This hints at one of the things I wanted to mention, and it also ties in to some things folks said earlier about tying an Age to a specific event. In my mind, when I think about technological ages, I see the flow of human history where people took the resources around them and used them to their best ability for the good of the population. Over time as the population's skill at gathering and using the materials in the way they knew to grew, they reached a saturation point - some point where they could not progress further. Either there was a limit to the resources available, or there were just not enough hours in a day to accomplish anything more using the established methods.Battlecat wrote: In both places, the waterwheel and the mechanical power provided was critical to increasing iron production speed and yield. In game right now we use iron very inefficiently. People were working iron long before the mechanical approach, mechanization improved efficiency and quality (more heat = better steel). Perhaps a mechanical approach could yield new options in minecraft as it did in the real world. The iron age seems to be an obvious next step, particularly within FlowerChilds state goal of enhancing and extending minecraft without massively altering the original gameplay.
And then, something would happen, and it would change the way everyone did things.
A good (and BTW applicable example) is the milling of wheat into flour. In ancient times, nearly every common woman in the village would begin her day by collecting water for the household, baking the day's bread from yesterday's flour, and then milling flour for the next day. They did this by hand with simple stone tools. I don't know if any of you have ever done this process before, but it took me a good hour and a half just to mill enough flour (1.5 cups) fine enough for a loaf of bread. Larger families, as was desired in those times, could easily go through several loaves of bread a day. The introduction of mechanical energy to mill flour was a lightning rod in that situation. In the same hour and a half, instead of having enough flour for one loaf, I could have an entire day's supply, and possibly more depending on the exact efficiency of the design. Even if I still have to attend the millstone while it is working, I can do other things - and I will certainly have the rest of the day to devote to more resource collection and use. It's the same as Battlecat says above - mechanical power increases the efficiency of output as a side effect gives people the freedom to do other tasks if additional output is not needed.
As for how this applies to BTW and it's (st)ages - there's been talk of bottlenecks, and events, and even lines drawn at individual blocks. I think it's less linear. Less, "Age start here - Age end here" and more flowing through peaks and valleys of efficiency. In the beginning we collect our resources by hand (literally) and build one little hut because that's the most efficient way to do it. We can't really do more than that to start - we've reached our maximum efficiency. When we start crafting tools though, it opens up a whole new world of things to do. Opportunity, efficiency. Over and over again.
Ok, my brain is exhausted now. As a side note - congratulations on Turtle status Adjudicator79. You deserve it for truly living up to the meaning of your name. With my medical conditions it's often difficult for me to focus my thoughts enough to join into these sorts of discussions. Your beautiful framework that you maintain in this thread is just what I need, and being able to participate makes me happy beyond words. Thank you so very, VERY much.
