Feedback from first adventures

[xeruf]

• Does the pipe of a hobbit have a function?
• What can I do with Orc Steel?
• Automated Inventory Sorting?

Polish

• As mentioned in https://www.reddit.com/r/Minetest/comments/6w8lx2/lord_of_the_test_questions/, please don't let us spawn in Mordor
• Please add an indicator for missing health/food so I know whether to eat more - maybe there could even be a mechanism whereby the health can never regenerate beyond the food points you have.
• Shift-clicking from the furnace - generally taking items from the furnace is a bit janky
• Drag-dropping in the crafting grid plus double-click to pick up a full stack like in minecraft, but I guess that is something to polish upstream
• Shift-click to equip armor, mark the aesthetic slots
• Why does wooden armor speed me up that much? I would expect a higher base speed and it slowing me down. With it I can basically walk across water
• Why are wolves slower than me at slowest speed, so easy to kill and don't seem to ever drop anything?
• Mobs seem to sometimes spawn and despawn pretty close to the player

Suggestions

• The bags seem too easy - why can I carry three, and who would make a bag out of planks? At least sticks, then it could be a basket of sticks carried in the off-hand which looses items when attacked as an early-game item - that way there is a trade-off.
• Can you add smelting recipes, and implement search in addition to https://github.com/minetest-LOTR/Lord-of-the-Test/issues/151
• How about charcoal mod and waypoints by default?
• Labeling Bags, like in Minetest Exile
• Non-Walkable leaves, rather a few branches

[neinwhal]

Great suggestions; however, LOTT has reached the end of development, and most of the features you suggested here are too significant to implement and are best left for the rework: Third Age.

To address existing minor issues however;

• For pipe, place cooked pipeweed in your inventory next to it. Find and read "Hobbit Farming Essentials Vol. II", it provides the same information.
• Orc steel has a minimal function now of only crafting orc swords, it was added with more ideas in mind back then, but since the end of development, it is unfortunately just stuck in its limited state for now. I previously added the ability to convert them into normal steel, but I just checked and turns out the ingot recipe is bugged and I have just pushed a fix.
• Describe "janky" behaviour of the furnace.
• As you mentioned, inventory handling is an upstream issue. If you are looking to split the stack into 1 by 1 however, you can do that while holding the stack and using right-click. Or using right-click directly on the stack in your inventory to split it into half.
• Limitations of the engine prevent proper detection of where the shift-click should go, so it is only linked to the player crafting, which is the most direct choice.
• On bags being too easy, it is partially intentional, because of the exploration nature of the game, however, I agree that there are better methods to do that, but again that is out of the scope for LOTT.
• Mob drops are random and by chance, it is the case for all the mobs, not just wolves. As for balancing issues, LOTT is plagued with it, I agree, and I need to take a step back and relook at all the values someday.

There are a few other things that are intentional choices.

• Walkable leaves - More of a preference
• Lack of charcoal - I find it a lazy alternative to having to look for coal

Anything I didn't mention are major changes that require a rewrite of the API or existing systems and are best suited for Third Age. But I will leave this issue up until they are addressed in Third Age as well.

[xeruf]

Thank you for the insights :)

Furnace jankiness described here: https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/13103

The armor speedup is still really irritating - there should be a tradeoff, not a cheap way to make everything easier.