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Better Stones (Granite, Diorite, Andesite)

Expands granite, diorite and andesite to full range of stone type blocks, and completely changes their textures.
item image
Every block of each stone type

Every block of each stone type

Description

Мод поддерживает Русский язык.

"With this mod, granite, diorite and andesite will stop being a clutter in your inventory during mining, and will become the target of mining themself! I made this mod to make it so for myself!"
This is my first mod. As it became clear that it will be a VERY long way before I would be able to realise my "way-too-big" game overhaul mod ideas, I decided to use some of the textures I made for it to make a smaller simple standalone mod, for practice, and playing it in my minimalistic vanilla+ modpack.

This is a simple mod that adds a bunch of new blocks (6 full blocks per each rock type, that, together with the vanilla 2, make it a nice number 8, so 18 new full blocks/24 full blocks overall. Together with 45 other type blocks, like stairs etc, 63 new blocks in total). Its goal is to make granite, diorite and andesite (GDA triad) a proper versatile building material akin to the regular stone.
Gameplay-wise, it adds dozen of new blocks for each of the rock types, namely, cobblestone (including mossy), bricks (including mossy, chiseled and cracked), with full (except chiseled and cracked) list of corresponding stairs, slabs and walls. It also adds missing polished wall variants, and even buttons and pressure plates if you ever will need them! Also, now natural GDA rocks drop corresponding cobblestone instead of themself, similarly to to regular stone, that needs to be smelted to get the rock variant back, that in turn, as in vanilla, is used to craft polished variant, that in turn are used to craft brick variant. Overall, all new crafting recipes are the same as for the regular stone.
Aesthetically, this mod replaces the vanilla GDA rock and polished textures with the ones made by me (obviously, along with the new blocks), that are much better looking and more realistic representation of the real stones, in my opinion, while aiming at the original Minecraft texture style. As such, this mod is intended to be played with Programmer art texture pack, though it can be played with modern default textures as well, I'm just not sure how well my textures will blend with the modern textures (that are blurry, lacking contrast, clearness and sharpness - qualities exactly for which I prefer the old textures in the first place). Just make sure that mod resources are placed higher than Programmer art, or any other pack affecting GDA textures. Also, because all textures in each stone type use almost the same colours, they mix very well together.

A bit of personal background.
Ever since I saw the addition of GDA triad back in 1.8, they were one of my personal most disliked additions. Of course, the most fundamental issue I have is that they should had been introduced as part of larger geologic overhaul, together with dozen of other stone types, while removing "generic stone" (having which became illogical together with inclusion of such specific stone types). Sadly, years later, Caves&Cliffs made it clear that we will never get a proper geologic system in a game called Minecraft.
Other than that, GDA stones just had quite an ugly textures (no offense to whoever made them). This is a rare case where I agree that the new textures are actually better than the old one, though both are still far from actual representation of the real stones. Also, for some years even vanilla GDA rock and polished variants lacked stairs and slabs, making them even less useful as a building material!
Thus, this mod is largely my longawaited (12 years!) "fix", changing GDA stones in the way they should had been introduced in the first place.

I'm not an artist. So, I can't/don't have skills to actually paint the textures I want. Instead, I construct them, using other textures as base and making both general manipulations, and pixel to pixel tweaks. It might be hard to believe, but all textures in the mod actually are based on old stone texture, with new granite as their "progenitor". I took the old stone texture, recoloured and detalised it using colours from actual photo of real granite texture, that fit with my vision of a "most typical granite" (real rock types have very varied textures!). Then I decoloured it and made some other tweaks and manipulations to get the diorite and andesite, and the rest of the textures followed up fairly simply (among other things, I used my favourite texture, the old cobblestone, as the base for GDA cobblestones). In the end, I think this makes my textures have very cohesive style overall.

You can use this mod in a modpack (likely, some minimalistic vanilla+ with original/old Minecraft aesthetics, just as I do).
It affects only textures, crafting and loot of vanilla GDA blocks, so it should be compatible with pretty much any mod except the ones that significantly affect GDA blocks - obviously, this mod wouldn't be really compatible with other similar mods that add "missing" (GDA in that case) building blocks.
Because I want these textures to be integral part of my future huge mod, any use of the mod or textures in any mod or modpack that significantly changes distribution/behaviour of the affected blocks, is prohibited without my explicit permission. In short, you may not use this mod or textures in any context other than vanilla+ modpacks (but you obviously can use it in both survival and creative mode building, just in case), without my explicit permission.
You may not port or recreate this mod on other versions without my explicit permission. I might learn and port this mod to 1.16.5 and some popular later versions, if there will be player demand. If you want, you can ask my permission to port this mod to 1.12.2 or earlier versions (they are quite different for modding, so I will be happy with someone remaking it for earlier versions, with my permission).

The Better Stones (Granite, Diorite, Andesite) Team

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An old Minecraft player with his own version of the game in head.

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