As for different crops sharing meta of the same ID. We're doing exactly that with any other block, and as long as they are thematically the same it's fine.
The difference, to me, is that those other blocks don’t already have some ‘internal logic’ tying together their block states, in this case level of growth. I’m generally wary of relying on vanilla blocks for things at all, since Mojang could so easily push an update which breaks something if we’ve been using a vanilla block in a way which is incongruent to how Mojang uses the block. It’s low risk for inert blocks like cobble, but for crop blocks, what if Mojang decides to do a crop revamp that changes their growth dynamics?
These new crops are not more or less unstable than the crops that cover hectares of land on our server already.
I don’t think you understood what I meant by that. If you replace e.g. flowers in mustard fields with a metadata of the vanilla crop block, it’d make them liable to breaking upon block updates (like when someone uses the wrong ID for water layers) since they don’t use tilled soil. AFAIK that’s not the case for any current fields, since people do use tilled soil for carrots/turnips/wheat.
There is a high demand for new blocks, and a primary argument against adding them is the fixed block ID limit.
I don’t think we’re so near that limit as to avoid adding a couple widely-useable new blocks like that; we’re just close enough to the limit to make me worry about adding a number of trivial or highly specific blocks, like house banners, unless they’re important for the canon of a server build. It’d be good to know just how close to the limit we are so we could figure out how to ration future additions better... or see it as impetus to figure out how to solve the limitation.
The main reason I’ve held out on crop additions (as opposed to ‘nature blocks’, although it seems like there’s been spillover between the two anyways) is because I think there should be an organized team dedicated to retrofitting existing builds with the new crops once that happens, and there didn’t seem to be very high energy for that whenever new crops were proposed in the past.
I will explore those in the ThamPack, and you guys can take time to make up your minds about them.
As long as people don’t use them in the production world beyond a temporary test.
www.dropbox.com
I'd add Garlic too! I'd also want to cover as much from this list as possible:
