Hunger

The first thing to "get fixed" is the awful hunger system. It is the one thing stopping me from actually playing Minecraft at the moment, and should be addressed first. The fix is going to get mixed up into the Flora mod quite a bit. I've divided up the process into a few parts:

1. Create more food sources
2. Change hunger from a punishment system (on the consequence scale) to something more fitting
3. Connect the potion and hunger systems with a cooking system.
4. Generate herbs as ingredients for various potions, healing items, and other effects

The first one is self-explanatory. Behold the blackberry bush:

(Testing screenshot, won't be quite that many. Also the fast graphics version; fancy is slightly buggy atm)

There are also raspberry, blueberry, and geoberry bushes that generate in various parts of the world. Wheat also generates naturally so that there's some form of food from the get-go besides hunting down the few pigs that spawn. Some crops (barley, potatoes) are in the works as well.

A few fruit trees are also planned. Apples, beware!

The second part is a bit more complex. Regeneration at full health is a slap-fix for a blatant lack of healing items, and with the brewing stand squarely placed at "endgame content" healing potions are only useful after you would normally need them.

The hunger bar will be replaced with a hybrid stamina/hunger bar. The player's hunger will affect how high the maximum stamina can be; the hungrier you are, the less stamina you have. This shouldn't affect mining too much, but will get in the way of combat if you run around on an empty stomach or just mined a long tunnel into a skeleton dungeon. Also, regeneration will be allowed at 70% hunger or above and be nerfed quite a bit. It's definitely not going to kill you at 0% hunger anymore; that part is rage inducing.

The lack of healing items will be addressed with the additional herbs. Aloe will be your friend; smearing it on your body will heal a few hearts directly. There will be other herbs for antidotes, speed enhancements, and possibly other nifty effects.

The cooking system will tie everything together. You will be able to combine foods in a sensible fashion, string herbs together for more powerful effects, and create potion ingredients so that you don't have to sit in the boring nether farming nether wart. I'm still working out the details of this one.

Special shout-out goes to a few mods: Pam's Harvestcraft, Xie's Farming Mod, and all of the RuneCraftory mods. I recognize these mods and have gained some inspiration from all of them, but the pieces alone do not make a coherent whole. RuneCraftory is a partial exception, but it mimics Harvest Moon too much for my liking.

Where we've been, where we're going

I've finally finished updating my mods and started playing Minecraft again. Most of the mods I use have been updated, and the ones that haven't can be substituted with others in the meantime. What's more, this is the official release of Minecraft. The game is finished and has a degree of polish above what the beta was, and a few niceities have been added. However... some parts of the game still bother me.

What's wrong:

The hunger system is completely broken for anyone starting a new world. There's hardly anything in the world that looks like food. Even though the world you start in is filled with lush grass and green trees all around, there's no plants anywhere in the whole game that can be used right off. Wheat is the exception; it's the only renewable food source in the whole game, and by the time you have any your hunger bar will probably be empty.

There are passive mobs wandering about, filled to the brim with juicy meat, but killing them has its own downside: They never respawn. Not to mention that killing a whole cow can gain you a total of 0 food... Mojang tried to alleviate this problem with the breeding system, but the whole process is tedious and boring.

Combat is lame. Let me repeat this: Combat is lame. There were some interesting additions with the bows and sprint-hits in 1.8, yet there is nothing worthwhile to fight. Skeletons are the only real threat due to walking around and fighting from a range often beyond yours. Part of the problem is the lack of variety in the mobs, and part of it is the AI of existing mobs. They're not interesting, and never were.

What could be better:

Enchantments sucking up levels to enchant items is one of the oddest things I've ever seen in a game. It feels like a quick-fix to give leveling a purpose, and then once you do gain those levels they're placed into the items. Some of the enchantments are ridiculously overpowered for the monsters in the game, and the whole process is random.

The nether is boring. Glowstone is alright, I guess, and netherrack makes for a good fireplace fuel, but having an entire dimension dedicated to this feels like a waste. The overworld has biomes, each with interesting and unique parts to it; why is the nether so neglected?

Potions have a nice system once you actually find a blaze rod for a potion stand. It also assumes that you know what you're doing. Then again, the crafting table assumes you know what you're doing.

The fix:

I am considering replacing the hunger bar with a stamina bar. I am also fond of RPGs, so I may implement a mana bar and let all of these bars grow as you level up or find items. The fix for the hunger system will be the cooking system, which will be used both for cookin' up some grub and for creating potion ingredients.

Passive mob spawning needs a rework. I'll probably take a look at hostile mob spawning so they don't spawn on unnatural blocks at the same time. Mob drops need examined as well.

The Range module will attempt to fix one part of combat: lack of combat tools. I may just throw in some magic and Mabinogi-style alchemy as well. I'm not sure what to do yet about the lack of combat challenges yet, but I'll think of something.

A list of potions that you have created in the past, along with their ingredients, is what I have planned for potions. It's not going to be soon, but it will happen. Anyone who's interested has my permission to implement this.

The future:

As the creation of InfiTools draws to a close I've begun looking to expand the mod into something... more. Blocks was an attempt to do this. While unfinished, I consider it a success at heart, if not in implementation yet. The pieces I have planned are: Animated, Armor, Range, Cooking, Traps, and Glassworking. I'm also toying with the idea of a nether-replacement dimension, and there's always the metal alloy system I designed but haven't decided whether to do yet.