Better Than Wolves

March 29th, 2013

Note: This release appears to contain changes to world generation, contrary to my normal policy, but it should be noted that anything I have done here has none of the negative impacts normally associated with such changes: it will not cause unsightly seams in your world, nor place a whack of mod blocks into your world that will leave gaping holes should you uninstall the mod. Everything I have done here has been done with extreme caution and moderation so as not to mess with your worlds, and that is a policy you can expect me to continue to maintain in the future.

• Added "abandoned villages" to the mod. Villages within a certain radius of the player's spawn location will be abandoned, which resolves a number of balance issues in the early game when the player happens to spawn near a village.
• Added the ability for cows and mooshrooms to eat mycelium (as well as grass), and changed cows so that this is what triggers their transformation into mooshrooms, instead of just standing on it.
• Added the ability for Mooshrooms to spread mycelium to nearby dirt blocks. In combination with the above, this subtly changes mycelium to be an infectious organism that uses cows and their eating habits in order to spread and reproduce, rather than just kinda sitting there :)
• Added a correlation between the drop rate of Mystery Meat and accumulated cellulite.
• Changed how which crops appear in which villages is determined. Most will only contain wheat, with a few containing wheat & potatoes OR carrots (never both). Along with abandoned villages this makes finding every crop in the game a much longer process, and helps smooth out the early game progression with Hardcore Hunger as you don't get every single crop upon finding a single village. Note that which crops appear in which villages is not dependent on the world seed, and thus may vary even when using the same seed from world to world.
• Changed desert temples to have obsidian detailing rather than wool, as wool being used as a construction material in these kind of structures is an immersion breaker. This was also done as a first pass test of my techniques to modifying world gen, to make sure it didn't have unanticipated consequences.
• Changed desert temples in one other subtle way that I'll leave to the player to discover ;)
• Changed the "tables" in villages to be Oak Wood Tables from the mod, to prevent another immersion breaker where either you or villagers jump on a table and cause an annoying clicking sound. Obviously, these will get deleted if the mod is uninstalled from a world, but I sincerely doubt a few missing tables would be of offense to anyone.
• Changed village lamp posts to use a dark (spruce) wood block or sandstone (for desert villages) instead of cloth, for the same reasons as above.
• Changed the torch recipe to only produce one torch instead of 4, to help increase the value of coal (it is a vastly overabundant resource) and wood overall (particularly in the early game), and because it corresponds better to the recipe for redstone torches as well. This also serves to increase the value of tree farms in the late game, and the use of the Saw to gain access to high efficiency recipes, as well as to encourage the player to consider torch placement a little more instead of just spamming them to light up an area. Additionally, this increases the value of Nethercoal in the middle game.
• Changed a little something something in a way that will be left for players to discover.
• Changed mob spawners so that they won't spawn creatures wearing armor or with other equipment (skeletons still spawn with non-magical bows), thus eliminating the iron output of them. This is to discourage their use in mob traps (since spawner traps are lame due to their AFK dependency), and further promotes the construction of full blown mob-traps.
• Changed (slowed) the growth rate of melons and pumpkins substantially to help further balance them as food sources.
• Changed ladders and other climbable blocks (like Ropes and vines) so that they may not be climbed if you are crippled, and so that other movement status penalties are also applied.
• Fixed problem with not being able to sprint at 5 hunger pips, instead of 4 (when 'Peckish' is first displayed).
• Fixed slight golden tinge in the Iron Nugget texture.
• Fixed vanilla problem where torches on village lamp-posts would be floating in mid air instead of attached to the lamp post itself. Obviously, this only affects newly generated villages.
• Fixed problem with particles not displaying when cows converted to mooshrooms.
• Fixed texture-offset problem with distended cow udders.
• Fixed problem with wolves being able to eat Cooked Carrots and Chowder.
• Removed the ability to "cook" logs into charcoal in the furnace. It must now be done in the Kiln. This was done to help increase the value of coal in the early game (for all the reasons stated in the torch recipe change above), while not adversely affecting late game automated systems. It also serves to increase the value of Kilns and particularly auto-Kilns in the late game.
• Removed the coal drop from wither skeletons to further promote the use of Kilns in the late game as a source of charcoal. It never fit particularly well with them anyways.