This is currently the dragon up the freeway when it comes to Minetest animal mods - a well polished work of art! Kudos to ElCeejo.
The Mobs
The animals themselves are well polished, have more behaviorial logic than any other mod not made by ElCeejo, and are really immersive!
The models stick to a consistent style which is asthetically pleasing and the textures go right along w/ the style to boot.
Sure, the mobs are going to end up being a bit robotic while walking around with nothing to do, but these are some of the least robotic mobs I've seen so far. Herding/Flocking behaviours stand out, as well as aerial predation (i.e. Owl)- I think they add a genius touch.
Lag
When you're dealing with all these behaviours, expect a bit of extra lag in return. This particular mod is pretty laggy for any public server, even with bird flocking nerfed :-)
However, it compares nicely with other mob mods like petz or mobs_animal per mob - These mods don't have even close to the amount of features animalia has, but don't optimize their code well enough to provide a significant lag differential, whereas animalia has pretty decent optimization. The (slight bit of) extra lag is worth it!
Having a good path system does more for a new server than one might think- and this mod does it for you! Also, if you use vehicle mods, you can ride around (almost) endlessly on these roads :)
My suggestion for the mod would be to make what nodes the road is made out of configurable, currently it is hard-coded; you can do it by changing the content ID's in init.lua and/or changing the description/textures of the nodes in nodes.lua, but that's not as desirable as an easy setting!
Gliders can do all sorts of things with even minor lags. The bonus effects you can get are quite humorous (at least for me) and add a degree of irregularity.
If you get it right, you can get an upwards thrust which can make you shoot into the air (sometimes over 10 nodes!), helping you to climb stuff.
Maybe you jump off a cliff and try deploying your glider only to fall to your death because the glider didn't open in time, or it disabled itself somehow.
Or you can even deploy your glider while on the ground (which normally shouldn't work) and start jumping around while experiencing the awesome physics of the glider - eventually this won't work anymore, but it has lasted quite a while sometimes (upwards of 30 seconds!), with a moderate amount of lag!
Or maybe you rubberband(?) - falling down from a cliff slowly and surely, only to find yourself shooting into the sky and your glider suddenly disabled!
In general though, >80% of the time the glider works great for me, and I live in a really heavy game :-) Most users of this mod will likely never run into these issues. If you need to survive a fall down a cavern or just like gliding off of towers for the thrill, this mod is for you! Recommended.
This makes messaging offline players pretty simple, without all the extra bloat of a mail mod. If the bloat isn't a problem I would reccomend a mail mod and not this mod, as it is really useful to see your old messages and keep up with conversations better and answer messages when you want to!
Although this adds a good way to message offline players, it isn't practical: You're only going to see the message once, so you need to either reply quickly or copy the message down and reply later - not convienent. Plus, getting spammed by messages when you join the game is not often a lot of fun! And if the player is going to respond to them is a whole different matter. So, this isn't even close to the perfect solution, but it will do the job for some servers.
I'm only recommending this because the description says Sure, some servers have an email/mailbox system, but for many, such systems are overly complex. That's why I made tell. - but if you can spare the space for a mail mod, I wouldn't recommend this.
Overall, a very nice mod- the boats work well, models are great, and the physics are great. I'm a big fan of this mod.
However, the boats are slow. If you want to go in a particular direction and the wind happens to be in your favor, you'll go fast- but anything else and you'll be going really slow. Turning off your sail (which you can toggle with Spacebar) will make you go a little bit faster, but still not as fast (about 2/3 as fast) as the regular boats:boat! There is really not much you can do when the wind isn't agreeing with you.
If you use this mod alongside the boats mod, you might find yourself using the boats:boat more than this one for that reason.I propose something like up-wind propulsion (which happens in irl boats) - some new physics to make this a rival to the boats:boat! People smart enough to sail their ship well should be rewarded by beating out the boats:boat guys :-) Thanks for the great mod, Termos!
If you want to explore caves how they were meant to be explored (which is not towering cobble up to get higher!), this mod takes the stage. If there's a cliff or a ledge you want to get up on, just throw your grappling hook up there and climb up! This has made spelunking a lot more fun for me, since I like to explore rather than mine a lot of the time :)
Additionally, this mod adds a few other nodes other than the ropes/hooks - The PChest is a portable inventory (which can be quite useful to store your ores on a mining trip, as well as many other applications), there's a mouth breather assembly in case you want to venture far into the ocean, and a slingshot for throwing stuff at other players/mobs!
This mod goes way beyond the title: The glass designs are great and all, but how you use the designs can make or break your experience! The glass can be partially embedded inside other nodes, meaning that you can make rounded/complex windows in many different ways. This may not seem like a lot, but it adds a lot of detail and beauty to any building!
The last example is my own design which has a window in 0 nodes! The trick is that the window node is hidden in one of the adjacent 'nodes' - this is with no changes to the mod, so you can do it too :)
Other schematic editors are just not as simple as this mod! I have used this for all of my schematics for more than 3 years now, and can say that I have never run into any problems.
I agree with Hugues, that a function to quickly change nodes within the region would be useful, especially for turning air nodes into void nodes. One can also use Worldedit to accomplish this- it hardly adds any new complication, and is quick & easy to use.
No worries- looking forward to mod progress :) Thanks for your opinion: I personally see something of a loophole in allowing all forks because of changes, but hey, nobody's abused it so far. Hoping that day is far away or never to come.
On the topic, I felt inspired to upload my fork of 3dforniture (a small, ancient furniture mod) to CDB, because the mod doesn't have any prescence on CDB yet. Same with the old soccer mod by kaeza, but that's All Rights Reserved. Curious to see how the process goes.
You read me wrong, then. My whole criticism here was based on the fact that this mod was too close to existing mods, I even write in the OP that this works pretty well as a standalone mod. I'm updating my original review to a +1, as we've established that there is no better alternative (well, no alternative at all) to this mod on the CDB if you're looking for a standalone.
The reason I continue, is that I am particularly curious now into how CDB manages forks and close-to-original mods. And what don't you agree with me about? What is your opinion on forked mods and CDB - I would be happy to hear you out.
The attitude isn't helping anything. From a server-admin perspective, it's not hard to cherrypick a feature out of a mod, hence why I wasn't thinking about that. I agree that having a standalone mod is useful, as long as there aren't any others (and indeed, this appears to be the only standalone void chest on CDB). After searching through CDB, I have found an awful lot of forks, some with very few modifications.
That begs the question- what if somebody severely abuses this? I know of plenty of bugs in most of the top-50 mods, some of them extremely dangerous, and if a player could simply fix these bugs, add a few cherries on the top, and publish the mod as "player's fork of x mod" on the CDB, this undermines the use of git - these forks should be merged into the master branch! (note: I'm not talking about this mod. I'm speaking generally)
The only way that a fork seems like it should be published on it's own is if:
(1 the git repo owner is gone and/or doesn't upkeep the mod, accept merge requests, etc
(2 the git repo owner does not want your groundbreaking features
... maybe something else that I can't think of.
Another problem is that it feels like you can always make a smaller version of a given mod and re-publish it: for example taking draconis, cherry-picking out the wyverns, and calling it a new mod "Wyvernis", lol. Because some people will just want the wyverns!!
Maybe the forks on CDB follow these unwritten rules, but- I'm worried, and I'm a git fanatic myself. I may have misjudged this mod because it adds no new content for server-admins, but okay, I see that it would add content for other people.
These portable powerbanks, which charge in the battery box, are truly a quality-of-life addition for any modbase containing technic: Being able to charge your tools on the go is a lot nicer than you might have thought it would be and makes for more productive mining trips.
The dinosaurs also get angry too easily, in my opinion, and winning back your dinosaur's heart can be really hard, or in some cases, I have found it impossible. Maybe this is intended(?), but it is not realistic: dinosaurs were not just killing machines.
Stuff unrelated to the mobs - The "Fossil analyzer" / "DNA Cultivator" seems quite unrealistic, creating an embryo from DNA is way more complicated than a single node. My suggestion would be to make more steps to the process (and possibly use gel electrolysis in place of the fossil analyzer?)- But I get it, it's supposed to be fairly easy to play with.
Everything about this mod is pretty awesome and I'm a big fan of it: I'm sort of being overly critical here to try to review this mod as best as I can.
The dinosaurs themselves - The mobs feel very consistent in the style as well as the textures, ElCeejo has obviously put a lot of work into making things stick to a certain design! The animations are also great, and each animal (except for water mobs and flying mobs) have a sleeping animation during night, which is really cute. Pathfinding is pretty decent, especially compared to other existing mobs mods. The amount of mobs added here, as well as the quality, make for a great experience: I look forward to new updates.
There are a few obvious problems: for example, the pteranodon model has a missing face, as well as the plesiosaurus model, which doesn't make for a good look. Things like velociraptors and smilodons can glitch right through solid nodes because of their small collisionboxes and high speed: and you're going to have some trouble building an aviary for your pteranodons too because they seem to glitch through anything with a bit of lag.
The dinosaurs can also be fairly robotic at times. Sadly, there is no good way to fix this without a lot of new pathfinding code and animations, which no other mod does except draconis (and a few animalia mobs).
For animals with big collisionboxes, enclosures can be easily made and maintained. The electric fences included with the mod will keep your dinosaur inside the enclosure, but it will also damage the dinosaur each time the collisionbox goes into the electric fence, killing dinosaurs if you aren't careful. I'd love to see a better implementation of this concept: like an electric shock which doesn't actually damage the mob, but makes it run a small distance from the fence.
Despite these issues, this is truly an underrated mod with stunning visuals and gameplay, kudos to ElCeejo. More in the comments->
If you're looking for a good skin mod without all the bloat of mods like u_skins, this is for you. A ridiculous amount of media can simply go into skin options on public servers nowadays, and this mod makes that media almost 0.
Additionally, the customization features are pretty good: to rival u_skins textures a few more options might be needed, but this mod does all it needs to: offering a fantastic alternative to bloated skin mods! The formspec is also top notch. Recommended!
The lava ingots can be used for all sorts of recipes in other mods, providing a great use for lava; as noted, stuff dug with lava tools is put in your inventory as the smelted item (digging cobble, for example, yields stone), and lava tools can light players/nodes on fire (seems a little OP, but definitely realistic :)), so the tools actually serve a purpose!
I have experimented with setups to farm lava ingots the fastest and have settled on one that uses pipeworks: 4 advanced vacuuming tube segments with max range (8) are put on the sides of an autocrafter which is configured to craft lava orbs and is sitting in a lava lake. You will only need to fill the autocrafter with maybe a few stacks of mese crystals, and then fill your inventory with random items. The trick is to have your inventory full, so the buckets drop after collecting the lava, which are then vacuumed and processed by the autocrafter. The empty buckets are then found in the output slots of the autocrafter, so you can do it over again. After you've gathered all the lava you can in that spot, you can move to a new lava lake.
This improves lag from smartshops a lot, as I was able to see first-hand on Tunnelers' Abyss, and the api just ends up being much smarter than the original. The new currency system works great, allowing you to make purchases such as buying something that costs a "10 note" for two "5 notes". Additionally, the smartshop updates with the meta from the item which will be sold to you; in the original, this was not implemented and could be used to sell you a below average item while advertising a fully-upgraded item.
Fair warning, your smartshops will mostly have 2D sprite displays now instead of the 3D model entities. This can be a painful reality, and some people were fairly upset about it, but in the long run, your client will thank you for not having to render those 3D entities.
These particular shapes seem to be best suited towards ancient western buildings, like Greek, Indian, or Egyptian buildings. If you're looking for more modern shapes, try mymillwork by Don, although it is a bit heavier.
Hunting these is a lot of fun: sadly, they have no practical use, but several mods add uses for the nyancat nodes. Miss the days when nyan cats were bundled with minetest_game :) The original nyancats didn't glow AFAIK(?), but no complaints.
My review is not criticizing your fork or functionality, it's criticizing that it is too close to existing mods. Whether this is actually a problem or not is subject to debate: I don't know what CDB people think of forks that are very close to the originals, but put under a different namespace. I'm willing to hear you out if you have any information up that alley- but if I somebody added a few extra particle effects and functionality to a popular mod - say, Draconis or i3, and republished their fork on the CDB, I don't imagine it would even get through the approval phase?
In my view, this mod does not give any extra functionality as compared to (for example) the ender chest from xdecor - I do not think of the particles (which happen to cause a considerable amount of lag, esp. in a server setting) or differing recipe as functionality - and therefore I am not reccomending it.
Simple, but very nice mod- great for decorating bakeries or birthday parties, or eat the pies as a satisfying dessert. Would reccomend brushing your teeth afterwards though, because sugar content can be up to 50%!
The models are not too high-poly, but not too low either, fitting right into most game styles. This can be used for a wide range of buildings, from vintage/medieval to modern/space styles, and the mod itself is well-polished- although I could cry a bit about the expensiveness of the recipes since I use them so much for my builds :)
The functions provided are mostly extremely useful and have practical applications in cleaning up griefed terrain, making buildings (and even 3D mazes!!), filling caves, adding a type of tree to a pre-existing biome, and much more. Unfortunately, a few crashes/bugs still exist, but this is an impressive mod with (hopefully) a bright future - Kudos to sbrl!
Other than the particle effects (which are cool!) and recipe, this is a standalone copy of xdecor's Ender Chest. A lot of the code differs, but the functionality is the same. As a standalone mod, if you aren't using xdecor, this works pretty well.
Great texture pack for those who want to relive early minetest days! The Mese texture, in my opinion, is the most classic/iconic thing from these early textures.
Sadly, the styles of this texture pack seem to conflict quite a lot. Some of the textures are slightly modified from minetest_game textures, some of them are slightly modified from PixelPerfection, and some of them are from Isabella II. In general, it feels like a mess of existing textures.
This is one of my favorite packs because of the aesthetically pleasing style and the consistency throughout the pack. It also gives a very nostalgic minetest feel, in my opinion, because of the old-style textures. Give it a try :)
This mod adds gigantic caverns and many biomes that are truly very interesting to explore and mine in. The crystal stalactites and stalagmites are my favorite thing about this mod. If you want to get to the top of any cave: it's going to take a while without fly mode :) The large caverns also prove to be awesome for mob-implementation: smaller caverns are hard to navigate for most mobs.
For smaller caverns and even more biomes, check out Hume2's mod Underground Challenge.
These machines are fairly easy to figure out, and can be used to do almost anything: build complex walls, structures, mazes, roads, or railways, by building things with a delay or offset, dig uniquely shaped tunnels underground, cool lava or melt snow automatically, and a lot more.
In general, this is one of the most intuitive machine mods that I have seen, where the user has incredible control over the machine they build.
One shortcoming is that the digtron inventory ejector is extremely laggy, and it's not clear how it can be dramatically optimized. Using pipeworks injectors for emptying the digtron inventory storages ends up being much nicer and reliable.
A medieval-themed mod with a nice selection of stuff to build with. This has been used in countless servers by now and can be used to produce beautiful buildings.
There are a few complaints: For people that are used to working with the circular saw or mymillwork, the lack of interior corners on Sokomine's roof nodes can come as a dissapointment. Additionally, the anvil has several bugs (including a crash you can get quite often), and you can get the HUD element stuck on your HUD permanently (until you relog) if you try hard enough.
This is one of the best building extensions I have seen, the shapes fit together wonderfully and are a great look on any build! This mod is also ancient and does not support a lot of mods, so I would reccomend that you add new materials with mymillwork.register(itemstring) in materials.lua.
The way unified_inventory does things makes it a joy to work with for developers, while more modern inventories like i3 are flashy, but do not support as much and are harder to work with. Registerable buttons and fairly easy configuration make this mod very flexible, and add-ons like Unified Inventory Plus make crafting a charm.
As for criticism, Unified Inventory desperately needs a better sorting system, although VanessaE's newest one is pretty good - but it needs a bit larger support. A more modern look might also help a lot. Also, UI does not come with a good skins mod out of the box, you need to install something like u_skins to get a nice selection of skins.
This is quite a difficult question to answer, because keeping the effect is tough while also adding scenery. Static ambient asteroids might be interesting, but might also come across as too boring, and one could argue that the puzzle is based on asteroids floating through space. Something similar, but maybe more likeable, would be asteroids of varying clusters could float by the puzzle every so often, going in a straight direction: these would have to be entities but would look like clusters of nodes. Somehow, this feels nice to me because the player also goes in a certain direction forever, so it would fit into the game nicely. They could even be white too, and it would certainly be an improvement. Thoughts?
Other than that, I can't think of anything right now, and I'm super busy w/ Thanksgiving :) I will definitely think more about it and get back to you.
Yeah, I was also a bit annoyed at how long it took to collect stuff, because there were spiders right on my tail! But the pillaring method (sort-of) solved that. Agreed w/ MisterE :)
Sounds like you need some real pathfinding :) I'm half joking, but it might solve both problems, and the mobs getting stuck on player's heads. Best of luck, whatever you decide on, I'm looking forward to it.
I think this game has a good concept, but to continue the concept the game must go a long way.
Some of the machines are functional, as well as the cannons (very cool), but some could use better functionality and logic (and some of them are just decorative). The game is also severely lacking documentation, it isn't at all obvious what the player is supposed to do while waiting for a pirate ship to attack, for example. You can also just dig up your whole ship if you want to and you won't suffocate or anything. It looks like an implementation for oxygen generation and player reliance on oxygen was started, along with an airlock, but unfinished. There is not a game finish or goal (other than defending your ship) either, so far.
That said, the window for the game jam was small and I'm sure this mod has far to fly! I will be happy to update my review when that does happen :) I'm also a fan of the textures, which follow the style very well.
This is currently the dragon up the freeway when it comes to Minetest animal mods - a well polished work of art! Kudos to ElCeejo.
The Mobs
The animals themselves are well polished, have more behaviorial logic than any other mod not made by ElCeejo, and are really immersive!
The models stick to a consistent style which is asthetically pleasing and the textures go right along w/ the style to boot.
Sure, the mobs are going to end up being a bit robotic while walking around with nothing to do, but these are some of the least robotic mobs I've seen so far. Herding/Flocking behaviours stand out, as well as aerial predation (i.e. Owl)- I think they add a genius touch.
Lag
When you're dealing with all these behaviours, expect a bit of extra lag in return. This particular mod is pretty laggy for any public server, even with bird flocking nerfed :-)
However, it compares nicely with other mob mods like petz or mobs_animal per mob - These mods don't have even close to the amount of features animalia has, but don't optimize their code well enough to provide a significant lag differential, whereas animalia has pretty decent optimization. The (slight bit of) extra lag is worth it!
Having a good path system does more for a new server than one might think- and this mod does it for you! Also, if you use vehicle mods, you can ride around (almost) endlessly on these roads :)
My suggestion for the mod would be to make what nodes the road is made out of configurable, currently it is hard-coded; you can do it by changing the content ID's in
init.luaand/or changing the description/textures of the nodes innodes.lua, but that's not as desirable as an easy setting!Gliders can do all sorts of things with even minor lags. The bonus effects you can get are quite humorous (at least for me) and add a degree of irregularity.
If you get it right, you can get an upwards thrust which can make you shoot into the air (sometimes over 10 nodes!), helping you to climb stuff.
Maybe you jump off a cliff and try deploying your glider only to fall to your death because the glider didn't open in time, or it disabled itself somehow.
Or you can even deploy your glider while on the ground (which normally shouldn't work) and start jumping around while experiencing the awesome physics of the glider - eventually this won't work anymore, but it has lasted quite a while sometimes (upwards of 30 seconds!), with a moderate amount of lag!
Or maybe you rubberband(?) - falling down from a cliff slowly and surely, only to find yourself shooting into the sky and your glider suddenly disabled!
In general though, >80% of the time the glider works great for me, and I live in a really heavy game :-) Most users of this mod will likely never run into these issues. If you need to survive a fall down a cavern or just like gliding off of towers for the thrill, this mod is for you! Recommended.
This makes messaging offline players pretty simple, without all the extra bloat of a mail mod. If the bloat isn't a problem I would reccomend a mail mod and not this mod, as it is really useful to see your old messages and keep up with conversations better and answer messages when you want to!
Although this adds a good way to message offline players, it isn't practical: You're only going to see the message once, so you need to either reply quickly or copy the message down and reply later - not convienent. Plus, getting spammed by messages when you join the game is not often a lot of fun! And if the player is going to respond to them is a whole different matter. So, this isn't even close to the perfect solution, but it will do the job for some servers.
I'm only recommending this because the description says
Sure, some servers have an email/mailbox system, but for many, such systems are overly complex. That's why I made tell.- but if you can spare the space for a mail mod, I wouldn't recommend this.Overall, a very nice mod- the boats work well, models are great, and the physics are great. I'm a big fan of this mod.
However, the boats are slow. If you want to go in a particular direction and the wind happens to be in your favor, you'll go fast- but anything else and you'll be going really slow. Turning off your sail (which you can toggle with Spacebar) will make you go a little bit faster, but still not as fast (about 2/3 as fast) as the regular boats:boat! There is really not much you can do when the wind isn't agreeing with you.
If you use this mod alongside the
boatsmod, you might find yourself using the boats:boat more than this one for that reason.I propose something like up-wind propulsion (which happens in irl boats) - some new physics to make this a rival to the boats:boat! People smart enough to sail their ship well should be rewarded by beating out the boats:boat guys :-) Thanks for the great mod, Termos!If you want to explore caves how they were meant to be explored (which is not towering cobble up to get higher!), this mod takes the stage. If there's a cliff or a ledge you want to get up on, just throw your grappling hook up there and climb up! This has made spelunking a lot more fun for me, since I like to explore rather than mine a lot of the time :)
Additionally, this mod adds a few other nodes other than the ropes/hooks - The PChest is a portable inventory (which can be quite useful to store your ores on a mining trip, as well as many other applications), there's a mouth breather assembly in case you want to venture far into the ocean, and a slingshot for throwing stuff at other players/mobs!
This mod goes way beyond the title: The glass designs are great and all, but how you use the designs can make or break your experience! The glass can be partially embedded inside other nodes, meaning that you can make rounded/complex windows in many different ways. This may not seem like a lot, but it adds a lot of detail and beauty to any building!
Here are a few examples:
https://imgur.com/Sa2Ybck.png
https://imgur.com/j9jaftK.png
https://imgur.com/bKTq2y4.png
The last example is my own design which has a window in 0 nodes! The trick is that the window node is hidden in one of the adjacent 'nodes' - this is with no changes to the mod, so you can do it too :)
Other schematic editors are just not as simple as this mod! I have used this for all of my schematics for more than 3 years now, and can say that I have never run into any problems.
I agree with Hugues, that a function to quickly change nodes within the region would be useful, especially for turning air nodes into void nodes. One can also use Worldedit to accomplish this- it hardly adds any new complication, and is quick & easy to use.
No worries- looking forward to mod progress :) Thanks for your opinion: I personally see something of a loophole in allowing all forks because of changes, but hey, nobody's abused it so far. Hoping that day is far away or never to come.
On the topic, I felt inspired to upload my fork of 3dforniture (a small, ancient furniture mod) to CDB, because the mod doesn't have any prescence on CDB yet. Same with the old soccer mod by kaeza, but that's All Rights Reserved. Curious to see how the process goes.
You read me wrong, then. My whole criticism here was based on the fact that this mod was too close to existing mods, I even write in the OP that this works pretty well as a standalone mod. I'm updating my original review to a +1, as we've established that there is no better alternative (well, no alternative at all) to this mod on the CDB if you're looking for a standalone.
The reason I continue, is that I am particularly curious now into how CDB manages forks and close-to-original mods. And what don't you agree with me about? What is your opinion on forked mods and CDB - I would be happy to hear you out.
The attitude isn't helping anything. From a server-admin perspective, it's not hard to cherrypick a feature out of a mod, hence why I wasn't thinking about that. I agree that having a standalone mod is useful, as long as there aren't any others (and indeed, this appears to be the only standalone void chest on CDB). After searching through CDB, I have found an awful lot of forks, some with very few modifications.
That begs the question- what if somebody severely abuses this? I know of plenty of bugs in most of the top-50 mods, some of them extremely dangerous, and if a player could simply fix these bugs, add a few cherries on the top, and publish the mod as "player's fork of x mod" on the CDB, this undermines the use of git - these forks should be merged into the master branch! (note: I'm not talking about this mod. I'm speaking generally)
The only way that a fork seems like it should be published on it's own is if:
(1 the git repo owner is gone and/or doesn't upkeep the mod, accept merge requests, etc
(2 the git repo owner does not want your groundbreaking features
... maybe something else that I can't think of.
Another problem is that it feels like you can always make a smaller version of a given mod and re-publish it: for example taking draconis, cherry-picking out the wyverns, and calling it a new mod "Wyvernis", lol. Because some people will just want the wyverns!!
Maybe the forks on CDB follow these unwritten rules, but- I'm worried, and I'm a git fanatic myself. I may have misjudged this mod because it adds no new content for server-admins, but okay, I see that it would add content for other people.
These portable powerbanks, which charge in the battery box, are truly a quality-of-life addition for any modbase containing technic: Being able to charge your tools on the go is a lot nicer than you might have thought it would be and makes for more productive mining trips.
The dinosaurs also get angry too easily, in my opinion, and winning back your dinosaur's heart can be really hard, or in some cases, I have found it impossible. Maybe this is intended(?), but it is not realistic: dinosaurs were not just killing machines.
Stuff unrelated to the mobs - The "Fossil analyzer" / "DNA Cultivator" seems quite unrealistic, creating an embryo from DNA is way more complicated than a single node. My suggestion would be to make more steps to the process (and possibly use gel electrolysis in place of the fossil analyzer?)- But I get it, it's supposed to be fairly easy to play with.
Everything about this mod is pretty awesome and I'm a big fan of it: I'm sort of being overly critical here to try to review this mod as best as I can.
The dinosaurs themselves - The mobs feel very consistent in the style as well as the textures, ElCeejo has obviously put a lot of work into making things stick to a certain design! The animations are also great, and each animal (except for water mobs and flying mobs) have a sleeping animation during night, which is really cute. Pathfinding is pretty decent, especially compared to other existing mobs mods. The amount of mobs added here, as well as the quality, make for a great experience: I look forward to new updates.
There are a few obvious problems: for example, the pteranodon model has a missing face, as well as the plesiosaurus model, which doesn't make for a good look. Things like velociraptors and smilodons can glitch right through solid nodes because of their small collisionboxes and high speed: and you're going to have some trouble building an aviary for your pteranodons too because they seem to glitch through anything with a bit of lag.
The dinosaurs can also be fairly robotic at times. Sadly, there is no good way to fix this without a lot of new pathfinding code and animations, which no other mod does except draconis (and a few animalia mobs).
For animals with big collisionboxes, enclosures can be easily made and maintained. The electric fences included with the mod will keep your dinosaur inside the enclosure, but it will also damage the dinosaur each time the collisionbox goes into the electric fence, killing dinosaurs if you aren't careful. I'd love to see a better implementation of this concept: like an electric shock which doesn't actually damage the mob, but makes it run a small distance from the fence.
Despite these issues, this is truly an underrated mod with stunning visuals and gameplay, kudos to ElCeejo. More in the comments->
If you're looking for a good skin mod without all the bloat of mods like u_skins, this is for you. A ridiculous amount of media can simply go into skin options on public servers nowadays, and this mod makes that media almost 0.
Additionally, the customization features are pretty good: to rival u_skins textures a few more options might be needed, but this mod does all it needs to: offering a fantastic alternative to bloated skin mods! The formspec is also top notch. Recommended!
Lol, to make it look like the pad was actually working? :D
The lava ingots can be used for all sorts of recipes in other mods, providing a great use for lava; as noted, stuff dug with lava tools is put in your inventory as the smelted item (digging cobble, for example, yields stone), and lava tools can light players/nodes on fire (seems a little OP, but definitely realistic :)), so the tools actually serve a purpose!
I have experimented with setups to farm lava ingots the fastest and have settled on one that uses pipeworks: 4 advanced vacuuming tube segments with max range (8) are put on the sides of an autocrafter which is configured to craft lava orbs and is sitting in a lava lake. You will only need to fill the autocrafter with maybe a few stacks of mese crystals, and then fill your inventory with random items. The trick is to have your inventory full, so the buckets drop after collecting the lava, which are then vacuumed and processed by the autocrafter. The empty buckets are then found in the output slots of the autocrafter, so you can do it over again. After you've gathered all the lava you can in that spot, you can move to a new lava lake.
This improves lag from smartshops a lot, as I was able to see first-hand on Tunnelers' Abyss, and the api just ends up being much smarter than the original. The new currency system works great, allowing you to make purchases such as buying something that costs a "10 note" for two "5 notes". Additionally, the smartshop updates with the meta from the item which will be sold to you; in the original, this was not implemented and could be used to sell you a below average item while advertising a fully-upgraded item.
Fair warning, your smartshops will mostly have 2D sprite displays now instead of the 3D model entities. This can be a painful reality, and some people were fairly upset about it, but in the long run, your client will thank you for not having to render those 3D entities.
These particular shapes seem to be best suited towards ancient western buildings, like Greek, Indian, or Egyptian buildings. If you're looking for more modern shapes, try mymillwork by Don, although it is a bit heavier.
Hunting these is a lot of fun: sadly, they have no practical use, but several mods add uses for the nyancat nodes. Miss the days when nyan cats were bundled with minetest_game :) The original nyancats didn't glow AFAIK(?), but no complaints.
The background image is mine, and I did not specify a license!! /jk, good to see the screenshot getting some love. https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4589&p=361844#p361844
My review is not criticizing your fork or functionality, it's criticizing that it is too close to existing mods. Whether this is actually a problem or not is subject to debate: I don't know what CDB people think of forks that are very close to the originals, but put under a different namespace. I'm willing to hear you out if you have any information up that alley- but if I somebody added a few extra particle effects and functionality to a popular mod - say, Draconis or i3, and republished their fork on the CDB, I don't imagine it would even get through the approval phase?
In my view, this mod does not give any extra functionality as compared to (for example) the ender chest from xdecor - I do not think of the particles (which happen to cause a considerable amount of lag, esp. in a server setting) or differing recipe as functionality - and therefore I am not reccomending it.
Simple, but very nice mod- great for decorating bakeries or birthday parties, or eat the pies as a satisfying dessert. Would reccomend brushing your teeth afterwards though, because sugar content can be up to 50%!
The models are not too high-poly, but not too low either, fitting right into most game styles. This can be used for a wide range of buildings, from vintage/medieval to modern/space styles, and the mod itself is well-polished- although I could cry a bit about the expensiveness of the recipes since I use them so much for my builds :)
The functions provided are mostly extremely useful and have practical applications in cleaning up griefed terrain, making buildings (and even 3D mazes!!), filling caves, adding a type of tree to a pre-existing biome, and much more. Unfortunately, a few crashes/bugs still exist, but this is an impressive mod with (hopefully) a bright future - Kudos to sbrl!
Other than the particle effects (which are cool!) and recipe, this is a standalone copy of xdecor's Ender Chest. A lot of the code differs, but the functionality is the same. As a standalone mod, if you aren't using xdecor, this works pretty well.
Currently, on 11 textures are included. The textures are also in a highly conflicting style, sadly. This is not a usable pack yet. :(
Great texture pack for those who want to relive early minetest days! The Mese texture, in my opinion, is the most classic/iconic thing from these early textures.
Sadly, the styles of this texture pack seem to conflict quite a lot. Some of the textures are slightly modified from minetest_game textures, some of them are slightly modified from PixelPerfection, and some of them are from Isabella II. In general, it feels like a mess of existing textures.
This is one of my favorite packs because of the aesthetically pleasing style and the consistency throughout the pack. It also gives a very nostalgic minetest feel, in my opinion, because of the old-style textures. Give it a try :)
This mod adds gigantic caverns and many biomes that are truly very interesting to explore and mine in. The crystal stalactites and stalagmites are my favorite thing about this mod. If you want to get to the top of any cave: it's going to take a while without fly mode :) The large caverns also prove to be awesome for mob-implementation: smaller caverns are hard to navigate for most mobs.
For smaller caverns and even more biomes, check out Hume2's mod Underground Challenge.
These machines are fairly easy to figure out, and can be used to do almost anything: build complex walls, structures, mazes, roads, or railways, by building things with a delay or offset, dig uniquely shaped tunnels underground, cool lava or melt snow automatically, and a lot more. In general, this is one of the most intuitive machine mods that I have seen, where the user has incredible control over the machine they build.
One shortcoming is that the digtron inventory ejector is extremely laggy, and it's not clear how it can be dramatically optimized. Using pipeworks injectors for emptying the digtron inventory storages ends up being much nicer and reliable.
A medieval-themed mod with a nice selection of stuff to build with. This has been used in countless servers by now and can be used to produce beautiful buildings.
There are a few complaints: For people that are used to working with the circular saw or mymillwork, the lack of interior corners on Sokomine's roof nodes can come as a dissapointment. Additionally, the anvil has several bugs (including a crash you can get quite often), and you can get the HUD element stuck on your HUD permanently (until you relog) if you try hard enough.
This is one of the best building extensions I have seen, the shapes fit together wonderfully and are a great look on any build! This mod is also ancient and does not support a lot of mods, so I would reccomend that you add new materials with
mymillwork.register(itemstring)inmaterials.lua.The way unified_inventory does things makes it a joy to work with for developers, while more modern inventories like i3 are flashy, but do not support as much and are harder to work with. Registerable buttons and fairly easy configuration make this mod very flexible, and add-ons like Unified Inventory Plus make crafting a charm.
As for criticism, Unified Inventory desperately needs a better sorting system, although VanessaE's newest one is pretty good - but it needs a bit larger support. A more modern look might also help a lot. Also, UI does not come with a good skins mod out of the box, you need to install something like u_skins to get a nice selection of skins.
The game's finale is incredible, don't miss that if possible.
This is quite a difficult question to answer, because keeping the effect is tough while also adding scenery. Static ambient asteroids might be interesting, but might also come across as too boring, and one could argue that the puzzle is based on asteroids floating through space. Something similar, but maybe more likeable, would be asteroids of varying clusters could float by the puzzle every so often, going in a straight direction: these would have to be entities but would look like clusters of nodes. Somehow, this feels nice to me because the player also goes in a certain direction forever, so it would fit into the game nicely. They could even be white too, and it would certainly be an improvement. Thoughts?
Other than that, I can't think of anything right now, and I'm super busy w/ Thanksgiving :) I will definitely think more about it and get back to you.
Yeah, I was also a bit annoyed at how long it took to collect stuff, because there were spiders right on my tail! But the pillaring method (sort-of) solved that. Agreed w/ MisterE :)
Sounds like you need some real pathfinding :) I'm half joking, but it might solve both problems, and the mobs getting stuck on player's heads. Best of luck, whatever you decide on, I'm looking forward to it.
I think this game has a good concept, but to continue the concept the game must go a long way.
Some of the machines are functional, as well as the cannons (very cool), but some could use better functionality and logic (and some of them are just decorative). The game is also severely lacking documentation, it isn't at all obvious what the player is supposed to do while waiting for a pirate ship to attack, for example. You can also just dig up your whole ship if you want to and you won't suffocate or anything. It looks like an implementation for oxygen generation and player reliance on oxygen was started, along with an airlock, but unfinished. There is not a game finish or goal (other than defending your ship) either, so far.
That said, the window for the game jam was small and I'm sure this mod has far to fly! I will be happy to update my review when that does happen :) I'm also a fan of the textures, which follow the style very well.
Thanks for the reply, and good to hear that development will continue! Appreciate it. God bless.