FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Important: Most of the mods in this modpack are outdated and have been replaced with newer versions.

The cottages mod still resides inside this modpack. The documentation for it can be found in this thread.

The traders have been heavily improved, do not have any dependencies and are far better than the version found in this modpack here. The new version of mobf_trader and its documentation can be found here.

Even the random_buildings part is done diffrent now. Entire villages and lone houses are spawned by mg_villages. The mod does not have its own thread yet but is discussed in this thread - which is mainly about my villages mod, which is also obsolete and is about to be replaced by mg_villages.

Want some wood?

Sample trader inventory:


Inside of a lumberjack house

This mod - or perhaps better modpack - is intended to bring some life to singleplayer by adding lumberjacks which settle close to moretrees and are willing to trade wood with you. The lumberjacks do not really cut down trees; they just live there and sell the wood to travellers like you are. Thus, you do not have to destroy the landscape to get wood from moretrees. Or clay. Or sand. Right now, only moretrees-traders spawn. Perserving the landscape was the original intention for this mod. Sapiers traders proved to be a nice addition on their own. It's good to find a friendly house somewhere in singleplacer.

The whole thing is not finished yet. It is work in progress. You may test it if you want. If you do so, better use a world specificly for this.

New huts are placed some 30 seconds after new parts of the map are generated and moretrees spawned a tree. The hut uses the same material as the tree that caused its spawning. In order to integrate the building better in the landscape, it is built on a platform. The ground will be either dirt, desert sand or sand. The building is a random one taken from a list and rotated randomly. Each building is read from a worldedit blueprint.

It is very similar to mtcities from Mauvebic (thanks to him for a lot of help and hints!) and bears some resemblance to mods such as deploy_node by Cornernote, villages by Ironzorg or towntest by Cornernote. It differs from those mods in the way that it comes with a trader from Sapiers animals mod mobf. The mobf_trader.lua file basicly clones Sapiers trader npc and lets those clones sell diffrent things depending on which mods you have installed (supported: default (clay/sand), animals, moretrees, farming, farming_plus). Only specialised moretrees-traders spawn automaticly next to their hut. All others can be spawned manually with e.g. "/trader animal_cow" . The traders as such might eventually be very intresting for servers where they might help preserve areas with clay and moretrees from material gathering players.

nodes.lua provides a small amount of nodes that where usefull for the lumberjack homes: modified beds (from the beds mod; without functionality; better stackable; texture not yet adapted), small benches to sit on, special roof parts (if you don't like them include them in the replacements-list in random_buildings.lua), and a dirt road. The texture for the dirt road was done by badger436.

If you want to give it a try, you will need a recent build of MT (one where npc can show you a formspec), the development branch of Sapiers animals modpack (else the trader will not be able to trade diffrent amounts of the same good) and of course the latest moretrees from VanessaE (thanks to her for help with spawning and other things!). A lot of other regular MT contributors on IRC helped as well to get this as far as it is.

Requires:
* recent version of Minetest
* moretrees
* development version of mobf (the mobf part is enough; you do not need any of the animals if you don't want them)

Version: 0.2 (alpha)
Download: https://github.com/Sokomine/random_buildings/zipball/master
Browse code: https://github.com/Sokomine/random_buildings

This is what happens if you allow too many lumberjack homes to spawn (they all want to sell wood...)

Oooo, I want to try this right now :D
Edit: It's really cool, some of the textures are missing though. :P And the lumber jacks are just unknown entities, but the house making is really fast!

cool. i really like it. would be better with my texture pack :P (i just added moretrees)

Do you have mobf installed? If so, the lumberjacks ought to be there. Mobf does require animalmaterials to work. Newer builds of MT usually start even if dependencies are not fulfilled or mods could not be loaded.

I've added the textures. So far they're only slightly modified beds and the texture for the dirt road.

What I forgot in the first posting: Chests in the houses are filled with random things depending on which mods are installed. It's supposed to be a halfway believable property of a lumberjack (so no dirt or cobble blocks...he's not saving on a house).

Sokomine wrote:Newer builds of MT usually start even if dependencies are not fulfilled or mods could not be loaded.

That was a bug and is fixed already.

Ah, fine. So even my build was not recent enough :-)

Very smart combination of mods!

Yeah next will be you have to pay, buy a house.

Added clay traders:

As with the lumberjacks, the materials of the clay traders vary. They spawn close to clay and sell mostly sand, sandstone, desert sand, glass, brick and clay. Clay/sand traders where the original motivation for this mod. Clay is a rare ressource. Gathering it devastates entire landscapes. With the trader, you can just buy as much as you need without destroying anything.

The next project will be traders for farming/farming_plus food/items and also traders for animals. Unfortionately, the traditional medieval type of farming house which holds everything under one roof is relatively large and occours in villages. This will be difficult to spawn.

Further textures are welcome! Timber framing, straw roofs, barrels (nodeboxes) and a wooden wheel (drawtype: signlike) would be great.

All buildings are in worldedit format so that new ones can be included easily.

Wow! This is severely impressive....

DO WANT!

the question is preformance wise does the game take a big hit?

Just tested this, and I should say it's very impressive.

I have found a possible bug though (it may be just me): The clay traders don't show the price of some of their items; namely, clay, brick, and sand.

Also, I have some suggestions:
- It would be good if the trader's houses couldn't be destroyed in any way. This may be hard, as it either requires you to reimplement/depend on the protector mod (or any other similar mod), or redefine all the nodes with unbreakable versions.
- Somehow remove dependency on MOBF/animalmaterials. Not everyone wants to install MOBF to use this (though mobs add a nice touch to survival gameplay). I don't really care about this; I'm fine either way.

Also, is it normal that the traders' chests have items in them?

Anyway, excellent work there.

Linxx wrote:the question is preformance wise does the game take a big hit?

I don' t think so. Mapgen may already be a problem in certain situations when you start a new world and try to go to fast. Most of the traders appear only next to moretrees-trees, and only some of those trees actually get a lumberjack house. Without moretrees, there are only the clay traders, and those spawn only if there's clay and they're lucky. Even while testing with a lot more houses than usual, there was no great impact on map generation. Please note that the houses appear 20 seconds after map generation and not immediately. This is to make sure that the area they want to appear in actually exists (otherwise the houses might be cut off) and in the hope that it's *after* the cavegen algorithm ran and digged holes in everything.
Make sure to remove at least all hostile animals from the animals_modpack if you run into trouble at mapgen. The "peaceful" farm animals (cows, chickens, sheep, gulls, ostirchs, wolfs (well, ok, less peaceful)) are far less problematic as far as load is concerned! To run this mod, you only need the mobf part and the animalmaterials.

kaeza wrote:The clay traders don't show the price of some of their items; namely, clay, brick, and sand.

Are you sure that you're using the development version of mobf? The current stable release of it is not yet able to handle diffrent package size of offers of the same material (i.e. "1 sand" and "10 sand" as offers from the same trader). It is sufficient if you take a recent mobf/inventory.lua

kaeza wrote: It would be good if the trader's houses couldn't be destroyed in any way. This may be hard, as it either requires you to reimplement/depend on the protector mod (or any other similar mod), or redefine all the nodes with unbreakable versions.

True! That is something that annoyed me with the mobf-trader as well: It is possible to tear the house apart and sell the components to the mob :-( As the mod is most useful for singleplayer where other protective mods are not likely to occour, I probably ought to implement a simple version of protection. Best would be if the mob would start attacking griefers or at least complain.

kaeza wrote:Somehow remove dependency on MOBF/animalmaterials. Not everyone wants to install MOBF to use this

The mod is already prepared to be split up into two parts. It might be best to turn it into a modpack with random_buildings containing only the buildings and mobf_trader as a seperate mod within the pack.

kaeza wrote:Also, is it normal that the traders' chests have items in them?

Yes, that's right. It may fit less here and was mostly intended for the "private" chests of the lumberjacks. The clay traders have some chests that act more as storage for their goods. Maybe I ought to exclude them from the random filling.

Sokomine wrote:Are you sure that you're using the development version of mobf? The current stable release of it is not yet able to handle diffrent package size of offers of the same material (i.e. "1 sand" and "10 sand" as offers from the same trader). It is sufficient if you take a recent mobf/inventory.lua

Ah! I may be using an old version. I will update and report later.

Sokomine wrote:True! That is something that annoyed me with the mobf-trader as well: It is possible to tear the house apart and sell the components to the mob :-( As the mod is most useful for singleplayer where other protective mods are not likely to occour, I probably ought to implement a simple version of protection. Best would be if the mob would start attacking griefers or at least complain.

That is a very good idea :)

Sokomine wrote:Yes, that's right. It may fit less here and was mostly intended for the "private" chests of the lumberjacks. The clay traders have some chests that act more as storage for their goods. Maybe I ought to exclude them from the random filling.

Hmm... I don't know if this is possible by using stock mobf_trader (I mean getting name), but you could simulate as if the trader was another player, by creating a locked chest instead, with the trader's name as owner (so the infotext reads "Locked Chest (owned by John the Trader)").

what about waitresses? As in cafes or restaurants?

Can trader part be sepearted from the building but specify that the trader remains in the area that IS the building. Like having some shady character in alleyway trading goods or butcher trading meats or baker trading pies.

Choose the skin, choose the goods, set the dialogue, set the area or spot and reap the profits. ;)

The trader does not wander around. He stays where he spawns or was spawned manually. Having them wander around/inside their building would make sense. Sapier is working on pathfinding for his mobf, so that such a feature might come up in the near future.

Buildings and trader are already seperate files and will become seperate mods within a modpack.

For a waitress, you'd have to find an appropriate skin. Most of what you want can already be done. The "set the dialogue" part does not exist for NPC yet (but could be implemented with the formspecs - would require designing them), and neither does "set the area" to walk around.

What you can do is this:

Thus, a sample call for your waitress might be:

To spawn one such waitress, you'd have to type "/trader waitress". She'll never run out of trade goods and right now will not offer you what she got in turn.

I really liked the idea of having trade posts (or buildings) spawn randomly on maps and prefer that over having to spawn traders and build buildings for them on your own (although that is awesome and useful on its own). It just was more interesting and immersive for me that way, especially when you randomly find a trade post while wandering in the wilderness. :) Hopefully this mod still works in the current version. *gonna test it out*

Caerulean wrote:I really liked the idea of having trade posts (or buildings) spawn randomly on maps and prefer that over having to spawn traders and build buildings for them on your own (although that is awesome and useful on its own). It just was more interesting and immersive for me that way, especially when you randomly find a trade post while wandering in the wilderness. :)

Thank you!

Caerulean wrote: Hopefully this mod still works in the current version. *gonna test it out*

The modpack still works to a degree, but it's certainly not very satisfactory anymore with current versions of minetest_game and MT. Some things got changed, so rotation will be wrong. Clay now spawns diffrently, so clay traders do get confused and may not find a place for their homes. Moretrees and mobf developed further and changed some elements. The delayed spawning (30 seconds after mapgen) was pretty annoying anyway, and clay traders tended to clump, while lumberjacks where kind of rare.

But don't worry: There are already successors for the mods in this modpack. Only the cottages mod inside this modpack is still the most current version - and that got a lot of improvements as well. The traders are now handled diffrently and are far more lightweight, requiring neither mobf nor additional models. They can be found in my traders mod and are designed to be more or less a drop-in replacement for the traders in random_buildings. And as far as the buildings themselves go, the upcoming mg_villages mod (currently only available on github, not officially released yet) does contain lone trading posts. It can even be configured so that it only spawns said lone buildings and no villages at all. By default, it'll create both. The houses will blend far better with the sourrounding terrain than those in random_buildings did. And they don't need those 30 seconds to spawn.

The only drawback with the newer versions of the mods in this modpack is that the traders are not spawned yet. The villages do require more..mobile..mob life than just those traders standing around I'm afraid. I'm going to add the trader spawning function to mg_villages soon so that at least some mobs will be there.

Oh, awesome, thanks. :)

Just one question though: will the upcoming mod need a new world to be created for it to work or will it be able to work on a currently existing world? (Those were technically two questions. xD)

Can you put your images somewhere that they don't expire? I miss not seeing the screenshots.

I've been putting mine on imgur, no idea when they expire but I haven't seen any of them lapse.

sofar wrote:Can you put your images somewhere that they don't expire? I miss not seeing the screenshots.

The trouble is that I've tried at least three diffrent sites so far, and they all went down. Hosting the files on Github might be an option; but I'm afraid Github might then shut down as well (even though that fear is irrational...).

sofar wrote:I've been putting mine on imgur, no idea when they expire but I haven't seen any of them lapse.

imgur is broken. When I click on "upload images", nothing happens. It seems to require JavaScript, and I won't enable that for an image hosting site.

Caerulean wrote:Just one question though: will the upcoming mod need a new world to be created for it to work or will it be able to work on a currently existing world? (Those were technically two questions. xD)

It's always a good idea to start a new world in order to be on the safe side. Still, existing worlds ought to be safe when using mg_villages - after all it only change the world at mapgen time, and that only happens in newly generated terrain. So all that ought to be affected (apart from really new terrain) is that strip of 15 nodes width around your current world that might be changed by the next run of mapgen anyway.

The traders are now integrated into mg_villages (at least to a degree), and I think I'm going to put up a pre-release modpack soon. Getting all the mods together in a modpack for all that the mods can do in concert might make it a lot easier for players.

Sokomine, have you tried PostImage.org?

The FAQ claims

You can upload unlimited images per post will never have to worry about your images being removed for inactivity.

...and I dont think it requires java but I am not sure.

I have used them for a couple of years now without any issues.

Sokomine wrote:

sofar wrote:I've been putting mine on imgur, no idea when they expire but I haven't seen any of them lapse.

imgur is broken. When I click on "upload images", nothing happens. It seems to require JavaScript, and I won't enable that for an image hosting site.

the javascript paints the form data so you can interact with it, including drag and drop.

They do however use plain POST to catch the upload. So you can just post to it via curl, and get the URL back in the request status headers:



Cheers :^D

Think I can reconfigure the traders to use mobs instead of mobf?

wcwyes wrote:Think I can reconfigure the traders to use mobs instead of mobf?

The new traders are a replacement for those found in random_buildings. They still carry the mobf_ part of the name for compatibilty reasons but are no longer based on mobf. I recommend that you use those. They don't have dependencies either and are very lightweight.

Or is your intention to have them move around and - apart from the trading - behave like other mobs?

Thanks for the info.

Sokomine wrote:The new traders are a replacement for those found in random_buildings. They still carry the mobf_ part of the name for compatibilty reasons but are no longer based on mobf. I recommend that you use those. They don't have dependencies either and are very lightweight.

Or is your intention to have them move around and - apart from the trading - behave like other mobs?

I tried loading traderf and it errors because you have mobf in the depends file. I tried making mobf a soft dependency, but then it crashes.

Sokomine wrote:

wcwyes wrote:Think I can reconfigure the traders to use mobs instead of mobf?

The new traders are a replacement for those found in random_buildings. They still carry the mobf_ part of the name for compatibilty reasons but are no longer based on mobf. I recommend that you use those. They don't have dependencies either and are very lightweight.

Or is your intention to have them move around and - apart from the trading - behave like other mobs?

wcwyes wrote:I tried loading traderf and it errors because you have mobf in the depends file. I tried making mobf a soft dependency, but then it crashes.

Then you got the wrong, the old version. Please use the seperate mobf_trader, and not the one that comes with random_buildings. The new one is far better! It can be found here. The new version does not have any dependencies. There are some optional dependencies; those exist solely so that mobs from other mob mods can be modified and turned into traders.

Nice Mod! cool that you have to insert items like stone, wood, glass etc and then the building gets build in front of you, it does not just spawn a complete building at once like other mods..
This is a realy nice Mod for Survival servers were you have to work hard to own items and build stuff..
One could setup a Shop where these Chests are sold to players (with help of curency mod Money) once a player bought a chest and choose a building he or she still has to gather resources to actually build it..

dannyplaysminetest wrote:Nice Mod! cool that you have to insert items like stone, wood, glass etc and then the building gets build in front of you, it does not just spawn a complete building at once like other mods..

That build chest from random_buildings still works, but I'm working on a new version. Right now, the build chest in handle_schematics is more useful for saving and restoring buildings and does not have the build-after-material-is-inserted yet. But if you like this, you'll probably also like the mod npcf, which comes with a builder npc who builds buildings block-by-block. It's very nice to watch for a while. Cornernotes towntest also had that.

dannyplaysminetest wrote:This is a realy nice Mod for Survival servers were you have to work hard to own items and build stuff..
One could setup a Shop where these Chests are sold to players (with help of curency mod Money) once a player bought a chest and choose a building he or she still has to gather resources to actually build it..

That would be pretty easy. All it takes is to add a line to a trader that makes him sell the build chests. But it's probably better to wait with that until the new version is finished. Because that one will be more flexible and allow to replace materials as well.