Pneumagination V0-11a and V0-12a

More progress!!! Everything has turned out great so far. All thats majorly left to do for this sprint is to get face/edge/vertex manipulation working.

Biomes

I’ve also added a new biome for v0.12! Currently calling this the “Quarry”. This contains Laterite as both the surface and inner rocks, giving a nice reddish brown color. This biome will eventually contain Bauxite as an underground ore. Bauxite will be craftable into Red Mud and Alumina. Red Mud is just a nice watery mud texture. Alumina can either be used to craft ceramic items, or be processed into Aluminum for computers and animatronics. Alumina will be one of the few materials to not be a placable texture, but Aluminum will. I’m not sure how I’ll make these items distinct in the UI to show they’re untexturable yet.

Another planned biome with a very useful item will be beaches. Unlike deserts, beaches will contain White Sand instead of normal Sand. White Sand will be craftable into Silicon for use in most computer items, alongisde any sort of arithmatic nodes in the node graph. Desert sand will just be used for glass and concrete.

Crafting Materials

Trees in the world are actually gonna be mixes of Brushes for the wood and Volumes for the leaves. They’re gonna be “welded” together so that when you break any part of the tree it will destroy the entire thing. This welded bit will be Tree Sap that’ll drop alongside the wood (Volumes like leaves wont drop anything if destroyed, they need that special late game item). Tree Sap can be used to continue to weld Brushes together, used to craft into Latex- which can also craft into Rubber.

That’s most of the core building materials out of the way, neatly split amongst resources in different biomes, but one of the main things I need to decide on is Plastic. Regular plastic is made from oil, and as someone into bio energy I don’t feel like having a pillar of my crafting system be taking up by smelting oil found underground. Bio-plastics seem to be made from stuff like Corn starches, which also can be made into PLA. Having a core material made from creating Corn farms could be a great way of incorperating that outside of just standard food production.

That mostly leaves underground ores to be used for fun stuff, which was more of my intent. Mining will still be a great method for gathering large amounts of Brushes for builds, though that does leave the player with likely tons and tons of unused rock textures. I’ll probably have them be used as fodder ingredients for lots of crafting recipes, alongside being able to be crafted into various different decoration textures to not make them an inventory filler.

Update

Later in the day writing this, custom fog and time of day is added! The fog is normal depth fog, but its positioned in a radius around the player rather than being just from camera depth! This means when in Photo Mode the fog will be in the same spot, ensuring you don’t see chunk borders! The time of day also changes the maximum and minimum radius of the fog, being much much much closer by midnight up until the morning. By midnight the light levels also reach pitch black. This means you really gotta have a light source by day 1 or you’re super fucked! The fog rolling in though means even once you’ve lit up a lot of areas you still can’t travel far without following roads. This is to signify that time past midnight is much more dangerous. I plan on enemies spawning just after sunset, but the much harder ones are saved for later.

The fog sticks around throughout the morning, which is mainly cause I’m biased and like foggy mornings. This is also my affinity for early Minecraft having low render distance. I wanna make sure for most of the day you have a generally unobstructed view, but that morning fog will signify the night is finally over. For now I don’t have any plans to let players skip the night so its an important detail.

Also just incase I haven’t mentioned it prior, yes I’m keeping the render distance FIXED to a specific value. I’m making sure nothing is hardcoded so people can mod bigger distances, but I 100% want the base game to keep only one distance. I don’t see people bring it up in their video essays about early Minecraft, but one major thing that cheapens the modern experience for me is being able to see every single structure from spawn. This incentivizes just re-rolling the seed over and over until you spot something close. Back in the day you didn’t know what was out of the immediate area. There could be an above surface dungeon 1 mile from you but if you never walked in that direction you’d never know! This made it feel rewarding to actually explore and leave the visible distance of your base, but it also trained your mental mapping skills to remember locations based on their key traits. I was a stupid kid and didn’t realize the compass didn’t actually always point North, so I found my way back just on intuition!

Another thing is that giant render distances lead to decision paralysis. You are given every landmark from the getgo, which can frustrate players knowing its better to go walk out a few miles to a giant ravine or sinkhole in the distance than to just start mining where they’re at. This again leads to frustrations to choosing the right seed. When I play the Better Than Adventure mod I always keep my RD to “Tiny” which is like around 4 chunks with heavy fog, and its a great experience. In modern this is usually around 6 chunks due to biomes and generation being pretty spaced out- leading me to atleast need to have some sort of landmark within the viewable area.

In Pneu this has manifested in biomes that are around 1-1.5x the render distance. Enough to encompass the visible area if you wanna be immersed, but close enough together that you’re always tempted seeing another biome reach into the corner of your view distance. Roads are also generated extremely close together, once again to atleast always have one or two within distance.

Back to the navigation point though- not everyone has that spatial awareness, and it sucks to get lost and just have to die and lose everything to get back to spawn. This is why the game added Photo Mode and roads! Due to how Vornoi noise works, all the roads are actually connected on a loose grid- so sticking to a single direction means you can easily trace your steps back! This also makes it easy to set up signs or other markers to denote where each road goes. Photo Mode also gives you unrestricted access to looking at all the visible chunks. This can make it easy to orient yourself and pick up on landmarks from a top down perspective. I think both of these features are crucial in making a fixed render distance not a detriment!

More Crafting Plans

Hello its a few days later. Now that pitch black night exists, I really have to think how players are gonna obtain their first light source in a unique way to this game. I was researching different types of historical and survival related torches and lighting methods and came across that Tree Sap can be used in a torch! I think then I’m gonna have wood from trees be craftable into sticks (Since that’s gonna be the first things players attempt from their experience in Minecraft). 1 Stick and 1 Sap will give a tall torch (cause why not I think tall torches look neat), and multiple sticks and sap will craft a campfire (or maybe combine multiple torches into a campfire?). All of these will be unlit though and stated in the item name.

Players will atleast need to dig around and find Flint underground to light any fires. Flint will also likely be used as an early weapon for players, which will have a random chance to light enemies on fire. One problem will be Flint needing to be common enough for players to obtain their first night, but be useful somehow afterwards. I think just the nature of my game seperating textures from the blocks in your inventory will create lots of things players will just dig up to get the Brush and discard the texture. It’ll likely just have to be dealt with by using it in recipes, but also having a destroy item option like in Terraria.

Weather

Also likely at some point I will add a snowy biome, that will let you craft snow into ice. I actually completely intend now to have the previously mentioned Volumes be permanent fixtures of rain, snow, heat, cold, ect. If you find a rainy biome, it will rain forever. Once you obtain the late game Volume mining tool, you can transport any weather effect to occupy any space in your world. Current plans are for rain to appear anywhere except deserts, snowfall in snowy biomes (maybe I’ll let it sometimes generate in forests) that quickly douses torches due to the cold, and hot spots in desert biomes that automatically light all torches.

Volumes are generally for particle effects and I think I’m gonna have how they work scale with the density of particles. In snowy biomes- caves and all underground surfaces will still suffer from the cold effect- just at 0 snow particles. Increasing density may lead to the particles looking like they’re blowing in heavy wind and maybe effects that could damage the player without the right gear. Same thing with heat- maybe the second tier has heatwaves appear inside the volume that also damages unprepared players, and then a third tier is just straight up a volume of pure fire particles.

With the fact Volumes will be controllable by players in the node graph by the late game, this will likely come in handy for traps or mob grinders. I may require frozen store items always be stored inside a 0+ particles snow Volume (Does this mean ice cream shop only viable in snow biomes early game? Might be a showoff feature for players to show they’re progressed far enough to build one in a forest or desert near late game). Combinations of heat and snow volumes technically could let players automate lighting up and blowing out torches in an area- as they’re gonna be some of the only things not powered by electricity in the node graph. Lots of fun divergent gameplay that I wanna pull outta these ideas!