides a strong visual indication of the player's progress, and the slow "industrialization" of his surroundings.

So, that's why I experimented with it initially, and I really liked what it did to my base with time:
Later, I realized it makes both base and road construction more interesting in that having small semi-permanent obstacles everywhere tends to shape a player's construction to adapt to the terrain. Bonus. Also, instead of stationary tree farming, I find it tends to encourage you to push out into the world to collect more wood, exploring, potentially getting into trouble, changing the landscape with your presence, building small bases and infrastructure, and having mini adventures along the way. Bonus again.

Ingredients for the remover I came up with afterwards. As always, I never add features to give ingredients a use, but I'm happy to make use of elements that require on after I've already decided on a feature.

However, I did intentionally choose ingredients that would make it difficult to remove stumps in large quantities, because otherwise, it would effectively remove the feature as a base design consideration / obstacle. The creeper oysters in the recipe ensure that you generally only have enough stump remover on hand for key areas of your construction projects (like the interior of my fort above and the roads leading off from it).

Hence why there's no tool to do it easily, as that would inevitably just result in people going OCD and removing every stump they come across. Late game you can always work on a mob trap using saws to produce high numbers of oysters. If you *really* need to remove a stump earlier on, you can of course just chop at for an extended period until it's gone. But overall, stump removal is intended to be a limited resource that the player is encouraged to think about before "wasting" on areas where it isn't really needed.

All told and after extended play with it (I've been sitting on that one for awhile now and playing with it in my own world), I think it's pretty much exactly where I want it. The only thing I've been thinking about changing is maybe adding a time delay on the remover use when I get around to it, so that the stumps sit and sizzle for awhile before being removed. That's largely just a visual thing though, so it hasn't been a priority for me.

I was never enthralled by the thematic aspect of leaving stumps, its not wrong, just not me. I do however understand and appreciate the difficulties it poses to road construction, that is not something I had considered and you are right, that will have an impact on roads for sure. Based on my experience, once a mob trap is built the red mushrooms will be the bottleneck. I have oysters and rotten flesh coming out of my ears. I restarted my world and it has already had an effect on my early game.

Mesh wrote: [*]The textures of the stumps are different to normal logs.[/list]


That's all I have so far. Loving the change, it should make red mushroom farms even more worth it, which is always good. From a texturing standpoint, I'm excited because now it seems I'll be able to make some custom tree trunk textures!

While you are working on these new textures, can you look into adding sockthing's deco support? I am so glad that Yhetti has been able to update it but your texture pack is my default, I can't really do vanilla any more.

jackatthekilns wrote: While you are working on these new textures, can you look into adding sockthing's deco support?

Now that the deco mod is modular I have considered adding a few of them into my server and if so I'd create some textures for it, however I haven't decided which (if any) to add. If you really need support right now I'm sure you can merge the textures yourself from Sockthing's TP into mine.

I don't want to have the thread go off topic so if you need to discuss further just PM me.

Keep the add-on discussion in the add-on threads please. This stuff isn't related to the mod itself.

hmmm. Question: Do those little 1 Log jungle bushes spawn as stumps now?

razar51 wrote:hmmm. Question: Do those little 1 Log jungle bushes spawn as stumps now?

No, they're just plain logs. That would have made clearing jungle paths a serious pain and a half :)

FlowerChild wrote:No, they're just plain logs. That would have made clearing jungle paths a serious pain and a half :)

So, it is true. You did mellow :)

Did some quick testing with stumps:

- All axes including steel ones are not effective against stumps
- Stumps can be cleared by setting them on fire
- Stumps can be pushed/pulled by pistons
- Stumps do not fall like gravel or sand
- When pulling a stump into a block dispenser, it becomes a regular log of the same tree type (no longer a stump)
- Stumps can be cut with a saw and yield the same materials as cutting a normal log with a saw

Looks like FC definitely wants us to auto-farm trees.

razar51 wrote:- Stumps can be cleared by setting them on fire

Really? That seems too easy... Oversight?

I thought about the fire thing, but it still makes sense. flint and steel is nerfed enough that it would take a significant investment of iron. has anyone confirmed if any iron is returned from flint and steel after the changes? It would also be more difficult than clearing a jungle by fire. So I think it still works

jorgebonafe wrote:

razar51 wrote:- Stumps can be cleared by setting them on fire

Really? That seems too easy... Oversight?

Unless it's a lead-in to Hardcore Fire, where setting fire to a jungle tree will burn the entire jungle down :P

In all seriousness, it'd seem pretty unintuitive for fire not to work (whether or not it'd be realistic is a different question).

Foxy Boxes wrote:

jorgebonafe wrote:

razar51 wrote:- Stumps can be cleared by setting them on fire

Really? That seems too easy... Oversight?

Unless it's a lead-in to Hardcore Fire, where setting fire to a jungle tree will burn the entire jungle down :P

In all seriousness, it'd seem pretty unintuitive for fire not to work (whether or not it'd be realistic is a different question).

If I remember properly it was changed in vanilla a long time ago to be less powerful because of performance issues. The big fires caused a lot of block updates.

So I just started a new world to see how it plays with stumps... On my second day, as I left my hole, I saw a creeper next to a stump. And I had the unstoppable urge to get it to "help" me clear it out.

So yeah, I like the risk/reward thing this creates, do I really want to remove this stump so bad that I'll risk getting blown up...

It all worked fine. This time.

Slightly off-topic, but has anyone noticed the other new item texture in this update? I went in to get the texture filename for the stump remover and noticed a copy(?) of the arcane scroll texture labeled "fcItemAncientProphecy". Curious as to whether this has anything to do with stumps or is just a secret addition.

Had that been there already? Best ignore though, feels data mining-ish although innocent, very dirty.

DiamondArms wrote:Slightly off-topic, but has anyone noticed the other new item texture in this update? I went in to get the texture filename for the stump remover and noticed a copy(?) of the arcane scroll texture labeled "fcItemAncientProphecy". Curious as to whether this has anything to do with stumps or is just a secret addition.

It's an interesting discovery - I must say I'm stumped.