About a month back I noticed that this castle mod had a very old version of the rope mod embedded within it. I did a lot of work making a rope mod that solved many problems the older versions had and I wanted to push an update into castle as well, but the monolithic nature of the castle mod made that difficult. So I started working on breaking up [castle] into a bunch of smaller independent pieces and turning it into a modpack whose parts could be updated independently.
It turned out to be a major operation because I just can't leave well enough alone. :) I've finished the project and in the process I added new features and upgrades to almost every part of Castle. You can get a pre-packaged version of the modpack
from my github fork; I expect a pre-packaged version will be available at the
minetest-mods source soon.
The component mods are:
Anvil
Spoiler
The anvil that was included in the Castle mod previously was just a decorative block. For this version, I started with the anvil from the
Cottages mod as a base. This mod allows you to repair worn-out tools on the anvil by using a hammer. Right-click on the anvil with your worn out tool and the tool will be placed on it; strike the anvil with the hammer to repair the tool, and then retrieve the tool by either punching or right-clicking the anvil with an empty hand. If you're familiar with the cottages anvil this version has done away with the formspec interface, instead displaying the workpiece as an entity similar to how itemframes does it.
Castle Farming
Spoiler
Castle included hide wall coverings and bound straw bales, and those were both farming products so I put them in here. While I was at it I added a straw "training dummy" you can build out of sticks and straw bales. Seemed like a useful decoration to add to archery ranges, or possibly to put on your battlements to make your castle look more heavily manned than it actually is (a classic ruse).
Castle Gates
Spoiler
I started by splitting the oak door and jail door/bars into a separate mod, but it felt like there needed to be something more in here. I wound up implementing a whole new system to allow for the creation of large multi-node swinging and sliding doors, sliding portcullises, and drawbridges. Also included in this mod are some "door slot" blocks that are useful for allowing portcullises to slide through a space without it looking like there's a big opening (it's a masonry block that extends into the neighboring space, filling the gap that would otherwise be left by a portcullis since they're not a full block thick).
Gates are built out of individual blocks and triggered by right-clicking on them. A gate with hinges will try to swing around the hinge's axis, a gate without hinges will try to slide to whichever side is open for it to move into. Although swinging gates can only exist in 90-degree increments due to the limitations of the voxel engine, they will test for obstructions in the nodes they're swinging through and take those into account. If you want to make a double door use "gate edge" nodes to define the seam between the two doors (otherwise the mod will not know where to split the two doors when they're triggered and the door will not open).
I tried to write the gate-handling code in a reusable manner, so if anyone would like to try their hand at adding new gate blocks it should hopefully be a reasonably straightforward thing. See api.txt for an explanation.
Castle Lighting
Spoiler
This contains the chandelier, chain, and lamp blocks. I also added brasiers. There's a metal "floor brasier" and masonry "pillar brasiers". Brasiers require fuel to operate; put something flammable in its inventory and it'll automatically light up, and continue drawing new items from its inventory to burn when the current fuel item runs out. One coal lump will produce 40 minutes of fire. The fire it produces is real, so don't place your brasier next to something flammable or you'll have a bad time.
Castle Masonry
Spoiler
This is perhaps the "core" mod of castle, the various masonry blocks used for building a castle's structure. While splitting this out I made a few modifications and additions:
- A new arrow slit type: the embrasure. This is wider than the existing arrow slit types and is useful both as a large arrow slit in a wall and as borders for wall-top crenelations. Turn it on its side and it makes for a reasonably modern-looking bunker gunport as well.
- machicolations, a type of specialized murder hole that is placed along the tops of walls to allow defenders to drop stuff on attackers at the wall's base.
- Half pillars, to allow pillars to be built right up against a wall.
- Ceiling beams to allow bracing to be added between pillars.
In addition I made the mod's material usage more easily configurable. Under the "settings" tab click on the "Advanced" button and then navigate to "mods" and you'll find an entry for castle masonry that allows you to enable and disable the various material types. In addition there are some new material types that are disabled by default but can be enabled here: wood, snow, ice, and obsidian brick (for building snow forts and for building a tower for your favorite Dark Lord).
The materials you enable here will also be available in a couple of the other mods in this modpack; pillar brasiers and gate slots use these material definitions (and default to stone brick if castle masonry is not installed).
Castle Shields
Spoiler
On the surface this is just the three decorative wall shields from the castle mod split out into a stand-alone mod. But in the process I changed how these wall shields are defined to make it easy for people to make new versions with their own color combinations.
The three default shields were defined thusly:
castle_shields.register_shield("shield_1", "Mounted Shield", "red", "blue", "slash")
castle_shields.register_shield("shield_2", "Mounted Shield", "cyan", "yellow", "chevron")
castle_shields.register_shield("shield_3", "Mounted Shield", "grey", "green", "cross")
The following colors are permitted:
"black", "blue", "brown", "cyan", "dark_green", "dark_grey", "green", "grey", "magenta", "orange", "pink", "red", "violet", "white", "yellow"
The following patterns are permitted:
"slash", "chevron", "cross"
Note that you should only define one shield for each particular color combination (ie, don't have both a red/blue slash and a red/blue chevron) otherwise the crafting recipes will conflict. You could have a red/blue shield and a blue/red one, though.
Castle Storage
Spoiler
The crate and iron-bound chest from Castle, split into a separate mod.
Sorry, no new additions to this one. Though I did make them compatible with the
hopper mod.
Castle Tapestries
Spoiler
The tapestires, split out into their own mod. This includes
the upgrades VanessaE discussed in the previous comment, so you'll need a dev build of Minetest for these to work correctly.
Castle Weapons
Spoiler
The battle axe and crossbow from castle, split into its own mod. No modifications or upgrades were made in the process.
Crafting Bench
Spoiler
The auto-crafting bench from Castle, split into its own mod. The only upgrade I made in the process was to make this
hopper-compatible as well; you can now set up a crafting bench that will automatically draw on external material sources and have its products placed into external storage.
Orbs of Time
Spoiler
The Castle mod included two magical orbs, the Orb of Midday and the Orb of Midnight, that allowed a player to change the time of day a limited number of times. I split these into this mod. I have to admit, I'm not really sure how these are castle-related but it's still bundled with the castle modpack for historical compatibility. I also added two new orbs, the Orb of Dawn and the Orb of Dusk, since it seemed to me that if you were using these things to bring daylight or darkness it would be more useful to maximize the resulting duration of daylight or darkness.
Ropes
Spoiler
Finally, the reason I started this whole project in the first place! :)
The ropes mod has its own forum thread, but in a nutshell:
- Rope boxes have a finite length of rope in them. Rope boxes containing different lengths of rope can be constructed and upgraded with additional rope.
- Hanging ropes can be severed with an axe, and the code for removing the rope below the cut point removes all of the affected rope immediately
- A player can "ride" the descending end of a rope box rope as it goes down (there's a knot on the end so you can more easily see where the end is)
- Rope boxes can be made from wood, copper, or steel. Better materials can support a longer maximum length of rope.
- There's also rope ladders that auto-extend much like how rope box ropes do.
