[Mod] Ferns [0.1.2] [ferns]

[Mossmanikin]

FeRNS

+ Preamble

The first time I played Minetest I noticed immediately this game lacks ferns.
I searched the forums here and didn't find anything. I kind of thought: Why? Minecraft has them, why not Minetest?
Then I remembered how ferns look in Minecraft: they suck!
Thus, slowly but surely, I drew a plan...
Not only did I want to add something Minecraft already has. I wanted to do it better: with love, with detail, with realism... and more.
To accomplish my goal I did a lot of research on the webs, looked at ferns in real life, tried to implement some stuff I read or experienced and checked if it was still, or even more, fun afterwards.
Dunno if I succeeded.
Ye may decide.
However: a mod is never finished...

This mod is about those archaic plants belonging to the division Pteridophyta.
It has three types (genera) of ferns:

• Lady-Fern (Athyrium)

+ More details

First I thought this genus would fit because all of the species look like what most people think of when they hear/read the word "fern".
But then I read something and I knew for sure this is the right one for this game:
"The abundance of this plant is an indicator of potential heavy metal-rich mines."
So , in this mod, if you see a bunch of these plants: chances are there's some iron, tin or silver nearby.
Take a look at the picture beneath:

• three different sizes
• near trees (woodlands)
• near rocks
• near ores

.

• Tree Fern (Dicksonia)

+ More details

• five different sizes
• two different leave shapes
• in jungles
• in oases
• at tropical beaches
• from the leaves of tree ferns you can get tree fern saplings.
• you can disable the spawning of these in SeTTiNGS.txt.
• if you cut the trunk, the whole tree will collapse

• Horsetail (Equisetum)

+ More details

• four different sizes
• you can eat the young ones (the smallest)
• you can disable the spawning of these in SeTTiNGS.txt.

• Giant Tree Fern (Dicksonia)

+ More details

• five different sizes
• in jungles
• in oases
• at tropical beaches
• you can disable the spawning of these in SeTTiNGS.txt.
• if you cut the trunk, the whole tree will collapse

Don't worry, this mod is only pseudo-scientific. But it's close to reality (whatever this means in a game like this).
I took into account: the circumstances under which the plants grow and what you can do with them.

+ Recipes

You craft ferns into fiddleheads and fern tubes.
+
You can eat fiddleheads and fern tubes when you roast them.
+

Credit

Code
super_tnt (Destroying all cactuses in a column)
VanessaE (Plantlife)

Review
Evergreen
Inocudom
Neuromancer
Saszrael
Sokomine
Yingaya

Last, but not least
all whom I forgot to mention, who made Minetest, modding and this mod possible and those whom inspired me



Dependencies: plants_lib
Supports: moreores, stoneage, sumpf

Downloads (direct)

latest:
ferns-0.1.2.zip

older versions:
ferns-0.1.1.zip
ferns-0.1.0.zip
ferns-0.0.9.zip
ferns-0.0.7.zip
ferns-0.0.5.zip
(for "prehistoric" stuff see archaeplantae of prehistoric-0.1.4 or earlier)


GitHub: https://github.com/Mossmanikin/ferns


License (ev'ryt'ing): WTFPL

+ Epilogue

As always: (constructive) feedback is appreciated.
If you want some super duper space fern I might consider adding something like that.
If you want some more realistic stuff I will most likely add it.

[Inocudom]

Oh, this is a wonderful thing to add to Minetest's jungles.

Would you be able to create textures of this for VanessaE's HDX texture packs sometime? You only need to make the highest resolution version of each texture. The textures of her texture packs, for the most part, come from free photographs on the internet.

[Mossmanikin]

Oh, this is a wonderful thing to add to Minetest's jungles.

Would you be able to create textures of this for VanessaE's HDX texture packs sometime? You only need to make the highest resolution version of each texture. The textures of her texture packs, for the most part, come from free photographs on the internet.

Sometime, yes, I'd love to. :)

[Evergreen]

You continue to amaze me. Amazing job, you have learned minetest modding very quickly, and you probably know more than I do by this point. Keep up the good work! Also, here is a happy little face from github.

[Mossmanikin]

You continue to amaze me. Amazing job, you have learned minetest modding very quickly, and you probably know more than I do by this point. Keep up the good work! Also, here is a happy little face from github. https://github.global.ssl.fastly.net/images/icons/emoji/smile.png

Thanks. :)
I doubt I know more about modding, maybe I'm just more into the 24/7-try-and-error thing. ;)
And... I love your subtle way of telling me to put something on github... I really do! :D

[Evergreen]

You continue to amaze me. Amazing job, you have learned minetest modding very quickly, and you probably know more than I do by this point. Keep up the good work! Also, here is a happy little face from github. https://github.global.ssl.fastly.net/images/icons/emoji/smile.png

Thanks. :)
I doubt I know more about modding, maybe I'm just more into the 24/7-try-and-error thing. ;)
And... I love your subtle way of telling me to put something on github... I really do! :D

Lol, wondered if you noticed that.

[Inocudom]

Oh, this is a wonderful thing to add to Minetest's jungles.

Would you be able to create textures of this for VanessaE's HDX texture packs sometime? You only need to make the highest resolution version of each texture. The textures of her texture packs, for the most part, come from free photographs on the internet.

Sometime, yes, I'd love to. :)

Wikimedia Commons is a good place to look for photographs.

[Mossmanikin]

Oh, this is a wonderful thing to add to Minetest's jungles.

Would you be able to create textures of this for VanessaE's HDX texture packs sometime? You only need to make the highest resolution version of each texture. The textures of her texture packs, for the most part, come from free photographs on the internet.

Sometime, yes, I'd love to. :)

Wikimedia Commons is a good place to look for photographs.

Thanks for the tip. :)
I'll definitely take a look at the pics there.

[Sokomine]

I've recently added the mod to my nature-singleplayer-game - and it looks phantastic! Those ferns are a great addition to plantlife. Thank you for it!

[Mossmanikin]

I've recently added the mod to my nature-singleplayer-game - and it looks phantastic! Those ferns are a great addition to plantlife. Thank you for it!

Thank you, I'm glad you like it and you're welcome! :)

[Mossmanikin]

Update (0.0.7)
- Giant Tree Ferns
- SeTTiNGS.txt
(for details see first post)

[Mossmanikin]

Update (0.0.9)
- more options in SeTTiNGS.txt
- less fps drop (at least on my machine)
- changed textures for giant tree fern leaves
- the circumstances under which plants spawn are slightly different

[Mossmanikin]

Update (0.1.0)
- No more flying tree fern trunks: cut the trunk and the whole tree will collapse

[Mossmanikin]

Small update (0.1.1)
- fixed broken recipe (and missing texture error)
- added support for textures with higher resolutions

[Mossmanikin]

Small update (0.1.2)
- big textures instead of combining small ones

[VanessaE]

This mod is now supported in HDX.

[LazyJ]

This is a great mod and I've added it to my standard set of mods for all my singleplayer worlds.

I noticed, though, that when used with Splizard's "Snow" mod, the "Ferns" mod won't produce.

Is there a config setting or lua line that needs to be tweaked so "Ferns" and "Snow" can be used together?

Thanks for another great mod, Mossmanikin. ;)


UPDATE 2013_11_10:
It appears Splizard's "Snow" mod also stops VanessaE's "MoreTrees" and "PlantLife" mods. (Ferns and MoreTrees both depend on PlantLife.) Vanessa updates her mods quite regularly while Splizard hasn't updated "Snow" in several months. This leads me to beleive that if there were a solution, Vanessa would have found it by now.

So the choice comes down to a large variety of beautiful plants or snow... I choose a large variety of beautiful plants. ;)

The more recent github releases of Minetest 0.4.7 do have snow and dirt_with_snow though they don't produce ice. Still workable, though. Use WorldEdit to set a blanket of snow nodes above an area and let it fall to create a "default" Minetest snow biome.

[Inocudom]

Anything going on with this mod lately? It is such a nice mod.

[Sokomine]

I noticed, though, that when used with Splizard's "Snow" mod, the "Ferns" mod won't produce.

I had the same issue with other mods of this kind. In a new world with undergrowth added, there was no undergrowth occouring as long as I had the snow mod enabled.

Nores alternate mapgen also comes with very nice snowy regions. Snow there even piles up at diffrent heights.

I hope there's a way to make both mods work in the same world. I havn't looked deeper into it so far.

[Inocudom]

Will this mod be supported by the new waving plants shader?

[VanessaE]

On my server, I have an "extra" mod in place that adds the waving effect to most of this mod's plants. I skipped the horsetail and giant fern "tree" tops because those would need a different shader formula/algorithm that has not yet been coded.

Just add "waving = 1," (without the quotes) to the node defs for the plants that need it.

[Mossmanikin]

Will this mod be supported by the new waving plants shader?

Just add "waving = 1," (without the quotes) to the node defs for the plants that need it.

I'll test it and add it, if I like it.
Thnx for the tip. :)

[fireglow]

Hi, on my minetest server (0.4.10), this mod crashes the server quite often (about 2-3 times a day) with this error:

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

18:58:27: ERROR[main]: ERROR: An unhandled exception occurred: /srv/minetest/world/worldmods/ferns/ferns/horsetail.lua:86: attempt to index local 'ret' (a nil value)
18:58:27: ERROR[main]: stack traceback:
18:58:27: ERROR[main]: /srv/minetest/world/worldmods/ferns/ferns/horsetail.lua:86: in function

So I've disabled it for now. I've created a GitHub ticket at https://github.com/Mossmanikin/ferns/issues/1.
Sadly, the mod seems abandoned. Can anyone else find the error and patch it?

[Inocudom]

Indeed, has Mossmanikin left Minetest for eternity. I wish VanessaE would add all of his plants to her plantlife modpack, for she has added so much to her homedecor mod recently.

[VanessaE]

I've never run into the crash described in this post. I placed nearly 100 of those horsetail ferns in my test world and could not get the mod to crash at all. Looking at the code, I can't see a reason for it to crash here, either.

Are you sure your ferns mod is actually up-to-date? It's possible that maybe you're running an old release version and not a git copy - releases are always older and often lack fixes applied only in git.

[fireglow]

It's git tip.

[VanessaE]

Can you try to reproduce the problem locally? What are the exact conditions under which it's happening?

[fireglow]

Sorry, that will be really difficult: It's a public server, the map is quite big. Often, I'm not even on the server at the time, I just get the crash messages.

[VanessaE]

Meanwhile, this mod has now been imported into my Plantlife modpack. Any future patches and such be directed there, since Moss is no longer maintaining it.

https://github.com/VanessaE/plantlife_modpack

[balthazariv]

Thanks Vanessa,

Since this mod is integrated into your Plantlife modpack perhaps should switch this topic in the olds mods.