Ok here’s my idea, i’ve given it some thought and i think it might work with respect to balance issues as well.
Hunger: Xie’s hunger mod is good enough already, i’ve tested it and it works very well, especially since it doesn’t have a bar but instead it has a sort of warning light, adding to the whole uncertainty factor. In fact i think all needs should be implemented that way, it makes for a better, less crowded interface while adding to the experience. The only change i would make is making hunger lower your effectiveness with tools and maybe your movement speed (much like being in water reduces your effectiveness, only not to that degree right away).
Thirst: i’ve been thinking about the whole salt water/fresh water deal and i’ve figured the game probably doesn’t make the distinction already (seeing the behaviour is identical, like the texture) so, since i assume creating a whole new class to distinguish the two doesn’t make for good compatibility, i thought this up: First and foremost you should be albe to gather water from anywhere, sea or river, it shouldn’t matter. More importantly, you can gather it from the runoff as well as the spring point without removing it. Much like hitting a cow with a bucket gives you milk without killing the cow.
You can use bowls (already present in the game for mushroom stew), cups (made from stone on the workbench), pottery (I was thinking of this one as a possible new use for clay, but it’s just an idea since clay is extremely rare and has better uses), glass bottles (glass, obviously) and so forth. Each of these has a different capacity, with pottery and glass bottles being the best since they can be created directly bottle-shaped, while wood and stone have to be sculpted.
To work around the idea of the salt/fresh water dychotomy i thought this: nobody who’s smart enough to survive on his own by creating his own survival system drinks the water as he finds it. It has to be filtered at the very least, boiled if possible. So you can use a furnace to purify the water (assuming it’s fresh) or separate it from salt and purify it if it’s sea water. If you make it clear by labelling water you just picked up as “dirty water” or “unpurified water” it should also be fairly intuitive (to anyone with some notion of survivalism anyway). And even then intuitiveness is not minecraft’s strong point, is it?
Meanwhile, if we were to implement the difference between fresh and salt water we could also add a new object: leather+gravel+sand = a filter, which makes the water drinkable but not as good for you and hence makes it only 75% effective (or something along those lines anyway).
Disadvantage of dehidratation should surely be health degeneration and either blurry vision or slower movement. Afterall death by dehidratation is much faster than death by starvation.
Rest: This one is tricky. Resting should obviously contribute, at least partially, to health regeneration, which makes it a great balance issue because of mainly two reasons: a) it makes nights much less of a problem, because you can just rest until the sun is up and you’ll not only be healed but also have avoided most mobs (except the fucking creepers) and b) the player would have to leave the character in bed, since i think it’s not yet possible to have time skip forwards and, even if it was, it wouldn’t be possible in multiplayer (which to me would be the most fitting game type to showcase the full potential of this mod as per the reasons i posted above).
The first problem is actually quite easily balanced by the food and water problems: you can fuck around in bed all you want, you’ll need to eat and drink sooner or later. We should pay specific attention to the regen rate for sleeping in order not to override or balance out the degeneration from thirst. With that taken care of, i see no problem with having the player wait a few minutes in bed. Minecraft’s days aren’t that long and human beings are remarkably sturdy when it comes to not resting. The need for rest should be the one with the lowest degeneration ratio.
Here too we would have to create custom objects, obviously: beds with different levels of comfort. I’d go with leaves as the lowest (using the little twig things that drop when you destroy foliage on a tree or it degenerates after you destroy the last piece of trunk) middle one being hay (obtained as an additional drop from crops) (and maybe cotton if we want to go nuts and add a whole new vegetable) and the best being wool and dove (maybe with the perk of being colourable). It would finally give a reason for existing to wool other than lying around looking pretty and add a whole new level of depth to the game.
Disadvantages of lack of sleep should be blurry vision and weakness, that set in after the equivalent of three ingame days since the last six hours sleep.
I’ve not thought about heat or hygene yet, because they are much more complex concepts that would need bigger modifications, like the introduction of constant area-of-effect for heat sources or objects with contingent uses, for soap in water (plus i have no idea how one would make soap, unless one could use bones, which would need to be dropped from something other than skeletons as well). Plus they’re really minor needs that wouldn’t impact the game as much so i think we should leave them out entirely.
Any thoughts? is there something i said that is not a good idea/should be revised/any of you have particular suggestions about?
P.S. I used “we” because it felt natural while writing it, i’m not implying i’m actually going to work on this because, while i may be able to cook something up, being a computer engineering student and all, i don’t know java and don’t plan on learning it anytime soon. If, as english mothertongues, you find me using “we” is inappropriate in a suggestion, if i don’t actually plan to do jack, tell me so because this is one of those times when my educations fails me miserably.
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