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)

You're the one arguing semantics. The signs are there because it is something that is unseen otherwise in that feature. If we could we would say that "colors can't be applied to signs" instead of the current article we would but we can't because there is no explanation of why there could be color applied to signs. With this case saying "The limit is 50... colors can't be applied to titles... etc" it's can be implied to anyone that it's not allowed. You are breaking limits, not adding anything new like the signs page. If you can find unused style codes that can't be used in anywhere in the book but could be used through third party programs than that could be added. A good example is Enchantments. Enchantments can easily pushed past the numbers available in game but we do not have that on the page as it's not anything new. But if there was a completely unique enchantment not available through normal means we would have a note about it. Our terms, practices and such may seem odd or wrong to you but we use them by our definition, not from a computer science standpoint. --Moxxy 00:25, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

I didn't say you were arguing semantics. I admitted I was, in my first paragraph. And I don't think I'm not adding anything new to the page - I would never have guessed that the format codes would work properly in the title and author of a book. I thought the reason the game prevented me from inserting them is because they wouldn't be handled right, and would cause a crash or other bugs. If they did, then I would never have felt the need to mention it - if you're breaking past the limits, you can expect crashes and even corruptions. What I found notable is that there weren't any crashes or other issues! As you have said, breaking the limits and causing weird stuff to happen can be expected... But finding that books can store content as unlimited as the Minecraft world? I thought that was certainly more unique than "hacked higher levels of knockback enchantment knock enemies even farther back". Note that I left out things such as "titles and authors cannot have multiple lines" and "too much text on a page will flow off the bottom", because these are the things you would expect.

Personally, I don't think this should be about whether something was a closeted feature, but rather, whether something is unique. You'll note that the farlands were special enough to deserve their own article, since they were so unexpected and unique. If the pre-1.8 farlands had never been discovered, and all that we ever came to know is the edge of the map as it exists in 1.8+, I would agree that there need not be an article on the handful of quirks it carries (at the very least, however, it is sensible to mention those quirks somewhere in a more general article on the world). Similarly, we don't mention "damage values higher than x will be identical with the default item, but not stack with it", because that's expected behavior - the unused doubleslab is unique, in that it isn't identical like all the rest. And again, bringing up bugs, we normally don't include the most trivial/expectable ones outside of the actual buglist article. So, I think, when choosing stuff like this to remove, it's better to consider whether it's unique or not (of course, the usual excluding factor of "does it work in vanilla?" should still always be employed). --WolfieMario 01:06, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

That's more the logic I was going with when I removed it. We don't usually mention things that can only be pried out with third party programs/manual editing unless it is very unique. The fact that the code works and doesn't cause issues fascinates me as well as it makes no sense why they wouldn't allow it but we aren't the average person reading this page. To most people they don't think of the issues it could cause and if it would work if allowed. I'm trying to look at it more through the average person's opinion as much as can. I could be wrong though, I wish we could get a few more non-biased voices on this issue.

On another note, you should definitely expand your full width characters picture with an explanation under the writing section. --Moxxy 01:41, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

I still don't see why a trivia section can't include it. The trivia sections usually contain a lot of information an average player doesn't have to worry about (as is the point of the category itself). Fair enough removing it from the gallery, as images make it stand out perhaps more than a hack should. But I still think my sentence in the trivia section wasn't going beyond any lines... And I'm not sure either of us can judge what an average person wants to see, having both admitted we are not the average people reading it (well, since the item has yet to be officially released, we might be the average for the time being :p). But as you said, it would be much better if it weren't just you and me talking back and forth here. At another wiki I was at, the talk pages would usually be filled to the brim for any new content introduced in an update, with people deciding what's important enough for the main article and which trivia is too trivial to be included anywhere at all. Does this wiki operate on a similar consensus-based model? Because it's hard to discern any consensus when there's only two people arguing... And yeah, this has grown stale.

As far as the fullwidth, the only real explanation is that they are alt characters, like any other. The only practical expansion I can think of is to cite a convertor that changes normal text into fullwidth, as it can be used effectively for this sort of thing... But now, this feels too trivial for me to include, as I already knew you could use fullwidth in Minecraft, as well as bubble letters (all letters enclosed in circles), and text from upside-down-text flippers. But I suppose I'll include it anyhow, as it does look interesting to have a "new font" in books. Sadly, it works far less elegantly than any of the hacks I posted: the text wrapping prematurely decides that a line is too long after about two words, so it doesn't look nearly as good as I'd like it. If you agree with my idea that it's actually rather simple, feel free to move it to the trivia section, as that is where I would have originally added it anyhow.

As for anybody else - me and Moxxy haven't reached consensus on whether or not to include the hacks. If anyone made it through these walls of text (yeah, sorry for that...), please provide any input you can on which side you support. In the meantime, if the trivia section has grown larger once this thing is actually released, I plan to re-add the trivia of colored titles and page numbers. I'm not backing down from my points, Moxxy, but I'm also not gonna edit war. Perhaps this discussion can be sparked again once the majority of the community has already played with books? --WolfieMario 02:13, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, WolfieMario, for the information about how to do books with larger capacity. This will come in handy for an upcoming project Too bad it's only available in the page history... Magic5ball 10:07, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Is this just stuff like changing values in NBTEdit? If so, I don't see what the problem is. The game has the capability to do these things, they've just been limited on purpose. You're not adding/removing any code from the game. –ultradude25 ^(T|C) at 10:52, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

I've changed my mind as well after thinking about this for a while. I don't think the pictures are necessary but the trivia can be re-added. --Moxxy 15:10, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

 It should be on the page somewhere. This is a relatively large and impactual implemenentation into the game. I can't imagine many custome and RP servers which would not employ a feature like this, should they know of its existance. The "average" player deserves to know about things they might encounter in game, without having to go googling across the place or rummaging through the mod pages to turn up empty handed. I was rather shocked when I first stumbled across a coloured sign in vanilla minecraft, and the first thing I wanted to know was how to achieve it. Having the information in mainspace would be extremely convinient. Biasment due to player concern aside, there are a few pages which relate to the code alone, rather than actual accessable features, such as the Potion effects page. --HexZyle 15:48, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm glad more people came to offer input; decisions like this do tend to go over much faster when there's more voices. I'm also happy others felt the information should be included; it's the sort of info I like to come across when reading this wiki.

Also, I noticed the enchantment article has a section called "How Enchantments Are Attached to an Item", which explains the NBT structure of enchantments. Should I make a "How a Book's Contents are Stored" section in this article, which would basically explain the same info, but for books? I won't include stuff about how to hack it, of course :p . I just feel the info may be handy to some devs (at least, as much as the enchantments' info is), and it also shows that a book's contents are stored in the item itself rather than a separate file (meaning if a book is destroyed, its contents are gone - on the other hand, lost maps can be recovered easily with the /give command). --WolfieMario 16:41, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

If you would like to. There are a lot of quirky things in this game that you could only understand if you knew code, so there tends to be a lot of "inside out" detail on the items here to help people who look at this game from a code perspective to understand what's going on. Detailing information also allows faster tracking of bugs. Such as the fact that lava does not inhibit theoretical momentem, and it's written on the page so that people understand that when zombie pigmen die in it, it's not because of the fire, but the impact damage from the ground. I for one have a mind that operates very similar to a computer, and If i can understand what the game is doing, I can emulate it in my head. I do not know the insides and outsides of how you modify books or how they are stored as information, so any detailed information would be welcome. Not just for interest's sake but also for the sake of factual information...meh I'm just rambling now. I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore. What I'm basically trying to say is: It's in the code, it's useful, it's not a bug, it's relative, it's encounterable, It should be on the page. I can't think of any instances in the past on this wiki where there has been an exception to this rule. --HexZyle 17:38, 28 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?

Where are books data stored when not in the player's inventory?

On my single player world if I have a book in my inventory I can open it up and edit it using NBT Edit. However if I put the book in a chest I'm unable to find it. I assume it's getting put into the region folder. Wouldn't it make more sense to put it in the data folder with the maps? Kredns 05:03, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

In Tile Entity For chests. Open chunk in which your chest are in NBTEdit and find your book. When you drop it on the ground it will be stored in entity data. If book data was stored as maps do now, there were a problems with max book limits, possibility to edit signed books, several books linked to one text and another. --10.244.209.67 08:15, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Ah, thanks! -- Kredns 09:46, 28 April 2012 (UTC)