How do we make flowers reproduce is minetest 5.0?

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damongang
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How do we make flowers reproduce is minetest 5.0?

by damongang » Post

We used to be able to plant flowers in an L shape on dirt/grass and they would spread. How do we make that work in minetest 5.0?
Thanks.
I like that feature but my wife REALLY likes that feature.

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Topywo
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Re: How do we make flowers reproduce is minetest 5.0?

by Topywo » Post

Without modding or changing the minetest_game mods, remove all grasses and ferns from the area where you want to spread the flowers.

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Re: How do we make flowers reproduce is minetest 5.0?

by Wuzzy » Post

Are you talking about Minetest Game?

The flower spread rules have been changed. In 0.4.17 and before, it was:

First, a definition: “flora node”. A “flora node” is any node that is either a flower or any grass (i.e. Grass, Dry Grass, Jungle Grass, Marram Grass). See also: https://wiki.minetest.net/Group:flora
There is not actually a rule for spreading flowers, but a rule for spreading both grass and flowers. It's the same rule for both of them

Each flora node can spawn a new flora node. First, it must be on a block on which saplings would grow (like dirt or dirt with grass). Then, there must be enough light (light level > 13).
Now, a new flora node is spawned if and only if there are at most 4 flora nodes (including itself) in a cube of 9×9×9 around it, with the flower that is being checked by Minetest in the center. The new flora node will be spawned randomly in that 9×9×9 cube.

The new rule since 5.0.0 is almost the same, but the new limit is a maximum of 3 flora nodes now.

This also explains why your “L” shape doesn't work anymore, those are now too many flowers packed together.


Oh: I'm not sure if the cube size in 0.4.17 was actually 9×9×9, but it sure is 9×9×9 in 5.0.0.

TL;DR:
To spread, a flower must:
  • Be on Dirt with Grass or another sapling-friendly node
  • In light (light level >=13)
  • Around an area of 9×9×9, not have more than 3 flowers or grasses (including itself)

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paramat
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Re: How do we make flowers reproduce is minetest 5.0?

by paramat » Post

Speaking as a MTGame core dev, the flower spreading system is really bad, i can think of far better ways to do it. However it probably can't be changed because so many games and mods depend on MTGame being the way it is.

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Re: How do we make flowers reproduce is minetest 5.0?

by ShadMOrdre » Post

In my lib_ecology mod, I had recently considered using node_timers to "play" conways game of life. Each timer event, I would check for how many of that node type was near; if too few, death from isolation; if just enough, either spawn new plant or blossom; and if too many, death by overcrowding. This is very similar to what exists already, just using node timers instead of abms. This should work for plants, grass, flowers, mushrooms, saplings and trees, because they all essentially use the same logic. In lib_ecology, they mostly use the same code.

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Re: How do we make flowers reproduce is minetest 5.0?

by Mew » Post

paramat wrote:Speaking as a MTGame core dev, the flower spreading system is really bad, i can think of far better ways to do it. However it probably can't be changed because so many games and mods depend on MTGame being the way it is.
It would be appreciated by many people if it was changed. Lots of 5.0+ servers (especially world limited maps) are running out of dye. I understand that nobody really minds what this density nerf has done to grass, but lots of mods rely upon several dyes and servers by default do not have other means of getting those dyes. It can be manually corrected on a case by case basis with the servers, but it's one feature that is simply expected by many players and hosts to work out of the box.

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Re: How do we make flowers reproduce is minetest 5.0?

by Sokomine » Post

I had the idea to add rape seed for oil production: Grow the new plant type "rape seed", cook it to oil, and use the oil to multiply your dyes. That'd at least help with the colors. Flowers for decoration would still be rare...farming them would be great, but then we'd need a ton more textures for all the plants in all the growth stages...
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Re: How do we make flowers reproduce is minetest 5.0?

by firefox » Post

Sokomine wrote:Flowers for decoration would still be rare...farming them would be great, but then we'd need a ton more textures for all the plants in all the growth stages...
how about food dye?
farming mods have many fruits and vegetables which could be used to make dye.
sure, it's mostly yellow/orange/red/green, but despite being red many fruits actually dye stuff pink or violet instead of red.
then only blue would be rare, but there is a certain historical british/irish weed that makes blue dye when fermented.
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paramat
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Re: How do we make flowers reproduce is minetest 5.0?

by paramat » Post

Mew,
It is a very difficult situation. The most recent change was actually done due to a complaint of far too high flower density. Now you are reporting a lack of flowers.
The most recent change did not reduce maximum flower density or growth rate to anything below that of MT 0.4.x, however the spreading behaviour is slightly different.

The details of the situation and the inherent problems are in this issue https://github.com/minetest/minetest_game/issues/2177 and the PR of the most recent change is https://github.com/minetest/minetest_game/pull/2178

I did propose we move to a seed system for farming flowers to solve the inherent problems, but the other MTGame core devs disapproved.
The flora spreading system in MTGame is a nightmare, but it is disruptive to change it as so much depends on MTGame staying the way it is. Bad methods that cannot be changed occur in many places in MTGame.

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Re: How do we make flowers reproduce is minetest 5.0?

by ptvirgo » Post

For the curious, can you fill us in on what a good mechanism would like? (Programmer but not a game programmer.) How would you design it if you had a clean slate?
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Re: How do we make flowers reproduce is minetest 5.0?

by Astrobe » Post

If I understand things correctly, the spreading behavior is done by an ABM created by the flowers mod that operate on the "flora" group.

It appears that marram grass is not in the flora group so it doesn't spread. Is it intended?

On the problem of the spreading behavior, it seems to me that such dynamic systems will grow until they fill all available resource unless there is some sort of predator countering it.

For instance, I made mushrooms way more sensitive to light so one can only farm them in caves. I noticed that once a player has their mushroom cave up and running, they basically have infinite food. So I made it so that rats can spread from mushrooms, and rats eat mushrooms. This requires the player to go kill rats from time to time (or put a cat there).

Obviously this isn't applicable to MTG because it has no mobs yet, but any sort of predator (maybe a simulated plant disease?) with an activity proportional to the density of the plant should establish an equilibrium below max density. The balance can be difficult to find though.

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paramat
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Re: How do we make flowers reproduce is minetest 5.0?

by paramat » Post

Ideally, i think all plants should be reproducable by seeds/sapling, using nodetimers, no ABMs (as i suggested for flowers in the past, and as we had for mushrooms before that was unfortunately changed to a spreading ABM).
Then all plants can be farmed at high density if desired. For spreading when dug in the wild, each dug plant auto-plants 1 seedling nearby to maintain a constant population.

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ShallowDweller
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Re: How do we make flowers reproduce is minetest 5.0?

by ShallowDweller » Post

paramat wrote:Ideally, i think all plants should be reproducable by seeds/sapling, using nodetimers, no ABMs (as i suggested for flowers in the past, and as we had for mushrooms before that was unfortunately changed to a spreading ABM).
Then all plants can be farmed at high density if desired. For spreading when dug in the wild, each dug plant auto-plants 1 seedling nearby to maintain a constant population.
I'm not sure if it would be a good idea to implement this to the main game, but this method sounds good (to ME). Is there a mod that implements this reproduction method so we can take a look at it? (see if it has any inconveniences and what they are, etc.)

By the way, somebody mentioned dyes above and I'm wondering why the new coral plants added by the game can't be crafted into dyes without extra mods. Now that I mentioned it... I don't remember having seen any mods that allow the player to craft those corals into dyes... Not even with grinding machines...

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Re: How do we make flowers reproduce is minetest 5.0?

by Sokomine » Post

Perhaps flowers could be handled a bit like bushes: If you dig a flower, you get the flower, the part above ground - but the root stays in the dirt below and will regrow a new flower after time unless you dig the dirt, in which case you'll get the root in addition to the flower. Occasionally a second root could be dropped for reproduction.

Technicly it could work like this: Dig a plant. If it was one that hasn't a special meta value set, then you'll get the flower as it looks now, and a tiny stem will remain where the flower had been. If you dig the stem as well, you'll get 1-2 bulbs. The bulbs can be placed like seeds on anything that drops dirt or is a flower pot. They produce stems when placed, which will then in turn over time grow into flowers. Placing a flower instead of a bulb somewhere will place the flower - but also store in metadata that it was placed and thus has no bulb below. Thus, if you dig a manually placed flower, you won't get a bulb as that cannot be regrown.

Perhaps diffrent textures for flowers that grew from bulbs and manually placed ones would be helpful (texture overlay?). And 1-3 new textures for growing flowers that havn't started blossoming yet. And one for the bulb.
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Re: How do we make flowers reproduce is minetest 5.0?

by twoelk » Post

interesting ideas.
additionally there could be more uses for the shovel so that you might get different results wether you use a bare hand, a shovel or some other tool on a plant.
Also a differnce could be made about the kind of earth you plant the flower or shrub in. Simple dirt with grass could be simply "take one - get one" while using the hoe on dry dirt might give you more reward and having wet dirt as in vegetable farming even more.

The flower farming and decorative gardening possabilites have always been a little limited in my opinion and there haven't been mods that really address that issue for minetest in comparism with some quite beautifull mods on this subject made for minecraft or to look a little outside of our voxely subgenre for example the Sims.

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Re: How do we make flowers reproduce is minetest 5.0?

by Sokomine » Post

twoelk wrote: Simple dirt with grass could be simply "take one - get one" while using the hoe on dry dirt might give you more reward and having wet dirt as in vegetable farming even more.
That'd be normal farming then? I was rather thinking of planting them on dirt_with_gass as that's their natural habitat. Digging the grass where a flower was (in theory: any dirt_with_grass with a low chance) would then yield 1-3 bulbs/roots. I think the flowers look better on grass then on farmland.
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