Better Than Wolves

Version 4.65

April 4th, 2013

• Added "partially abandoned" villages to the mod. These exist on the border zone between abandoned villages and normal ones, in terms of distance from spawn. This is largely an aesthetic change, and helps smooth the transition from one type to the other, but otherwise doesn't really impact the game in a way that should motivate people to start a new world or what have you.
• Added Hardcore Wood, which assigns different burn times to different wood types in the furnace. The value of the different wood types is left to the player to discover.
• Added recipe to convert clay blocks to clay balls in the crafting grid instead of having to place and break them.
• Added sounds to the furnace when it is lit for greater ambiance.
• Added weeding as part of the overall farming experience. Yeah...I'll let you figure that one out on your own ;)
• Changed (rebalanced) the relative value of wood & stone vs iron tools to make the gap in terms of effectiveness much wider. This is intended to make the upgrade to iron a much larger jump, and thus far more rewarding than it previously was. Generally, the nature of these changes are along the lines of a severe nerf to wood & stone (which also introduces further challenge into the early game), and durability increases to iron tools so that they'll last you longer once you obtain them.
• Changed the way blocks are harvested so that not using the appropriate tool on a material will always take a rather long time (similar to how it does when you break stone with your fist), regardless of whether you still get the result in the end. For example, it will take much longer to break logs or dig dirt with your hands, although you will still get the wood or dirt in the end. This greatly increases the value of axes and shovels in particular, which were both rather underused tools, as well as making things a tad more challenging in the early game, and also has a number of interesting consequences throughout play such as spider webs being extremely difficult to break and thus escape unless you have a blade. If there are any blocks that feel like they don't have an appropriate tool assigned to them, please let me know, as this was a rather major change and it's entirely possible I missed a few.
• Changed the name of firework rockets to better reflect their functionality.
• Changed axes to be effective when used on leaves and vines, which makes them a much quicker way to clear them. This also makes them a rather effective "machete" when attempting to navigate jungles. Also made them effective vs webs, operating under the assumption that it takes a blade of some form to hack through them, as well as cactus and wool. Basically, if you used to break it with your hands, and it's become a pain to do so...try using an axe ;)
• Changed the furnace to burn twice as long with the same amount of fuel, and to take twice as look to cook an item. This leaves the amount of total fuel required to cook an object unchanged (example: coal will still cook eight items), but makes the furnace a more viable emergency light source for the early game if you've yet to find any coal.
• Changed the furnace to burn fuel regardless of whether there are any items to cook in its inventory, for the same reason as above. This also makes furnace management more interesting in terms of avoiding wasting fuel, and furnaces automatically going out when they no longer have stuff to cook always felt rather meta*gamey anyways.
• Changed the Nethercoal recipe to produce 4 units instead of 2, and cut its burn time to half what it was in the furnace. This makes it much more efficient for use in crafting torches, while leaving total furnace output unchanged.
• Changed furnace burn times on various blocks and items so that they relate better to each other, and to correct exploits. This mostly affects wood in particular, given it's now the furnace fuel of choice since the changes to coal, but I've also tweaked burn times pretty much across the board so that they make a bit more sense relative to each other.
• Changed things internally so that furnace burn times set by mods will override those set by vanilla. I mention this in case add-on authors can also make use of it.
• Changed fishing to make it more time consuming for balance compared to other food sources.
• Changed melon and pumpkin stems to not drop seeds when they are harvested to prevent exploits. Seeds can only be obtained from the melons and pumpkins themselves. If you kill the plant before it produces fruit, well...tough luck :)
• Changed (reduced) the rate at which grass spreads to encourage larger pastures for your grazing animals (cows & sheep). This may also help performance on lower end systems as there is a lot of grass in the world, and it constantly makes these kinds of checks for growth, even when it's not possible.
• Changed the bucket recipe to use 7 iron nuggets in a 'U' pattern, instead of 3 iron ingots, to better balance it for the recent changes to iron.
• Changed the sound on webs to be squishier.
• Changed (tweaked) mob and animal AI a bit in ways you will likely not even notice, for a bit of subtle refinement to their behavior. I just mention it in case any odd or buggy behavior shows up as a result, in which case you should let me know.
• Removed the ability to craft wood and stone swords from the game. Note that the wood picks and shovels make for passable clubs (I've boosted the damage on the wood shovel to be the same as a pick), and the stone axe is an incrementally better weapon than the wood tools, creating a smoother progression curve to the early game, and providing a much greater reward for making iron swords, especially since you gain the ability to block with them.
• Removed the ability to craft the wood axe from the game, for the same reasons as above, and because it never made a whole lot of sense anyways.
• Removed the ability to craft wood and stone hoes from the game, which results in the player having to work their way up to the ability to farm crops in the early game. It also makes hoes and expanding your farms a more significant investment and part of the game overall, as there was never any real reason to use anything other than a stone hoe in the past. In an abstract sense, this also serves as an analogy for the player moving out of the hunter/gatherer "stone age", beginning to be able to farm crops, and being able to settle a location in a more permanent manner.
• Removed some lingering vanilla code that was causing some mobs to still stop wandering with distance from the player.
• Fixed problem with mushrooms cooking forever in the Cauldron in the presence of Dung.
• Fixed problem with books being enchantable.