What is equipment? Well first thing for those familiar with Minecraft is the helmets, chest pieces, leggings and boots. The part that has always bugged me is that it simply stops there and it isn't like adding more would be challenging in any way. However, equipment is also pickaxes, shovels, axes, hoes, swords, bows, fishing rods, flint and steel, I would even say compass, clock and map.
Homestone
My first idea is pretty simple, closely related to a hearthstone from World of Warcraft, I always wondered why the game never came with a simple item for teleporting back to your spawn point. It would make the most sense to craft a single-use item which can be consumed to teleport you to your spawn point following the same rules as when you die, except without killing you.
Many servers have simple commands like /home which offer the feature, but to give a player a cost-less way to teleport is extremely powerful and can easily be abused. Instead, it should be a crafted item, I suggest to craft the Homestone you would need 4 obsidian blocks in a diamond shape with an ender pearl in the middle. This makes it fairly difficult to craft, but something which could be farmed very easily to create relatively large supplies. The item type would be stackable up to 16, as a 64 stack wouldn't make it feel very important. Additionally, in order to use it the item there would be a 2 second delay or so. The same concept as eating food, this is so it cannot be easily abused to get you out of any bad situation but could be used to help if you need an escape.
Now that I've covered this one particular item of interest, lets get into equipment.
Equipment Interface
Obviously, if we want to expand the equipment we will need a larger interface. However, I would much rather create a new one instead of stretching out the inventory tab. Keep the inventory tab simple and remove the player component from it, assuming in the near future that will be easy to do. Instead a new hotkey will allow you to open up an interface similar to what we currently have, minus the crafting section.
Additional Equippable Armor
We will add additional armor slots to the current layout to have the following equip-able armor slots (This will require a rework of how armor works):
- Head
- Neck
- Shoulders
- Chest*
- Bracers
- Belt
- Gloves
- Ring
- Legs
- Feet
Italics - Indicate what is new
* - This model will need to be changed to not include the shoulder pieces.
The motivation behind this is to add significantly more depth into the game in regards to armor and making equipment choices. This is very important to any 'rpg' like systems as only 4 armor slots is quite workable, once you get used to it the choices you have to make become very simplistic.
In addition to having to change how armor works, enchants will also have to change as well as a few other minor changes to Minecraft in general.
Equippable Tools
Additionally, I would like to have slots for 'tools' This removes some of them from the inventory, but more importantly gets them off the placement bar. Instead of 'selecting' a tool, you would instead equip it onto your character and use it. There would be an easy way to equip tools, as you simply hover over the item in your inventory and then press a hotkey to equip it. Then whenever you are wandering around in the world, you simply press the hotkey and the tool switches into your active hand. Press the hotkey again, use the mousewheel, or press a number key and it will disappear. This would work great for Pickaxes, Shovels, Axes, Hoes, Swords and Bows.
For each tool, there would be two slots for each of these items, a primary and a secondary. To differentiate them you would press SHIFT + hotkey to select the secondary, and have a hotkey for swapping the currently active tool with the secondary version. Why only two? Well, I never really seen the need for more than two tools items with different enchants/types.
Auto-Equip Tools
When the primary slot on each tool type is empty, or when an active item is broken. The inventory will be searched for a replacement tool and it will automatically equip it into the slot. This avoids the unnecessary need to keep opening the inventory interface or equipment interface when acquiring a new item or replacing a broken one. It will also naturally select the worst one, first based on item quality, then item enchants, and then durability. I usually find I want to get rid of bad tools first before using good ones.
This feature would need to be able to be disabled easily.
Other Equippable Tools and Effects
Other items also make sense to be able to equip them, but they have slightly special effects. They also would only have a single slot for them.
Compass/Map Slot - This slot is shared between map and compass, it will not be auto-equippable because it wouldn't make sense without some complex logic. When a compass is equipped it will be displayed on the HUD as a 3D arrow pointing towards Y-127 and north. When a map is equipped it will be displayed as a mini-map on the HUD which either rotates with your direction being constant or has the player rotate on a constant map.
Clock Slot - This slot is interesting because it really will only have a single item ever. The whole point would be to add a time element to the HUD. I was tempted to make this occupy the same slot as the compass or map... however it would be very rare to find a situation where a clock would be better than a compass or map and if you did use it then it would be very temporary.
Fishing Rod/Carrot on Stick Slot - This slot is shared between the fishing rod and the carrot on a stick items. As with the map it will not auto-equip, but doesn't offer any real extras beyond what it currently does.
Non-equippable tools
Flint and Steel - This is mostly a rarely used item, not really needing its own slot. Usually you only have one unless you have some very pyro needs.
Buckets - These items are mostly used as 'blocks' so equipping a bucket makes little sense. You could argue a bucket with milk is a valid item, but that fits more into the consumable one with potions.
This outlines some of the basic concepts I have, I will certainly have to revisit armor types in more detail but for now this is plenty.
No comments :
Post a Comment