[Mod] Ropes and rope ladders [0.9] [ropes]

[FaceDeer]

This mod is a fork of Vines by Bas080 but has undergone extensive rewriting. It no longer has any vine content in it so a new name was in order.

This mod adds "rope boxes", blocks that when placed in world will automatically lower a rope at 1 meter per second until it reaches a fixed maximum length. The basic rope box produces 50m of rope by default and there are up to eight additional rope box types that produce multiples of that rope length - 100m, 150m, and so forth up to 450m. The number of rope boxes and the length of a standard rope length can be configured via the settings menu. Rope boxes can be crafted from different materials and have different maximum rope lengths depending on what material they're made of - wood, copper, and steel.

The rope stops lowering if it reaches an obstruction. Ropes can be cut using an axe or other choppy tool at any location and when they're cut the bottom half of the rope will disappear, dropping any climbers. The same happens to the entire rope if the rope box at the top of the rope is removed. Cutting the rope doesn't reduce the maximum length of rope the rope box will produce if it's removed and rebuilt again. Ropes are flammable. They respect protection settings - if the player that placed the rope box isn't permitted to build in an area then the rope descending from that box will treat it as an obstruction.

Also included is a rope ladder that behaves similarly, though it only comes in one standard maximum length - 50m by default, again changeable in settings.

This mod retains optional backward compatibility with the crafting items from the vines mod (anything with group "vines" can be used to make rope boxes and rope ladders). Ropes can also be made from cotton, available via an optional dependency on the farming mod.

In-game documentation is provided via an optional dependency on the doc mod.

Links

• Github
• Download

Recommended mods that work well with this mod: Sounding line, Vines

[texmex]

This is great stuff, thank you FaceDeer!

[texmex]

In most worlds where cotton should exist, I've found it to be very rare. That makes ropes hard to get with only farming dependency fulfilled, whereas with vines mod ropes comes easy.

The difference in balance is fine really, but if you're looking for an default alternative for vines, perhaps a rope recipe with jungle grass or similar could work as substitute.

Personally I find rope boxes to be very powerful, hence I would increase the cost of those. (or decrease each max length, which is what I'll do since you made those handy settings available)

[FaceDeer]

Personally I find rope boxes to be very powerful, hence I would increase the cost of those. (or decrease each max length, which is what I'll do since you made those handy settings available)

You could also boost the amount of cotton required by fiddling with the recipe in crafts.lua. By default a 50m rope box takes 6 cotton to build, you could boost that to 18 cotton by changing the cotton requirement for rope segments to 9 cotton and up to 81 cotton total by changing the recipe for a rope box to 9 rope segments.

It's been my experience that, where farming is concerned, I generally either have no cotton at all (haven't found the seeds yet or haven't established a secure place to farm them) or I have arbitrarily large amounts of cotton (my farm is up and running so I can harvest hundreds of cotton whenever I log on). Balancing crafting recipes is hard. :)

[FaceDeer]

I just noticed that this mod didn't do protection checking, allowing players to lower ropes into areas they're not allowed to build in. Fixed now.

[texmex]

Yes, the default recipe is probably as balanced as it can be. I'd rather not edit mod code, because I want to be able to pull the latest updates to it without having the pull overwrite my tweaks. If there's another methods of changing recipes I don't know about them. Can recipes be overridden by writing another mod, for example?

There's also the cotton gathering method of killing mobs_redo kittens, that is, if you lack a soul.

[FaceDeer]

Yes, the default recipe is probably as balanced as it can be. I'd rather not edit mod code, because I want to be able to pull the latest updates to it without having the pull overwrite my tweaks. If there's another methods of changing recipes I don't know about them. Can recipes be overridden by writing another mod, for example?

Looks like it. I just whipped up this little example mod to override the rope segment recipe and double its cotton requirement, and it seems to work fine. Should make a good template for you to use on any other mod as well - just add a dependency on the mod to the depends.txt file (to ensure that this mod is loaded after the mod with the recipe you're overriding), add a copy of the old crafting recipe to init.lua with the output count set to zero (don't just put an empty string for output, that crashed Minetest for me :), and add the new recipe.

[texmex]

Thanks a bunch FaceDeer, I'll try it as soon as theres time.

[FaceDeer]

I just made all of the various rope items usable as furnace fuel with burn times based off of the components that went into making them, so if you significantly change the crafting recipes you might want to look at changing those as well.

Turns out that cotton doesn't have a fuel value, which is a bit weird and probably just an oversight. I assumed a 1-second burn time per cotton.

[FaceDeer]

Just did a big revamp of the rope nodebox models, making them resemble the ropes in the "castle" mod. In the process I increased the number of rope boxes available, there's up to 9 now (so the default maximum length rope box has 450m of rope in it). If anyone thinks this is excessive I added a setting to allow that to be changed, if you want to retain the same behaviour that there was before set the maximum rope length multiple down to 5 and you'll get the same 50-250m range of rope lengths.

Other new features:

• You can now "ride" the descending rope if you get within a few meters of the end of it while it's lowering.
• Rope boxes themselves are "climbable" now, allowing much easier transition from one rope to another.
• Severing a rope will now destroy all of the rope hanging below that point instantly, all the way down to the bottom. Previously rope destruction would pause when it reached the lower edge of the loaded map region, which could result in unfortunate incidents if someone tried climbing up a partly-destroyed rope from below.