Author: allaryin

After several weeks of occasional headaches, and several long nights of more consistent headaches, there is now a very very buggy 1.7.10 build of EBXL 3.16.alpha in testing.

When I say “very very buggy”, you probably imagine something that has bugs. Don’t. Imagine something with bugs, but those bugs have bugs. And those bugs are on fire.

But it runs and doesn’t crash Minecraft any more (that was fun).

The code on github is mostly current. However, I am not going to provide a link to a compiled jar here – you guys don’t really want to look yet. But soon, it will get better, and I’ll make a more public beta release that people might actually want to play with. 

Many thanks to Asie for doing most of the heavy lifting these last few nights to get things running after I burnt out.

To volunteer your own sanity to the cause, stop by our irc channel, #extrabiomes on irc.esper.net. And for those of you who somehow do come into possession of a copy of the 1.7 alpha branch of the mod, please report any issues on Github.

The question has come up of which BiomeDictionary types we’re actually registering for everything now. So, in the name of making a really cool chart, I present to you this:

I’m sorry about the wait – there’s not a lot of good reason why this build wasn’t out 2 or 3 weeks ago. But it’s here now. Like I promised in April, this is mostly a bunch of bugfixes with a few minor functionality updates. So, without further bumbling apology, the release:

Change Log

So, it’s apology time. We’re way behind on our release schedule and it’s about 80% my fault. Even my kids are starting to pester me for an update. We have good excuses including multiple illnesses and ridiculous work schedules – but nobody cares about that.

The main reason things have been taking time is that our work on the 1.7.x release was stalled when we saw some of Mojang’s patch notes for 1.8 – that completely invalidated things that Shecky was working on at the moment. And that’s kind of demoralizing – knowing we have to make a change… that we will have to undo in the immediate future.

But we’re back on top of things and progress on the 1.7 update is moving along nicely – it’s still not there but it’s coming along. That said, we do have an update for 1.6 in testing. It is primarily a bugfix release but fixes strawberries a bit and should make upgrading to 1.7 easier when that time comes.

Strawberry Behavior Update
My initial strawberry release had things working how Pam’s Harvestcraft regrowing crops work. They’re nigh indestructible and replant themselves at 50% growth when you harvest their fruit by breaking them. The way you get rid of them is digging the ground out underneath and maybe then breaking the floating plant. It’s not the most elegant solution but it’s fast and a major food mod uses it.

But it’s not what most people expect. So, I’ve rewritten things to work more like Natura’s cotton. Left or right clicking will harvest the crop if it is ready (and won’t reset its growth by accident). Holding left click for a few seconds to break the block will break the plant and require you to replant it.

So hopefully this is more useful for everyone.

Bugfixes
There are also some minor issues with strawberries and Waila that we will definitely be fixing for the next update.

Right now, the only real outstanding bug is a potential issue reported with newer versions of ATG. We’ve not had a chance to look into this yet – but we will do so soon and will include any necessary fix in the release if we find one.

So bear with us, we’re getting there, it’s just taking a bit longer than anyone hoped it would.

We’re kind of awash with ideas and plans here at EBXL headquarters. And it’s getting to be a problem. See… we want to provide all of these features, but in so doing we risk damaging the focus of the mod. Eventually every large mod has to choose whether or not to stick to their original plan or go the kitchen sink route and start implementing tangential features that stray further and further from the core.

My strawberries are a good example of this dangerous border territory.

Is it appropriate for a biome mod to provide decorative flowering plants? Of course. Is it appropriate for those plants to also be useful? Absolutely. But how useful? How many systems can they provide before those systems start to get in the way of what was previously largely aesthetic?

It doesn’t make sense not to provide edible plants here and there… but it also doesn’t make sense to inundate the player with 30 new types of fruit and a system for mixing custom beverages out of them. Strawberries themselves are appropriate for inclusion in the mod, but certain features that I wanted to implement with them were not.

But I AM going to write those features. And I’m going to write lettuce, onions, and tomatoes too… I’m just not putting them all in EBXL Core.

When we release our 1.7.x build of the mod, we will be introducing the concept of official EBXL add-ons. These will be mods developed by the team that implement things that we want to see but also realize that some people may not – so we aren’t going to force them on you. The main mod will continue to provide all of the functionality that it traditionally has – but it will also serve as a launching point for any add-on mods that we release.

In general, these add-on mods will be released separately from the main mod, and should maintain compatibility with a number of EBXL Core versions. Add-ons will also typically increase the complexity and difficulty level of the world in various ways.

Right now, we have 2 submods that we’re talking about implementing – with numerous other ideas that haven’t quite yet been categorized.

Farming Add-on

The first add-on we will release is (for lack of a better name) EBXL Farming. It will eventually grow to be a fully featured food mod with interesting crops and even more interesting ways to use them.

Strawberries will remain in Core, and we will be joined by a handful of other edible wild plants. They will, however, not be farmable. So I will be nerfing Core’s wild strawberry plants and removing the seed recipe. Seeds and reliably renewable sources of custom food will go into the add-on. The add-on will also be adding a lot more edible plants that don’t fit in the main mod.

Similarly, the chocolate recipe will remain in Core. It’s honestly something that Mojang should have implemented themselves in vanilla. But since they didn’t, we’ll provide the recipe ourselves out of all vanilla components. And we’ll continue to provide a recipe for chocolate covered strawberries. But those recipes will just use the vanilla 3×3 crafting grid.

The add-on will introduce new cooking mechanics. This means new machines/tools/etc… that are outside of the scope of the main mod. If you install the add-on, it will optionally disable any vanilla-style cooking recipes that we add to Core in favor of more interesting ones.

If it sounds like I’m being vague, well… maybe I am. The full scope of the farming mod is just a bit too big for this post. I’ll go into more detail when the time comes. But one other thing I will mention is that you won’t need to run electrical wires from a generator in order to can your strawberry jam. Our machines will remain relatively low tech – no plugs involved.

Fantasy Add-on

The second add-on will be EBXL Fantasy (also for lack of a better name). This is were biomes that don’t exist in the real world will go. Like the old Forgotten Nature (Trees++) crystal forest. We’ve not forgotten about it, but crystal trees just don’t fit in a mod that tries to base everything on reality.

I have no clue what else might eventually actually go into this add-on, but we’ve got a laundry list of features that may change the behaviors of existing biomes. Like wasteland. Something will probably happen to it in the fantasy add-on. Probably.


If all goes well, the farming add-on will ship its first public build within hours (or days – but not weeks) of our public 1.7 release candidate. Fantasy is still way out there – we are still just in the planning phase there.

So here we are again. The 3.15.2 patch is actually pretty big – and while we were feature complete on Tuesday, the team has spent the last few days hunting down some bugs. We hope you like it. And by it, I mean chocolate covered strawberries.

You can download it here.

It has long been one of my biggest complaints with vanilla MC that they never really make good use of the materials they provide you with. I mean, take pumpkins for example. They have have been around since alpha but have only been edible since 1.4.

In this case, MC provides us with all of the raw ingredients for chocolate – but doesn’t actually let us make “chocolate”. Sure, we can make cookies, but the recipe is strange, and have you ever eaten a cookie that doesn’t contain any sugar? *shudder*

EbXL 3.15.2 introduces farmable strawberries. You can find them growing wild in a variety of places. The bushes regrow, so you only need to plant them once and then punch them when they’re ready to harvest.

By themselves, strawberries aren’t terribly valuable as food. But because of the effort involved in producing it, chocolate is a bit more filling. And chocolate covered strawberries are more valuable than their individual ingredients would be if eaten separately.

These strawberries are the first of what will be many interesting crops that we plan to introduce, and are really meant as a test of the crop system. EbXL 3.16 will flesh out the system with more types of crops and recipes from them. We will, however, try not to be overwhelming with it – and are thinking about making an optional addon that contains additional crops and recipes for those who really like that sort of thing.

Bone meal super powers activate!

In addition to crops, we’re also adding two new classes of plant to EbXL. Namely – underwater and vine plants. Expect to see more interesting varieties of these in the future. 🙂 We’ve also added another regular flower that turns into cyan dye and have added custom dyes to provide colors that vanilla reuses for other purposes – which means we produce all dye colors except grey and dark grey.

Eelgrass grows under water.

Gloriosa flowers grow like vines.

Changelog

• Added delphinium belladonna and blue poppies.
• Added new dyes for white, black, brown, and blue.
  • Updated some flowers to now produce these dyes.
• Added eelgrass subaquatic plant.
• Added gloriosa vines.
• Added configuration settings to control the density of new flowers in each biome.
• Added strawberries, chocolate, and chocolate covered strawberries.
• Improved ability of flowers to spawn in snowy biomes.
  • Removed toadstools from snowy biomes.
• Fixed some plants that were unintentionally changing colors to match their biome.
• Fixed the “already decorating” errors sometimes encountered when generating large trees.