Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-28440866-20160816135842

Heya!

I want to explain my ideas about a system in which you can upgrade your mount. As of right now, mounts are pretty boring and kind of useless, especially on servers (not even mentioning lag). My goal is to change that, because mounts play a huge role in the LotR series and this should also be the case in the mod.

This suggestion goes hand in hand with the one about Buying mounts, which is endorsed. Aspects of that one are mentioned here, so I advise you to read it first.

Synopsis: a new trader should be added for each faction that has its own mount armour. You can buy your mounts there instead of going out and search them in the wild.

This suggestion REQUIRES that the system as described in ‘Buying mounts’ is to be implemented alongside it. Otherwise, if you have upgraded your mount like I am going to explain here, you will lose everything when the mount dies. The progress needs to be saved, or none of my suggestions regarding mounts would be lucrative at all.

There we go!

There are 6 different statistics that the mounts have. These are:

Speed, jump height, health, weight, damage, and offspring.

Note that the mounts do not have all 6 of the stats. I will come back to this at the end of this suggestion.

You can upgrade your mount using Upgrade Points. You get 1 point for riding the mount for 10 minutes. I imagine (I hope) that this would be fairly easy to code. Upgrading the different statistics of a mount becomes increasingly more expensive as you upgrade it more: 1-2-4-8-16. That means that to fully upgrade one stat, it will cost you 31 points a.k.a. 5 hours and 10 minutes riding the mount. In my opinion, this is justifiable because the mod is focused on exploration its vast world. It makes it lucrative to invest in these upgrades, because each one adds enough increase in performance.

Here are the values in which they increase:

Speed: 1 block/second added

Jump height: ½ block added

Health: 2 health points added

Weight: 3 inventory slots added (6 for last upgrade)

Damage: 1 health point of damage added

Offspring: The baby’s performance shifts 10% to the upgraded animal

About the babies. The mount that you upgrade is probably bought from a trader (buying mounts), because then you won’t lose its statistics. The babies that it produces however are not part of this. If the youngling dies, it is lost forever. However it is not hard to get a new one, which makes it still a pretty good way to improve your stables.



When you open the mount’s GUI, some things will have changed. First of all, there is a bar in which you can name the mount. Nametags would no longer be necessary. The name would still be displayed above the mount, along with the name of the owner (in a smaller size). The owner’s name is not visible to the owner himself. As an example, I used the name Brego for my horse.

Next, there is the upgrades list. These 4 stats can be upgraded on horses, as I will explain later on. In the example, I’ve ridden Brego for 3 hours and 50 minutes. That got me 23 points, of which I haven’t used 5 points yet. At the moment, I can upgrade the jump height so Brego will jump higher, or the offspring so that his babies will have better stats. I can also save up to upgrade his speed or health later on. I will have to ride him 30 more minutes to do so.

Mount statistics

So which statistics are assigned to the mounts? And what are the values at which you start to upgrade? (b/s = blocks per second)



NOTE: this is only the case if you buy the mount from a trader. If you get a horse from the wild, it will have random statistics, either better or worse.

I also want to make warg damage a thing. You need to left-click while on a warg (the same as your normal weapon) and the warg will ‘bite’ with a reach of 100%. Damage is shown in the table above. Also they should be tameable but there are already plenty of suggestions covering this.

So there you have it. I’ve spent a lot of time on this so useful feedback would be nice! Also if you have anything to add, please let me know

- Ging 