Primitive crafting and progression

Now with the new 0.9 beta update out, I think its time to re-visit this topic since the changes in this update show we're heading in the right direction. I just would like to see a few changes. I ran some of this by Red but I want to also put this here incase anyone has some ideas to add on.

First, I love the primitive furnace. It's small and smelts just enough to get started and has a significant fuel inefficiency to add incentive to upgrade it asap! Also. we are now starting out with a stone axe. This is good. I also presume that ground scatter (sticks, stones, and bones) is still coming so we should eventually start barehanded and craft our first stone axe. Also, still no tool wear but I'd imagine that will now be coming soon. However, there's some significant gaps still in the progression. Here's my thoughts:

• Stone axe should have rapid wear time unlike Minecraft (which has little incentive to upgrade from stone pickaxes except for mining special blocks like redstone and diamon).
• Mining stone and ore with a stone axe should require more hits. It's basically as effective as the old iron pickaxe.
• Tool ccomponents were removed from the anvil temporarily as new component models are pending. Red mentioned some complaints about crafting being confusing due to the anvil being required (probably because its only used for repairs in Minecraft). Well, with the components gone, crafting an anvil no longer has incentive. You can now smelt a small batch of iron in the primitive smelter, craft a workbench, and immediately progress from stone to iron tools. For me, gathering my first batch of 24 iron was a significant milestone. Starting out with crappy stone and wood tools should make more incentive to make that anvil and upgrade to iron tools ASAP!
• The small and large furnaces should require iron parts. They're already modeled with iron doors on side. The fuel efficiency of these furnaces should be something you work towards achieving and adds further incentive to craft the anvil.
• The mithril ingredient for steel tools is probably temporary until a steel crafting method is added. In real life, steel is made by smelting iron and coal together. Given how deep mithril is, I feel like that's unreasonable of a requirement to make steel when it could easily be made with stuff found on the surface.
• Mithril for repeater bullet tips sounds cool. It's supposed to be a very hard substance in fantasy worlds so it should definately make a great addition to projectile weapons. It's hard and likely to easily pierce armor.
• add copper tipped bullets as well. They're softer but likely cheaper to make since we don't use much copper at present.
• We still need potassium nitrate added as well as bringing the sulfur closer to the surface. This will make gunpowder crafting feasible.
• Guns are too easy to aquire and should require a tier2 workstation (what I think of as a fabricator).
• Bullets (the ones made of iron anyways) are too easy to craft. They should require iron, gunpowder, and paper. This adds incentive to craft additioanl workstations such as the paper press and hopefully a mortar+pestle someday for making the gunpowder.
• I noticed that "arrows" require a rod to craft. This makes sense for crossbow ammo. Infact, the arrow should probably be re-named to "bolt" to distinguish it from regular arrows (made of wood and stone, and hopefully feathers someday) which is used on a normal bow

Well that's my thoughts on progression. Hopefully when steel crafting is made, the steel tools can be moved back to the workbench from the tier 2. Personally I see the tier 2 as more of a fabricator. You don't need a fabricator to make a steel pickaxe, just a steel making process. However, the new mining hammer fits perfectly into something you can craft on a fabricator.

I also want to say that the iron pickaxe, then steel pickaxe, then mining hammer seem to be set correct as far as mining efficiency goes. And the difference is a huge incentive to upgrade. I think the stone tools need to be adjusted a bit

Quote from littlecats

I like a lot of your ideas. I haven't been able to make steal tools or the drill in my game so I can't comment on that.

Steel tools are currently crafted on the tier 2 workbench. I realize a lot of this is brand new so recipes are subjec to change so I'm gonna wait further to see what @red51 does.

Quote from littlecats

I would like all ores and the coal to only be found underground, not on the mountain sides. I have more fun in the game when I can't find a map, tools, or a weapon in a chest. (When I do find any of those items, I feel like I cheated and start a new game.) I like finding records, ores, and pelts in the chests. I don't like finding caves under your mine, it feels like cheating to get lower without having to dig.

You can disable caves in the world generator on creating a new world. But yes, I agree that the ores need to be distributed better. Minecraft seems to have everything but coal hidden from mountain tops. Most of it should be underground in cave walls with harder to find stuff by purely digging. Here's an idea... things like coal, iron, and sulfur and potasium nitrate (both I hope will be implemented someday so we can craft gunpowder) can be found in cave walls. Other ore nodes are located between cave systems so you have to spend some time digging for it.

I'm not sure I agree with it feeling like cheating when you mine into a cave systems while digging. We still don't have tools that wear out. When that comes, I'm sure it wont be so bad afterall. I like the idea that the new stone axe is so slow to mine. That's gonna force us to use more iron if we want to get serious about mining. I don't like how in Minecraft the stone pickaxes is not that slow and weak to be a nuisance to use. In minecraft I use stone mostly and only keep an iron pickaxe for mining special blocks.

Quote from littlecats

The wild boars, bears, and tigers are close by, making it a
challenge to get food and cut down trees, (ETA, without a weapon).

We just got our first stone tool. Some other stone tools and weapons should be implemented. When more dangers get added to the game, this is probably going to become more of a necessity. For now, avoidance of agressive wildlife works pretty well (especially when we don't yet run out of stamina.. still pending implementation). Personally I like the stone sword from Conan Exiles:

Quote from MommaT

Actually making clothing is a very labor-intensive task that is very time consuming. We should have to wear pelts, then tanned leather (requiring more than just scraping), cloth comes much later. A red plaid shirt needs dyes as well!

I'm sure dyes will come and will be a determining factor in whether or not we can craft fancy clothes. We could probably use all those cherries to make dye. Not sure how dye crafting works in real life but it definitely should be a thing in-game. I do like how time consuming clothing crafting is now. It's a step in the right direction and certainly made hemp and cotton farming very important overnight. I now have more cotton planted than food. It's gonna get better once clothing wears our from fighting or perhaps just normal use (same as how food needs to spoil). More survival stuff is coming. Fires will someday be required to survive the cold of night.

I just thought of something that might address the primitive clothing issue. Eventually we are going to have scattered items on the ground (stick and stones and maybe even bones). Perhaps we can the current stone axe an the proposed stone sword like above, and a bone shiv (like in 7D2D). With those items, we can begin hunting. Here's the critical change: move the tanning rack off the workbench and make it one of the things we can craft on our person. Then we can make leather and cut the leather into strips to use as primitive bandages! At present it makes no sense to go through all the steps of crafting a workbench and a loom and a spinning wheel just to make bandages.

Now regarding the tanning process, yes. The process is far more compllicated than it currently is. I'm gonna do a bit of research on this but at first glance I'm seeing there's a pretty common technique of mixing the brain of the animal with hot water (there's supposedly just enough brain of any animal to tan its own hide) to make some kind of amino-acid rich liquid that makes removing the fur very easy.. Gross. But hey, in real life, all body parts are used.

Apparently eggs can be a substitute for brains. I really look forward to collecting eggs from chickens.
Red should still add brains in just for creepy halloween dungeon stuff. heh... maybe a Dr. Frankenstein lab could be a rare dungeon room find.

Quote from littlecats

I haven't been able to get past -98 depth in the game yet. My mines become death traps the deeper I go.

What I do is dig down at around a 45 degree angle and bring a sledge hammer with me. If I make the tunnel 2 or 3 blocks wide instead of one then it becomes much easier to smoothen out the tunnel with the sledgehammer. You can also use stone to fill pit holes that you get sometimes when you pick into the ground. Just keep plenty of torches on you and don't let it get too dark otherwise you risk picking into a cave and falling down. It also doesnt hurt to create rest stops every 100 blocks and make a chest and a shelter. You can probably make it to hell in a few hours. But you definately need to get down to -300 or more before you'll find mithril.