Poll - Smelting armor for ingots.

[Cujobear]

Hello fellow nerds!

 

How often have you thought or heard, "Man I wish I could smelt this armor and get some ingots out of it"?  I for one have thought about it and have heard others discuss it as one of those things Mojang should have added by now.

 

So let's discuss it. Is this something that should be added to PvE? We've recently added a plug-in to allow the crafting of the elytra as well as red sand and sandstone. Should we look into including a recipe to smelt our unwanted armor into ingots? 

 

A reminder please to stay on topic in this thread and not to delve into bigger and broader topics of rev's past and how 'vanilla' the server is. This is simply a poll to see if this is something the community wants and why or why not. I will have totemo add a response with some of the nitty gritties. 

[Omegaeddon]

I think this would be a fine idea.

 

However, we should only get back a maximum of say... 25% of the iron,

 

So, pair of boots = 1. Helmet = 1 chestplate = 2 ect.

[totemo]

Details of the current proposed configuration

 

• Smelting would apply to iron or gold armour, and tools and weapons that require more than one ingot to make (i.e. shovels cannot be smelted).
• Smelting would take 20 seconds per piece.
• Only full durability items could be smelted. You would need to combine items to smelt them down.
• The rate of return would be about 1/3 the rate that it would take to craft new items from scratch.
• In a dungeon grinder, you would need to kill approximately 50 mobs with a Looting 3 sword to get one ingot of gold. Iron is a lot rarer and we don't have statistics on it. It is effectively negligible.

Smelting results (iron or gold items):

• Helmet: 2 ingots
• Chestplate: 3 ingots
• Leggings: 3 ingots
• Boots: 1 ingot
• Axe, hoe, pickaxe or sword: 1 ingot

[Guest Former Staff]

Totemo's post just convinced me to go from undecided to yes. My concerns were that the return rate on smelting has to be reasonably low and I think those values are fair. It will require some effort to pick out the iron and gold armour and get them into a furnace, that's good enough for me.

[Flumper]

Not only do I think we should have it, it should already be a feature of vanilla minecraft.

 

I think the ingot return figures Totemo listed sound reasonable. Though I don't necessarily think it's fair that only full durability items can be smelted, that would seem to make the returns almost non-existent for anyone not camping a zombie/skele spawner, while still allowing exploitation via villager trading for smeltable items. A compromise may be to allow smelting of items with any durability, but with lower returns. Or, if possible, the number of ingots gained could depend on the durability to some extent (less for lower durability).

 

But overrall I'm really enthusiastic about this idea!

[totemo]

Unfortunately, Minecraft and the Bukkit API only register unique smelting recipes for a specific material and damage/durability value. In order to enable smelting of a gold chestplate in every possible state of repair, I would need to register 112 recipes - one for each damage value. That would be tedious and I wonder if it might have some detrimental effect. I'm not prepared to do it at this stage.

 

The rate of return from smelting gold items is far less than what you would get for a comparable time investment in mining the mesa.

[Flumper]

Unfortunately, Minecraft and the Bukkit API only register unique smelting recipes for a specific material and damage/durability value. In order to enable smelting of a gold chestplate in every possible state of repair, I would need to register 112 recipes - one for each damage value.

 

Ah, that's unfortunate.

 

Fair enough. :P

[Wozdaka]

Skeletal/Zombie Grinders then become an ingot grinder.

 

Could be interesting. Looking at what I seen the zombie grinder drop you could make a decent gold ingot grinder out of it.

 

Could you also rip up/salvage leather armor drops into leather?

[BernzSed]

I vote yes. In Vanilla Minecraft, we'd be able to make AFKable gold farms (using portals) and have plenty of spare gold nuggets, so this is an ok compromise.

[Guest]

I think this is a great idea and would substitute for the lack of iron grinders. This will also make normals skeleton and zombie grinders very useful for people, which is a plus since they tend to fall off after a couple weeks into the rev.

 

This would even be a thing that would replace iron grinders all together with plumped iron ore in the ground.

 

Maybe add chain mail too into the mix with one one iron per piece or something like that?

[tobylane]

It favours people able to AFK to build up local difficulty and be at the spawners but we're used to that now. Great idea.

 

edit: Horse armour? Trapdoors? Bars?

Edited December 14, 2016 by tobylane

[twilexis]

Would it drop XP like smelting other items?

[twilexis]

I'm 100% for this, and consider this a step towards balancing out the changes to iron and horses this rev.

[dnynumberone]

.

Edited December 17, 2016 by dnynumberone

[Guest Former Staff]

Welp, P isn't the place for me anymore obviouly.

 

I think your constructive discussion in the same forum proves your point wrong but I won't argue with you any further so this thread isn't derailed.

 

Edit:

 

 

Edit: what the fuck is going on with  this server? Iron is too easy, so let's make a huge fundamental change to minecraft so iron isn't too easy.  Oh, but now gold is too hard?! So let's make another fundamental change to minecraft so gold is easier.  

 

Stop taking community polls for this shit. Because every poll seems to boil down to "i'm bored make changes i don't care what changes are made but i'm bored so change something."

 

It's ok to have a different opinion but this isn't a constructive way of going about it. Putting thoughts across this way will only get them dismissed or lead to conflict. It's clear that you care very much for P from the time you invest into the community, would you be able to take the same composure on this topic as you have done elsewhere? I often find you get me thinking beyond what I know when you take that approach.

[DjentleGiant]

I think this is a great idea. Too often I just throw out mob-dropped armor. Most players do; there's really no reason to wear anything other than diamond armor due to the server running on hard mode. It would be nice to be able to "recycle" mob drops instead of dropping them or letting them sit in a chest until rev end. 

 

DNY: I'm not a vanilla purist. However, in terms of vanilla gameplay, the padmins have made a giant leap forward by removing the ability to purchase or build iron grinders. If anything, this is a minor half-step backward. I'd hate to see you leave over this.

[totemo]

Edit: what the fuck is going on with  this server? Iron is too easy, so let's make a huge fundamental change to minecraft so iron isn't too easy.  Oh, but now gold is too hard?! So let's make another fundamental change to minecraft so gold is easier.

 

It's not going to be a huge fundamental change to gold. If you spend a couple of hours and kill a thousand mobs at a dungeon grinder, you get about 20 gold ingots if you can be bothered to combine and smelt the armour. It's pleasing to the packrats who have been saving up drops for years hoping that they would somehow be useful one day, or in fact hoping for exactly this change. But it's not going to completely change the game balance. You can still get a lot more gold, a LOT faster, and with a lot more entertainment value by mining the Mesa.

 

The big winner may actually be the zombie pigmen hunters, who get an extra 20%, based on the tests I did this evening, they would only need 20.6 hours of grinding free-range pigmen to get a full health horse, rather than 24.7 hours. For an hour and half of grinding, 250 kills, we're talking 84 gold ingots instead of 70. Again, it's 20%. It's not double or triple. And we can argue about whether it should be 10%, 20% or 30%. (In fact, I would characterise that as a constructive criticism.) It's still not a huge change. And it's still not as fast as mining in the Mesa.

[totemo]

Would it drop XP like smelting other items?

 

There is no XP drop.

[totemo]

edit: Horse armour? Trapdoors? Bars?

 

Would need to be considered. Bars are hard because each one is 6/16ths of an ingot, so probably never for bars. Horse armour is notionally a rare item (even if in a practical sense people end up with a lot of it). I'd personally prefer to see it circulated among players rather than just smelted down.

[Silversunset01]

Would need to be considered. Bars are hard because each one is 6/16ths of an ingot, so probably never for bars. Horse armour is notionally a rare item (even if in a practical sense people end up with a lot of it). I'd personally prefer to see it circulated among players rather than just smelted down.

Horse armor is also not craftable. For something like this I'd be more in favor of "unmaking" something you can create rather than destroying an item with only one method of obtaining it.

[WondrLand]

I was strongly against this. I felt that this was proposed only because of the increase in demand of gold from EasyRider. I felt that if a server plugin was leading to the addition of a new server plugin to balance everything out, then it would become an endless loop of adding more and more server plugins until we're an entirely different server.

 

However, this post changed my mind.

 

I vote yes. In Vanilla Minecraft, we'd be able to make AFKable gold farms (using portals) and have plenty of spare gold nuggets, so this is an ok compromise.

 

My opinion about this server is that it should be as close to vanilla as possible. The reason (in my mind) why we have plugins at all is to counter the large number of people that visit us every day and still keep the server stable. As a result, we've decided to limit nether portal placement. With this limit, players can't make the huge gold farms I've seen others make in vanilla. With that in mind, and the proportions totemo suggested. I think this is a fair balance.

[NotActuallyAuree]

Welp, P isn't the place for me anymore obviouly.  Have fun with your TechnoSuperUltraCraft server, maybe when you install the Call of Duty Zombie Level plugin I'll come back.  

 

Edit: what the fuck is going on with  this server? Iron is too easy, so let's make a huge fundamental change to minecraft so iron isn't too easy.  Oh, but now gold is too hard?! So let's make another fundamental change to minecraft so gold is easier.  

 

Stop taking community polls for this shit. Because every poll seems to boil down to "i'm bored make changes i don't care what changes are made but i'm bored so change something."

 

C'mon dny, even the greater Minecraft community at large doesn't quite understand why you can't break down gear back into constituent parts - especially rare stuff like metals.  Let's be honest here:  there's dozens of people who play on P, and we're probably one of the most active mining communities and servers that plays PvE.  We have a few minor plugins that don't affect much of the vanilla minecraft experience, but do make it slightly more interesting, simpler to play considering our short revision times, and easier on the server hardware.  Custom spawners are interesting (e.g. Slime, Witch, etc) and can help with server load (e.g. Iron Golem) from having too many mobs loaded in various chunks at any given time.  EasyRider makes getting a decent horse not an unending, mind numbing, and incredibly resource intensive chore but instead encourages using the horse to explore the map and gives a little bump linearly over time.  Because EasyRider requires the use of gold to give horses more health, instead of breeding 50,000 horses to min/max a decent breeding pair, bumping up the generation only makes sense.  The same is true of iron generation; if we can't use villagers to spawn golems because of server load, and we can't petition/modreq to get more or better spawners this Rev, then iron needed to be plumped.  Making armor smeltable just makes sense even from a vanilla minecraft perspective.

 

I think you're blowing this very small plugin change way out of proportion.  This should have been an inclusion into the vanilla basecode of minecraft.

[buzzie71]

At risk of sounding like a party pooper, I am not enthusiastic about the addition.

 

To keep my post within the bounds specified, there are two reasons: the more personal reason is that as someone who has been grinding pigmen for gold since the beginning of the rev, the ability to obtain enough gold through other means (ie. smelting equipment, not fighting pigmen or constructing a grinder or mining) feels like a devaluing of the other (especially non-mining) methods ("if I need some gold ingots, why brave the Nether or go mining if I can smelt some junk I have from the first few nights or a grinder?" - though a grinder or a platform or a lightly altered Hell biome area in the area would demonstrably be useful for more industrial applications, eg. powered rails for an intercity rail line; see the 20% additional gold from pigmen killing that totemo brought up, which I was able to match on my own testing).  I don't think gold grinder designs have really been limited throughout the revs for this to be an equal offset, though it can be argued that the pervasiveness of Plains biome in the current custom nether relative to Hell is a limitation.

 

Certainly, going off the number of swords I've tossed into lava because I was losing inventory space, the thought of being able to obtain extra gold in the same time I spend killing pigmen is always welcome - but it feels to me a bit cheap to get gold by smelting junk, both literally and figuratively, and the benefits from it are too high compared to the problem being addressed (getting rid of junk items sitting in chests - imo the existing solutions to that are enough).

 

The second reason is an observation of mismatch between stated goals of the server and the possibilities smelting (iron) equipment will open up.  I'm probably with most of the players who weighed in in the previous thread (https://nerd.nu/forums/topic/4357-i-would-highly-recommend-adding-4-golem-spawners-in-the-very-near-future/) opposing the distribution of iron spawners this rev, but having gameplay features that both makes resource acquisition harder and easier feels weird.  Being able to smelt equipment opens the possibility of players with access to a solid support base of crops, fuel, and villagers (not unreasonable assumptions, either now or later in the rev) to farm iron by buying iron helmets and smelting them down into ingots, which in my opinion defeats the purpose of limiting iron spawner distribution.  It's not necessarily proof of bad game balance (it could also be proof that players who engineer that setup are masters at the game), but it feels strange that iron grinding would be nerfed by spawners but made possible through equipment smelting.

[Avi_Dangerstein]

What happened to vanilla?

[BernzSed]

I ate it.

I ate all the vanilla.

Now we just have pistachio.

 

I'm sorry (but not really).