Better than Horses (No Alligators please)

[jorgebonafe]

It doesn't matter which addon you add last, we made sure they will work either way.

[DNoved1]

New Release: Here

Changes from the previous version:

• * Added hunger to horses. Your horses will slowly grow hungry throughout the day, and will attempt to graze on any grass nearby. They will also eat certain items off of the ground if they are close enough. Making your horse gallop or jump will consume extra hunger as well. Finally, you can roughly determine how hungry your horse is by the position of its tail: if it is raised the horse is full, if it is droopy then the horse is very hungry.
  
  * Added threshing to wheat. Wheat can now be harvested in two ways: by hand, whereby you will get only seeds, or with a hoe, whereby you will get the stalk. This stalk can then be threshed in the crafting grid with a shovel to produce seeds and straw. Straw can be fed to your horses or can be crafted into hay bales by combining nine of them in a crafting grid. Seeds can also be fed to your horses or can be ground into flour.
  
  * Fixed debugging (should definitely now be on) to assist in play testing. This means horses will never run from players, and you can tell what gender a horse is based on the particles it is emitting. If they are black, you have a male horse, if they are yellow, you have a female horse.

If you notice any bugs or have concerns regarding balance, please report them either here or on the github issues page here.

[Sandrew]

The one question concerning balance that I have is how your changes to wheat will affect automated wheat farms and by extension animal farms.

[DaveYanakov]

That is actually a valid concern but we have tried to mitigate this by making it so that wheat stalk items will be collected by BDs which can be used for feeding livestock and grinding as usual. Automated farms that use water or pistons for collection may be broken by the addon so as always, please back up your worlds before playtesting unfinished content. Horses are being designed to provide early and extended midgame gameplay but we will continue to look for ways to avoid damaging well established worlds.

[Kezza]

One Question, which Item ID uses the Straw?

[DNoved1]

Straw uses the same item id as wheat, with a metadata/damage value of 1. Hay bales use the same block id as the sponge, with a metadata/damage value of 1 as well.

[DNoved1]

Well, it's been a while since the hunger update, so I'd like to ask for observations on horses in general, but especially on the impact of horses having hunger. Is hunger ever a concern, or does having a decent-sized field prevent your horses from starving?

Also, some non-hunger related questions I'd like to ask: Have you ever accidentally killed a horse/yourself while riding one? Do you typically use horses as your main mode of transportation, or do you only use them situationally? Do you feel that horses are too fast, or perhaps too slow(I suspect they may still be too fast)? And finally, how do you feel horses fit in with the environment, do they fit in with the other animals, do they have problems in tight spaces(under trees for example), and do they feel like Minecraft/BTW?

[DaveYanakov]

The goal on hunger rates is to require a 256 square meter pasture to maintain horses that are living on grass alone. More efficient foods would allow for tighter population density if properly automated to avoid foundering as horses are entirely capable of eating themselves to death. Please let us know if you are requiring more or less pasture space per head.

[utakataJ6]

Just started BTH for the first; it's quite pleasing that it still works with the most recent minecraft.
I would like to discuss my observations, but I'm not sure how much I should avoid spoilers in this thread?

[Sockthing]

So what happened with BTH? Is anyone still working on it?

[Zeeblosity]

Is the hoe when harvesting wheat supposed to remain undamaged? I have a brand new hoe, and I harvested three stacks of wheat and not a single durability was taken. I don't know if it was intended or overlooked or what. I also just want to say thanks, I'm really enjoying this add on, even though I still haven't found a horse. I really like the added challenge (?) to harvesting wheat. Thanks again.

[DNoved1]

New Release: Here

Changes from the previous version:

• * Made hoe take damage when harvesting wheat. Oversight, definitely.

If you notice any bugs or have concerns regarding balance, please report them either here or on the github issues page here.

[FlowerChild]

Just wanted to mention people have been making a few balance observations over on the BTW MCF thread.

At present, there's a couple of comments about how it makes the game too easy as horses don't run away when they're attacked and thus are an easy early game source of food and leather.

If you take a look at my mods to the other animals, this should be a very easy change, as I believe you can just add in a call to my AI task for fleeing from the player in the constructor for your horses, and another call to panic nearby animals when they're attacked.

[DaveYanakov]

Thanks for the heads up FC. I'll send a couple messages.

[Larmantine]

Sorry for a stupid question, but do you have any link or thread that provides a comprehensive information about it? I seriously don't understand anything. All I know that horses emit particles and if i castrate a male horse he wont be emitting particles any more.

[DNoved1]

Balance issues.

I'll fix it by Sunday at the latest, assuming no one else does before me.

Lack of info.

Yellow particles are "females", black are "males". It's a temporary measure to help distinguish between the two. For general infomation, I would check the design document, here. Not everything has been implemented.

[Sockthing]

I would check the design document, here.

Thanks for that! Answered alot of questions :) Good Luck with bringing it all together :D

[Larmantine]

Thanks DNoved!

You should ask gates to add it to the first page.

[DNoved1]

New Release: Here

Changes from the previous version:

• * Horses act like other animals and run away when hit.

If you notice any bugs or have concerns regarding balance, please report them either here or on the github issues page here.[/quote]

I was planning on releasing additional changes today, however was unable to complete them in time. These changes will likely require a fresh installation of BTH, so I thought I'd give a heads up anyways (not that this is overly difficult to do, but it's slightly different from the usual drag-and-drop).

[WeedFather]

Pretty cool. Sounds like things are beginning to shape up a bit with this add-on. I'm a little surprised that the saddle is not used at any point yet, but however this add-on works is how it works.

[Epsilon]

Hello DNoved1,
I, and I personally guess many other people as well, have been observing this thread for a long time.
I have played with BTH a bit to try it and see how it is but personally decided it's still not 'finished' enough to be used in my game.
Through I wanted to tell you how much I like this mod and its basic idea; imo horses are something that has its place in vMinecraft, as well as in BTWMinecraft.

So what this post is intended to do, is to motivate you to keep up your work and finish this mod!

Unfortunately I can't think of a way to help you apart from thanking you for your great work so far.

Sadly whenever I played with the horses I where reminded of 'MoCreatures' before they joined to McForge, and therefore always compare your horses to theirs.
Although I know, from your design document, what you're planning and what your goals are.

so one last time: keep up your great work and finish the mod by implementing all the things you mention in your design document.
Greetings Epsilon

[DNoved1]

Experimental new version here.

This version is incompatible with previous versions installation wise, otherwise it should be fine.

There are two ways of using this version, both require minecraft with BTW installed and BTH not installed.

Spoiler

Show

1) Place the jar in the same directory as the "minecraft.jar" file and run it as a java program (double click in windows).
2) Open a command line in the same directory as the BTH file. Run "java -cp BetterThanHorses-0.22.jar btw/bth/install/Install". This will give you further options on how to use it, and will allow the complete un-installation as well as installation of BTH.