The End Of An Era???

I think this is an important topic to discuss despite (and possibly because of) the massive projects we are currently undertaking. In light of the new strategic attack on the farm caves by authorizing use of Diamond picks if they are enchanted.... going back to stone after it is completed is going to be very hard for most of our dwarves. I don't know if it is cost-time effective to revert back to our previous methods of digging. It may be time to end that era and begin a new. An era where we are continually allowed to use diamond-grade tools(Not armor or swords just yet) in order to rapidly expand the project and over-all EVOLVE the server from it's current state. A time of massive expansion at the expense of stockpiled reasourses. Our storage will eventually recover assuming each dwarf contributes more that they take but it may be time for change. It is not my decision to make, but it is something I think should be seriously considered. If we end up with a vote I cast my vote for the push for progress. But it is ultimately up to our admins to decide the fate of the server. It may be hard to make the choice but it needs to be made. Lets get a conversation going and decide in a little while so we can think it through completely.

I do know where you are coming from, however, I disagree.

Back when I was playing my single player, I spent ages mining. I would have massive branch mines, that extended hundreds of blocks in each direction, and I dug them all with diamond picks. I never used stone once I had diamond, and that's just how I worked. I had extreme surplus of materials, and everything was good. I couldn't even consider using a stone tool.

Once we began the dwarven city (admittedly, about a year later), we used nothing but stone picks. At first it seems like it is slow as all hell, and yes, compared to enchanted diamond picks, or even just regular, plain old, unenchanted diamond, it is a lot slower, but once you've dugout 10 picks worth of stone, you'll be completely used to using stone again, and the second you touch a diamond pick, you'll shit yourself about the speed. I've seen all the comments about it, and how well the diamond picks have been accepted because of the speed. Yes, it makes a big difference, but it is something everyone can get used to rather easily.

So, diamond picks are amazingly better. More than twice as fast, and last many times longer than stone picks, then why do I say that we shouldn't use them? It's a matter of sticking with what we started with. We have spent the entire dwarven city, 9 months worth of playing, using only stone picks, with the occasional iron pick thrown in. We have dug out the entire city using only the stone that we carved out of the earth. We count our digging progress by picks. Just like we have refused to accept any modding to the client or server, like we have chosen to play vanilla, and why we have chosen to play on hard difficulty, and why we are digging out the city in survival mode, rather than resorting to creative.

This is a team project, and I will not deny the wishes of everyone, however, I will voice my opinion, and let my motives be known. I will execute my power and completely forbid the use of any diamond axes, shovels, and hoes, as they are a complete waste of resources (I can provide an explanation if you really need it, but I'm sure you can all see why we don't need to bother with them). I personally, will always continue to dig with stone picks, just as I continue to eat rotten flesh.


Yes, the progress has sped up, and yes, it is almost necessary for a project of the scale of our farm caves, but I do not believe that it should lead to a new style of gameplay. There shall be opportunities to play differenly later on in the life of the server. As something other than dwarves, however, that time is not for now.

Yet again I'm with Brendan on this. However, I do have my own agenda as well. I have used diamond picks very few times during the 2 years I've been playing Minecraft, and when I did... well, it sure as hell was amazing but more importantly it felt similar to when you activate cheats in other games. When I sped through rooms with a diamond pick it didn't feel like I was actually digging, and when I was done I didn't get the usual feeling of accomplishment, but was instead left with a feeling of awkwardness. I would love to occasionally use diamond picks for the same reasons that I occasionally turn on things like invincibility or infinite ammo in games focused on killing things, but using them too much would kill the game for me. This is one of the reasons (another is my severely crippled internet) that I haven't dug anything for the past few weeks... those darn diamond tools are scaring me off.

When I play Single Player or on my other server, I always have a diamond pick on me. An Enchanted diamond pick. Actually, I usually carry two: one with Fortune III, one with Silk Touch. The Fortune III pick is obvious, I use it for all Fortune-affected ore: coal, lapis, diamond, redstone. The Silk Touch one I use, not only for fortune-unaffected gold ore, but for removing misplaced glass rather than breaking it, and for occasional removal of misplaced smoothstone, or supplemental gathering of small amounts of smoothstone to save me a trip back for more smelted smoothstone. I have taken to anal-retentively replacing ALL visible dirt, cobble, or gravel in the walls, floors, and ceilings of my base complex with dressed smoothstone. Heck, the inside of the darkroom of my item grinder is entirely dressed with smoothstone. When I run low on smoothstone while digging a tunnel or chamber, I'll sometimes dig out a few smoothstone with the Silk Touch pick to let me keep going until I run out of inventory space for cobble or run out of stone picks to dig it with, rather than running back early due to lack of smoothstone to patch up the walls as I go.

Other than that, almost everything is dug out with unenchanted stone picks. Aside from a first iron pick to get my first few diamonds (and any gold/redstone before I discover my first vein or two of diamond), I never even make iron picks.

I do make dozens of enchanted diamond picks. Especially now that I get XP from mining and smelting ore, coupled with my love of building XP grinders from dungeon spawners, I get plenty of XP to do it with. This does tend to leave me with a surplus of non-fortune, non-silk-touch diamond picks. Some of them I use for Obsidian mining, obsidian taking just so dang long even with Efficiency IV to work with. Once in a while I'll use another for special projects, when I've got an awful lot of stone to dig out and just want to get the project over with. But general mining and tunneling is still done with stone picks. Hoes and axes are ALWAYS stone, anything else feeling like a painful waste of resources.

So what else do I do with those non-Fortune/Silk Touch picks? On my other server, some of them go into the Newbie Chest at spawn to be donated to new players. Some get given away as gifts or traded to other players for raw diamonds or other rare resources. I used to use them to combine with the nubs of worn-out high-enchantment picks to yield new unenchanted picks for re-enchanting in hopes of more Fortune III and Silk Touch picks. Now that Anvils are coming out, those surplus failed-enchantment picks finally have another use. Barely-used low-enchantment picks can be combined with worn-down nubs of high-enchantment picks to yield restored and EVEN BETTER ENCHANTED picks for continued use on ore and other special blocks. Eff IV only? Combine it with the nub of your beloved Eff4/Unbr3/Fort3 pick to make a brand-new Eff5/Unbr3/Fort3 pick! Fort3 Only? Combine with one of those Eff4/Unbr3 picks for an awesome god-pick!

And yet the vast bulk of digging is still done with unenchanted stone picks. Because in the end, I'd rather see the durability be used up of stone, which I've got tons of clogging my storage chests, as opposed to diamond, which I'm chronically short on due to my producing more XP to enchant diamond picks than I produce diamond to make enchantable picks out of.

Additionally, I've found too often that when digging with enchanted diamond picks (and using an unenchanted diamond pick seems like a waste of potentially-enchanted diamond tools), I tend to zone out and not notice when I hit an ore pocket, leading to digging out a few fortune-affected ore with a non-fortune pick. When one is short on diamonds, finally hitting a diamond vein can be an exercise in frustration when you absent-mindedly chop the first couple of ore out with your Eff4/Unbr3 pick instead of your Fortune III pick, depriving you of potential bonus gems.

alright how about for anything we declare as a "massive project" we are going to use diamond picks on and for everything else it is stone and maybe an iron pick or two. I can Accept that happily. does anyone else have imput?

I'm also an advocate for the use of stone picks for every action other than mining rare minerals such as diamond which require iron pickaxes.

The only difference is that I tend to enchant stone picks en masse with efficiency and unbreaking perks via the use of grinders, most efficiently done by slaying Enderman. Here's a video of the Enderman grinder a player made in the other server I frequent, as you can see, I can go from level 0-30 in about 50 seconds.

Fifty seconds to build a tool that has the chance to last 2.1x more than iron and dig as fast as a diamond pick.

As a side note, while not playing on dwarven's, I find myself occasionally tempted to build iron picks rather than stone since their apparent abundance is more than enough to meet my digging needs.

I'm finding that iron picks are not something we want to use too much, as we have many many more uses for iron, which chews through it rather quickly

Supacreator wrote:alright how about for anything we declare as a "massive project" we are going to use diamond picks on and for everything else it is stone and maybe an iron pick or two. I can Accept that happily. does anyone else have imput?

I think this is the best way to go about things. When we were digging the dome many months ago stone was fine for the job. It was not such a huge and disheartening amount of stone like our current endeavour. Now that we have this huge area to excavate I think we can justify the use of sophisticated technology. I think this can also go for any other huge digs in the future. I'm talking like Farm Caves size though, anything less could be dug with cold stone.

Regardless of what picks we use, the city is going to be impressive either way. We are doing all the digging on hard difficulty in survival mode without any mods or plugins. I have seen similar projects that require a lot of digging but I have never heard of them restricting themselves as to what picks they use. I just worry that using stone picks only will hurt activity on the server from members with a small amount of patience.

I personally would use all the diamonds and enchants that I could, but seeing how much it means to everyone to use stone, I can go with that too.

Brendanan wrote:I'm finding that iron picks are not something we want to use too much, as we have many many more uses for iron, which chews through it rather quickly

yeah we build with the stuff

That is true... I think you'd find a good 5-8 stacks of those blocks as building material through the city

The 1.4 update nerfed villager trading for emerald farming. We can no longer trade a whole inventory of paper or wheat at once to a villager for a stack or more of emeralds to spend on diamond picks. Instead, we can only trade for 7-12 emeralds at once before the trade is closed...but not taken off the list. We need to buy or sell the other deals before that can happen. Which will likely eat much of our emerald supply. And unlike on my other server, because we haven't updated our map, we can't mine for more emeralds. Maybe we should dig a long netherrail line out into the distance, then portal back to the overworld in newly-generated terrain and look for some Extreme Hills to mine for emeralds.

Maybe we can't keep using diamond tools after all. Ah well, it was a good idea while it lasted.

Well, the plan is to get a dwarf mining session going sometime mid-december. That we can make maybe 1000 blocks away via nether railway line (8000 blocks overworld). That should, if we go in the right direction, be far enough to generate new terrain (not like our world isn't already 100MB)

spectrumwars wrote:The 1.4 update nerfed villager trading for emerald farming. We can no longer trade a whole inventory of paper or wheat at once to a villager for a stack or more of emeralds to spend on diamond picks. Instead, we can only trade for 7-12 emeralds at once before the trade is closed...but not taken off the list. We need to buy or sell the other deals before that can happen. Which will likely eat much of our emerald supply. And unlike on my other server, because we haven't updated our map, we can't mine for more emeralds. Maybe we should dig a long netherrail line out into the distance, then portal back to the overworld in newly-generated terrain and look for some Extreme Hills to mine for emeralds.

Maybe we can't keep using diamond tools after all. Ah well, it was a good idea while it lasted.

How exactly does this work? It wont let you trade to stock up on emeralds? You have to use them to buy stuff before they will let you trade anything for new ones?

They still offer trades for things like trading paper or wheat to the villager in exchange for emeralds. Slightly nerfed by raising the amount of paper etc. needed to buy a single emerald. But the big problem is that we can no longer load up a full inventory and trade 36 stacks of paper for a stack and a half of emeralds. If, for example, a villlager offers the trade of 23 paper for an emerald, if you do that seven times to get seven emeralds, it will stop buying paper for emeralds and you're gonna be left with over 30 stacks of paper still unexchanged.

If paper for emeralds was its only available trade, it will probably make another offer (in the case of a librarian, buying books or selling bookshelves, most likely). But until you do this new trade a couple of times, that paper-for-emeralds trade will still show up in the interface, just with a big red X over the transaction arrow to signify that it's not really interested in doing that trade any more. You just have to keep doing other transactions until it has four offers available. Then do whatever trade is in the fourth and final slot...and maybe, just maybe, instead of removing the paper-for-emeralds deal, it will open up again for a random 2-12 uses before shutting down again. After which you need to do other trades to encourage the villager to remove other offers and either reopen old trades or remove them from the list and replace them with other trades.

In the end, we'll end up spending a crapload of emeralds on useless, expensive stuff we don't want to waste emeralds on, just to try and get villagers to change their list of offered trades to include something we can get a few emeralds back on. Buying apples, cooked chicken, or leather pants is not a particularly good use of emeralds, but we'll spend half our emeralds on such crap just to get those offers off the list and replaced by something better.

Without the ability to cash in big on the few profitable emerald trades by trading dozens of stacks of those commodities at once, we probably can't use villagers as a reliable enough source of emeralds to buy diamond tools in the quantities we'd need to use them for regular digging.

So we should just skip the whole villager thing and save our emeralds for decorational purposes and emergency issues. Too bad.

I think that's best sret. We could get back to work in the mines :p earn our share of the diamonds :p

That's why you're working on a dwarven mining comeback?

yep It's on hold until exams finish, but yes, exactly