Minecraft mod planning - Boats Evolved idea

Since it's been quite some time for me that I've read the original thread-posting, I'll need to refresh my mind with the general idea of what component parts would be needed for the ships. But so far what you have said about the helm wheel seems fair.

About the shipyard block, I don't know that more than one, or perhaps two at the most, would be needed. Minecraft's boat is made in the vanilla crafting table, so perhaps the smaller boats could use one shipyard form, and the larger vessels use another. This is part of the reason I'd be leaning toward a RPG-esque advancement system, something hopefully not too overdone, but something that slows down the availability of some of the larger vessels until a player has had some nautical experience.

The gui screen(s) that would be made to handle the blueprints/recipes should be easily adaptable to the purpose. The vanilla inventory, crafting, and enchantment screens that you see in the game are actually just .png graphics for the backgrounds, backgrounds that can be found within the minecraft jar. The text labels, and any item stacks visible in any screen, are actually rendered in the foreground, drawn on top of the background, and are not part of the .png image itself (unless a modder has made it so, which would be poor foresight on their part).

Beyond that, having multiple backgrounds for the shipyard gui might be a fun feature; if basing it upon the player's advancement in shipyard and nautical experience, the background might be a "hazy" ship drawing/blueprint, and as the player advanced, every successive time he accessed this shipyard, the background would be changed to a more sharply-defined blueprint, albeit with some alpha-transparency effect, so that it doesn't overpower the purpose of the shipyard block.

Then, there's the real-world equivalent thing I'd want to at least simulate in a minecraft world, an actual "Ship Yard" or "Dock" where vessels might be constructed, a piece at a time. How I define this is in Minecraft World terms is ... still a mystery to me.

Sail patterns might be a neat effect, and possibly even do-able, if I understand the premise. Actually, it would be based upon merely supplying the sail texture to be blitted onto the sail model. In a multiplayer server setting, this graphic would also need to be uploadable to the server, so that other players who have this mod would be able to see the proper graphic. I would imagine that teams/guilds/whatever should be able to share the same sail pattern, with perhaps secondary sails allowing for more personalization.

Mobs would also be something that would be do-able; although another mod already has sharks (is it Mo'Creatures?), and if you've seen the EnderBeastCraft stuff being posted on that deviantArt channel, you know that others are also working on some aquatic and/or nautical beasts in various capacities. Having pirates and scallywags being the random encounter in a naval sense would be something I'd keep in mind, but so would hireable/tameable sailors that could be found in villages near water, to add a bit of flavor to the world.

Beyond any of the above musings, I'd need to look into the thread again, and go through page-by-page to find hidden gems of ideas for what could work for a "Boats Evolved" mod idea. I know I've followed that thread for quite some time, and I've even posted in it at times; I just need a refresher course for where I left off....