Adding a bronze age to minecraft

[Golrith]

In my pack Omega Dawn, I want to change vanilla MC early game wood, stone, iron progression by introducing a Bronze Age (or more accurately, a Crude Bronze Age so no conflicts with modded Bronze).
I just hate that the wooden era lasts about 30 seconds, and stone era a few minutes. Seems pretty pointless & shallow.

Here are my ideas based on the mods on my pack. Can anyone see any flaws/issues or any further ideas/suggestons? I want a bit more depth, while still feeling "minecrafty" (basically simple crafting recipes, not deep nested/chained recipes)
Key mods in this era are Tinkers Construct and Flaxbeards Steam mod. Tools being used are Minetweaker and CustomItems.

• Rename/Retexture/"Rerecipe" Wooden Tools to Flint Tools. Flint can only mine Copper, Tin, Zinc & Weathered Stone. Flint cannot mine normal stone. Weathered Stone drops lumps of rock which are craftable to cobblestone. Flint can also be dug up from Flint Pile blocks STATUS - DONE
• Rename/Retexture/"Rerecipe" Stone tools to Crude Bronze Tools. Can now mine Iron level ores and stone. Crude Bronze is 1 ingot from 1 copper ingot and either 1 tin or zinc ingot. A highly inefficient recipe representing early forging. STATUS - DONE
• Tinkers Construct Seared Brick blocks recipe changed to include "something" you either make through Flax mod, or from ores you can mine using Crude Bronze. TiC ore doubling then gated behind the crude bronze age. STATUS - IN TESTING
• Add alternative recipe options to some vanilla blocks/items (like pistons, buckets) that use copper/tin/zinc/bronze so you are not limited to getting to "iron age" before being able to make those items.
• I may also potentially also add in Crude Bronze Armour

This may not seem like much, but gaining resources in Omega Dawn is more difficult. Exploration & looting chests is encouraged to assist your early game progress.

Scrap the below idea, Flax's crucible is for alloys only, still uses furnace (steam powered) for processing ores.
I'm not very knowledgable with Flaxbeards mod, I was thinking of perhaps limiting early game ore processing to it's crucible system, by removing the furnace recipes of the ores. This may have bad side effects on mods machine furnaces.

Mods that use Wooden or Stone Tools as part of their recipes/functions will still work, they will show flint or crude bronze instead.

 

[hotblack desiato]

I see what you mean. basically gregtech without most of its insanity.

for example, in some runs, I try to avoid automatic mining (okay, MFR-mining laser, but they are quite difficult to supply with energy). and without automatic mining, you are pretty much not able to gain enough resources (I once tried in 1.4.7 with gregtech, but had a stable dense ore age).

I guess, what you would need (only counting mods which I use) a thermal expansion and/or IC2 version which works with steam and needs a lot of bronze. with the more or less normal ore generation, this should be possible.

 

[1SDAN]

I always liked the idea of mobs only dropping Corpses and then needing to use specific tools for actions such as skinning, cutting and bleeding them. And as players get better and better tools/machines, they gain access to more ways to process animal meats.

 

[PierceSG]

I always liked the idea of mobs only dropping Corpses and then needing to use specific tools for actions such as skinning, cutting and bleeding them. And as players get better and better tools/machines, they gain access to more ways to process animal meats.

I remember that there was a mod, Meat Hook is the name, where you need to grab the carcass and hook it up.
Then you get to skin it for leather, cut it up for meat.
You'll also need to store it in the ice room or the raw meat will rot.
There is also the spit where you can roast the whole cow carcass with.
Too bad the mod was abandoned in 1.6.4.
It had the potential to spice up the game.