Thank you for posting! It really means a lot to me. I love comments like these, carefully analyzing every detail, lol.
OK:
Almost all of the points you have touched are things for which I already have plans, yes I thought deeply about many things about what this game will become. It's just I have been still kinda secretive …
I'm still not willing to reveal it all (it's just a lot to write tbh, lol). But one day I will talk more about my plans, when I actually have a solid plan.
To give the game some depth, I thought it may be nice if there was some kind of tech tree mirroring the tree of life.
Some kind of tech tree is planned, but I still need to think of a good concept. Designing a game is a lot of work actually, but it's also super exciting. I don't know yet where my thoughts will lead me to, but I am positive it will turn out something great! I have a lot of notes and concepts, but its all rather chaotic. I need to sort my own thoughts, haha. I always have celeron55's words in my mind, that coherence is important. Not idea how I'm going to get that one right …
Hades Revisited only supports mapgen v6. Is it a lot of work to make other mapgens work?
I have a major overhaul of the mapgen planned, but I have no concept yet. I want definitely to make the whole map be more diverse and also to give a reason to explore a little. Currently, it's pretty much the same everywhere, this needs to change. I am not in a hurry to unlock the other mapgens, it mostly depends on the end result.
The problem is not whether the other mapgens "work" but to make sure they create good worlds. First I want to make sure to have ONE good mapgen, then I MIGHT think about the other ones.
I was thinking along these lines: "You wake up in your crashed spacecraft containing minimal supplies: a few environment suits, a bare minimum of tools, some water, a little food." You obviously need some more spectacular starting gear just to survive in the hostile environment you've crashed into! Then, after you've terraformed a little bit of paradise, survival should become easier. A space ship may also be handy to 'attach' some mechanics to: machines (nodes) you can't craft yourself at the start and which you can't relocate.
Yes, yes, all of that was already thought about. The spawning mechanism will be much different eventually. Maybe there will even a little bit of backstory, who knows? It turns out, the hard part is not the implementation, but the design. :D And don't get me even started about balancing! I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of spacecraft in this game, be it in the past, the present or the future.
My Hades Revisited project is so different from MCL2. In MCL2 I had I was just cloning an existing game design. But now I must design from the ground up (well, based on Glünggi's work, of course). This is new!
How a about a dedicated starting food system? Something rather low-tech, low-effort, low-yield. In a stroke of silliness, it could be heavy on the stomach so that players need more advanced food to be able jump higher.
Yeah, I also wanted to rethink the food system, I also noticed the current system is too simplistic. I am not even sure if I want to keep hunger at all and maybe use a different mechanic. The game is not primarily meant as a survival game, more like a "progress game". Like you start small but eventually end up with mighty and powerful gear and unlock more and more abilities to transform the world. Or something like that ...
As for old boost_cart mod: YES. This mod is on the chopping block already. Actualy, there is still a great deal of really ancient mods/code in this game, there still needs to be a lot of cleanup to get rid of legacy. This is also the reason why I don't care about backwards-compability for worlds at this stage.
Other mods which are on the chopping block are: mesecons (will be gone in next version, and this game is NOT about building full adders and the like), pipeworks (too broken, replacement is planned), signs_lib (too ugly, I want new signs), mobs (I want a new mob API, probably Mobkit), vessels (too MTG-y), travelnet (too OP, I want my own teleportation system) and more.
I hope to eventually reach a point when things have stabilized a little, but for now always assume that updates might break your world (that's alpha-stage software for you ...).
It is intentional that you can't skip the night, so you have to deal with the darkness. Sorry, that's just the way it is. ;-)
There is also no fire in this game, this is also fully intended.
I really didn't think about mushrooms so far. I have so many other plants on my idea list, but not mushrooms yet. Not sure if I want them, but those will probably a late-stage thing because of water.
My idea is to draw inspiration from the vegetation around the world except arctic and sub-arctic climates. Maybe also some fantasy plants like the pale tree.
Speaking of vegetation, I recently worked a little on grass to behave more like an actual plant. Grass seed will be added, and dirt will no longer automatially turn grassy. I also added grass color. And there are multiple stages for grass on dirt now:
https://satoshiupload.com/images/hUr1KvDRFi.png
It's not much, but a start.
I agree that water is too easy to replicate, which really doesn't make sense for the premise of this game. What's worse, with pipes you can also clone water sources, but this is totally wrong. I do plan to rethink the liquid mechanics, as this will be obviously very important but I don't really have a concept yet. It's on my long "need to think about" list, lol.
Eating sounds: Ooff, that's a good one, yeah. Yes this sound is really really old and not fitting, lol. Thankfully, I got a nice microphone and this game includes some of my own recordings (not the eating sound!), and I am constantly replacing the sounds bit by bit, until none of the MTG sounds remain. I feel like the environment sounds will be a big part of this game.
Some node sounds have been replaced already. I want to get rid of any trace of MTG. ;-)
Again, thanks for the great comment, it's clear you have thought a lot about this game, which is cool.