PlanetCraft and Planet of Cubes Forum

Starting as far back as mid-2016, PoC started implementing ways to obtain certain resources that didn't have an official or proper source as of yet in the form of "placeholder drops" in the hostile mob loot tables.
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Since then, some items were removed from being in the "placeholder drops" category over the years(such as slime balls), while plenty of others were added into the "placeholder drops" category(such as quartz, cocoa beans, and ink sacks).
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In current PoC, the following items can be considered "placeholder drops";
raw fish, raw salmon, pufferfish, clownfish, ink sack, cocoa beans, glowstone, quartz, nether wart, magma cream, blaze rod, and ghast tears.
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Though I've noticed some potential issues with the current way that PoC deals with placeholder drops;
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1. It can cause inventory management issues:
In PoC, you tend to get swarmed by large amounts of hostile mobs constantly at night, or even in day when in dark forests, cliff overhangs, or caves.
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As you have to kill these swarms of mobs, your inventory gets filled with an excess of situationally-useful items (meaning that they aren't trash items, but don't always have a use outside of building, dyeing, or potion brewing so they pile up in your inventory while you look for an opportunity to use these items, limiting overall inventory space).
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2. There's too many types of placeholder drops for any given hostile mob:
There are a large variety of placeholder drops that you can get from killing hostile mobs in PoC, but that also causes draw-backs because if you're trying to get a decent amount of a particular "placeholder drop" resource to use(such as building materials like quartz, or dyes such as ink sacks and cocoa beans), it would take an intense amount of time, effort, and dead mobs to get it.
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3. Certain "placeholder drops" for certain mobs have some strange logic that currently don't make much sense:
Things such as endermen dropping fish, and pigs dropping cocoa beans and ink sacks don't make much sense in current PoC, so I believe that they should re-work the logic behind their "placeholder drop" decisions a bit.
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I've been thinking of some solutions to the current issues of "placeholder drops" and I think I've figured out some;
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#1. Certain blocks should take over the role as being the placeholder source for certain resources:
For instance I feel like quartz and cocoa beans shouldn't be dropped from mobs, but rather by certain blocks.
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Cocoa beans:
I think that until PoC can allow cocoa beans to naturally generate in block-form within freshly generated jungles and be farmable, they should have a 1/200 drop chance by breaking jungle leaves, the same way (and drop chance) as you get apples from oak leaves.
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Basically cocoa beans should basically be the jungle equivalent to apples.
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This seems like it would make more sense rather than a spider or camel randomly dropping a cocoa bean on death.
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Quartz:
As for quartz, I feel like it should be a 10% chance drop from breaking gravel, similar to flint, since gravel is meant to be a pile of small rocks, and since if you're wanting to build anything with quartz, you'd want to get them in bulk, so it's much better and more reliable to be able to get them from a common resource (that currently only either drops gravel or flint) in the world, rather than getting it as a 5% chance of dropping from hostile mobs (which already have so many rare drops, that getting any decent amount of a particular rare drop is even rarer than the supposed 5% drop chance).
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Especially since even in MineCraft (where quartz ore is as common in the Nether as iron ore is in the Overworld), building and crafting with Nether quartz is tedious and expensive, so any little bit that can make quartz a more commonly available resource helps.
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#2. Certain mobs should lack various fish drops:
Raw fish/salmon, pufferfish, and clownfish:
I feel like the skeletons, and endermen shouldn't be able to drop them, since I feel like the most logical way that most hostile mobs are dropping fish (in a "lore" sense) is because they were hunting fish in nearby bodies of water, and when the player finds the hostile mob and kills it, the fish was already in the process of being digested.
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With this logic in mind, Endermen have a natural avoidance to water, and skeletons don't have any internal organs to hold in the fish, so it would make sense that these two mobs would lack fish drops.
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Ink sacks:
For ink sacks, I have the same logic for them as the fish drops, but a bit further, I believe that only slimes should drop ink sacks (but make the slime's chance for dropping ink sacks higher), since slimes spend the most time in large bodies of water (such as swamps), they would be much more likely to catch and eat the elusive squids (that players hadn't even found yet) than most other mobs would.
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Also, it's significantly easier to kill slimes in bulk rather an most other hostile mobs, because one giant slime splits into 2-4 medium slimes on death, and one medium slime splits into 1-2 tiny slimes on death, so unlike other mobs, an individual slime can give you as high as 7 possible mob deaths, making the chance for rare death drops higher.
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#3. Nether/Potion based resources should be limited to a few mob types:
As for the placeholder Nether resource/Potion-related resource drops(Glowstone, Nether wart, Magma cream, Ghast tears, and Blaze rods), I think that only Endermen, Witches, and Zombie pigmen should be dropping them (but make their chances for dropping them higher).
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Witches should drop them because they make the potions, so it makes sense for them to be having potion ingredients in their pockets.
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Endermen should also drop them because (In Minecraft at least) they're inter-dimensonial beings, able to exist in all dimensions, so it makes some sense that they brought along Nether-related resources with them, though also because endermen drop nothing unique in comparison to all other hostile mobs in PoC.
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Zombie pigmen should drop them because they're currently the only true Nether-related mob in PoC as of yet, so it would make sense that they would have Nether-related resources on them.
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Another reason why I chose these mobs is because they also have a natural rarity to their spawns, and potions were meant to be a bit higher in the progression tree than what they ended up being in PoC, and also so killing the more common hostile mobs doesn't fill up your inventory with so many situationally-useful items (that normally ends up making them junk items in practice).
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#4. Elytras should be added as a "placeholder drop" rather than only being obtainable via the in-game shop and significantly rare lucky block chances:
I feel like elytras should be a rare placeholder drop from Endermen only, since the Elytra is the closest thing we have to an End dimension resource in PoC.
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It would be nice to be able to get elytras within the natural in-game mechanics if you were to go out of your way to locate, grind, and kill significant amounts of endermen.
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This wraps up my suggestion about the re-working of the logic behind PoC's "placeholder drops".