New Pine Flora

[QueryEverything]

What great times we're in when resources are able to be mapped together, so new start conditions can be achieved with a little juggling on the gamers part

Fabulous work @Necora my game runs beautifully and I'm very happy with all the mapped goodies


I've added 2 pics, 1 a crudely edited view of what I am seeing in game, and a tip of the hat to @Necora  for also the smallest of details, adding an angled house diagram in the 'upgrade' button for the diagonal houses
Also, my mod load order in case anyone missed the tips higher in the thread.


Thank you to @tanypredator  for allowing your mod to be adapted by Necora  

[Abandoned]

@Necora just a note, hope you didn't miss @Nilla and my opinions posted above. 

[Discrepancy]

... the mod list description but then again those overly long descriptions in the mod list make it more of a task arranging the list especially when adding new mods.

sorry, I'm pretty bad at that. I will shorten mine from now on.

I also agree, keeping things all compatible is going to be hard now we are adding in lots of natural resources, new production chains calling for different production rates...
It will be good when banished comes out of beta.

[brads3]

><insert  image from REDK of trainwreck>< 
   thread derailed.

  this discussion probably should be moved to its own page. then other modders might see it and add their thoughts also. we don't mean to disrupt your work NECORA.
      i agree that all flax should work the same.no different than if we cut a tree and get logs.processed we have lumber,etc.it does fit better that way.

      NILLa,i think i get what you are saying or i need more coffee. that the bushes can be named and look different but when harvested give the same items so the inventory list doesn't get longer.so someone adds rasberry,you would see a different shrub. to the inventory it would show as berry.and it would also be used or processed as a berry. would work if it was a strawberry or a goose berry,etc. you have several different looks but all functioning and going to the inventory generically. just like the forester cuts down several different types of trees but they all give logs. that might work
      ABANDONED, you are right with the issue of having everything in all mods. everyone plays different and not everyone plays the same climates or terrains. i doubt TOM will let you have swampgrass and alligators and spagnum moss up there in the north.it wouldn't fit that way.
      if we make the game spawn more and more items,we will get less of each 1.  some players will want different items than others. say you have A to Z items. by doing this you will have less of A,B,C,and D. now some players would rather have more of EFG and give up XYZ.some will want MNO and not RST. i think we would make the modders work too hard to try to find a balance. how many items can we have for a gatherer before we start giving up larges amounts of each???
        we also have gatherers for fodder and flowers and thatch. do we want a food gatherer in the forest collecting those too? i do think that would cause more troubles.
         in game now, items do get left. laborers don't collect everything. they look like items from the NAT DIV mod mostly.if anyone except a trapper destroys a beaver lodge,they won't get pelts or game either. i figure those items are left and can be collected once a specific gatherer is added to that area.NILLA and i debated several points when testing the pine mod. she disagrees with it but i did find a way that worked. use a maple gatherer in the maple forest and a CC vanilla gatherer. it gave me the ability to collect different items.in theory and realistically,1 would pick berries and the other tap maple trees and pick apples. the reason it will work is the radius of the vanilla gatherer is about double the maple. point is it gives you different ways to play the game and use the mods.
         i did come up with a way to keep adding items to the game but not lower the amounts from the gatherers we have now.this would give the ability to gather a larger variety or number of different items also. i will hold my idea for now. modders are busy and this page isn't the place for the suggestion.
         1 thing that we came up with lately i do hope BARTENDER or NECORA can crack. to force the game to structure or draw the map in more layers.we have a few now:stone and iron,trees,ground or terrain,etc. i'm not sure how CC does the extra textured ground plants. the hope is if it can be expanded and added to it will give many more options. for 1,we could force it to add trees twice.therefore giving us meadows but thicker forest areas.if that part of the game code can be cracked far enough,we could as players adjust what does spawn throughout the map,either by mod orders or start setings. say you want to play as adam&eve and collect apples, a few apple trees would spawn at game start and drop apples. this way would still be limited by the number of squares.

[Necora]

Hey all, thanks for the feedback. I'll answer as many points as I can...

@Nilla, I agree with the first part, but the reason I made these patches is because the New Flora seems to be a widely used mod and there are a lot of comments around various message boards about compatibility issues and having to chose what natural resources you want, hence possibly missing out on key parts of certain mods. Plus, I personally like the New Flora mod and want to use it with the Pine Set etc., so it made sense to make a patch. I don't think a patch will be necessary for the Nat Div mod after thinking about it, they should all work fine and all resources will be spawned where they should be. There might have to be one for the vanilla gatherer though, I have to check, because I think we all edit the same part of that code.

I have a suggestion, that I guess some people would dislike but I will throw it out here anyway. Why don't all of you who make some new resources make a "light" version, or "add on" to your original mod, that makes it compatible with more or less everything. Let the all mushrooms, berry bushes, plants look different on the map but all have the names: mushrooms, berries, roots, herbs. I don't think it will be too much work and I can't see, that it will bring any conflicts between mods. (I know nothing about modding, so maybe I'm wrong about that  )

I very much like the look of chantarelles, cranberries and other plants I recognize (but not know the name in English). I like very much, that different spices spawn in different kind of forests. But I don't mind (or rather I would even prefere) that they all where called mushrooms/berries.....

I see what you are saying here, and I get the idea to make all berry bushes just produce berries and mushrooms produce mushrooms, so the chanterelles and cranberry bushes are just mesh variants for diversity like that Nat Div has done. However, these are not the issue at hand, they are just extra visual add-ons with some regional flavor because I could really. The real issue is unique new additions that different mods make, so the roses, bees, flax, and wild oats of NF and the trapper/wild animal resources of the Pine Set in this case. Both of these things are added using the same line of code in the tree file, so which mod is on top will overwrite the other. This is the reason for the patch, so that the vanilla maps spawn NF goodies and PS trapper chains from the start, not having to chose between one or the other. Unfortunately, without patches like this, there is no way to get around this. I do want to move the beavers and perhaps another to a different layer so they spawn in specific places, just along the river, but that will have to wait until the fall. It still won't solve the issue of other resources in the forests though. And moving to another layer, I think we only have a few to chose from (I'm not sure, perhaps @Bartender has discovered infinite layer dimensions which would be awesome) so there will be issues at some point. It would be great if there was a more flexible way to get things onto the map rather than just a few snippets of code.

I agree with Nilla on this, as I've said before, you lose the ability to pick and chose if mods are dependent on other mods.  I think the flax mod is a good idea for sure but adding so many spawners means less of each, does it not?  A few of this and a few of that, plus all the more items in inventory and many more unwanted or not needed items when the riverboat trader comes to call (again requiring special orders and higher cost to order what is needed or wanted). Then of course we have more and more problems with load orders.  I hope load order note are include in the mod list description but then again those overly long descriptions in the mod list make it more of a task arranging the list especially when adding new mods. 

@Abandoned Well, no mods are dependent on any others, you can still mix and choose as you want. This isn't a 'oh you must use all these now' it is more of a 'if you want them both, here is a cool way to be able to get the best of both' as they both have similar chains/resources/uses so it makes sense that they can be played together. So now you don't have to chose between using either one or the other, and if you want you can have both. It is the same with Red's garden utility pack and my Crystal Cliffs pack, I was tempted to make a cross over patch to allow red's fodder to be used in crystal cliffs if you want, because they chains are very similar and it would make sense if using them both on the same map that they interlink between each other, rather than having to duplicate a similar chain.

As for the number resources, if you use this you will see even on a small map with all of these goodies there is still an awful lot of space and production can be quite high. I think this is even a bit too easy, I need more feedback, but we might have to reduce the spawning of these resources because there might be just too much. I very much doubt we are going to start running into space issues any time soon.

@brads3 I think it's the perfect place for such a discussion, it is after all about developing these patches not the individual mods. Hopefully other players will read through and understand more about how/why these mods work. I also like the layer idea and would like to try and use it in the future, but it will have to wait for the fall.

Cheers all!!

[Bartender]

The amount of naturally spawning resources (layers) we can add is probably practically infinite actually. The only problem is that each new layer also influences the spawn behaviour of other layers, so there are limitations to what you can add without breaking the game. Especially with combinations of different mods this could happen really easily.

As for how to combine the different mods, I think a mega nature mod would be the only way in which we could be able to reliably balance all the different resources that are introduced. I think compatible versions are still very nice to have ofcourse, but they get rather complicated as more and more mods get added to the equation.

[Gatherer]

As for how to combine the different mods, I think a mega nature mod would be the only way in which we could be able to reliably balance all the different resources that are introduced. I think compatible versions are still very nice to have ofcourse, but they get rather complicated as more and more mods get added to the equation.

I'll second that!

[brads3]

leave it to BT to give us a tidbit of info and leave us with more questions and wanting more.what a typical wiZARD.

[QueryEverything]

Thank you for the explanation @Necora the mod is certainly a mod-send for those of us who do use the 3 core nature mods now: Pine Set, New Flora, & NatDiv - I always missed having your mods natively spawn, and a small tweak mod (or 2) certainly doesn't break anything, and with the clear instructions, it was quick to update, and get back to a new name and now we have a beautiful diverse map. 

I also want to say thank you for taking the time for writing out the instructions, and what the mod does/does not do & include in the mod details.  It's important (I believe) the players know about the mod, what comes under the hood, and what it will/will not work it - and any possible clashes & conflicts.  We are, after all, adding files to a game which gets altered.  A number of times I see in threads questions that have the answers in the product description is nowhere near as many as the questions I see where the download doesn't have the description, and in the long run, it will take less time 'housekeeping' than if you hadn't included it in the first place.  (From a helpdesk perspective and software dev experience).

If I remember correctly (the mind wanders a little, be kind, and I read this a couple of days back, I think in one of @kid1293 comments) - when a mod adds a Gatherer and has all of the resources coded into it to gather, it doesn't mean you have to load the mod that it works with - because the code will
a)  see it & collect it or
b) not see it, and ignore it - move on. 
In this way, it really doesn't matter to JoeBloggs the 3rd, whether a mod is suitable to use with another mod or not, it's not adding files it doesn't need.  But, not all mods are coded the same

@Bartender raises an interesting point about the compatible versions etc, I wonder, if in time, with the way the coders are working together, a Nat Compat mod (or similar, not named yet ) , which could be an extension of this mod, wouldn't eventually be the 'norm', when B1.0.7 came out & MM wasn't updated, Kral released the Compatibility mod for it - so, I wonder if the same couldn't be done, keeping Necora's mod uptodate, as new spawn resources are released.

Now, this is a big burden on Necora, but - if each modder had access to the core files, then perhaps they can update it as they release their own new mods, and include an updated version in the mod release - OR - update the main file hosted here & BL - and direct downloaders to that mod page - so there aren't 'clashes' between versions when supplied at the time a new mod is downloaded.  This then means that the modders need to keep an eye out on the most uptodate version - however a synced dropbox folder between you would keep it tidy, or the modder needs to keep downloading the mod as a 'common practice'.

I think though - to be fairly honest, with the way the modders are working together now, that you will see more and more resources being able to be used by other mods.   Especially given the generosity of time & helping hands when new (and existing) modders are working on new projects.


And so it's not just a wall of text, a couple more screenshots for you

[Nilla]

Thanks for the explanation, @Necora. Now even I can understand a wee bit. I think, you have a good approach on things: Work to make the mods you like and you think would fit together with yours work.

We don't always agree on things, @QueryEverything , but this time we do: The cooperation, I have seen on this page over the years, where modders help and support each other is great. It helps to create very nice things.

But again; not everything has to be compatible with everything else. There are so many nice mods out there, you don't have to use all of them at the same time. But it's always good with some notes on the download page, maybe as the first thing in sometimes long texts. Not long descriptions (not everyone is good in English), just something like "recommended additional mods:.....", or a small note: "no known conflicts........" doesn't work with...." . You can see a lot of that now. That's good.