FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

I had a friend who's playing the game ask me yesterday if the mithril pickaxe was better than the mese pickaxe. Since I'm dabbling in the code to make mods. I thought I'd look at the code directly. I think I understand the "Time" numbers correctly. If the node includes group . and the wielded tool then the node will take 1.4 to be destroyed. Here from this code I can ascertain that uses=0 must mean infinite uses because the object that I took it from is the hand. But I do not understand how say the mese pickaxe has a uses level of 20. when clearly it can be used more times than 20. I theorized that different nodes can use it up at different rates, but looking at the node code I don't see any corresponding numbers. maxlevel and max_drop_level, I could guess about what they do, but they are mystery, for example the only difference aside from time value between the mese and steel pickaxe is maxlevel -1, not uses which equal 20 in both cases. Could anyone explain exactly what these numbers do? and how they might correspond with numbers in the nodes?

thanks

It depends on the level. The nodes have a "level" field in the groups and the tools have a "maxlevel".
Tools can only dig nodes with level <= maxlevel.
Tools with higher level take longer to dig and wear out the tools faster (the use count is multiplied by 3^leveldiff)

are there any wiki-pages with these informations. not everybody can read the LUA or C code to find out how tools are working with the different ways of usement. comments of source-codes helps only programmers but dont show you the complexity of the objects working together.

Documentation is very important for normal beginners.
the news-section of the forum is a first very important thing for everybody who want to understand the changes of a complex game as minetest is.


sorry for the bad english.

Its documented in the main resource for modders: https://github.com/minetest/minetest/blob/master/doc/lua_api.txt#L671

Thanks PilzAdam,

That document is an awesome resource! I hadn't found that before.
One question that isn't quite explained is this apparent contradiction:

the definition of the steel_axe includes this:


and the stone block is this:


correct me if I'm wrong, because I know that the steel pick can break stone, but the cracky level of stone is 3, the max level of the steel pick for cracky is 2, and I don't see a definition for the steel pick to work with the stone group.

BadWolf wrote:Thanks PilzAdam,

That document is an awesome resource! I hadn't found that before.
One question that isn't quite explained is this apparent contradiction:

the definition of the steel_axe includes this:

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

groupcaps={
cracky = {times={[1]=4.00, [2]=1.60, [3]=0.80}, uses=20, maxlevel=2},
},


and the stone block is this:

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

groups = {cracky=3, stone=1},

correct me if I'm wrong, because I know that the steel pick can break stone, but the cracky level of stone is 3, the max level of the steel pick for cracky is 2, and I don't see a definition for the steel pick to work with the stone group.

The rating of the "cracky" group just says which digging time to take, the level is a different field (0 for stone, since its not set).
E.g. the steelblock has level 2:

Thanks!