Salt and Sands

Salt and Sands

This mod serves to add flora and fauna to water bodies, focusing mostly on the ocean environments but also adding some to freshwater environments as well.

Currently the mod includes bivalves in the form of clams and scallops occurring in saltwater bodies and freshwater mussels occurring in freshwater, 13 types of sea urchin, two types of water plant (one in saltwater, one in freshwater) and coral reefs which have five different types of coral that come in multiple colours.

The bivalves will spawn in clusters within bodies of water with clams and scallops spawning on the seabed in saltwater oceans and freshwater mussels spawning in freshwater ponds and lakes, but if the Rivers mod is installed they can also potentially spawn within the freshwater of the rivers.
The bivalves represent a cultivatable source both of food and of shells which can be ground into lime as an unconventional source of the material, the mature reefs can be harvested similarly to reeds in that breaking them with a knife provides a live bivalve and leaves a depleted reef that will slowly recover but harvesting the depleted reef provides a second live bivalve and destroys the reef. While live the bivalves can be placed in their native water type (clams and scallops in saltwater, freshwater mussels in freshwater) to produce an immature establishing reef that will slowly develop into a mature reef that can be harvested, this allows you to culture bivalves to provide a sustainable and expandable farm.
To extract the useful resources from a live bivalve it must first be killed by placing it in the crafting grid with a knife and then it can be shelled by holding it in your hand and holding the right mouse button which separates the shell from the meat, providing one piece of meat and two shells (as they represent the two halves of the shells) but also if you're lucky a bivalve will be hosting a pearl which can rarely also be dropped during this processing with the meat and shells. The meat can be roasted over a firepit for immediate consumption, cured with salt for long-term storage or used in meals in place of redmeat or poultry, the pearls can be used to make some jewelry items including brooches, bracelets, the vanilla game's pearl necklace and some other bling, traders may be interested in buying pearls or the jewelry items for a fair price.

Sea urchins will also be present in the ocean as clusters of urchins on the seabed with thirteen different species providing splashes of colour, each species has it's own preferred temperature conditions and depth that it will spawn at though multiple species will have overlapping spawn areas. Sea urchins are processed by placing them in the crafting grid with a knife which provides a piece of urchin meat that can be roasted in a firepit for immediate consumption, cured with salt for long-term storage or used in meals in a similar fashion to red meat and poultry.

The mod's two waterplants, water milfoil which spawns in freshwater and seagrass which spawns in saltwater serve as indicator plants, which help to immediately indicate whether the water you're examining is saltwater or freshwater without having to collect it with a bucket and check what the contents are. (1.22 update: water milfoil no longer spawns from this mod because it has been added to vanilla. Old worlds from 1.21 will still have it.)

Finally the mod also contains coral reefs which spawn as large round structures of coral substrate upon which five types spawn, in the form of Brain, Fan, Staghorn, Table, Tube corals which spawn in many different brightly coloured subvariants, these corals and the coral substrate can be broken to provide coral pieces which can be used to make aesthetic jewelry items or ground into lime which represents another unconventional source of lime. If you really can't find any chalk, limestone or other lime bearing rock and can stomach the thought of destroying something so visually impressive you can demolish the coral reefs and roast them to produce lime.
In future these coral reefs will be home to multiple different types of fish and other fauna which will only spawn within the corals making these reefs a hive of activity and life.

Models and JSON work by Catasteroid, coral textures by Lucas, urchin textures by Hieronymus, En-PT language file by AzuliBluespots, compiling work by Sekelsta and Valkyrja, Russian translation by Dimeymer, and some plant art by Ледяная Соня.

Due to life events of the authors, this mod is currently in maintenance mode. That means I'll try to keep up with updates and bug fixes at least every few months, but new features are not currently being added.

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