Bear Crate

BEAR CRATE

-What is this Bear Crate you speak of?

A Bear Crate is a new item for Hytale. It is essentially a Capture Crate BUT it can only catch grizzly or polar bears.

-What can one do with a so called "Bear Crate"?

There are many amazing uses for the Bear Crate.

use it to pick up bears who are bothering you on your adventures

put a bear inside the spawn cave to welcome new players

place a bear near a pack of herbivores and enjoy your newfound hunting companion

place a bear in your friend's house

place a bear in your house to protect your valuables*

send a bear through a teleporter to make sure everything is safe

summon bears to chase your enemies

continuously place and pick up a bear in front of someone and trap them in a world of fear

The possibilities are endless.

*WARNING: THE BEAR STILL HATES YOU

-How do I obtain one of these "Bear Crates"?

The Bear Crate can be found in the farming bench and is only craftable if you have upgraded it to at least tier 2. It costs 1 Capture Crate, 4 Iron Ingots, and 1 Heavy Leather to craft.

-Why would anyone in their right mind create a Bear Crate?

I made the Bear Crate to practice Hytale modding and it's my first released mod for anything ever. It seemed like a good candidate for a first mod because just copying and modifying and item seemed easy enough. Hytale's modding process is really good and has a fun workflow so I decided to try to make something I would be ok with releasing to the public. I was also thinking about all of the fun ways people could troll their friends with the Bear Crate and how much I would enjoy seeing videos of people having fun with it so I hope you create lots of chaos!

-How did you constuct such a monstrosity?

The Bear Crate is essentially a copy of the Capture Crate but with a modified list of NPCs it can catch, in this case grizzly bears and polar bears. It uses the same sounds and animations at the Capture Crate and the model texture was kitbashed from other Hytale assets to make it fit reasonably well in the game (I am not an amazing artist). I think it's awesome how readily available the Hytale team made the assets of the game and it was super fun to stitch elements of Hytale textures together to make something new. Thank you Hytale team!

I also had help from various youtube channels that have been posting useful tutorials on Hytale modding such as Modding by Kaupenjoe, Auesip, and TroubleDEV. For Blockbench basics I got some help from ArtsByKev tutorials. It's amazing how many videos on Hytale modding are already out when Hytale's release is just a week old.

-Oh wow you actually seem like a pretty cool guy and I totally misjudged you... so why did you design the Bear Crate the way that you did?

Even though the Bear Crate is kind of a silly item and it's mostly made so you can troll people with it, I took great consideration when deciding how and when the player should be able to access the item as well as the narrative of how this item is crafted by the player. Encountering your first bear in Hytale is a quintessential experience when playing the game for the first time and I did not want to make the item too easy to obtain so I would not trivialize fights with bears right from the very beginning of player progression. At the same time, I wanted the Bear Crate to be somewhat rushable so if you are just starting a world and you want to play with it, it won't take too long to obtain. The requirements are also low enough that if you add this mod to an existing world, you'll likely be able to craft one right away and have fun with it. I think I hit a good spot in progression to reveal the Bear Crate because you have to engage with mining, farming, and leatherworking before you can craft it and it requires Heavy Leather to ensure that the player has defeated a bear or other major predator before the item is available to craft.

The visual concept of the Bear Crate is that it's an upgraded Capture Crate that is strengthened to contain bears and I reinforced this concept in a few different ways. I made the Bear Crate craftable only with a tier 2 farming bench to make it feel like an upgrade to the Capture Crate which is available from the start. I also made a Capture Crate a requirement for the recipe to reinforce the idea that this item is a Capture Crate that has been upgraded with Iron and Heavy Leather for the purpose of holding bears. Finally, I changed the texture of the Capture Crate to show iron and bear skin applied to the crate, making it feel like the process of crafting this item is the player reinforcing the crate with the materials needed to craft it.

-Known Issues

-If you have a filled Bear Crate in your inventory when Hytale updates, the bear inside will turn into a dummy NPC. All you need to do to workaround this is kill the dummy NPC and catch a new bear. The Bear Crate should work as intended from there.

-When a Bear Crate is filled, it's name changes to "Capture Crate (Grizzly Bear)". I would have liked to change that to say "Bear Crate" instead of "Capture Crate" when the crate is filled but I didn't know how. If anyone knows how to fix that feel free to leave a comment.

-The Bear Crate uses some assets that are specifically assigned to the Capture Crate such as sounds and animations. I had a feeling that copying these assets and giving the Bear Crate a full asset set of its own might be a good practice because it leaves room for these assets to be customized later and eliminates some dependancies of the mod in case someone else modifies the base Capture Crate assets. I never intended to add custom animations or sounds as the existing ones work perfectly so I decided against it for now.