Talk:Book and Quill/Archive 1

Capabilities of books beyond what can be created in-game
A user has repeatedly been removing evidence that books can be edited to contain more than 50 pages, more than 256 characters and 13 lines per page, colored and formatted titles, custom player names (also with colors and formats), etc. These are all properties which a book in vanilla Minecraft can have, but they require an editor such as NBTedit to be created. A vanilla Minecraft player may encounter books like this in adventure maps, or on multi-player servers, and they will work as my screenshots have shown. Moxxy has insisted, however, that this information should be excluded from the article, simply because a vanilla player cannot create the books, disregarding that they may still encounter them.

If this is a sort of standard the wiki community wishes to set, then fine. But please be consistent about it. The article on signs provides evidence that signs can have colored text, even though this requires mods/programs. The article on snow mentions that snow can actually have varying height, but that this does not occur in singleplayer Minecraft without mods or editing (I myself have encountered varying-height snow on servers in the past, and I was playing vanilla). The article on slabs shows a special doubleslab which requires mods/editing to insert into the world. The map article mentions the zoom level property of maps, which is unused in vanilla. Grass makes prominent the existence of a third grass type, which resembles dead shrubs but cannot be obtained without mods/editing (again, I have witnessed it playing vanilla on servers before). All pages of blocks mention the unused, unobtainable Locked Chest.

Now, do tell me, why is it that this information on books must be removed, when all that other information can stay? If you want this information removed, you ought to remove all of that information as well, to keep this wiki consistent.

Or, you could acknowledge that this information is relevant to vanilla players, because they could very well encounter it themselves and wonder what is going on. Then we'll have people re-adding information in a far less organized and informed manner than I have, with trivia sections such as "sometimes a book can have a colored title on some servers. it is not known why this is" or "some adventure map makers may get famous people, like notch, to write books for their maps". Honestly, I fail to see why that is preferable to what I have contributed. --WolfieMario 03:42, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
 * It occurred to me, after writing this, that the /give command can also be used to obtain the special doubleslab, unused grass, and no-longer-used locked chest. Note, however, that there is still no vanilla way to get colored sign text, varying-height snow, or maps with different zoom levels. --WolfieMario 04:14, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
 * We mention those because they are unimplemented features found in the code. What you are adding is something that isn't a feature. It's not something that was ever added or even thought about being ever added. What you are adding is basically "Hey, when you hack, things work the way they aren't supposed to". --Moxxy 21:55, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
 * First off, at least in the definition of "unimplemented" I've heard in computer science, that's when the code for a feature has not been written yet. You'll notice the "Quiver" item is the only item listed as unimplemented in the items template, and indeed, it has no code ingame - all other things, ranging from colored sign text to zoomed maps to books with formatted titles, are implemented. Implementation status is not something that sets apart my discovery from those discoveries.


 * Semantics aside, you can't say that colored/formatted book titles/authors aren't a feature if colored signs are. For all we know, the code might be general enough that all text in the game, 3D or otherwise, is automatically formatted properly. In this case, you could either argue that colored book titles and colored sign titles should both be acknowledged, or both removed.


 * In addition, if you refuse to acknowledge anything on the wiki that isn't an intended feature, then you'd have to extend that policy as well. Wouldn't that attitude apply equally well to glitches? We have an entire article on the pre-1.8 Far Lands, which were unintended. Furthermore, they were discovered with hacking (teleport commands), and the only person trying to reach the Far Lands legitly still hasn't gotten there to this day - without hacks, we'd have no evidence they ever existed.


 * Anyways, what exactly is your definition of a feature? In my opinion, it is a feature that book pages are stored in a variable-width list. If they were stored in a fixed array of 50 String values, then it would not be possible for a book to have more than, or even less than, 50 pages. Is it not a feature that books can have any number of pages? You can't honestly tell me you are so convinced that the developers have never even thought about some number of pages other than 50 - whether they did or did not, none of us would know this. But making books extensible like this is indeed a feature in the code: a future update may come along to raise the cap, or even add a new type of book with higher capacity, and it would be made far easier by the current code.


 * In addition, I felt it was misleading that titles were limited to 16 characters and pages limited to 256 characters. Normally, when you encounter a limit that's a power of two in a game, it's a hard limit: it is impossible to go beyond the limit without modification of the code. I was surprised to learn that was not the case here, and I'm sure many other programmers wouldn't have expected it.


 * When you say "Hey, when you hack, things work the way they aren't supposed to", I find that strange: much of what I found is that things do work the way they're supposed to, even after hacking. I'm not hacking and then placing it in the bugs section. The things I found actually work perfectly well, despite expectations - they don't cause crashes (at least not yet) and don't cause any bugs or issues: it's not breaking the game.


 * Lastly, you make it sound like I am adding something to the code. I'm not adding an enchantment tag to a fish to create the Cleophian Digging Feesh. I'm just changing existing values - the only case where this is not true is when I made more than 50 pages; you may be right in wanting to remove that. Note that, in order to have colored text on signs, one must add color formatting codes to the sign's "Text1", "Text2", etc. tags. Here, I've shown you can add the very same codes... To a book's "author" and "title" tags, achieving the same effect. There is no fundamental, inherent difference between the two, except that one trick has been known for ages and the other is new because the item itself is new.


 * Anyways, if this has anything to do with you thinking I'm advertising or something, with that reference tag to my topic on the Minecraft forum, no, I am not. If you feel it is for the best that the reference be removed from my trivia, I have no qualms with this; it isn't really necessary to explain these things are possible without altering game code. As I said on your userpage, also, I have no issue with you re-wording my contribution to sound less like hacking, and even removing some images to make it seem less prominent (I can also re-do the colored title/author image if you prefer, to look less like a messy hack. It only looked that way because I used the character µ, as well as §k). However, I do have an issue with the idea that information should be completely removed just because some part of it doesn't sit well with your idea of the wiki's quality and purpose. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water; if my contributions really are 100% improper for the wiki, I fail to see how at least colored sign text is not. --WolfieMario 23:27, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

how do you change the colors and such?
I've got a mac and Idk how to get the "section operator" key. Is it the same as & ?
 * On a Mac, the § character is accessed on the keyboard by pressing Option-6 (or Alt-6). Unfortunately, Minecraft does not accept this character directly.  Instead, press Option-6 in TextEdit, then copy/paste the character into the game.--Inertia 20:38, 26 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks so much! works just fine now and I can make So. Many. Books. : D
 * How do you make that on a PC? Cobalt32 03:52, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Crafting image is incorrect
Anyone know which image is actually supposed to go there?