User blog:Vanderm/A couple of Lotr mod myths investigated

What This Is About
Over the last year of playing this mod, I have been told certain things about the mod from various sources (the wiki, other players). Some of these didn't seem to be true in-game, so I decided to perform some tests. This is not meant as an attack on the wiki, I'm sorry if it appears that way. I just want the truth to be known.

Factions Attacking When You Have Less Than +50 Alignment
I've heard this from friends, and it is cited on the wiki that the Woodland Realm and Mordor will occasionaly attack you if you are near them with less than +50 alignment with them. I had been in Mordor and the Wodland Realm with a lot less than +50 while travelling, and never been attacked.

How it was tested
I decided the best way for me to test this was to spawn a whole bunch of these mobs and afk it. I set up multiple spawners of different kinds (warrior/elf/scout, Olog/orc,archer)  in their respetcive biomes. I set my alignment with the factions to 0, and put the difficulty on Hard. I then lowered my hunger until I was just above starving, then I sat in the middle of the spawners for 10 minutes per location.

Woodland Realm
In this test, no damage was taken.

Mordor
In this test, no damage was taken

Possible Error
As the results defy what I have been told, I looked for possibles sources of error.

In the Mordor test, a skirmish broke out within the first minute of the test. This could have stopped them from attacking me, since they were fighting each other.

Conclusions
As is rather obvious right now, either my test was wrong, of I have been misinformed. I do beleiee most of this myth came from the Lotr mod itself, since this was a feature in the very early beta versions (announced beta 4, I think). I am assuming that this feature was removed somewhere along the way. I would appreciate it if someone were to replicate a similar test, to see what results they get.

Orocarni Having 2x Orespawn From Everywhere Else
This was inspired by a personal trip to the Red Mountains. I personally didn't notice a difference in the ores I got, so I performed a test.

How it was tested
To start, I got some preliminary data from the Misty Mountains. Not all this data is relevant to this test, but it will be used later. These ores were measured in an area of 100x100x10. I used a consistent y level of 4 and 14 for all the tests.\

Results
Values for the Orocarni: From a quick look at this comparison, you can easily tell that the Reds have a much higher ore content. They may have looked higher, but they didn't look twice as high. I divided the Orocarni values by the Misty values, and got these results:

949/615=1.54

225/140=1.61

These values are both close to 1.5

Possible Error
The biggest problem with this was probably the size of my selection. With a sample of only 100k blocks, the results could be off. If my computer were better, I would have gone with a much larger sample size. However, given how close the values are to each other I'm guessing this is right. aside from that, everything else I can think of was controlled.

Conclusions
My results on this seem to prove this statistic wrong. Both numbers are close to 1.5x. This test seems to have proven this myth wrong. Again, if someone wants to verify on their own, I would be very interested in what they got.

The Iron Hills Have more Iron Than Other Biomes
I never believed this myth, but quite a few people on the server I was on did. It seemed like something simple rnough to verify, so I did.

How it was tested
For this test, I did the exact same as the test above. I used the same data from the Misties, and contrasted it with the new data from the Iron Hills.

Results
Previous Information from the Misty Mountains: Data from the Iron Hills At a glance, these values seem very close, but I still decided to mathmatically prove it.

673/615=1.10

141/140=1.01

Thes values are so close to each other, the ratio is quite clearly 1:1

Possible Error
The test was near identical to the previous on, read the possible errors on that one.

Conclusion
The test seems to prove that this is a myth fueled by amateur players, decieved by the name of the biome.

Travelling to Meneltarma Is Worth It
I recently started travelling there on a server, but I wa sunsure of whether it was worth my time to boat so far to such a tiny island.

How it was tested
This is probably the most difficult test, as it depends how long you intend to mine for. I started out my getting some numbers.

Results
I started with my data from the Misty Mountains as a comparison. Given you are probably going there for the mithril, I used that as part of my measurements. I then perfomed the same test on Meneltarma (coords not gotten from the wiki) As is apparent already, Meneltarms has a higher Mithril content. But the oceanic voyage still hasn't been factored in. For this, I had to use some information from the Minecraft wiki. I started by finding the speed of a boat, and the speed of a dwarven pickaxe, my go-to pickaxe.

Speed of a boat: 8 m/s or 28.8 km/h (citation)

Mining speed of a pickaxe: 81 blocks/minute *60 minutes/hr =4860 blocks/hr

There is one more variable missing-  the distance to the island. I took measurements from a coupls locations, adn came up with this: For the purpose of this experiment, I went with the Andrast location. The Harad island was closer, but I didn't want to factor in the time required to get to the launch spots.

I then calculated how long it would take to get to Meneltarma.

104 km * 1h/28.8 km=3.61 h

I then needed the average time it took to get mithril at each location. Mining in a straight line is mathematically the most efficeint, for every block you mine, you uncover one face on 4 different blocks.

I then calculated the amount of blocks that were mithril in both biomes.

20 blocks/100,000 blocks=0.0002% (Misties)

34blocks/100,000 blocks=0.00034% (Meneltarma)

Using the mining technique brought up earlier, this quadruples your chances for each area.

Misties: 0.0008%

Meneltarma: 0.00136%

These are still tiny numbers, but they get a lot more achieveable. I then calculated the amount you would average per hour.

4860 blocks/h * 0.0008 = 3.89 mith/h

4860 blocks/h * 0.00136 = 6.61 mith/h

These numbers correlate with what I normally get.

I inverted the numbers to get hours/mithril, then I graphed the values:

The blue line is the Mithril in the Misties, and the red line is the Mithril in Meneltarma

Conclusion
As the graph shows, your trip to Meneltarma is worth it, assuming you spend a net time of mining and traveling of more than 8.75 hours. I fyou need less than 34 mitril or don't want to spend 9 hours getting that mush, you're better off sticking to the Misty Mountains.