ExtrabiomesXL 3.15.2 - Happy Chocolate Day!

So here we are again. The 3.15.2 patch is actually pretty big - and while we were feature complete on Tuesday, the team has spent the last few days hunting down some bugs. We hope you like it. And by it, I mean chocolate covered strawberries.

You can download it here.

It has long been one of my biggest complaints with vanilla MC that they never really make good use of the materials they provide you with. I mean, take pumpkins for example. They have have been around since alpha but have only been edible since 1.4.

In this case, MC provides us with all of the raw ingredients for chocolate - but doesn't actually let us make "chocolate". Sure, we can make cookies, but the recipe is strange, and have you ever eaten a cookie that doesn't contain any sugar? *shudder*

EbXL 3.15.2 introduces farmable strawberries. You can find them growing wild in a variety of places. The bushes regrow, so you only need to plant them once and then punch them when they're ready to harvest.

By themselves, strawberries aren't terribly valuable as food. But because of the effort involved in producing it, chocolate is a bit more filling. And chocolate covered strawberries are more valuable than their individual ingredients would be if eaten separately.

These strawberries are the first of what will be many interesting crops that we plan to introduce, and are really meant as a test of the crop system. EbXL 3.16 will flesh out the system with more types of crops and recipes from them. We will, however, try not to be overwhelming with it - and are thinking about making an optional addon that contains additional crops and recipes for those who really like that sort of thing.

Bone meal super powers activate!

In addition to crops, we're also adding two new classes of plant to EbXL. Namely - underwater and vine plants. Expect to see more interesting varieties of these in the future. :) We've also added another regular flower that turns into cyan dye and have added custom dyes to provide colors that vanilla reuses for other purposes - which means we produce all dye colors except grey and dark grey.

Eelgrass grows under water.

Gloriosa flowers grow like vines.

Changelog

• Added delphinium belladonna and blue poppies.
• Added new dyes for white, black, brown, and blue.
• Updated some flowers to now produce these dyes.
• Added eelgrass subaquatic plant.
• Added gloriosa vines.
• Added configuration settings to control the density of new flowers in each biome.
• Added strawberries, chocolate, and chocolate covered strawberries.
• Improved ability of flowers to spawn in snowy biomes.
• Removed toadstools from snowy biomes.
• Fixed some plants that were unintentionally changing colors to match their biome.
• Fixed the "already decorating" errors sometimes encountered when generating large trees.

Welcome Back!

Welcome Back!

Our team is very pleased to welcome back to EBXL, Scott Killen, whom as many of you that follow EBXL know, was part of the team for a long time.  Scott retired from actively modding about a year ago, although he still continued to write hooks for Forge as well as helping behind the scenes with several mods.  He was instrumental in making EBXL one of the most popular biome adding mods for Minecraft.  This is in part due to the high standards he has for everything he does, as well as being an all around genuinely nice person.

It's a shame that you can only list one person as the "author" or "creator" of the mod because EBXL is the result of team work and not any one person.  We have an outstanding team of people that work together to bring EBXL to you, our players.  I feel very lucky to be able to work with such a wonderful group of people.

We have many new and exciting things that will be happening in the coming weeks and months.  We will be releasing 3.15.2 in the next day or two.  It will contain some tweaks to flower generation as well as adding a few new plants and dyes. (A full list of changes will be posted when it is released.) It will also have a special Valentine Day present for everyone!

At this time we plan on releasing 3.16 as the last update to 1.64 before moving on to 1.7.

Late night crunch releases can result in derps. ExtrabiomesXL 3.15.1

Well, I just got reminded again of the fact that trying to release an update after working for nearly all day, when one is still under the effects of a cold can result in a few derps. It turns out that yesterday's release was supposed to be 3.15, not 3.14.6.  Things got changed in some places and not in others, so mcmod.info was reporting that the mod was 3.14.6 and internally the mod was saying that it was 3.15. Also, we missed a couple other things, such as the day after we finished updating the New Dawn API, it was updated.  The missed change was causing crashes, which should be taken care of in this patch. Also, due to the late hour and my not having a written checklist for release procedures at the time, (Annysia is in the process of writing one up so I don't goof things up again.) I forgot to do testing in dedicated server mode, and look over the forge log for any warnings/error so a small error with trying to load textures on the server got through. I have to give a grateful thanks to our team member joe12o, for getting the fix to that written up after it was reported, while I was sleeping.

Anyways here is ExtrabiomesXL 3.15.1, which should fix those issues. I am still looking forward to trying to get another balancing release in on Monday or some time later this week.

Change Log

Bug Fixes:

• Updated New Dawn API
• Fixed crash on Server due to code running that should only run on the client.
• Fixed version number in mcmod.info and previous blog post.

ExtrabiomesXL 3.15 - Back in Business (3.14.6 it was not.)

[EDIT]3.14.6 is bugged and should have been called 3.15, read more and get the fixed D/L.

Well boys and girls, oh, and you ladies and gentlemen in the modded Minecraft community, we are back in business, and finally despite the perfectionists and various troublesome bits of code have a new release for you all to tinker around in.

For those of you who could care less about any news and just want the download link, go have at it. Although you might want to read the change list as there were a couple things that you may want to know if you run into any issues, and a few things have changed. For those of you who are willing to wait a little while, please continue reading.

What is this sorcery?

We have a top secret project that we had hoped to preview/demo in this build, but things haven't worked out quite as well as we had hoped, so we had to push it back a little longer. No, this secret project is not v4, although it has helped me breakthrough some of the things that had been holding me back. I really can't say to much more with out giving away to many things. But to sum it up, it is something that as far as we know, has never been done before and when the entire project is complete it might even blow one or two people's minds.

On the note of v4. after about 6 months, I think I am finally understanding the hooks that Scott added to forge over a year ago, and I finally have figured out how to incorporate them into the v4 world generator.  This would allow us to do things like finally control the rate that biomes spawn, so lets say you wanted a world that has very few wastelands you can finally allow that. All in all I have to say that the hooks that Scott wrote are totally awesome, and that I have been considering using a couple of them to write a super small utility mod to "deal" with troublesome players like Annysia, who hate all things that attack you, would like to have on your survival server. The big thing that has held me back is that with some of the new features that are being added to the 1.8 snapshots, it looks like it might be doable in vanilla with command blocks come 1.8, if they add just one more thing to commands. (The only thing thing that is missing for it to work in vanilla as it stands now is the ability to select entities that are in certain distance from a specific player. If this is possible feel free to let me know.)

Anyway, we've got a number of things lined up and with more team members, we think we can knock them out. I must say that it has been fun working back and forth on our secret project, with Allaryin and myself pushing code back and forth, and extending each other's ideas when one of us hits a road block.

On to what is new/changed in this release. We should have better support for Thaumcraft 4 (Finally), and some of our old quarter logs have finally been replaced with more user friendly versions that are a little more inter mod friendly. The old ones are still in but they are only able to be crafted into the new version and will no longer be generated, and only exist so that people don't suddenly have trees that are missing their trunks. There was a bunch of code cleanup, and a few minor things managed to slip through the cracks that were not discovered till after we had our release candidate and we had already delayed releasing longer than intended so since they didn't break anything we decided to let them go for the moment. I may do a build on Monday to just fix the few things that I discovered at the last moment.

Do Not Adjust Your Set

Howdy, my name is Allaryin and I just tricked the others into giving me write access to the dev blog ;)

First off, by way of personal introduction. I'm a professional software developer and have been around the modding community for about two years now - primarily releasing small patches for other peoples' mods and hanging out on irc. I had made some small changes to EBXL in the past (mostly config file improvements iirc) before officially joining the team last month. I am also one of the developers on MCUpdater as well as several small mods that were doomed to obsolescence as Vanilla (or other big mods like Thermal Expansion) beat me to feature releases.

We have big plans for EBXL, and I am going to make sure we actually inform people of interesting progress as we start making more regular releases in the very near future. If all goes according to my evil plan, we will be updating to MC1.7 in the next couple of weeks as well as making at least one final MC1.6 release after this last one.

One thing I've been playing with is New Dawn support. It is in the early stages, but since New Dawn itself is pretty young too, I don't feel bad letting people see what we've got. The mod is a cool alternative terrain generator, and it gives me really interesting controls over what sort of conditions biomes appear in.

Speaking of this release, it is almost ready - but a few of us have had some real life emergencies come up that are cramping the schedule a bit. We will be releasing 3.15 within the next 24 hours, hopefully sooner than later.

In the worst case, where we still have not vetted all of the patch's changes, I will make sure we still release the stable updates and make quick mini releases to follow up in the next few days.

In the meantime, enjoy this soothing image while I go pound out the last few bugs with a hammer.

New Release Friday

I was hoping to get the rest of the team to write a post, as I think it's nice to get to know the whole team as well as get their perspective on things.  However, our coders, Shecky, Allaryin and Joe12o, are busy coding and our texture guy, Zenth, is busy making textures for all the new things, so you are stuck with me posting again this week. :P

The team has been hard at work so that we can get some new content out to you all.  But before we can do that we needed to do quite a bit of clean up to the code as well as some other behind the scenes things,  which while not very exciting, will make EBXL much better.

That being said, we are hoping to have a little bit of new content in the release planned for this Friday.  We are adding new flowers of our own, plus Zenth has worked on getting textures redone for the flowers from Forgotten Nature and More Than Just Trees mods.  If you follow our blog or thread you know that many things from those 2 mods are being incorporated into EBXL.

We will also be adding in tooltips for some items.  Right now, most of you are probably familiar with most of the things that EBXL adds, but with all of the new content we are going to be adding over the next few months, we thought it would help everyone learn about what different items do if we added tooltips.

This release will also include Thaumcraft 4 support as well as beta support for the New Dawn mod, and perhaps a few more things if we can get them completed in time.

We are hoping to add more content in the next release, which we are wanting to have ready within 2 or 3 weeks from the release this Friday.  After that, we will see where Forge is at in regards to a stable release for 1.7 and either add some more content to 1.6.4 or release a version for 1.7.

We're Not Dead!

We have been very busy these last few months and have added 2 more people to our team, Allaryin and Joe12o.  They are both great additions to the team and have already had some fantastic ideas.  While waiting for Forge to get closer to releasing a stable version so that we can update to 1.7, we are planning a couple of releases to our 1.6.4 version.

Some of the things we are hoping to put in these 2 release are:

• Tweaking support for the New Dawn mod
• Starting to implement things from FN (Forgotten Nature) and MTJT (More Than Just Trees) mods into EbXL
• Changing out our redwoods for the ones added by FN
• Adding new fir and pine trees to existing biomes
• Adding flowers from FN and MTJT
• Adding the fruit and nut trees and berry bushes from FN
• Adding food recipes utilizing the fruit, nuts and berries
• Add a couple of biomes from FN
• Helpful tool tips
• A completely new item, in it's beta form, which will only be available in creative mode for right now as it is being tested and we work on the ideas we have to implement it fully into the game.

We are hoping that after these 2 releases, Forge will have a stable version and we can then update to 1.7 and start looking ahead to 1.8.

We have A LOT of new things coming up in the next few months.  I don't want to give away to much, but just a few of those things are:

• A contest
• New biomes
• Revamping of existing biomes 
• Removal of some biomes
• An EBXL villager or 2, with their own building and possibly a quest
• Villages made out of materials found in the biome where they are located
• More trees and plants
• Add on mods that will contain such things as fantasy biomes and crops
• Terrain generation
• Much, much more!

We will also be trying to update the blog on a weekly or bi-weekly basis with information and screenshots of what we are working on.  As always, we look forward to hearing ideas and feedback from our players.  Please feel free to post them here on the blog or on our thread on the Minecraft forums.