Better Than Wolves Forum

Hey guys,

As I mentioned in another thread, I'm considering adding an additional source of blue dye to the game so that I can once again bump up the amount of lapis used in Detector Block construction without leaving folks hoarding all their lapis and not having an effective source of blue dye.

I've been tossing around a couple of ideas so far:

-Blue flowers (kinda dull if I'm going to have to consume a block id for this).

-Blueberry plants, which are more historically accurate, and probably more interesting to farm (as I'd be sure to come up with a unique farming mechanic to cover the bushes/berries). Still, this would be pretty limited use to be hogging a block ID. I could however make this an alternate source of food as well.

I wanted to throw it out there though in case anyone came up with other alternatives which might also produce an output I could use in other recipes down the road, which might not be dye-specific, or perhaps an entirely different source of the dye other than plants, which might even already be built into the game.

Have at it :)

We could make blueberry pie with it :) and hey while your at it make pumpkin pie seeing as we can grow those too they wouldnt even need to use up any extra block IDs. As for other uses maybe FC you could come up with a way to make the "vine" of the blueberry vine useful in making something later on... no clue what but hey worth an idea.

Would flowers/berries require a new ID or could they use the damage trick and act on the same ID as something already existing? If a new ID would be needed then perhaps have blueberries drop from tall grass or something similar? Since we can make 8 wool with one lapis in the cauldron (we can, right? I haven't tried it but I guess it behaves like the other dyes) another solution could be to have the DB use e.g. 4 lapis - thereby still being less resource expensive and not needing a new ID.

EDIT: Were you thinking of adding some form of alchemy or am I remembering wrong? If you are planning, then having more plans could obviously serve new uses with such a system.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved seven artificial colorings for food, including two blues: Blue No. 1 and Blue No. 2—which are often combined in food products like M&Ms.

Blue No. 1 is called "brilliant blue" and, as is typical of modern dyes, was originally derived from coal tar, although most manufacturers now make it from an oil base. Blue No. 2, or "indigotine," on the other hand, is a synthetic version of the plant-based indigo that has a long history as a textile dye.

Coal tar is a brown or black liquid of extremely high viscosity, which smells of naphthalene and aromatic hydrocarbons. Coal tar is among the by-products when coal is carbonized to make coke or gasified to make coal gas. Coal tars are complex and variable mixtures of phenols, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and heterocyclic compounds, about 200 substances in all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_tar

;)

Add mussels. Historically a source of purple dye, or red, there's no reason one can't use them for blue. You can get mussel meat from them, or shells which can be ground for fertilizer, or abalone which has several desirable properties, such as:

"The shell of the abalone is exceptionally strong and is made of microscopic calcium carbonate tiles stacked like bricks. Between the layers of shells is a clingy protein substance. When the abalone shell is struck, the tiles slide instead of shattering and the protein stretches to absorb the energy of the blow. Material scientists around the world are studying the tiled structure for insight into stronger ceramic products such as body armor.[4]" -Wikipedia

On top of this, it would require underwater farming, which is a nice break from having half a dozen or so plants in an above ground farm, as well as new challenges of collection. Oh, and pearl diving.

Urian wrote: EDIT: Were you thinking of adding some form of alchemy or am I remembering wrong? If you are planning, then having more plans could obviously serve new uses with such a system.

Well, it already looks like I've put an alchemy system in place right? ;)

But yeah, that's the kind of thing I'm hoping for: an idea here that either comes naturally out of elements already found in the game/mod, or something entirely new which is open to additional *interesting* uses down the road (and no, I don't mean pie).

One additional (so-so) idea I just had was to cook slime down into dye. There aren't many blue elements in the game, but if you "cook the yellow off" the green slime, I guess that could make some sense.

Battosay wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_tar

Ooooh! I like that idea! Gives us a lot of stuff to spend our coal on though. nethercoal for furnaces and torches and coal dust for steel. Maybe the tar could be a by-product of grinding the coal into coal dust? (even if that isn't totally honest to how you produce it in the real world.)

EDIT: Actually, Necropolis' idea about mussels is quite interesting as well. Maybe even more so than coal tar.

Having another farm to automate would be pretty fun. I'm assuming blueberries could act as another source of food, too?

BinoAl wrote:Having another farm to automate would be pretty fun. I'm assuming blueberries could act as another source of food, too?

Yeah, that would be the idea. I'd also want to come up with a unique farming mechanic for them potentially involving horizontally growing bushes or what have you.

I kinda like the underwater farming idea mentioned above too. That would indeed put a new spin on things. Something that only grew in the Nether might also be interesting, as it would act as an incentive to setup shop there instead of just making quick visits, especially if that "something" had additional uses in other aspects of the mod.

Given how heavily red-dominated the Nether-palette is though, having a blue-element in there might be rather odd.

Apparently mussels also have traditional medicinal and potion making uses. The Green-lipped mussel is an anti-inflammatory used for asthma and arthritis, carrier shells (not technically a mussel, but who the hell cares) are being looked into for bone cement for fractures, some other things were used for stopping internal hemmoraging, and the like.

I'm supporting the coal tar idea, as it's the kind of thing that can loosely tie into the tech tree and yet has alternative uses.

Stormweaver wrote:I'm supporting the coal tar idea, as it's the kind of thing that can loosely tie into the tech tree and yet has alternative uses.

Yeah, it's a good idea, but it's a bit "high-tech" for my taste though. Obviously, the tar needs further processing to turn into a dye, and that's the part that I'm not so keen on as it's a little more advanced than "basic alchemy" IMO.

I'd much rather have a less scientific, and more intuitive approach to this.

This is not really anything to do with other ideas, but if you put mossy cobble under water for a prolonged amount of time the blue pigment (or anything else that makes sense) disolves of and will throw out a bit of lapis in a similar way to the mill stone.

FlowerChild wrote:I'd much rather have a less scientific, and more intuitive approach to this.

Lol, yeah sorry, that's the scientist in me ^^
In my lab we oftenly use polyphenols to dye different materials, so that's the 1st thing I came up with ;)
I thought it could be somehow related to alchemy for the final extracting part, and would be more fun than a basic and not original blue flower, but I can see the technological gap there.

Is grinding the lapis into a powder and using it in the cauldron to stretch supplies a viable idea?

My preference is a flower or other plant that directly provides a blue dye when ground or boiled as that is a basic & straight-forward means for providing renewable blue dye.

I was originally going to suggest coral as a renewable source of blue dye, but the more I think about the clam/mussel idea of Necropolis, the better it sounds.

The diverse applications of the mussels - food, medicine, dye - certainly would allow its future use.

Additionally, by putting in clams as mobs instead of blocks, you won't even need to use up another block id.

As a final note, if mussels were to be used, why not involve pearls? Those pearls could possibly serve as the lapis lazuli-like gem for detectors and dye, and they could occassionally drop from the clams like eggs do from chickens. With this method, you wouldn't even need animal breeding to farm the dye/pearls, much like the way chicken farms are possible now.

I really like the mussels idea (after a search to translate it to "moules" for the French speaking).
We have a lot of this cultures in my region (Bretagne, the westernmost part of France) and I can see how it would be challenging to aulomate this process.
Hell, we are more advanced then Steve but there's still a lot of manual process in the whole harvesting chain.
The process include a growing stage on Bouchots which are big wood poles planted on the sea floor on which we let the mussels grow for quite some time. When they are mature, we wait for a low tide and go get them to throw them in a cauldron with a good measure of white wine and some other ingredients then we eat them the way Belgians taught us : with a lot of French fries.

My completely silly idea was a new mob : "SMURFS" (that we call "Schtroumphs"). We can go Gargamel on them and eat them, transform them into gold or into blue Dye.

I like the mussel idea. It is something that makes sence tech wise, it doesn't rely on digging down in the earth like so much else of MC does, and it is not another "insert x here, wait, and collect y" sort of thing like coal tar probably would be. The shells of mussel contain lime, which may be something to do other stuff with in the future, and maybe if you have to filter out mussels out of seawater, salt can be obtained in the same way if you have a use for that.

rbh wrote: My completely silly idea was a new mob : "SMURFS" (that we call "Schtroumphs"). We can go Gargamel on them and eat them, transform them into gold or into blue Dye.

Smurfs are awesome, don't mess with smurfs.

I personally think that the blueberry bush would be a lot of fun to try to automate

rbh wrote:My completely silly idea was a new mob : "SMURFS" (that we call "Schtroumphs"). We can go Gargamel on them and eat them, transform them into gold or into blue Dye.

Lol ! Fuck yeah !
I always wanted to hunt and kill those blue perverts things ! (Only one girl ? For hundreds of guys ? Really ?!)

I'd just like to point out that I LOVE the idea of an underwater resource. I'm not quite sure if I like mussels though.

Maybe you should go just a little fantasy here, in line with vMC. Add some sort of clam-like thing that is not necessarily a mussel and give it the properties you want. Make it clearly blue to make the die extraction obvious and perhaps follow up on the idea of rare pearl drops (if there's a further purpose to attach to them).

I just don't think the term "mussel" would work, since players don't associate them with dyes at all. Making a clearly blue clam-like opens up much more gameplay and makes more intrinsic sense.

I think the coal tar would probably be the simplest solution. However, the blueberry bushes with unique farming properties would be neat and give us more to automate. That being said, I think the mussel idea would bring the most to the mod. Under water farming isn't something that's been explored in too many mods and would present new technical challenges and opportunity for expansion of the mod. Plus the possibility of pearls for alchemy is pretty exciting.

The information you provided regarding the Bouchots for collecting mussels and the boiling for cooking is both fascinating and supportive to the idea rbh.

By placing a peice of moulding, fence or block of wood under water, that might establish the requirement for mussels to spawn. (That's assuming the coding for mab spawn conditions could work that way) With this, one doesn't have to waste time going out searching for them.

I'm fond of the idea of a plant source of blue dye. Complex farming in the form of hemp is an excellent aspect of the mod so far. But as you've said, it's unreasonable to use a block ID to the game with only one use. So I did a bit of research on blueberries, and I've listed some potential uses below. I hope I'm not overstepping the bounds of your request.

- Cooking is the most obvious one: Muffins, pies, etc.
- They were indeed actually used by Native North Americans as a dye.
- Historically the leaves were used by Natives to make a medicinal tea. Possible alchemy component.
- They are a woody plant. Perhaps harvest of the main plant base could yield sticks.

Thoughts about potential in game behaviors based on real blueberry plants:
- Blueberries are bush plants. They are traditionally trained onto supports to keep the berry loaded branches from leaning. Maybe they grow up against fences.
- Berry growers in my area have to go to extremes to keep animals away. Whole fields are covered in nets.
- Trade off, perhaps it produces two different materials depending on how/when it is harvested. IE: Leaves or berries for different uses.
- It should certainly be as slow to grow as hemp. It's a bog plant so fertile soil should be a necessity.

Anyhow, I'm seeing a lot of good ideas here, I hope this helps.

Battosay wrote:I always wanted to hunt and kill those blue perverts things ! (Only one girl ? For hundreds of guys ? Really ?!)

Why do you think they were all blue? :D