Lantern Forge Tips and Tricks!

[CoLS Firestar]

Here's a few tips I found while playing. Feel free to add your own.

-Get a portal ASAP
Silver and gold are both rare, so until you find some, make a jeweler trader and buy what you need from them to make portals. If you need money, kill creatures or farm apples. I suggest milking a spider nest or beehive. Silks sell for 60 a pop. Honey and wax sell well too.

-Pick your "adventuring biome"
This is very important. I reccomend always going to desert and plopping down your shiny new portal pad. Why? Because deserts have orelings as monsters. It's much faster and easier to kill them to get your ore. Especially that difficult to find mithril.
Also, chances are, you start out in grassland. so you don't get the shiny silver and gold scones/torches that come with desert and magic.
Not tested but I believe there are no dragons in grasslands, but they do exist in deserts. Not getting dragon scales in you wear medium armor is much like not finding mithril.

-HOW TO PORTAL!
This one is an easy way to safely cut down on loading screens.
1. Go down a few levels. When you find a safe spot, plunk down your pad.
2. Keep going down, picking up loot. When your inventory is full, make sure you do not place another down stairs but make a safe spot for yourself.
3. Port to town to sell or hoard all your new gear.
4. Port back to the pad, pick it up and hop down the now safe stairs and plop it down when you can't go down any more.

-Out of food? Don't like the hassel of farming? No problem, get chickens and place them in a fence that looks 2x Whatever wide. The fence will really be one wide and you can just walk past them to grab your eggs. Alternatively, make a row with apples trees on both sides. Now you have many many 3 point foods and no need to farm. (or cook in the case of apples)

[Chicktopus]

Good tips! I'll have to set up a desert portal now.

Here's a tip: Too many dirt blocks? Don't throw them away! Use them to easily obtain stone blocks by replacing stone floor underground with the dirt. (While holding dirt, ALT + Right click) Dirt gets used up, and you get stone blocks without using a pick!

[Nadrik]

Use 2 or more dimentional chests to move large quantities of items around

[fredingue]

- Don't eat, don't sleep, gain one level :p
- Pick up early stage vegies, flowers and trees to get seeds
- Don't eat all the chocolate

About portails : i did not build them until recently because there where some questions i asked myself.
- are the shards used after you teleport ? No, you keep them. So, once built, TP is free of charge.
- Can you place a pod far away from your town center ? Yes, i put my second house's one about 1500 "units" away from my town center and it works.
- Are they safe ? Not fully for the moment, some seem to turn invisible or disappear after using. Know bug.
- How many ? You can place 3 pods away from your town center (Gree, Blue, Red) and you got an extra shard to get back to the town center. The pods can be moved and repositionned.

[CoLS Firestar]

Some floorings like the dungeon blocks have alternate tiles. Press 9 when in ground placement mode to see them all or to get a specific tile.

[gekkobear]

Originally posted by fredingue:

- Don't eat, don't sleep, gain one level :p
- Pick up early stage vegies, flowers and trees to get seeds
- Don't eat all the chocolate

About portails : i did not build them until recently because there where some questions i asked myself.
- are the shards used after you teleport ? No, you keep them. So, once built, TP is free of charge.
- Can you place a pod far away from your town center ? Yes, i put my second house's one about 1500 "units" away from my town center and it works.
- Are they safe ? Not fully for the moment, some seem to turn invisible or disappear after using. Know bug.
- How many ? You can place 3 pods away from your town center (Gree, Blue, Red) and you got an extra shard to get back to the town center. The pods can be moved and repositionned.

- are the shards used after you teleport ? No, you keep them.

O.O

Well THAT is worth knowing. I assumed incorrectly they'd be one-shot items and therefore not worth the trouble until much later in the game.

That changes EVERYTHING. Well, ok, just a few things, but still, thank you. :)

[Slipsilk]

ya, because the levels are like zones (since it's a 2d game) you have to load each zone so we aren't gonna penalize you by using the teleports. You can go back and forth freely. Does anyone feel that we should charge cash or something to use them? I personally don't really feel like it will matter. It would make it harder for people at the start, then mean nothing for people at the end...so no need. You will get enough loot to have to go back and forth anyway.

Ya we are looking into that bug. Should be fixed up soon.

I love the chicken idea :p I'm totally gonna do that lol.
food is gonna get a bit more balanced in the next patch to make the higher level stuff more
worthwhile to those that want to use it, it's a balance between making it valuable to those
that do it, while not forcing people that don't want to do it to have to.

TIP: put a few torches down around your staircase underground, if you leave it in the dark, monsters may spawn on it.

keep having fun guys/girls!

[Chicktopus]

Originally posted by Slipsilk:

ya, because the levels are like zones (since it's a 2d game) you have to load each zone so we aren't gonna penalize you by using the teleports. You can go back and forth freely. Does anyone feel that we should charge cash or something to use them? I personally don't really feel like it will matter. It would make it harder for people at the start, then mean nothing for people at the end...so no need. You will get enough loot to have to go back and forth anyway.

Portal crystals are perfect just how they are. With how the level loading works and how far different biomes can be from your home base, crystals that don't cost anything to use is wonderful.

I vote to have them stay as is.

Originally posted by Slipsilk:

food is gonna get a bit more balanced in the next patch to make the higher level stuff more
worthwhile to those that want to use it, it's a balance between making it valuable to those
that do it, while not forcing people that don't want to do it to have to.

Looking forward to this, I love the farming/cooking system. I posted a suggestion in the other thread regarding food, temporary buffs and what not. Would make cooking much more worth it and as you're aiming for, it wouldn't be required by the player but would be very beneficial to do.

[Mnemovore]

Placing protals in far-away biomes can sometimes make the portal pad invisible on the surface. As a workaround I dig to level 1 under the interesting biome (desert or graveyard for example) them place the portal pad there.

[Slipsilk]

oh...so the portal never disappears underground, only above? that is very useful information indeed. I'm gonna go try that now. Should help us locate why it's glitching out.

[fredingue]

Originally posted by Slipsilk:

oh...so the portal never disappears underground, only above? that is very useful information indeed. I'm gonna go try that now. Should help us locate why it's glitching out.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=299729244

Sorry to say, but they can "turn invisible" underground as well.
(i haven't checked yet if this portail still "exists" anyway)

[HeikoFennec]

If you want to be mobile early on, make your workbenchs, and right click em from your inventory. pocket furnace.
Still hoping the game stabilizes.

[Lachcrys]

Originally posted by Slipsilk:

oh...so the portal never disappears underground, only above? that is very useful information indeed. I'm gonna go try that now. Should help us locate why it's glitching out.

It happens anywhere as long as the saves got messed up.

[delerium76]

Food Tip:
Want some good dungeon food?
Quiche is easy to make and provides 65 food points!
Needed:
Glass bottles (smelt sand->glass block->empty glass bottles), Cow, Chicken, and Wheat.
Once you have the cow and chicken, the only things you need to grow is wheat.
1. Gather 3 milk from the cow in glass bottles. (bonus tip, the cow can be milked as often and fast as you want, so you only ever need 1 cow.)
2. Egg from chicken (bonus tip #2, animals can be stacked multiple in one square, so put several chickens in one single square pen and all the eggs drop in one place)
3. 5 wheat from farm
4. turn 2 milk into cheese
5. turn 5 wheat into flour
6. make Quiche!

[Slipsilk]

alright then it is still just a saving issue anywhere. We should be able to fix it soon. good to know (although it sucks to hear ... )

[delerium76]

Slip, I've been testing this wonky bug out, and here's what I've found:
The teleport location stays, and still functions long after the portal "object" is gone.
Long range surface teleporting causes lots of artifacts, not just this bug. If you teleport long distances, any of the following can happen:
Objects will seem to be visually duplicated (burned on the screen) on top of themselves. This is apparent when trees and crops grow and start phasing between versions of themselves, or if you go underground, these duplications will sometimes stay on the screen, superimposing themselves on top of the underground blocks. Even when you harvest these objects, their ghost remains.

To keep with the theme of this thread, I discovered another great tip to add:

Alot of times when moving through a dungeon, I stay in combat mode. This presents a problem when I come across a chests/ore/whatever that I want to harvest. Normally, I would have to switch to a harvesting tool, switch back to build mode, harvest it, then switch back to my weapon and back to combat mode. I recently found a workaround that saves me a step. Rather than switching to build mode, instead just select your tool and hold down shift while clicking on the object. This action with a weapon equipped makes you attack while standing still, but with a tool, it instead allows the tool to interact with blocks as if you were in build mode.