This release introduces giant glowing mushrooms that players can grow in caves. They help with bringing light to dark places (hence the codename), provide fuel, and a medium to grow more mushrooms. Those new mushrooms triggered a series of changes to mushroom farming, most notably the common mushroom will always turn to dirt the log they grow on. This effectively slow down mushroom multiplication, as mushrooms on dirt don't spread.
Farming has been simplified: mix seeds and dirt to get blocks from which the desired crop grows. Combined with the previous changes, the shovel will become your best friend.
I've been wanting more types of furnitures, and unexpectedly toilets appeared.
Compass can detect lava. It is more limited than with ores, however: only one lava block will react.
Mob's navigation code has been improved. NPCs behave better, but a few minor glitches have been introduced for hostile mobs.
I have included most of this textures in my game (Minefall) mainly in order to make it look different than the former default game. My thanks to the author for this good work.
The issue with texture packs is that they often don't cover some obscure mod you use, and the more "opinionated" it is, the more those blocks stand out (I'd love to use the Soothing one, but can't for this reason). A texture pack like Defaultpack Remastered just changes some of the default textures a little, yet it is enough to be noticeable and to "refresh" the game.
There are however a couple of choices I don't like in this pack, so I made some edits (mainly keep the default ones), but YMMV.
The codename was chosen as an antiphrasis as the main changes for this release is about looks.
Particle effects for wands
New textures
New HUD crosshair which turns red when the player is being target by a mob
Other major changes are:
adjustements to the stun mechanics (against mobs)
shooting mobs are more accurate
abyss dungeon blocks lose their "mimick" ability, but are now directly diggable, resist blasts and have the same property as tree blocks (dig from top block only).
See also the /news command for other changes.
There's also various fixes, in particular the blast wand's explosion radius which was mistakingly overbuffed in the previous release (if you got killed because of that, sorry about that). Also various undisclosed minor changes (no spoilers).
This release is codenamed "Show no Mercy" because of its focus on combat:
Hostile mobs switch between "fight" and "flee" depending on their health and a bit of randomness.
When dying with 100 m of your home beacon, you won't lose RP and keep your inventory no matter your level. The rationale is to make the player's home safer and to allow consented PvP.
Eating now refills your HP bar first, and then the mana bar (previously it was the opposite)
The invisibility wand becomes the "greater mese wand".
The orange wasp now has its own attack.
New: abyss spider.
The shadow from the Shadow focus is now spawned in front of the player.
Flying mobs will now fall down as long as they are stunned.
The melding has been reworked, because it is not much of a threat as long as it is taken care of early; but when it isn't, it was unstoppable.
The melding won't expend higher that 50 m from sea level. Mountains can block it, and player can find refuge on high ground.
The Mogall no longer spawns from Melding.
Saplings that grow next to the Melding will grow into an aberrant tree.
The air-focused wand loses its ability to remove melding. As a compensation, it now turns monsters into a "whale egg".
Other notable changes:
New recipe to "reset" a dungeon beacon to inactive. This means that players can effectively set a teleportation destination where they want.
Butterflies now spawn under low light conditions (night) and below see level (caves).
flora under unsuficient light eventually turn into a mushroom.
Players can trade a red mushroom for a random bush sapling.
New recipes that allows to convert between cotton and wheat seeds, for a red mushroom.
Airtanks will now light the water where the player is when used. The "light" focus loses this ability. This makes underwater mining more doable.
Springs erode limestone into gravel and a new spring.
Issue tracker is on Github, why would mere mortals have to make a Github account to report bugs ? People will continue to report on CDB because they already have a CDB account, or maybe if you're lucky on the forum.
They are already quite thoughtful when they make a CDB thread for that, instead of dumping their logfile into a review post like I've seen before.
Yeah. I have pushed this idea a couple of times on the forum and never had an answer, not even why they don't think it is a good idea. Sure, they don't have any obligation of justifying the decisions they make, but it'd be nice to hear about it.
Hey Nathan, don't take it as criticism, this wasn't my intention :-) I agree that one can take some liberties with reality in video games (to a certain point; making wool from cotton for instance is really questionnable).
I like cactuces, so I just wanted to give some "fun facts" about them.
Cactuces being basically water tanks, where there's often very water, makes them targets for thirsty animals. Hence the famous stings but also, and it is perhaps less known, some of them are toxic. "Don't this at home" or anywhere else unless you don't have other options.
Once again, the description is not "descriptive" enough. Please, please, CDB editors, be more picky about descriptions. One shouldn't have to go read the source to figure out what a mod does.
So here I go, after reading the source, the box marked with a K on the picture contains items that are added to the player's inventory when they dig it. So, basically a simple loot box.
An unintended update happened yesterday. If you see in the crafting guide that you can craft gold lumps from glowstone, you have up-to-date version.
Highlights:
World-breaking changes. Your existing worlds will be broken by this release, you'll have to start a new one. I know, I know, I threw away a couple of worlds with hundreds of hours in them. But compatibility would have held back improvement. Because one of the major changes is
New biome map. More simple, more consistent. Notably, the cold "basalt" biome has morphed into the
New Basalt layer at -100 meters. Below it is the
Abyss layer at -300 meters. It is accessible by digging further down or more efficiently, "cave hopping" as I like to call it. Nether portals are therefore gone.
Improved help. I tried to remove the big wall of text and to place as much info in tooltips as possible. Also, the first player entering a new world gets help messages periodically to help him/her getting started. These messages assume they did follow the hint of using 12341234 as the seed for the world.
New "gift" feature: a specific feature granted by the game base on the character's name, and not revealed to the players. Possible gifts are: "fisher" (more fishnet durability), "ranger" (more mese wand durability) or "lift" (better upwards lift with levitation).
Reworked focus and talents. Notably, the less interesting "air" focus now is the only way to remove melding and get aberrant tree saplings.
I had to download and look at the source to learn that it restores 20HP (so full health if the max health of the player has not been extended by another mod).
(please ContentDB editors, be a bit more picky about descriptions, this is not the first time it happens).
The crafting recipe is 2x glass and 1 blueberry, which kind of weird considering that you are actually "eating" more glass , and mysteriously the blueberry that restores 2 HP in the default game becomes 10x more effective in the process.
Thanks, it's better. If you could address the last point, it would be perfect.
You can use the link button in the editor to make your links to Paladium's drawbridge and its User interface. your overall comment wil be more readable (and less scary). Fill the replacement text un the square brackets, and the actual link between the parenthesis (you'll probably have to delete what it puts there by default).
Please link to the images directly rather than giving a Google search :
The results might change over time, or depending on your Google profile. Also, this is a community in which people have stronger beliefs with regard to openness and freedom (MT is more than a free-as-in-bear MC) and the respect of their right to privacy. Google could not be very welcome here.
The URLs you give apparently unnecessary information, like the "fact" that your are on a Lenovo android tablet
Long bare URLs are plain ugly, and ContentDB supports Markdown for the cases when you really have no other choice.
You need to level up do be able to wear armor. It is written in the help tab, and it is clearly stated in the armor tab. No amount of button pushing and smileys can save you if you don't read.
Thanks for the review. I have a tendency to "tune" the game difficulty according to my own skills, so it might have drifted to the "hard" side.
A couple comments:
Minefall can be very difficult or next to impossible depending on where you spawn; that's probably why you had too many enemies to deal with at the beginning. Make sure to use a seed I recommend (at least for the first game) at world creation: 12341234. This is - perhaps not strongly enough - suggested in the first line of the Help tab.
"digging to build protection", "making a pillar to escape enemies": it is indeed unlikely to work in this game; for one thing some enemies shoot at you. You have the mobility advantage, use it. Run away to lose the enemies until you can make a weapon. That's the second piece of advice in the Help tab.
"to jump you use stamina {actually mana}, making escapes even harder". It uses mana to allow you to jump higher; it actually increases your mobility and helps with escapes.
"at least each punch could be damaging rather than missing": I indeed changed the default gameplay from something proportional to time - which is not well understood - to a hit/miss mechanic that's easier to understand and actually less detrimental for the player. I realize that the piece of advice regarding how to do it right comes in a tip, it should probably go to the in-game FAQ.
There's no knock back in this game (there's a "stun" or "snare" that only applies to weapons). Also water is not your friend, as you no longer have the mobility advantage there.
You downloaded a game to try something different; here it is. Certainly it lacks some help (there will be some improvements in the next version), but the player will have to adapt to its gameplay mechanics no matter what: be cautious, don't do things without a purpose, don't go where it looks dangerous. I don't accuse you of all those things, but that's generally the kind of mistake players that come to my test server make.
Hey erlehmann. I didn't make a mod for that, I sort of kept for myself as it is only in my game (Minefall, available on CDB). I should mention that in my game, leaves are not "solid" blocks (can't walk on them). If you combine firelike leave textures and solid leaves, players will probably report that they're crashing on "invisible" blocks somtimes.
With the extension of the view range enabled by the recent improvements and optimizations in the engine, "moiré" and other unpleasant effects that were already visible at short range before that on the red brick blocks start to appear also on other blocks at a distance, like the basic stone blocks.
Perhaps this could be solved with further GPU work (better anti-aliasing, distance-based blur?), but an alternative could be to either downscale the textures indirectly with the global texture feature. Using higher-res textures with this feature is another idea (eg 32px and 8X), in order to hide the repetitiveness that's particularly accute with the "voxel tech". But it could be a fool's errand, because the human brain is extremely good at detecting patterns.
It's because it uses "nodeboxes" to do it - the same thing that is used for stairs for instance. I'm not sure, but with the upcoming 5.7 perfomance might improve.
I like this style of leaves too. I hijack the texture layout property used for fire to achieve a similar effect, but there are some cosmetic drawbacks.
I've been tempted to suggest to the dev team a type of texture layout that would fit this use.
New Blasting Wand. Made from red Mese, shoots a missile that explodes on impact.
This wand is however not really OP. Against mobs, it is is worth the cost only when players can hit multiple mobs with the explosion, or achieve something else in the process (digging a hole, removing melding, setting cobwebs on fire).
But having a weapon that makes big explosions and sets things on fire feels weirdly good, hence the title of this release ;-)
The "diver" talent gets 2x durability on the net item.
Business cards are no longer obtainable (but still work). Instead, one can summon an NPC by feeding a grey mese shard to a beacon. The reason for this change is to speed up a bit the early game.
The mushroom spreading algorithm has been changed in order to make it more doable to start in biomes with few food.
The Anvil is now protected and clan-restricted, meaning that only players in the same clan as the owner can use it.
The texture for "aggregate" (what you get from "cooking" gravel) has been changed to a clearer, cleaner one.
Checkout your logs, if you did it something wrong, you'll see a message like "[mpd] Misformatted song entry in songs.txt:" followed with problematic line.
Mpd expects at least on each line a name (filename), duration (yes, you have to measure it youself) and a gain (volume adjustement). Only the title is optional (should be autofilled with the filename if missing).
That's probably not the problem you have, but note that Minetest can only play ".ogg" files (Vorbis format); MP3 won't play.
I can certainly go to the source, look into init.lua and see how players can make those paths, but the average user doesn't have this resource. And as crafting guides are often filled with trash^H^H^H^H lots of stuff, the item the this mod introduces can easily be overlooked.
Best would be, methinks, to insert the tool in the main screenshot.
New "Abyss" subworld. This is really a heavily customized version of the Nether mod.
New feature: melding. The melding are air-like purple blocks that appear in the world then slowly self-replicate. They are not directly lethal, but can become a serious issue if left alone for too long. For how to remove melding, see the FAQ tab.
Singleplayer (offline play) now starts with 27 candies (81HP worth of healing) in order to let players take the challenge of starting in less friendly areas.
I've added recipes for bush saplings in order to provide a semi-reliable source of sticks.
Clouds now move mainly according to the current season.
This release also tries to fix some mistakes I made with the mapgen. This won't affect the terrain that already has been generated, only new parts will benefit from it. Those who want to use this is release as a chance to start from fresh can use this seed: 123123123. You spawn in the middle of a snowy plain, but if you walk towards the sun (east), you'll find some green land.
You might be wondering which of the two Nether mods you should use. This one is more for hacking/customization.
It has the portals API that does the main part of the job, and the map/cave generator. It doesn't add much else and this is great because that's less things you have to remove in order to fit it into your game.
From this perspective, it may still add some things you don't want, and it may don't add enough stuff for straightforward use. But if you are looking for some way to use the vast space under the surface, this Nether mod is a good pick if you are used to modding.
This used to be a negative review, because of various concerns about what and how things are done. By the looks of the changelog, those issues have been fixed. I did not try the mod, though, but I cannot delete my review, so I'll give a thumb up for at least the responsiveness of the author.
This update continues to improve the game in the "help" departement. I have tried to provide in tooltips bits of useful information. Most of it can be found in the "Help" tab as well, but I know playesr are reluctant to read manuals and other big walls of text.
It also introduces hanggliders and windmills. Hanggliders cannot be crafted directly, players must place a windmill first. Then feed the windmill a string to obtain one hangglider.
Lastly, the game is now more forgiving to beginner mistakes. Beginners now "only" lose 5 RP if they die (but Singleplayer now starts with 30RP instead of 40). When the level up to regular player, they go back to the 10RP loss.
Hotfix: half of the text was missing in the Help tab.
Various "first play experience" improvements (new FAQ tab, singleplayer help rewritten, more explicit directions with regard to how to get a crafting table).
Apple's healing value nerfed to 2 HP.
Focus wand's Shadow HP buff (doubled).
Loot crates/boxes have a new texture distinct from "bones".
Hi. It may be that it is written somewhere that there should be one near the spawn indeed, but that's in the context of multiplayer, when someone has prepared a cosy spawning location.
In the context of singleplayer, that's different: you get crafting table from the loot boxes in ruins or dungeons. These loot boxes, that look like "bones" blocks, drop random things. However, the most frequent drop is the crafting table. Usually if you dig ten of them, you should get two or three (enough to also make a furnace and maybe a chest), a bunch of compass (for ore detection) and some bronze (use it in priority to make a pick, then a sword).
Digging those loot crates cost you 1 RP (you'll see warning messages), but you start with 40 of them (4 lives). As I said, digging around 10 will usually get you started, unless you are unlucky. In this case, just dig some more. It only hinder a little your progression (leveling up costs RP) - the "lives" thing I mentionned earlier doesn't result in a game over in singleplayer (it will only prevent you from digging more loot).
In the "HELP" tab of your inventory there's a section named "Starting (singleplayer)" that gives basic advice.
I would add that wheat seeds are dropped by giant bettles (biomes: aspen and not-snowy pine forests), and cotton seeds are dropped by manticores/scorpion-like things (biomes: jungle, dirt desert, savanna). Drops are random, you might have to kill a bunch of them. Like most mobs they also drop mese fragments, use the first nine ones to make a mese wand.
Also if you do use seed 12341234, you can basically ignore the whole thing a about the beacon ; just leave it alone.
A good flight model that allows to dive and rise. The mod also does not mess with the player's physics, which avoids problems with mods that change them, by using an entity instead. The drawback, though, is that players may experience "rubberbanding" sometimes, but that's an issue with the engine that might eventually get fixed.
No, I did not click the "recommended" button by mistake, this tutorial is indeed fine.
But... Are we really asking newbies to download a tutorial? Where is the tutorial for that?
Makers, let's not forget that most players don't want to make their own game. They want a good game out-of-the-box and maybe just customize it or extend it after a while.
Imagine for yourself, someone tells you that "you have Notepad and you can turn it into a half-decent IDE by installing two dozens of plugins; you can be up to speed in a week or so. If you have issues with plugins fighting each other, seek help on the forum"... Chances are that you'll say "No thanks, I'll use VSCode".
"You have MTG and then you can make your own game by downloading mods, checkout out our huge ecosystem" obviously won't fly with most newcomers. It used to be Ok when users had to install mods and "subgames" manually, but not anymore (those people are modders now). To be fair, this is thanks to the efforts of the MT team and contributors. Don't let one old apple that turned bad spoil the barrel.
This tutorial should be shipped instead of MTG. Add to it a couple of lines to tell the players what to do from there at the end (how to get an actual game), then we are good and done.
August 2024: "Fear of The Dark" release
This release introduces giant glowing mushrooms that players can grow in caves. They help with bringing light to dark places (hence the codename), provide fuel, and a medium to grow more mushrooms. Those new mushrooms triggered a series of changes to mushroom farming, most notably the common mushroom will always turn to dirt the log they grow on. This effectively slow down mushroom multiplication, as mushrooms on dirt don't spread.
Farming has been simplified: mix seeds and dirt to get blocks from which the desired crop grows. Combined with the previous changes, the shovel will become your best friend.
I've been wanting more types of furnitures, and unexpectedly toilets appeared.
Compass can detect lava. It is more limited than with ores, however: only one lava block will react.
Mob's navigation code has been improved. NPCs behave better, but a few minor glitches have been introduced for hostile mobs.
See /news for a more detailed list of changes.
I have included most of this textures in my game (Minefall) mainly in order to make it look different than the former default game. My thanks to the author for this good work.
The issue with texture packs is that they often don't cover some obscure mod you use, and the more "opinionated" it is, the more those blocks stand out (I'd love to use the Soothing one, but can't for this reason). A texture pack like Defaultpack Remastered just changes some of the default textures a little, yet it is enough to be noticeable and to "refresh" the game.
There are however a couple of choices I don't like in this pack, so I made some edits (mainly keep the default ones), but YMMV.
May 2024: "Look Into Nothing" release
The codename was chosen as an antiphrasis as the main changes for this release is about looks.
Other major changes are:
See also the /news command for other changes.
There's also various fixes, in particular the blast wand's explosion radius which was mistakingly overbuffed in the previous release (if you got killed because of that, sorry about that). Also various undisclosed minor changes (no spoilers).
March, 2024: "Show No Mercy" release.
This release is codenamed "Show no Mercy" because of its focus on combat:
The melding has been reworked, because it is not much of a threat as long as it is taken care of early; but when it isn't, it was unstoppable.
Other notable changes:
That's wishful thinking.
Issue tracker is on Github, why would mere mortals have to make a Github account to report bugs ? People will continue to report on CDB because they already have a CDB account, or maybe if you're lucky on the forum.
They are already quite thoughtful when they make a CDB thread for that, instead of dumping their logfile into a review post like I've seen before.
Yeah. I have pushed this idea a couple of times on the forum and never had an answer, not even why they don't think it is a good idea. Sure, they don't have any obligation of justifying the decisions they make, but it'd be nice to hear about it.
Hey Nathan, don't take it as criticism, this wasn't my intention :-) I agree that one can take some liberties with reality in video games (to a certain point; making wool from cotton for instance is really questionnable).
I like cactuces, so I just wanted to give some "fun facts" about them.
Cactuces being basically water tanks, where there's often very water, makes them targets for thirsty animals. Hence the famous stings but also, and it is perhaps less known, some of them are toxic. "Don't this at home" or anywhere else unless you don't have other options.
converted review into a thread
Once again, the description is not "descriptive" enough. Please, please, CDB editors, be more picky about descriptions. One shouldn't have to go read the source to figure out what a mod does.
So here I go, after reading the source, the box marked with a K on the picture contains items that are added to the player's inventory when they dig it. So, basically a simple loot box.
December 2023: "Dig Into Yourself" release.
An unintended update happened yesterday. If you see in the crafting guide that you can craft gold lumps from glowstone, you have up-to-date version.
Highlights:
World-breaking changes. Your existing worlds will be broken by this release, you'll have to start a new one. I know, I know, I threw away a couple of worlds with hundreds of hours in them. But compatibility would have held back improvement. Because one of the major changes is
New biome map. More simple, more consistent. Notably, the cold "basalt" biome has morphed into the
New Basalt layer at -100 meters. Below it is the
Abyss layer at -300 meters. It is accessible by digging further down or more efficiently, "cave hopping" as I like to call it. Nether portals are therefore gone.
Improved help. I tried to remove the big wall of text and to place as much info in tooltips as possible. Also, the first player entering a new world gets help messages periodically to help him/her getting started. These messages assume they did follow the hint of using 12341234 as the seed for the world.
New "gift" feature: a specific feature granted by the game base on the character's name, and not revealed to the players. Possible gifts are: "fisher" (more fishnet durability), "ranger" (more mese wand durability) or "lift" (better upwards lift with levitation).
Reworked focus and talents. Notably, the less interesting "air" focus now is the only way to remove melding and get aberrant tree saplings.
Various new effects.
Uses MT 5.8's mod-controlled fog for weather.
I had to download and look at the source to learn that it restores 20HP (so full health if the max health of the player has not been extended by another mod).
(please ContentDB editors, be a bit more picky about descriptions, this is not the first time it happens).
The crafting recipe is 2x glass and 1 blueberry, which kind of weird considering that you are actually "eating" more glass , and mysteriously the blueberry that restores 2 HP in the default game becomes 10x more effective in the process.
Thanks, it's better. If you could address the last point, it would be perfect. You can use the link button in the editor to make your links to Paladium's drawbridge and its User interface. your overall comment wil be more readable (and less scary). Fill the replacement text un the square brackets, and the actual link between the parenthesis (you'll probably have to delete what it puts there by default).
Please link to the images directly rather than giving a Google search :
Yes, the slots appear once you have leveled up. Then shift-left or shift-right click, or drag from/to the armor slot to equip it.
As for seeds, this refers to the field "seed" shown when one creates a world.
I am considering the idea of forcing a specific seed by default to at least smooth this issue.
You need to level up do be able to wear armor. It is written in the help tab, and it is clearly stated in the armor tab. No amount of button pushing and smileys can save you if you don't read.
Thanks for the review. I have a tendency to "tune" the game difficulty according to my own skills, so it might have drifted to the "hard" side.
A couple comments:
You downloaded a game to try something different; here it is. Certainly it lacks some help (there will be some improvements in the next version), but the player will have to adapt to its gameplay mechanics no matter what: be cautious, don't do things without a purpose, don't go where it looks dangerous. I don't accuse you of all those things, but that's generally the kind of mistake players that come to my test server make.
Out of curiousity, do you refer to the "brick" texture that shows unpleasant artifacts at a certain distance ?
Hey erlehmann. I didn't make a mod for that, I sort of kept for myself as it is only in my game (Minefall, available on CDB). I should mention that in my game, leaves are not "solid" blocks (can't walk on them). If you combine firelike leave textures and solid leaves, players will probably report that they're crashing on "invisible" blocks somtimes.
With the extension of the view range enabled by the recent improvements and optimizations in the engine, "moiré" and other unpleasant effects that were already visible at short range before that on the red brick blocks start to appear also on other blocks at a distance, like the basic stone blocks.
Perhaps this could be solved with further GPU work (better anti-aliasing, distance-based blur?), but an alternative could be to either downscale the textures indirectly with the global texture feature. Using higher-res textures with this feature is another idea (eg 32px and 8X), in order to hide the repetitiveness that's particularly accute with the "voxel tech". But it could be a fool's errand, because the human brain is extremely good at detecting patterns.
It's because it uses "nodeboxes" to do it - the same thing that is used for stairs for instance. I'm not sure, but with the upcoming 5.7 perfomance might improve.
I like this style of leaves too. I hijack the texture layout property used for fire to achieve a similar effect, but there are some cosmetic drawbacks.
I've been tempted to suggest to the dev team a type of texture layout that would fit this use.
Febuary 2023: "Psychopathy In Red" release.
Highlights:
New Blasting Wand. Made from red Mese, shoots a missile that explodes on impact. This wand is however not really OP. Against mobs, it is is worth the cost only when players can hit multiple mobs with the explosion, or achieve something else in the process (digging a hole, removing melding, setting cobwebs on fire). But having a weapon that makes big explosions and sets things on fire feels weirdly good, hence the title of this release ;-)
The "diver" talent gets 2x durability on the net item.
Business cards are no longer obtainable (but still work). Instead, one can summon an NPC by feeding a grey mese shard to a beacon. The reason for this change is to speed up a bit the early game.
The mushroom spreading algorithm has been changed in order to make it more doable to start in biomes with few food.
The Anvil is now protected and clan-restricted, meaning that only players in the same clan as the owner can use it.
The texture for "aggregate" (what you get from "cooking" gravel) has been changed to a clearer, cleaner one.
That's probably not the problem you have, but note that Minetest can only play ".ogg" files (Vorbis format); MP3 won't play.
From memory you have to add them in a text file that comes with the mod.
The "music" setting doesn't seem to belong to this mod - could have been a remain of mpd which served as a basis for it, but that's not the case.
In any case, players can adjust the volume with the /music chat command.
Adding tunes is technically possible but not user-friendly at all, cause you would need to edit the mod itself.
You should use CDB's thread feature (in the bottom right of the mod's page) to report issues.
I can certainly go to the source, look into init.lua and see how players can make those paths, but the average user doesn't have this resource. And as crafting guides are often filled with trash^H^H^H^H lots of stuff, the item the this mod introduces can easily be overlooked. Best would be, methinks, to insert the tool in the main screenshot.
January 2023: "Seasons In The Abyss" release.
Highlights:
New "Abyss" subworld. This is really a heavily customized version of the Nether mod.
New feature: melding. The melding are air-like purple blocks that appear in the world then slowly self-replicate. They are not directly lethal, but can become a serious issue if left alone for too long. For how to remove melding, see the FAQ tab.
Singleplayer (offline play) now starts with 27 candies (81HP worth of healing) in order to let players take the challenge of starting in less friendly areas.
I've added recipes for bush saplings in order to provide a semi-reliable source of sticks.
Clouds now move mainly according to the current season.
This release also tries to fix some mistakes I made with the mapgen. This won't affect the terrain that already has been generated, only new parts will benefit from it. Those who want to use this is release as a chance to start from fresh can use this seed: 123123123. You spawn in the middle of a snowy plain, but if you walk towards the sun (east), you'll find some green land.
You might be wondering which of the two Nether mods you should use. This one is more for hacking/customization.
It has the portals API that does the main part of the job, and the map/cave generator. It doesn't add much else and this is great because that's less things you have to remove in order to fit it into your game.
From this perspective, it may still add some things you don't want, and it may don't add enough stuff for straightforward use. But if you are looking for some way to use the vast space under the surface, this Nether mod is a good pick if you are used to modding.
Yes, I was watching for updates, as I didn't want to leave an outdated negative review.
This used to be a negative review, because of various concerns about what and how things are done. By the looks of the changelog, those issues have been fixed. I did not try the mod, though, but I cannot delete my review, so I'll give a thumb up for at least the responsiveness of the author.
November 2022: "Screaming From The Sky" release.
This update continues to improve the game in the "help" departement. I have tried to provide in tooltips bits of useful information. Most of it can be found in the "Help" tab as well, but I know playesr are reluctant to read manuals and other big walls of text.
It also introduces hanggliders and windmills. Hanggliders cannot be crafted directly, players must place a windmill first. Then feed the windmill a string to obtain one hangglider.
Lastly, the game is now more forgiving to beginner mistakes. Beginners now "only" lose 5 RP if they die (but Singleplayer now starts with 30RP instead of 40). When the level up to regular player, they go back to the 10RP loss.
Hotfix: half of the text was missing in the Help tab.
Various "first play experience" improvements (new FAQ tab, singleplayer help rewritten, more explicit directions with regard to how to get a crafting table).
Apple's healing value nerfed to 2 HP.
Focus wand's Shadow HP buff (doubled).
Loot crates/boxes have a new texture distinct from "bones".
Hi. It may be that it is written somewhere that there should be one near the spawn indeed, but that's in the context of multiplayer, when someone has prepared a cosy spawning location.
In the context of singleplayer, that's different: you get crafting table from the loot boxes in ruins or dungeons. These loot boxes, that look like "bones" blocks, drop random things. However, the most frequent drop is the crafting table. Usually if you dig ten of them, you should get two or three (enough to also make a furnace and maybe a chest), a bunch of compass (for ore detection) and some bronze (use it in priority to make a pick, then a sword).
Digging those loot crates cost you 1 RP (you'll see warning messages), but you start with 40 of them (4 lives). As I said, digging around 10 will usually get you started, unless you are unlucky. In this case, just dig some more. It only hinder a little your progression (leveling up costs RP) - the "lives" thing I mentionned earlier doesn't result in a game over in singleplayer (it will only prevent you from digging more loot).
In the "HELP" tab of your inventory there's a section named "Starting (singleplayer)" that gives basic advice.
I would add that wheat seeds are dropped by giant bettles (biomes: aspen and not-snowy pine forests), and cotton seeds are dropped by manticores/scorpion-like things (biomes: jungle, dirt desert, savanna). Drops are random, you might have to kill a bunch of them. Like most mobs they also drop mese fragments, use the first nine ones to make a mese wand. Also if you do use seed 12341234, you can basically ignore the whole thing a about the beacon ; just leave it alone.
A good flight model that allows to dive and rise. The mod also does not mess with the player's physics, which avoids problems with mods that change them, by using an entity instead. The drawback, though, is that players may experience "rubberbanding" sometimes, but that's an issue with the engine that might eventually get fixed.
No, I did not click the "recommended" button by mistake, this tutorial is indeed fine.
But... Are we really asking newbies to download a tutorial? Where is the tutorial for that?
Makers, let's not forget that most players don't want to make their own game. They want a good game out-of-the-box and maybe just customize it or extend it after a while.
Imagine for yourself, someone tells you that "you have Notepad and you can turn it into a half-decent IDE by installing two dozens of plugins; you can be up to speed in a week or so. If you have issues with plugins fighting each other, seek help on the forum"... Chances are that you'll say "No thanks, I'll use VSCode".
"You have MTG and then you can make your own game by downloading mods, checkout out our huge ecosystem" obviously won't fly with most newcomers. It used to be Ok when users had to install mods and "subgames" manually, but not anymore (those people are modders now). To be fair, this is thanks to the efforts of the MT team and contributors. Don't let one old apple that turned bad spoil the barrel.
This tutorial should be shipped instead of MTG. Add to it a couple of lines to tell the players what to do from there at the end (how to get an actual game), then we are good and done.