On March 31st, 2011 a modder by the name of FlowerChild posted a topic on MinecraftForums called--
”Notch: Wolves are a Bad Idea.” This followed the release of Minecraft Beta 1.4 that same day which included wolf mobs for which Notch had spent a good deal of time coding after receiving it as a suggestion from one of his idols. If you remember early wolves, they were buggy. All mobs back then were solid and pushed you around as opposed to today's mobs which you can push but they can't push back. Wolves were prone to pushing you over ledges or into lava when they teleport to you, so they were often more annoying than useful. FlowerChild's reasoning for wolves being a bad idea was that in a game about exploration and building, wolves had no place.
Shortly after his pleading to Notch to remove or at least stop development on wolves (which was met with silence), FlowerChild
made a new thread challenging the community to come up with ideas that both contributed to the core game more than wolves and were easier to code. The ideas which came from this contributed to what would become the mod Better than Wolves.
Many would say, including FlowerChild, that Better than Wolves would have been the natural progression of Minecraft if the game had focused more on a progressive mechanical tree while fully embracing its survivalist path with steeper difficulty and a higher learning curve. Better than Wolves is a transformative mod which overhauls the game. Hunger and diet. Hard stone. Scarce resources and food. Add that to unforgiving gameplay mechanics like being punished for dying by respawning randomly within a 2000 block radius of the world spawn or falling into dark caves that are pitch black where prolonged exposure to pure darkness will kill you, it's truly balls hard Minecraft.
So why would any sane person play this mod? Is the challenge reasonable and payoffs rewarding? Well, let's look at early game.
First off, let me just say that if I have to ever punch another fucking tree in Minecraft, I'm going to stick my dick in an electric outlet. I'm going to be blunt, I'm above punching trees in Minecraft at this point. We all are, frankly, who've ever played survival mode for an extended period of time. The “first night” which is glorified as one of the most memorable and frantic parts of the game is overblown and boring. You'll try to be patient, wait out the night. Mine a bit, smelt some iron. Truth is within five minutes you do what almost everybody ever has after sitting through the first night the first time. You type /time set day, and get back to work. Maybe you're like me and you actually choose to start with a
bonus chest not because you're a n00b who sucks at Minecraft but because you don't like bullshitting around punching trees and want that wooden or stone axe right from the get go.
Better than Wolves, however, I'm completely torn on. My beef with the first night and punching trees comes from the sheer tedium and lack of reward for something so mundane. Better than Wolves, however, has surprised me. It has given me a dire sense of urgency to collect wood early game because it takes forever to collect it. When you punch a tree in Better than Wolves, you get a tiny bit of bark, some sawdust and one wood plank. You do this until you have about sixteen planks and use that to craft two wooden pickaxes which are capable of mining one stone per pick and you use two stone to make an axe which then
slightly speeds up collecting wood.
The early game for Better than Wolves is a mixed bag. These first twenty minutes make you feel like you're playing Minecraft for the first time, but it quickly loses its charm because of one fatal flaw—the Hardcore Spawn aspect of this mod which is
deliberately immutable and non-configurable because FlowerChild is completely fucking insane.Really, FlowerChild is a madman with childish ego. That's another entry for another day, but the hardcore respawning in Better than Wolves makes what's up until then an interesting and refreshing take on the early game I would normally welcome actually feel like an unrewarding and pointless experience because if you die, you lose everything. All of your progress. You respawn at any random location within two thousand blocks of the world spawn. Go to the nearest tree, start punching it. Get used to it.
There's a Bukkit plugin which does a similar respawning method called Extra “Fun” Mode. I played it on the Wooden Axe's Origin server. As far as I'm concerned punishing a player for cheap deaths is bullshit. It's demoralizing to work hard to just scrounge up the materials you need to survive through the night only to die and lose it all then realize you gotta start all over again. A key aspect to all games is to temper risks with reward. The more you're willing to risk the better your reward should be, but hardcore respawning basically means you're playing Minecraft with higher risk for significantly less reward you'd otherwise get through normal gameplay. That's not fun or challenging—it's cheap, and I often find that it discourages me from wanting to play without cheating in a few apples to keep myself from starving in my hidey hole. What's laughable is that FlowerChild claims to carefully consider balance in his mod when the early game clearly isn't fairly balanced unless you're modding a preexisting world you've already established. Lose the hardcore respawning or make it configurable, and the early game would actually be pretty fun.
As I said, Better than Wolves primarily focuses on a progressive, mechanical tech tree. If you can survive through early game things actually start to become a lot easier. But the early game, frankly, sucks balls. You're far better off pre-generating a 1.5 world in vanilla or playing an existing 1.5 save file with Better than Wolves.
What does the middle game bring you? Automation. Windmills and gears grinding your grains and hemp for you than whittling away at it manually and burning out your hunger. By then you're most efficiently cutting your wood but iron is still an issue. At 1 iron nugget per 1 ore and 9 nuggets to make one ingot, getting a respectable amount of iron to armor yourself up and eliminate one-hit deaths from Creeper explosions takes forever.
Better than Wolves essentially has a predictable pattern of taking vanilla elements, making them harder to do with less immediate gratification and in the long term rewarding the grinding by piecemealing out features of his mods which vary in usefulness and novelty. Farming sucks--more often than not one plant will yield only one seed to replant it which makes pumpkins and pumpkin farming crucial early game so you can raise up chickens.
I'd talk about the end game but I've never got there. I get as far making my first windmill then... that's about it. The next step after that is the Nether, but for the life of me I can't find diamonds at all to make a pick to harvest obsidian. I've honestly just considered just trying to move lava sources around and pouring water on them in a Nether portal shaped cast but for some insane reason you can't fucking
scoop water out of a pond with a bucket. Because that's too easy, apparently. You need a spigot tap to fill the bucket.
So I've never got to the Nether in Better than Wolves, and at the same time I've refused to cheat the obsidian in to do it. I don't have any qualms cheating apples in to not starve, but that's because his food system is fucked up early game. I don't want to
have to cheat to actually progress through the mods. Iron is too expensive to branch mine at y-11 and caving is too dangerous because you're not protected enough to stand a chance against the mobs. What can I say--as a guy whose main survival world is a vanilla superflat hardcore world, even I have to admit defeat and say Better than Wolves is too hardcore for me.
How would I say Better than Wolves compares to other mods, though? What does a strictly 1.5 total conversion mod bring to current 1.7 conversion modding that mods like Gregtech and Terrafirmacraft don't? Again, let's look back in time to early Minecraft when Better than Wolves first came out. Back then a lot of mods were single-purpose mods that were hard to make play together well. And even Tekkit which made modpacks insanely popular wouldn't be released until three months after FlowerChild created Better Than Wolves. When you consider what it did to the base game and the content it added while also managing to be completely stable which Tekkit never fully was, Better than Wolves was pretty big for its time. When you think about it, the spirit of playing with mods is to change the mechanics of vanilla and FlowerChild has managed to achieve that.
Still though, in comparison to the content you get out of modern modpacks, Better Than Wolves still shows its age maybe a little too much. It's weird to install, you can barely tweak much of its functionality, and there are next to no servers for it because of the ubiquity most players are used to when it comes to playing online. The Technic, FeedTheBeast and many other launchers are essentially plug and play--the server and the client make it as easy as vanilla to connect without clientside tinkering, and you get dozens of times more content with these packs compared to Better Than Wolves. I mean, sure--one of the appeals of Better than Wolves isn't the content but the struggle and the challenge but even then that can be trumped with packs like Agrarian Skies, Blood'n'Bones and Magic Farm 2.
Ultimately, Better Than Wolves can best be remembered as a reactionary mod and FlowerChild stands at the forefront of modder's rights to the content they create. He looked at the game, didn't like where it was going, and changed it to be the kind of survival Minecraft he wanted to play and that's actually pretty awesome. Would I recommend Better Than Wolves to the typical player? Well, no, honestly.
First off, manually having to add the mod's class files to the minecraft.jar is antiquated and hasn't had to be done to install most mods for years. Plus if you are installing it with the new launcher (and you should be doing that--for gods sake don't give MCPatcher more reasons to exist) you have to also edit a few configuration files to make it load. I don't think the "typical" player knows or would like the DIY approach to installing this. Apart from that if you're somebody who has a hard time playing on anything above a difficulty of Peaceful this is definitely not for you. For reference, The-Outpost is on easy difficulty and always has been.
And more than anything, from my own experience I just didn't enjoy playing Better Than Wolves. The early game is remorselessly repetitive and demoralizing, the mid-game has a huge hump in terms of lack of iron to get over and even though I never got to the end game, the idea I get from the wiki's is that you basically get better tools and more advanced automation--nothing that can't be made more interesting with Tinkers' Construct and Thermal Expansion on Forge instead.
Better than Wolves had its time and its place. It was one of the first well known mods that overhauled the game for people tired of vanilla and can still be enjoyed by a select group of people more hardcore than I am. If you want to play balls hard Minecraft, give it a shot. If you just like playing with mods casually, I'd divert you back to Tekkit or Feed the Beast, because Better Than Wolves is not for the casual or the faint of heart.
