Gameplans: Added an Example for how to use Items (Bottle)

Example for Items and their Interactions

Lets say you have a Bottle with a Liquid in it, what do you think can you do with it?
First the most obvious, drink it and you get whatever Effects that Liquid has, Nutrition, Drugs, Potion Effects whatever you drank was. This is typically the use Action.
Now what about throwing the Bottle at someone? Well that would be the chuck Option, and result in something similar to Splash Potions in Minecraft (+ Physical Damage of the Bottle itself hitting), but only if the Liquid actually has a “Splash Compatible Effect”. A Bottle of Acid would for example have an obvious one, Booze would drench you in alcohol and make you slightly more flammable, while Water and most Juices etc. could extinguish you, or at the very least make your Clothes dirty, especially dirty when it was a Dye!
But what if you dont just wanna throw a Bottle at someone? What if you just whack it on their Head? Well, the Bottle itself would break, causing the Splash Effect and Physical Damage, but as a Bonus you now have a broken Bottle that can be used as a Melee Weapon.
Both the whack and the chuck option would result in Glass Shards spraying on the floor, which can but usually don’t harm people walking over them.
So what about forcing someone to drink the Bottle? Well that would be part of the action Menu, because it is an unusual use of the Bottle. Same would go for putting Poison from a Bottle into Food, as it’s not a commonly done thing.
And if you want to coat a Surface in a fluid by just dumping the Bottle onto the Floor, a Person or something similar, that is also action Menu. And unlike chuck and whack this will not end up breaking the Bottle. A lot of unusual things will be in this Menu.
When the Bottle happens to be empty, you can just use it on something that can fill it with Liquid, like a River, a Tap or a bleeding Creature. I should mention that some of these Actions will require a few seconds worth of time and can be interrupted by others.
Not to mention Bottles dont have to contain Fluids, they could contain Solids and Dusts too, or small Creatures like Insects and Frogs, or even Gasses, though that last one is usually harder to manage. Letters, Molotows and Miniature Ships are also an Idea!
Filling an Object in your Inventory, for example a Cup, would also be in the action Menu, as it also requires you to select which Cup to use from your Inventory.
Last but not least, ofcourse you can put the Bottle on a Shelf or the Floor or whereever. And then maybe put a Firework Rocket in it and light it!
This is just one Item, yet there is so many possibilities for its usage!
And there will even be some nonesense in the action Menu like “eat the Bottle”, though those will be sorted to the bottom of the List (but still above “Misc”).
Generally the action Menu is sorted depending on which Actions will make most sense, and you can sort certain Actions by proving you can use them that way. Like a Firework Rocket on a Crossbow, which will be sorted into the “Misc” category at first, until you discover this can be weaponized very well, and they go up into the Ammo Category (which for Crossbows is at the top).

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You will need to think of a way of relaying possible actions to the player in a context sensitive menu, or risk overloading them with information.

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Yeah actions that are not actually possible will ofcourse not be shown at all. And things you never actually tried out will be in the Misc Submenu at the very bottom (that Submenu might also just end up being at a special location in the UI).

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I want to know whether the bottle ( or test tube, sink, even bucket) can be a kind of chemical reaction container.
This applies to some chemical reactions that do not require harsh reaction conditions.( e.g. NaOH+ H2SO4)
In this way, even in the early stages of the game, some important reactions can be made without the need for highly specialized chemical reaction machine.
Those specialized reaction machines can be used to process recipes that require strong reaction conditions.

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Yeah it should be possible to simply mix Fluids inside a Bottle. Though I would recommend using a Glass Jar for that instead, simply because of the larger opening. (otherwise you might end up needing some Dexterity Stat or Funnel in order to successfully pull that off)

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Can I say chemistry set blocks, with funnels, bunsen burners, beakers, flasks and distillation columns?

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You can say all those things, at least i hope you can, unless your Voice Box is broken. XD

But yeah I am planning to very slowly add those things, though I might do something more akin to the Brewing Stand or a Crafting Token Block, where you just select the Recipe and it happens. Though those might just be a convenience thing so you dont need to do shit manually, so the normal “each step done manually” way still exists.

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You have the test tubes already, what are those things for by the way? Gotta collect 'em all?

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Currently only used the make the Material Books much cheaper, and also to make sure that Liquids work too with crafting said Books.

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Key Items

There will be a special Item Inventory, usually with Items you start with or that custom Scenarios can give you.
When you respawn you will still have said Key Items, and you cannot drop Key Items on the Ground, in the World, nor into Chests.
The only special thing about Key Items is that they are in the Key Item Inventory. Any Item could be placed into said Inventory (using Startup Items, Commands and Cheats).
A typical Startup Item could be a Music Player, which would be the way you enable special background Music ingame (but only for yourself) and have no real effect on anything. (there will be a way to compose Music ingame similar to Noteblocks but better)
Same can go for certain types of decorative Clothes, which some people ofcourse dont want to lose on respawn.
It would for example be possible to have a Spear in the Key Items Inventory, and you could melee attack with it, but you could not throw it at people because Key Item, unless it would be an infinite Spear Item.

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Two things,

One, this inventory kind of sounds like how I would use an ender bag, keep all my personal stuff in it that I can retrieve if my game bugs out and I lose my inventory.

Second, if the items are placed there by the game and you can’t lose them or voluntarily give them up, wouldn’t this be more akin to main menu option or the like?

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This would be for Quest Items and similar, that you are not supposed to lose under any circumstances.

And a Music Player could also play regular Audio Files, or Audio Logs that you could pick up in a quest Map, that is why I mentioned it as an example.

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Tools and their Behaviour

Bottles are fine and well, but what about Tools like a Pickaxe or a Sword? Lets go and explore that!
A Pickaxe is made out of two Parts typically, the Tool Head and the Tool Handle, but a lot of people forget that the Tool Head actually is two Parts, and I am not talking of the Bolt holding together the Handle and the Head.
The Front Pointy End of the Pickaxe Head and the Back Pointy End are two different Tools, even when they both happen to be the same Type.
This means you can just turn your Pickaxe around once one of the Pointy Ends happens to become less pointy due to whacking Blocks with it, this can be done in the action Menu as it is a Mode Switch of some sort, and may also happen automatically if both Pointy Ends are the same Type of Pointy End.
A Side Effect is that there is multiple Types of Durability on a single Tool. Each Toolhead itself can become less sharp/pointy/etc when you work with it, and therefore useless for working.
It either doesn’t lose Matter at all, or only so minimal amounts that you wouldn’t notice, like single specs of Dust that will drop in the World, which are technically “there” but nobody would be able to pick them up without some insanely serious scrubbing.
This first Type of Durability Issue can be fixed by a Grindstone (which will also cause small but significant amounts of Dust) or by Re-Forging/Re-Smelting a Tool. Afterall Tool Creation Recipes aren’t going to be very precise about the Amount of Required Material to make them, so losing some Dust wont need to be replaced when Re-Crafting the Tool.
The Second Type of Durability is also rather obvious, the Tool Handle can break in some way, sure the Tool Head will stay intact, but you cant really use it without replacing the Handle.
Now for the Third Type of Durability that might be less obvious: Corrosion. Some Materials might become Rusty in certain Environments, like Iron in a Moist Area for example. But this takes ages ofcourse. What doesn’t take ages is the Rust that builds up on your Sword if you don’t clean off the Blood from it, or if you slice a particularily corrosive Slime with it.
Corrosion will have the Side Effect of actually changing the Material your Tool is made out of, to be a certain percentage of Rust. How you get rid of said Rust will highly depend on the Material that rusted in the first place, sometimes Re-Smelting is just enough, sometimes you need to actually process the Metal chemically to do so.
The Handle itself can Rust or Rot too, resulting in a 4th Type of Durability. If you want to replace the Handle, just pop the Tool Head off the Handle in the action Menu, and combine it with another Handle. This may require some Tools depending on Handle Material and if the Handle is welded/part to the Head or not.
Certain Tools can also be used for multiple purposes, for example a Pickaxe could open a Crate or Door just like a Crowbar could, since it’s essentially a Lever. Though such options would be in the action Menu for Pickaxes while they would be the primary use of a Crowbar and also faster.
One thing I do not want to do is clutter peoples Inventories with seemingly mandatory Tools that take up Volume and Weight, so a lot of Tools can be “misused” for other purposes, like a Pickaxe or Wrench can totally work as a Hammer even if it’s inefficient and slow.
Another way to reduce Tool overload would be just dropping the Tools you don’t use in World. You can totally just put your Pickaxe on the Floor in the Mines for when you come back, Item Despawn wont be a thing whatsoever. Spontaneously grabbing Tools whenever you need them is going to be easy, and Tools needed for Crafting other things in a Crafting Menu, can just lay around closeby without having to be in your Inventory.

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Would this cause an object or surface to have the aspect: dirty?

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Yeah something like that, it would actually just be some additional info stating “there is X units of dust on this block”. You know how Microblocks in MC work? Where you can add more Sub-Microblocks to the thing? Something like that, but the spec of Dust wouldn’t be big enough to actually take Space for a Hitbox/Collisionbox.

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I like the persistance of assets, are you worried people will abuse this to crash the system?

Edit-

could make it so a limited number of items can be dropped in that location.

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It’s as if you wanted to use Minecraft Chests within Minecraft Chests until the NBT of them Stackoverflows, this takes way too much to happen, and it’s not single specs of dust being saved, it’s “Number multiplied with Dust” per Material, and after a certain Number of Dusts it will definitely get a Hitbox and Collisionbox and even become visible (I might make the Dusts part of the Air Block in that case).

And as far as I understand ECS, Blocks with an identical amount of Dust (and identical everything else) in them will share the same “ID” type of thing. But I will let @OvermindDL1 confirm this or not.

Also I could even do this Dust thing in MC, if it wasn’t that every Block you can place just deletes whatever was previously at the target location… would be much better if the Dust was just pushed around to the closest other Block or something.

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Wait, what gets deleted? I thought you could only place a block on an ‘air’ block,

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Try placing a Block on a Snow Layer, it will remove the Snow Layer and place the Block.

Try placing a Block on a Carpet, it will not do anything as the Carpet cant be replaced, and there is no way to auto-move that Carpet to the left or something to place the Block there.

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Ah yes I see what you mean now, if it is known that a block is going to be removed is it possible to spawn an item entity in its place to pick up? Or is it not possible to identify the replaced block?

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