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so i've been playing a lottttt of minecraft recently (but sadly will have to forego images since dw doesn't have native hosting and i'm too lazy to upload them on my server) and i think i've finally put my finger onto what i don't really like about botania.
so botania went into the realm of minecraft tech/science mods going "no more inert blocks w/ huge uis that do things; this is plant-based magic and you have to do gardening and arrange flowers and stuff". and that seemed like a great concept, but i was always vaguely let down by how it worked in practice and unable to really articulate why.
and the thing is: nothing is actually growing. when i think "plant magic" i think like, trellises w/ magic ivy growing on them to funnel mana through them in the correct fashion, except you have to prune and sculpt the ivy sometimes so it doesn't make your mana shoot off in the wrong direction. casting spells on a full moon b/c that's when your moonflowers blossom and that means they can contribute to your spell. having magic plants that grow based on ambient mana levels, so you have to tune the environment in other ways to actually get them to fruit sometimes. like, change. things actually changing and growing and dying and spreading.
and the reason it was so hard to articulate that that was what i wanted was because precisely nothing in minecraft actually grows and spreads and dies. i mean, mushrooms, i guess, kind of. and botania is all about making inert blocks that do something and then plonking them down in the world, and those blocks tend to look like flowers but it's not like "oh yeah my mana factory only works every third day b/c that's when the blooming periods of all the plants sync up". really, the unique thing that botania is doing is having a minimal ui, which i mean, i like. but. it's not really all that specific to plants.
thoughts to file away in some plant magic video game folder i guess, in the event i ever do anything with it. (i mean or try to implement that into my minecraft mod, but, ehhhh)
so botania went into the realm of minecraft tech/science mods going "no more inert blocks w/ huge uis that do things; this is plant-based magic and you have to do gardening and arrange flowers and stuff". and that seemed like a great concept, but i was always vaguely let down by how it worked in practice and unable to really articulate why.
and the thing is: nothing is actually growing. when i think "plant magic" i think like, trellises w/ magic ivy growing on them to funnel mana through them in the correct fashion, except you have to prune and sculpt the ivy sometimes so it doesn't make your mana shoot off in the wrong direction. casting spells on a full moon b/c that's when your moonflowers blossom and that means they can contribute to your spell. having magic plants that grow based on ambient mana levels, so you have to tune the environment in other ways to actually get them to fruit sometimes. like, change. things actually changing and growing and dying and spreading.
and the reason it was so hard to articulate that that was what i wanted was because precisely nothing in minecraft actually grows and spreads and dies. i mean, mushrooms, i guess, kind of. and botania is all about making inert blocks that do something and then plonking them down in the world, and those blocks tend to look like flowers but it's not like "oh yeah my mana factory only works every third day b/c that's when the blooming periods of all the plants sync up". really, the unique thing that botania is doing is having a minimal ui, which i mean, i like. but. it's not really all that specific to plants.
thoughts to file away in some plant magic video game folder i guess, in the event i ever do anything with it. (i mean or try to implement that into my minecraft mod, but, ehhhh)
