Better Than Wolves

July 23th, 2013

• Added Hardcore Archery. This makes a few changes to the way bows work. First, it requires players to have arrows in their hot-bar in order to use them, abstracting the idea of a quiver, making bows a little more inconvenient to use to balance their power, and also allowing the choice of precisely what kind of arrows to use at any given time. Arrows are used in left to right order should the player have multiple arrow types in their hot bar, and note that infinity enchanted bows do not require arrows in the hotbar (although they will use them if present) increasing the value of that enchantment. Secondly, it reduces the range of Rotted Arrows when used with a regular bow (they still always break when used with a Composite Bow), reducing their effectiveness to further encourage making your own arrows. Lastly, it reduces the output on the arrow recipes so that you only get 1 arrow instead of 4, making them a much more valuable commodity (the Broadhead recipe has had its output boosted slightly to compensate for the amount of Soulforged Steel it consumes).
• Added Hardcore Enchanting. This rebalances the vanilla enchanting table in various ways to make it a better integrated part of the BTW tech tree, and to make it feel more like a feature and less like an exploit. This feature is comprised of various changes that are listed individually below.
• Added the Redstone Latch as a new item. This device creates a small amount of physical force when a redstone signal is applied, which can then be used to trigger various devices, and is meant to bridge the gap between redstone as a pure signal and various blocks that produce physical results (such as doors), following the in-game logic of powered rails producing similar results. It is created by crafting redstone dust with a horizontal line of three gold nuggets above. This is intended to bring both a bit more consistency to the internal game logic of what redstone does, and is also intended to increase the value of gold throughout the game.
• Added Soulforged Steel Nuggets as a new item for consistency with the other metals, and because the recipes involving ingots were getting overly complex for nothing, especially when the items were being melted down in a Crucible.
• Added high efficiency recipe for Black Stone (nether quartz) Stairs, made out of three Black Stone Moulding.
• Added a slight delay in recovering your air supply upon surfacing to prevent exploits involving placing temporary blocks like torches to create air pockets.
• Added sound effect for when the player is underwater and wearing a Soulforged Steel Helm with a respiration enchantment. Yes, that's extremely special case. I couldn't resist :)
• Changed the recipes for the following blocks to use the Redstone Latch in place of redstone dust: iron door, dispenser, note block, Gear Box, and Pulley. The recipes remain unchanged otherwise.
• Changed gold ore to smelt into nuggets instead of ingots. In the end, I decided that while previously it had been my hope to maintain the value of mining gold throughout the game, that it wasn't winding up being particularly compelling anyways, and that I'd prefer to further incentivize the construction of nether mob traps in the late game given that. Additionally, gold was primarily getting abused as an early game tool substitute for iron given its relative abundance. In the early to mid game, mining gold now has value given the changes with the redstone latch, and in the late, the desire to create additional redstone devices hopefully serves to further promote nether mob trap construction.
• Changed Crafting Tables and Furnaces to drop parts instead of whole blocks when harvested (unless a silk touch enchant or Block Dispenser is used) to fit better with the concept of these being non-portable workstations in contrast to the small crafting grid the player has in their inventory. This is intended to encourage putting a bit more thought and planning into the setting up of more permanent installations for these crafting devices rather than just carrying them around and placing them wherever and whenever they're needed.
• Changed the vanilla enchantment table to not be able to apply some of the more powerful enchantments, which now may only be acquired through finding pre-enchanted tools and weapons, or through using the Infernal Enchanter (or through beacons in some cases). This applies to silk touch, fortune, sharpness, father fall, and protection. Basically enchants that have very specific (and powerful) effects (like silk touch & feather fall), or those that apply general bonuses (such as protection & sharpness) as opposed to specific ones (like blast protection or smite), have been moved higher in the tech tree to create more of a progression to enchanting overall.
• Changed the vanilla enchantment table to no longer be able to enchant bows and wood tools (the latter for consistency, implying that wood is a particularly difficult material to enchant). This is strictly the domain of the infernal enchanter now.
• Changed the vanilla enchantment table to be crafted using Black Stone (nether quartz) blocks instead of obsidian, and an Ancient Manuscript instead of a book, to bump it up slightly in the overall tech tree as well as to increase the value of quartz.
• Changed the vanilla enchantment table to only be able to apply enchantments up to level 15 instead of 30.
• Changed the number of book shelves around the vanilla enchantment table required to get the maximum level enchant (level 15) back to 30 instead of 15. In other words, it will require 2 book shelves for ever level of enchanting. Additionally, the enchantment table will only produce level 1 enchants without any bookshelves at all.
• Changed the vanilla enchanter so that the top slot will always provide a level 1 enchantment, the bottom slot will always provide an enchantment of the maximum level allowed by the shelves present, and the middle slot will provide some random value in between the two to minimize annoyance in its usage.
• Changed the Broadhead Arrow recipe to use shafts instead of Moulding. It was confusing for no good reason.
• Changed the Broadhead (arrowhead) recipe to use Soulforged Steel Nuggets instead of ingots.
• Changed the piston recipe to require a Soulforged Steel ingot instead of an iron one, and to require wood panels along the top instead of wood blocks (not just the high effeciency version anymore). This was done to better integrate it into BTW's tech tree and to better explain how it functions in-game.
• Changed creepers so that they will not drop records if deoystered. They're just too depressed to appreciate good music anymore.
• Changed trip wires to no longer be able to detect items to prevent exploits involving this behavior.
• Fixed crash when placing a Crucible (and potentially other blocks with associated tile entities) in a location recently occupied by dried cement.