Better Than Wolves

May 3rd, 2013

• Added Hardcore Bouncing. This prevents the player from placing blocks while jumping or while otherwise in the air, in order to reduce the effectiveness of "pillaring" (particularly when creating shelters in the early game), increase the value of stairs and ladders, and in general to promote a little more thought going into support structure when working on construction projects rather than just placing a column of dirt.
• Added Hardcore Protection which is comprised of a number of changes and additions to how armor works in BTW, which are listed individually below.
• Added Wool Armor (it's more like clothing, but offers minimal protection). It is created with the standard armor recipes using wool blocks. Like leather armor, it may be dyed various colors. For now, it is always grey (assuming a mix of colors) when initially created, but I will likely base it on the color of wool used in crafting in a future release. It is intended to act as an early game source of very low level armor. Note that you may not make boots out of wool, as those would be socks ;)
• Added Padded Armor. It is created with the standard vanilla recipes, using Padding. It is as effective as leather, but has far less durability, and is intended as an early to middle game alternative to leather for those that decide to settle an area and farm rather than live a nomadic lifestyle. It may also be dyed like leather. Like with wool, you can not make boots out of Padding.
• Added "legit" Tanned Leather Armor, that may be made with the standard armor crafting recipes using Tanned Leather. The "Gimp" version still exists, and old sets will retain this appearance, however, those items (and their recipes) are now left as easter eggs. Tanned Leather Armor has the same protection values as regular leather, but twice the durability.
• Added Cut Leather, and Cut Tanned Leather as new items. They are created by combining leather in the crafting grid with shears, which consumes durability on the shears, but serves to increase the effective amount of leather you have on hand by reducing wastage. All recipes that use leather may use Cut Leather instead, creating "high efficiency" leather recipes, in a manner similar to what the Saw does for wood. This both serves to increase the value of shears throughout the game, making them a more integrated part of MC, and reduces the difficulty of acquiring leather since leather armor is now a much more important part of the game.
• Added Diamond Ingots as a new item. These are created with a diamond and iron ingot along with Creeper Oysters in the crafting grid. They replace diamonds in all tool, weapon, and armor recipes (other recipes that use diamonds, such as the Lens and enchanting table, remain unchanged). This is intended to balance the relative value of iron and diamonds in the early game, and lead to diamond tools being more of an "upgrade" to iron rather than an outright replacement.
• Added the ability to melt down diamond tools, weapons, and armor in the Crucible in order to recover the iron used in their creation (the diamonds themselves are lost).
• Added internal hooks so that add-on authors can create their own custom armor, and have it display on players and mobs with minimal effort.
• Added internal hooks so that add-on authors can have items either not be consumed or get damaged during the crafting process.
• Changed the Breeding Harness recipe to be 5 Tanned Leather in a "plus sign", with Straps at each corner, since the "Gimp" version of Tanned Leather armor is no longer considered a part of the main tech tree.
• Changed the recipe for Straps so that they are created by combining Cut Tanned Leather with shears in the crafting grid.
• Changed the recipe for Tanning Leather so that it requires Scoured Leather, Dung, AND a number of logs (for Tannin). The number of logs required is dependent on the species of tree, with the requirements left for the player to discover (even more Hardcore Wood!).
• Changed (further nerfed) the efficiency of stone tools on blocks to further encourage the upgrade to iron.
• Changed (greatly nerfed) the durability of wood and stone picks (this doesn't affect the other tool types of the same material) to further emphasize the advantages of upgrading to better ones, and to hopefully make branch mining with stone picks far less feasible to further encourage collection of iron in the early game through cave exploration rather than mining.
• Changed (optimized) the number of polygons that are rendered for snow, which should aid performance in taiga biomes.
• Fixed problem with picks not being efficient vs silverfish blocks.
• Fixed vanilla problem with the particles for block breaking effects rendering behind the cracks on the block itself. It was too annoying to leave as is.
• Fixed vanilla problem where tools would break at -1 damage instead of zero.
• Fixed problem with the Lens inventory render sometimes changing shape based on activity with other blocks.
• Removed the high efficiency book and item frame recipes using Tanned Leather, as that functionality is now replaced more elegantly by Cut Leather.