It's a cool mod that creates more life like water behaviour but sadly it comes at the cost of changing the way water works that many mods take for granted. By itself a fine mod, but if paired with other mods, watch out. Compatibility is going to be very low.
On all the servers where I've encountered it there is a problem with the armour. It gives either 99 or well over 100 damage absorption which means you are invincible. Not a good idea for survival servers (only type I play).
The tools are very fragile while being blazingly quick. (Personally I prefer the opposite)
The easiest to use protection mod I've seen yet. Just click the pencil where you are and bam that "block" is yours. With simplicity come limits of course. The pencils are fairly cheap though so what they lack in control they can make up for with quantity. I really think that it ought to be used on all servers (as a supplement to another more sophisticated prot. mod) because this one is idiot proof. Give one pencil to all start characters.
P. S. The radar mode is excellent. Quickly see where there is open land.
It makes playing easier. Well laid out and the best looking (sfinv is hideous!) of them also. I play on a few servers that fail to use this and the only reason I stick it out there is because those servers have some other very good features to compensate for their folly. It also seems to be the most up to date with the latest features as well as having great compatibility with most of the popular non-inv mods.
If I could install only one single mod... this would be it.
I keep running into very basic default recipes that this mod has hijacked for its own items. So far the coffee tables hijack the wood helmet and the hedges hijack the oil extract. It is almost as if the recipes were created by someone who has never played Luanti because these are ones that you memorize after a while. Very strange.
In case you're too young to remember the film that's where the title originates. This is a really good mod. The cars look fantastic (although not blocky but I think that bird has flown the coop ;-) and drive pretty well too. The controls will take a while to master but I'm sure my years of old MSDOS auto games will come in handy. Keyboard controls aren't ideal for a car but hey that's the way it was and is.
As a real life motor boater I must say this feels pretty accurate. The controls take a bit of time to get used to (and something that's missing is a steering wheel like in the cars to show you your direction) but after that you are flying. They are fast. They're also biogasguzzlers. ;) You might have to work hard to keep that engine fed. Interestingly they can run aground in shallow water and "sink". You'll need to use your shovel to save your vessel. Sometimes they also seem to run into "rough" water and start bucking up and down. Maybe it has something to do with flowing water. There is no reverse on the engine (unlike on real ones) but you can paddle reverse so it isn't too problematic.
Planted these on Blocky but 1 deep and when they didn't do anything I checked the code and it needs 2 water above. So all my seeds wasted because this was not documented in the readme. I'll have to gather more seeds and craft more soil (you can't dig it up) and start all over. Irritating and not fun.
Makes repair more important. Preserve those tool xp! : ) Also adds more choices to make. Keep using your level 10 steel/bronze/mese pick or start on a new level 0 diamond one? Tricky. This mod definitely adds some spice to the tools, always glad to see it in use on a server and sad when I don't.
They look good and have neat special abilities. I've used them on several servers now.
Some specific notes.
The Engraved Pick's special might require you to break habits on where you keep stuff on your hotbar. I suspect many players have established patterns of layout. Being forced to insert or shuffle them for this pick is an unfortunate annoyance. Can't be helped I realize.
The pick is fast and you may end up digging sand/gravel you didn't intend to behind the rock you targeted. Watch out. :)
The Capitator is limited to MTG trees basically (the 5 default/core types). Still a good and helpful ability. A big GOTCHA though is that it ONLY cuts the trunks and leaves the leaves to decay. Woodcutting mod is definitely better than this axe. Still you can workaround it by collecting the leaves manually first. And if you don't want the leaves then it's great! :)
The chest is nice but really expensive (more than an ender). On one server it exists alongside the ender. I have 2 of each and the nice thing is that this chest has a separate inv from the ender thus giving you 2 sets!
Love this idea. Obviously it's not going to appeal to everyone. Some people I'm sure thrive on the spawn swarm. It'll create a truly decentralized world. Can't wait to find a server using it.
It's got good realism but the stinker is the final piece needed to make honey: The extractor/centrifuge. Costs two mese crystals which might not be much on some servers but on others it is hard to come by. On those servers 2 mese crystals are not even close to being worth investing in some honey...
Dudes... honey is only food. Easier to grow wheat.
My suggestion is to change it to something reasonable like tin ingots or even just coal. Deep mining should not be a prerequisite for making honey. Or forget tin/coal, make it something like wood.
<rant on>
Centrifuge??? How did apiarists extract honey back in the year 4000 BC? Not with a piece of high tech machinery I'll tell you. The extractor might need to be totally overhauled or eliminated. Just a bad choice. I was expecting to take the filled frame and put it in my craft grid and get honey. When I learned I need a machine that costs 2 mese I was understandably irritated.
<rant off>
Problem with the default is that you're never sure if you have 10 hearts or just 9. I suppose if you play enough you see it, but I've only played a few weeks. This mod is a life saver. That 1 missing heart could be the one that kills you... ;- )
Unfortunately it does have a compatibility problem with the stamina mod. The breads from Stamina appear at the same place as the Saturation bar. Looks hideous and naturally is hard to read. My solution was to uninstall Stamina and install hbhunger and hbsprint to provide something sort of similar.
It sure helps, but I fear it helps way too much. I could spot monsters a hundred nodes away. Normally they are barely visible in the dark and often get the drop on me. Basically an easy mode.
Perhaps with some tinkering it could be improved though. A setting to choose how close a mob has to be before the bar appears might be an improvement. Best would be a setting that allows one to choose only having the bar appear after you've been attacked or have attacked a mob.
Or maybe the bars could be set to appear only when the mob is close enough to get the hover info on it. Lotsa possibilities.
I'm afraid I don't see the point of extra realism when the game has floating blocks of stone... True I sometimes smirk at being able to reach 5 metres across a chasm to mine some ore and retrieve it like magic but like I said, floating stone, so why not?
The villages look great but I found a couple of problems.
First it crashes (program shutsdown - can resume but...) when I right clicked a village bed to try sleep on it. Afterwards when I restarted my character was standing on the bed but the ceiling was so low that his head was inside a block and it was so narrow that he could not move away. Had to go creative mode to escape.
Second the village was carved brutally out of a mountain creating a giant cliff on one side. Unpleasant but plausible I guesss...
Third there was no way to buy a house apparent. Because:
Fourth there are no villagers (they are added by a mobf_trader mod but that I had to dig out of a forum thread) to buy a house from or to simply populate the village.
Fifth the chests are all unlocked and lootable which pretty much wrecked my game since I'd just managed to get bronze and suddenly there are free steel ingots in the chests. Bah.
Sixth when the mod is removed from the game it leaves behind a mess of no texture blocks (cottages was co-installed/removed).
Sadly I had to delete my world and start over thanks to this mod.
Tried this in spite of the "chest thing" and I was blown away with how amazing it is. It just suits me to a T. Neat freaks and hyper-organized types will be in 7th heaven with all the tricks this can do.
It's not perfect of course (what is???) and the biggest flaw is the need to scroll down on some of the displays like armour and waypoints (which are great, almost feel like a cheat - but then I play with F5 (debug) info on so I guess not, just saves pencil, paper and eraser use heheh). As for the chest thing... haven't played with it long enough to build a chest yet, heh. IIRC some comment mentioned there was a solution to it.
One thing that could be improved is adding the ability to look up an inventory item by clicking (shift? use key?) on it instead of having to type its name in the search field.
P.S.
First impressions are a thing. I've since realized that there are superior inv mods out there (UI+) and that the sorting thing isn't really useful once you learn to play and set up your own system to organize your inv. Waypoints turn out to be available as a separate mod anyways. The 5 armour slot limit is pretty damaging as many mods add wearable rings, etc. The extra slots aren't ever going to be used since the 32 slot chest is a given.
Yes it adds spice to life for sure. I know this mod from a server I started on (all of 2 weeks ago!) and the dreaded Land Guards that kill you in two hits. What was that. Huh why am I at spawn? On the server it only seems to include Land Guards, I've never seen any of the weaker ones.
So I installed it on a local game with other mods and I've seen the others too. At first none but I think they spawn from terrain (yes I peeked) so it takes a few days. The Land Guard forced me to build a tree house (I know their weakness from the server) but I was amazed when a spider climbed up past me as I was placing the ladders and bit me and then stood on top of the tree. It was an easy target from below even with a wood sword though! Also saw a tree monster drown in water (while a Land Guard right next to it easily walked underwater (which I knew they could I studied the HELL out of them in order to survive them on the server)).
Looking forward to meeting the others. I've not peeked at their files unlike the Land Guard which I've more or less memorized out of sheer brutal neccesity.
P.S. Did I mention I hate Land Guards?
P.P.S. I don't mean they should be excluded, just they are so terrifyingly deadly that hate seems the right reaction to them!
P.P.P.S. Makes killing one all the sweeter...
N.B. The default spawn rate is ideal for a hack fest of killing monsters. However if you wanna do something else such as mine or craft or farm you had best set the mob spawn multiplier to about 6. That reduces the spawn rate of monsters to 1/6th and makes them appear once in a while to terrorize you but leaves you time to actually do something else.
LOVE it. The animals look great and they're always coming up to nuzzle me for food.
(Nota Bene: I've learned this is partly a feature but the tame vs wild still seems a problem)
The only thing that puzzles me is that when you point at one it doesn't show if they are tamed or not (like another animal mod does). There is almost no feedback about how the animals are aside from seeing their HP and the hearts that fly when you do tame one (which you can never find again). Chickens you raise also can't be told from wild ones.
Taming is also harder than the other mod which was too easy (mostly feed 'em grass, heh) which is an interesting challenge but I'm reluctant to invest better foods in if I have no way to distinguish the tamed from the untamed...
I chose this one over the two minecraft clones because I've never played MC. I did come to Luanti/MT thanks to the TV ads for the big hollywood flick (which I won't watch) but Asuna seemed more fitting as something more MTish.
It's a large mod I believe but that's because it seems to have been very inclusive (everything but the kitchen sink ;- ) so it includes a dizzying variety of mods. A bit overwhelming at times but that's generally a good thing.
I started playing ( a few weeks ago only) on a server with a different set of mods so it's a new experience. I miss some of the server's mods (mithril/silver were fun, and some mod that added 4 extra bags to the inventory are both missed) but other choices are far superior (slimes are better than dealing with another monster mod that has "land guards" that kill with 2 hits!, and animalia is STUNNING compared to mobs_redo (I think was the name)).
Sadly it pretty much kills any interest in playing survival. I don't like creative mode. Sure it's fine for testing things or if you're a master builder but for me I like the struggle. Striking a rich motherlode should be exhilarating, not boring. It's disheartening when you have researched mese and as you mine you come upon some and realize I don't need this. The world becomes a bland place.
(This is version 3 of my review - hopefully the final revision!)
Great variety and it feels as if a geologist was behind this with the passion for stones that is evident. One caveat though is that it is mostly decorative (but that's a vital part of this game) but at least one of the stones (no spoilers I guess) I've found has a practical use (and highly useful). The problem being that with 88 varieties it is tedious to have to search each new stone found in the recipes and click through a dozen usages to see if it has a unique usage or not.
Nice but
It's a cool mod that creates more life like water behaviour but sadly it comes at the cost of changing the way water works that many mods take for granted. By itself a fine mod, but if paired with other mods, watch out. Compatibility is going to be very low.
Only thing factions are good for is
Faction teleport points... Alas this mod does not offer that making it useless to me.
It looks nice but...
On all the servers where I've encountered it there is a problem with the armour. It gives either 99 or well over 100 damage absorption which means you are invincible. Not a good idea for survival servers (only type I play).
The tools are very fragile while being blazingly quick. (Personally I prefer the opposite)
Very pretty though.
Too easy
I wouldn't use this on a survival server. Unfortunately that's exactly where I know this mod from. : (
Good idea
It would suck to be homeless.
Good and simple
The easiest to use protection mod I've seen yet. Just click the pencil where you are and bam that "block" is yours. With simplicity come limits of course. The pencils are fairly cheap though so what they lack in control they can make up for with quantity. I really think that it ought to be used on all servers (as a supplement to another more sophisticated prot. mod) because this one is idiot proof. Give one pencil to all start characters.
P. S. The radar mode is excellent. Quickly see where there is open land.
Simply the best
It makes playing easier. Well laid out and the best looking (sfinv is hideous!) of them also. I play on a few servers that fail to use this and the only reason I stick it out there is because those servers have some other very good features to compensate for their folly. It also seems to be the most up to date with the latest features as well as having great compatibility with most of the popular non-inv mods.
If I could install only one single mod... this would be it.
Spooky delight
A nice alternative cave style.
Carelessly created?
I keep running into very basic default recipes that this mod has hijacked for its own items. So far the coffee tables hijack the wood helmet and the hedges hijack the oil extract. It is almost as if the recipes were created by someone who has never played Luanti because these are ones that you memorize after a while. Very strange.
How idiotic
Nowhere does it say you must harvest crops with a RIGHT click. Found that digging through the code. Unacceptable.
Herbie the Love Bug
In case you're too young to remember the film that's where the title originates. This is a really good mod. The cars look fantastic (although not blocky but I think that bird has flown the coop ;-) and drive pretty well too. The controls will take a while to master but I'm sure my years of old MSDOS auto games will come in handy. Keyboard controls aren't ideal for a car but hey that's the way it was and is.
Wow
As a real life motor boater I must say this feels pretty accurate. The controls take a bit of time to get used to (and something that's missing is a steering wheel like in the cars to show you your direction) but after that you are flying. They are fast. They're also biogasguzzlers. ;) You might have to work hard to keep that engine fed. Interestingly they can run aground in shallow water and "sink". You'll need to use your shovel to save your vessel. Sometimes they also seem to run into "rough" water and start bucking up and down. Maybe it has something to do with flowing water. There is no reverse on the engine (unlike on real ones) but you can paddle reverse so it isn't too problematic.
Cute but...
Planted these on Blocky but 1 deep and when they didn't do anything I checked the code and it needs 2 water above. So all my seeds wasted because this was not documented in the readme. I'll have to gather more seeds and craft more soil (you can't dig it up) and start all over. Irritating and not fun.
Fun stuff
Makes repair more important. Preserve those tool xp! : ) Also adds more choices to make. Keep using your level 10 steel/bronze/mese pick or start on a new level 0 diamond one? Tricky. This mod definitely adds some spice to the tools, always glad to see it in use on a server and sad when I don't.
Cool stuff
They look good and have neat special abilities. I've used them on several servers now.
Some specific notes.
The Engraved Pick's special might require you to break habits on where you keep stuff on your hotbar. I suspect many players have established patterns of layout. Being forced to insert or shuffle them for this pick is an unfortunate annoyance. Can't be helped I realize.
The pick is fast and you may end up digging sand/gravel you didn't intend to behind the rock you targeted. Watch out. :)
The Capitator is limited to MTG trees basically (the 5 default/core types). Still a good and helpful ability. A big GOTCHA though is that it ONLY cuts the trunks and leaves the leaves to decay. Woodcutting mod is definitely better than this axe. Still you can workaround it by collecting the leaves manually first. And if you don't want the leaves then it's great! :)
The chest is nice but really expensive (more than an ender). On one server it exists alongside the ender. I have 2 of each and the nice thing is that this chest has a separate inv from the ender thus giving you 2 sets!
To your scattered bodies go
Love this idea. Obviously it's not going to appeal to everyone. Some people I'm sure thrive on the spawn swarm. It'll create a truly decentralized world. Can't wait to find a server using it.
Nice but...
It's got good realism but the stinker is the final piece needed to make honey: The extractor/centrifuge. Costs two mese crystals which might not be much on some servers but on others it is hard to come by. On those servers 2 mese crystals are not even close to being worth investing in some honey...
Dudes... honey is only food. Easier to grow wheat.
My suggestion is to change it to something reasonable like tin ingots or even just coal. Deep mining should not be a prerequisite for making honey. Or forget tin/coal, make it something like wood.
<rant on> Centrifuge??? How did apiarists extract honey back in the year 4000 BC? Not with a piece of high tech machinery I'll tell you. The extractor might need to be totally overhauled or eliminated. Just a bad choice. I was expecting to take the filled frame and put it in my craft grid and get honey. When I learned I need a machine that costs 2 mese I was understandably irritated. <rant off>Essential Mod
Problem with the default is that you're never sure if you have 10 hearts or just 9. I suppose if you play enough you see it, but I've only played a few weeks. This mod is a life saver. That 1 missing heart could be the one that kills you... ;- )
Unfortunately it does have a compatibility problem with the stamina mod. The breads from Stamina appear at the same place as the Saturation bar. Looks hideous and naturally is hard to read. My solution was to uninstall Stamina and install hbhunger and hbsprint to provide something sort of similar.
Seemed nice at first
It sure helps, but I fear it helps way too much. I could spot monsters a hundred nodes away. Normally they are barely visible in the dark and often get the drop on me. Basically an easy mode.
Perhaps with some tinkering it could be improved though. A setting to choose how close a mob has to be before the bar appears might be an improvement. Best would be a setting that allows one to choose only having the bar appear after you've been attacked or have attacked a mob. Or maybe the bars could be set to appear only when the mob is close enough to get the hover info on it. Lotsa possibilities.
As is though it's too powerful.
Unwanted realism adds work
I'm afraid I don't see the point of extra realism when the game has floating blocks of stone... True I sometimes smirk at being able to reach 5 metres across a chasm to mine some ore and retrieve it like magic but like I said, floating stone, so why not?
Looks good but has problems
The villages look great but I found a couple of problems.
First it crashes (program shutsdown - can resume but...) when I right clicked a village bed to try sleep on it. Afterwards when I restarted my character was standing on the bed but the ceiling was so low that his head was inside a block and it was so narrow that he could not move away. Had to go creative mode to escape.
Second the village was carved brutally out of a mountain creating a giant cliff on one side. Unpleasant but plausible I guesss...
Third there was no way to buy a house apparent. Because:
Fourth there are no villagers (they are added by a mobf_trader mod but that I had to dig out of a forum thread) to buy a house from or to simply populate the village.
Fifth the chests are all unlocked and lootable which pretty much wrecked my game since I'd just managed to get bronze and suddenly there are free steel ingots in the chests. Bah.
Sixth when the mod is removed from the game it leaves behind a mess of no texture blocks (cottages was co-installed/removed).
Sadly I had to delete my world and start over thanks to this mod.
Fantastic
Tried this in spite of the "chest thing" and I was blown away with how amazing it is. It just suits me to a T. Neat freaks and hyper-organized types will be in 7th heaven with all the tricks this can do.
It's not perfect of course (what is???) and the biggest flaw is the need to scroll down on some of the displays like armour and waypoints (which are great, almost feel like a cheat - but then I play with F5 (debug) info on so I guess not, just saves pencil, paper and eraser use heheh). As for the chest thing... haven't played with it long enough to build a chest yet, heh. IIRC some comment mentioned there was a solution to it.
One thing that could be improved is adding the ability to look up an inventory item by clicking (shift? use key?) on it instead of having to type its name in the search field.
P.S. First impressions are a thing. I've since realized that there are superior inv mods out there (UI+) and that the sorting thing isn't really useful once you learn to play and set up your own system to organize your inv. Waypoints turn out to be available as a separate mod anyways. The 5 armour slot limit is pretty damaging as many mods add wearable rings, etc. The extra slots aren't ever going to be used since the 32 slot chest is a given.
Oh the Horror!
Yes it adds spice to life for sure. I know this mod from a server I started on (all of 2 weeks ago!) and the dreaded Land Guards that kill you in two hits. What was that. Huh why am I at spawn? On the server it only seems to include Land Guards, I've never seen any of the weaker ones.
So I installed it on a local game with other mods and I've seen the others too. At first none but I think they spawn from terrain (yes I peeked) so it takes a few days. The Land Guard forced me to build a tree house (I know their weakness from the server) but I was amazed when a spider climbed up past me as I was placing the ladders and bit me and then stood on top of the tree. It was an easy target from below even with a wood sword though! Also saw a tree monster drown in water (while a Land Guard right next to it easily walked underwater (which I knew they could I studied the HELL out of them in order to survive them on the server)).
Looking forward to meeting the others. I've not peeked at their files unlike the Land Guard which I've more or less memorized out of sheer brutal neccesity.
P.S. Did I mention I hate Land Guards?
P.P.S. I don't mean they should be excluded, just they are so terrifyingly deadly that hate seems the right reaction to them!
P.P.P.S. Makes killing one all the sweeter...
N.B. The default spawn rate is ideal for a hack fest of killing monsters. However if you wanna do something else such as mine or craft or farm you had best set the mob spawn multiplier to about 6. That reduces the spawn rate of monsters to 1/6th and makes them appear once in a while to terrorize you but leaves you time to actually do something else.
Gorgeous and cute as hell!
LOVE it. The animals look great and they're always coming up to nuzzle me for food.
(Nota Bene: I've learned this is partly a feature but the tame vs wild still seems a problem) The only thing that puzzles me is that when you point at one it doesn't show if they are tamed or not (like another animal mod does). There is almost no feedback about how the animals are aside from seeing their HP and the hearts that fly when you do tame one (which you can never find again). Chickens you raise also can't be told from wild ones.
Taming is also harder than the other mod which was too easy (mostly feed 'em grass, heh) which is an interesting challenge but I'm reluctant to invest better foods in if I have no way to distinguish the tamed from the untamed...
Beautiful
I chose this one over the two minecraft clones because I've never played MC. I did come to Luanti/MT thanks to the TV ads for the big hollywood flick (which I won't watch) but Asuna seemed more fitting as something more MTish.
It's a large mod I believe but that's because it seems to have been very inclusive (everything but the kitchen sink ;- ) so it includes a dizzying variety of mods. A bit overwhelming at times but that's generally a good thing.
I started playing ( a few weeks ago only) on a server with a different set of mods so it's a new experience. I miss some of the server's mods (mithril/silver were fun, and some mod that added 4 extra bags to the inventory are both missed) but other choices are far superior (slimes are better than dealing with another monster mod that has "land guards" that kill with 2 hits!, and animalia is STUNNING compared to mobs_redo (I think was the name)).
Fine if you like creative
Sadly it pretty much kills any interest in playing survival. I don't like creative mode. Sure it's fine for testing things or if you're a master builder but for me I like the struggle. Striking a rich motherlode should be exhilarating, not boring. It's disheartening when you have researched mese and as you mine you come upon some and realize I don't need this. The world becomes a bland place.
(This is version 3 of my review - hopefully the final revision!)
Variety
Great variety and it feels as if a geologist was behind this with the passion for stones that is evident. One caveat though is that it is mostly decorative (but that's a vital part of this game) but at least one of the stones (no spoilers I guess) I've found has a practical use (and highly useful). The problem being that with 88 varieties it is tedious to have to search each new stone found in the recipes and click through a dozen usages to see if it has a unique usage or not.