More complete plans to all the current items and tiles

[BenCheung0422]

As there are some unused or functionless items and tiles that should be worked out to fill in the missing parts in the game, we should also have a more complete plan on these. This briefly describes the basic information about what functions the current items and tiles have and how plans should be done in the future.

Background

@Makkkkus mentioned that, there are plenty of items that are unused. There are items and tiles that have only little functions or are functionless in the game. Possibly those items and tiles are not implemented completely or planned ideally. We would also need a big direction on how we should handle this circumference.

Current Situation

There are indeed some fixed directions and functions what most of the items and tiles should have. The following is made with the main directions about how they are designed basically.

Items

There is an exception that when any of the item is made into an ingredient of the recipe, they would not have only these properties. Their properties should be considered when the recipes are being designed.

• Armor item - Acting as a representative of an armor.
  • A renewal armor can be applied only when the previous armor is completely broken, i.e. completely lost of armor points. Seemingly this is related to some of the properties of armor that they are not repairable and cannot be taken off.
  • Add Repair Bench #532 mentioned that armors might be able to be taken off to be repaired, replaced or melt down.
• Book item - Acting as a representative of a book, the interactive object (entry point) for a book menu (reader and/or writer).
• Bucket item - Acting as a representative of a unit (bucket) of fluid.
  • If some recipes require the content of a bucket item, this could be an ingredient of a recipe.
• Clothing item - Acting as a tint changer of player's skins.^[1]
• Fishing rod item - A tool to help player fishing.
• Food item - Acting as a representative of food, to restore hunger points of players.
  • Some food items could be the ingredient of another food item, or a potion, to give enhanced effects or boosts.
• Furniture item - Acting as a representative of a furniture entity, i.e. furniture entity summoner. This should be the only function.
• Heart item - Acting as an ability to unlock the potential of the player's health point limit.
  • There could also be more different kinds of potential boosts in the late game.
• Potion item - Ability to give effects to entities manually. It relates to the status effect system.
  • More different potions should be planned in the future.
• Summon item - Ability to summon bosses in after the boss defeated.
  • This could be generalized to be the general summoner for entities in creative mode and boss summoning should be grouped as a boss summoning item (designed to be used in survival mode).
• Tile item - Should only act as a representative of a tile in ideal by its designing property. In the current actual practice, a tile item acts as a tile placer and the items are not exactly the same as their tiles with their sprites and distributions.
• Tool item - Should only act as a tool or a helper to help player's doing works according to their functionalities.
  • Shovel - Generally, a shovel is used for digging and plant collecting. Currently used for:
    • getting cloud, dirt (dirt tiles and path tiles) and sand from their tiles,
    • getting flower item from flower tiles and turning them into grass tiles,
    • getting grass seeds item from grass tiles and turning them into dirt tiles.
  • Hoe - A hoe is only used for making dirt tiles and grass tiles into farmland. It could be also used for farmland repairing to enhance farming experience, and harvesting crops in efficient way, i.e. increase the number of drops or restrict to the only legal way to harvest crops.
  • Sword - A sword is only used for attacking mobs with bonus damages. It could be a tool to break plants or similar tiles.
  • Pickaxe - Generally, a pickaxe is used for collecting or breaking hard materials and tiles, also gives little bonus to attacks. Currently used for:
    • giving small damage bonus when attacking spawners,
    • giving little damage bonus when attacking mobs,
    • turning grass tiles into path tiles,
    • breaking hard rock and rock for stone and coal, ore tiles for ores, stone/obsidian material tiles (i.e. decor, door, floor, material, wall tiles) for their materials,
    • turning lava brick tiles into lava tiles (unused feature).
  • Axe - Generally, an axe can be used for giving some damage bonus, and mainly for chopping trees. Currently used for:
    • giving some damage bonus to mobs, but lower than the sword gives,
    • chopping trees for wood items.
  • Bow - A bow is used for firing arrows. Non-plain arrows (arrows with special effects) could be in plan. Also, arrows should be returnable when fired and not all damage is absorbed for cycle-balancing.
  • Claymore - A claymore is only used for giving damage bonus slightly greater than that of a sword. It is an upgrade version of their sword with shards.
  • Shears - Generally, a pair of shears is used for cutting materials. It cannot be used as a weapon. Currently used for:
    • cutting and collecting wool items from sheep,
    • breaking wool tile for wool item in return,
    • breaking wooden material tiles (i.e. door, floor, wall tiles) for their materials.
• Torch item - As a representative of a torch tile, and a special handle for placing torches due to the game mechanics. Actually, the onType tile ID could be turned into the tile data instead of creating a number of different tile variations for each onType tile.

Stackable Items

Many items are made into implementations of a stackable item instead of being their own classes because they are only enough to be a general material carrier. They should have no special functions by its design. Obviously, there would only be possible that tile items and stackable items have some kinds of missing desired functions.

With the designs of item, entity, tile interactions, all of them have their corresponding handling methods (Tile by Entity: Tile#bumpedInto, Tile#steppedOn; Tile by Entity attack: Tile#hurt, void Tile#hurt; Tile by Player with Item: Tile#interact; Item on Tile by Player: Item#interactOn; Entity by Player: Entity#interact). There is an obvious duplication among these methods, Tile#interact and Item#interactOn. Item#interactOn is used only when the target tile is not strictly specified or the item is not interactable with world. Items that require other "directors" (items or entities) to work with are considered to be a direct implementation of a general stackable item. The only direct interactable stackable item example is the key item (with dungeon cheats). For better organization and (runtime) exception prevention, it would be better if items are made into an alone class (when the items are directly interactable with tiles).

• Wood - An ingredient for wooden items basically. An ingredient for recipes of: workbench, torch, plank, (normal) lantern, enchanter, chest, loom, all leveled tools including wooden tools except claymore (fishing rod, sword, axe, hoe, pickaxe, shovel, bow), arrow, bed, haste potion.
  • A drop by tree tile.
• Leather - An ingredient for leather armor only.^[2][3]
  • A drop by cow.
• Wheat - An ingredient for bread only.
  • A drop by mature wheat crop tile.
• Key - A key is used for unlocking a dungeon chest.
  • A drop by knight and a snake.
• Arrow - A bullet of a bow. Arrow can be made by stone and wood.
  • A drop by skeleton.
• String - An ingredient as string. String can be collected by breaking down (crafting) wool. An ingredient for recipes of: enchanter, all levels of fishing rod and bow.
• Coal - A source of light and heat, also for black color. An ingredient for recipes of: torch, black color (black dye; black wool, black clothes), ore smelting (iron, gold, glass), food cooking (cooked pork, steak, cooked fish).
  • A drop by rock and hard rock tile randomly.
• Iron ore - An ore of iron. An ingredient for iron only.
  • A drop by iron ore tile.
• Lapis - A source of magic (brewing basically) and blue color. An ingredient for recipes of: enchanter, blue color (blue dye; blue wool, blue clothes, purple clothes, cyan clothes), awkward potion, escape potion, boss summoners (totem of air, obsidian poppet).
  • A drop by lapis ore tile.
• Gold ore - An ore of iron. An ingredient for gold only.
  • A drop by gold ore tile.
• Iron - A strong metal made from iron ore. An ingredient for recipes of: anvil, iron tools (fishing rod, sword, axe, hoe, pickaxe, shovel, bow), iron armor, iron lantern, shears.
  • A drop by zombie.
• Gold - A stronger metal than iron made from gold ore. It is used for some magical equipment. AN ingredient for recipes of: golden tools (fishing rod, sword, axe, hoe, pickaxe, shovel, bow), gold armor, gold lantern, gold apple, boss summoners (totem of air, obsidian poppet).
• Rose - A red flower and source of red color. It is not placeable as being a flower and a drop by a flower tile while flower item is placeable, i.e. not a tile item. An ingredient for recipes of: red color (red dye; red wool, orange clothes, purple clothes).^[3]
  • A drop by flower tile.
• Gunpowder - A fuel of explosion. An ingredient for recipes of: tnt, health potion, escape potion.
  • A drop by creeper (dropped only when the fuse is not lit).
• Slime - A sticky item, a (magic and permanent?) source of light of a lantern? An ingredient for recipes of: all lanterns, light potion.
• Glass - A decorative material allowing light to pass through, made from smelting sand. An ingredient for recipes of: all lanterns, glass, glass bottle.
• Cloth - A piece of textile from made string. It is not craft-able. An ingredient of all clothes only.^[3]
  • A drop by zombie.
• Gem - A appealing and very hard rock. An ingredient for recipes of: gem tools (fishing rod, sword, axe, hoe, pickaxe, shovel, bow), gem armor, energy potion, boss summoners (totem of air, obsidian poppet).
  • A drop by gem ore tile.
• Scale - A piece of hard animal skin. An ingredient for recipes of: snake armor.^[3]
  • A drop by snake.
• Shard - A booster to swords. An end-game material. An ingredient for recipes of: all claymore (iron, gold, gem), obsidian poppet.^[2]
  • A drop by knight and Obsidian Knight.
• Cloud ore - A mystery ore collected from the sky level. A very-late-game material. An ingredient of totem of air only.^[2][3]
  • A drop by Air Wizard and cloud ore tile.
• Glass bottle - A container for water and potions, made from glass. An ingredient of awkward potion only. Potions are dry.
  • A glass bottle is returned when a potion item is consumed.

Tile Items

Tile item is a subclass of stackable item and provides a basic function for tile placement. With the current implementations, tile items are tile placers other than the exact representatives of tiles. With the original designs and architectures, tile items should be the exact representatives of their (contained) tile in ideal.
This should be more well-designed. Valid tiles the tile items can be placed on should keep same for similar tiles; a design of inheritance or instances should be used. The tile it is placed on should be the same as the tile when it is removed in general and logical cases. The overall organization of tile items is quite chaotic. There could possibly be seed item for seeds, except grass seeds.
Names of most of the tiles and tile items are not the same (non-standardized).

• Flower - For making (yellow only) colors and decorations (biodiversity; one variation only). As of an exact representative of flower item, this is not circular from flower tile to flower and rose items (illogical).^[4] The current implementation is not enough for "biodiversity" and "decorative".^[2][3]
  • A source of yellow color. An ingredient for recipes of: yellow color (yellow dye; yellow wool, yellow clothes, orange clothes). There are only 2 varieties in tile models.
  • Placeable only on grass tile.
  • This relates to a color system update in Update color system and sheep coloring #445.
• Acorn - Seed of tree.^[4] It requires some time to grow into tree tile. It is boost-able by applying bone, but not available with Improved the farming system #437.
  • A drop by tree tile (dropped randomly on each attack).
  • Placeable only on grass tile.
• Dirt - Tile for the originate of ground lives, basic ingredient of a world.
  • Placeable only on hole, water and lava tile.
• Natural rock (Rock tile) - Source of stone age. It is unused in survival mode.
  • Placeable only on dirt, sand, grass, path, water, lava tile.
• Plank - Base of a wooden house, made from wood.
  • An ingredient for recipes of: plank wall, wood door.
  • Placeable only on hole, water, cloud tile.
• Plank wall/Wood door - Basic architectures of a wooden house.
  • Placeable only on wood planks tile.
• Stone (with appearance of slates/cobblestones) - Placement of raw stone materials. Item of material of stone/rock. A hard material.
  • An ingredient for recipes of: stone brick, ornate stone, oven, furnace, stone tools (sword, axe, hoe, pickaxe, shovel, bow), arrow, haste potion.
  • A drop by rock and hard rock tile.
  • Placeable only on hole, water, cloud, lava tile.
• Stone brick - Base of a stone-based house.
  • An ingredient for recipes of: stone wall, stone door.
  • Placeable only on hole, water, cloud, lava tile.
• Stone wall/Stone door - Basic architectures of a stone-based house.
  • Placeable only on stone bricks tile.
• Ornate stone/Ornate obsidian - basic decorative tile variations of stone/obsidian. Ornate obsidian is used in some structures.
  • Placeable only on hole, water, cloud, lava tile.
• Raw obsidian (with appearance of purple old planks) - Placements of raw obsidian materials. Item of material of obsidian. Basic composition of dungeon. It cannot be destroyed by creeper. It can be made by placing lava and water close to each other.
  • An ingredient for recipes of: obsidian brick, ornate obsidian.
  • Placeable only on hole, water, cloud, lava tile.
• Obsidian brick - Base of an obsidian-based house.
  • Placeable only on hole, water, cloud, lava tile.
• Obsidian wall/Obsidian door - Basic architectures of an obsidian-based house. Obsidian wall cannot be destroyed by creeper.
  • Placeable only on obsidian (bricks) tile.
• Wool - Decoration and a source of colored decorations. Allowing only furniture entities, player and other mobs except creeper to walk on. A different implementation should be made.^[1]
  • An ingredient for recipes of: loom, string, bed.
  • Placeable only on hole and water tile.
• Sand - A source of glass and "dirt" of cactus. Projectiles of a TNT explosion. There should be decorative tiles like sand stone.^[2]
  • An ingredient for recipes of: tnt, glass.
  • Placeable only on hole, water, lava tile.
• Cactus - A re-growable part of cactus plant. Sapling of cactus.^[4] Other mechanics are the same as acorn.
  • A source of green color. An ingredient for recipes of: green color (green dye; green wool, green clothes, cyan clothes), speed potion.
  • A drop by cactus tile (with more than 1).
  • Placeable only on sand tile.
• Bone - A source of calcium. This is designed with a really illogical way. This replaces tree sapling tile with tree tile.^[1][3][4]
  • This is changed into a direct stackable item with no actual functionality in Improved the farming system #437.
  • A drop by skeleton.
• Cloud - A unit of cloud (water droplets). This is unused with completely no actual function. A composition of the sky level.^[2][3]
  • Placeable only on infinite fall tiles ("empty" tiles on the sky level).
• Wheat seeds - The seeds of wheat. A crop tile is placed when placed on. It is grown into a mature wheat by time.^[4]
  • Placeable only on farmland tile.
• Potato - The "seeds" of potato. A re-growable plant with using parts of its crop. A crop tile is placed when placed on, similar to wheat tile.^[4]
  • Placeable only on farmland tile.
• Grass Seeds - This turns dirt tile into grass tile. This completely violates the design a tile item should be. This is not a crop.^[4]
  • Placeable only on dirt tile.
• Tile items specially designed for creative mode - The actual tile of the item is placed when placed on. Actually, more this kind of tile items should be done for convenience of debugging; this should be more well-designed.
  • Farmland, lava, path, water - Placeable only on dirt, grass, hole tile.
  • Exploded, hole - Placeable only on dirt, grass tile.

Tiles

Most of the tiles have been described above. All tiles related to the farming system are updated in #437. There should be more decorative tiles as described in #539, even that there are 2 tiles are completely designed for decorations, ornate stone and ornate obsidian. Flowers and color-related items are updated in #445. Lava brick is an unused tile currently, with a lost texture, but it can be reused in the near future. For material tiles and floor tiles, the names and the actual instances should be standardized. The achievable change to ore tiles has already been described in #539. Torch and similar tiles should be redone with a system when there is an implementation of #396. With the recursive tile resolution, the problem that the tile placed on after removed would differ from the original one would be easily resolved. We could also use tile entities to separate dynamic attributes (internal states) from static attributes (overall states) in tile data.

With the proposal in #538, there are also suggestions to world generation, biome system and structures.

Seemingly, many contents on the sky level are not well-planned and mostly empty or unimplemented. A replan similar the update to the dungeon should be done on the sky level. Some of the contents are well-implemented, but there are still contents that require more work on the dungeon level. Despite the boss levels, the underground levels could have more well-planned implementations to improve the gaming experience underground. There should still be more new and different contents in the game.

Footnotes

If there are no any footnote markers marked with the list item, it means that this item or tile should only contain only the function, property or feature, i.e. its functionality has already been implemented and planned ideally, not considering its corresponding system.
^[1] It indicates that the function, property or feature of this item or tile should be re-planned in ideal.
^[2] It indicates that this item or tile is lack of enough implementations, functions, properties and features for various reasons.
^[3] It indicates that this item or tile has very low usage (very rare) considering their functionalities in the game.
^[4] (Tile items only) It indicates that this tile item does not strictly match the original designs and architectures, i.e. not the exact representative of the tile it representing. It should be re-planned in ideal.

Trivia

Wooden claymore is available but not craft-able.

Conclusion

The problems currently having have been mentioned and explained briefly above. We should have more plans targeting these with more thoughts. We still need a precise and exhaustive roadmap aimed at resolving all of these problems we have. Also, we could expand the uses of all the existing items, entities and tiles. Not only restricting to only 1 use for 1 thing, but also flexible features and properties among these things. We should not just limit the scope of the contents to only the real world, but also create and define our world by ourselves with many logics and evidences. Just like the golden apple in Minecraft, it is not just food that can only restore hunger points, but it could also give bonus effects to the player. Potions are also designed with the properties of the items instead of a really actual real-world logic related to their compositions. We should have this as our one of the directions and objectives to work on.

[BenCheung0422]

As an additional information, when contents are reimplemented in the End Game, dedicated boss drops should also be considered. This relates to #531. Mentioned with a post on Discord.
When we are working on world generation reorganization, the biodiversity and abundances of structures and variations should be taken into account for improving Quality-of-Life and overall gaming experience, as described in 2 posts about tall grasses and decorative floor tiles on Discord, #538, #539, #445 and #437.

[BenCheung0422]

Dedicated Boss Drops

Dedicated boss drops would be the preferred objectives and direction to work on in the near future. Implementing in this way could make the game survival flows more complete. Currently, the End Game part is obviously incomplete.

Background

There are some discussions about the feature of dedicated boss drops, but some implementations are incomplete and rejected as in #531. The original post on the Discord forum is https://discord.com/channels/280723930942013440/1132738003996004523. The reason of this is not to have completely the same drops from bosses with other mobs as this would be repetitious and some kind of reduced meaning of defeating bosses.

Details

As an example, #531 only adds "Knight Shard" for the Obsidian Knight, but there should also be a dedicated drop for Air Wizard, because it should not just be a meaning in only the story but also the game play experience, the actual game progress (not about the storyline).

With dedicated boss drops, there should also be the meanings of those drops. Referring to the property of the Obsidian Heart, Knight Shard should be the ability to unlocking player's potential if the Obsidian Knight targets on unlocking player's potential. The drop from Air Wizard should have the meaning of powerful tools to the players as an example. According to the main topic of this issue, cloud ore is lacking of enough implementation and should be rewritten. Similarly, the target of the Air Wizard should also be decided. This is related to the gameplay progress after the Air Wizard, so it is about the End Game. The Obsidian Knight is also a part of the End Game content.

Currently, the use of cloud ore is only making summon items of the Air Wizard and the uses of shard are only making summon items of the Obsidian Knight, Knight Statue, and claymores. The actual uses of cloud ore and shard should also be re-planned at the same time. As an idea with the cloud tools, we can have a material that can be made by cloud ores and boss drops by crafting or magic refining.^[1]

For Obsidian Knight, we can have "knight shard"; for Air Wizard, we can have "master rune". They can be obtained only by defeating the bosses, so that they are difficult to be obtained compared to cloud ores (already dropped by cloud ore tiles) and shards (already dropped by knights). Powerful items in the late game can be made using the boss drops.^[2]

There might be a problem about that the balancing might be broken if we have more powerful equipment in different stages, so we need to increase the gaps of stages between the bosses and the survival, at the same time, as the advances between are small and might be difficult to add such additional features. This means that we would need to replan the boss flows. At the same time, side activities related to the bosses can be rewritten in a neater plan.^[3][4] However, this is not in the scope of this subtopic.

Conclusion

This seems to be a long-time goal, but this should be finally accomplished to complete the storyline.^[5] Moreover, this should first be considered before the release of 2.2.0, because the storyline and survival flows are still not complete and finished.

References

1. A Discord post about Cloud tools in development forum https://discord.com/channels/280723930942013440/1134508188876677212/1141343269998035045
2. Comments in the original Discord post of this subtopic https://discord.com/channels/280723930942013440/1132738003996004523/1141342490591514654
3. Complementing End Game contents #444 includes some change requests to bosses
4. [FEATURE] More side activities separate from the storyline. #201 suggests the Obsidian Knight and 2 related buffs
5. A proper story #304 an important feature required to be finished in 2.2: The Story Update

[BenCheung0422]

It is important to note that every item should have different properties originally designed to be. There is not an item that has the exact same properties as another item, unless they are exactly the same item. It is not a good plan to use just for using or mix their properties when designing.