Main Suggestion

Since we can easily and quickly build Totems after starting a new World and stack their Buffs as stated in #107 to become very strong too early, I thought of a way to make the Totems granting their Buffs harder more rewarding by putting some real efforts into it :

First, you'll need to get "Medicinal Plants" (it can be either the bark of Trees after using the Bark Stripper, or a kind of tobacco you can grow by turning crops into it through a Ceremony) and a Pipe of Peace (which need to be "load" with "Medicinal Plants", whatever they are). You'll also need to place a Dream Catcher above any kind of Bed or in a Tipi and some Totem Poles (on Totem Bases of course) from which you want to get a Buff (just building them isn't supposed to provide it).

Then, you use the Pipe of Peace to get the effect Communion for a few seconds. This will act like Poison 1 (i.e. it can't kill you), but if you sleep in a Bed under a Dream Catcher while under Communion effect, you'll wake up with the Land of Spirits Buff for some minutes : you become colorblind (or almost) and invisible to entities and Spirits (white and glowing version of usual mobs) will appear around their corresponding Pole (for instance, Ocelot Spirits will only appear in a certain range of Ocelot Poles).
Land of Spirits looks a bit like the Assassin's Creed's Eagle Vision.

Now you have to take your Dream Catcher with you and trap the Spirits in it. How ? Well... I don't really know, either with the Pan's Flute, or the Netherumbrian Pipes (not fully implemented yet, I just saw them and don't know what they will be used for), or with a Ceremony. The Dream Catcher gathers Spirits until a certain amount (you can see the progression with the GUI below), after what you have to release them in their corresponding Pole (with another Ceremony ?) which will now grant a Buff, but not for ever.

Each pearl on the Dream Catcher starts from the middle and move to the edge by gathering Spirits of a specific mob. When the edge of a pearl turns white, it means you can infuse 1 Pole of this mob.
This is a try of what we'll see in game. If you're interested, I made a ready-for-code GUI.

Indeed, Spirits are free forces of Nature, and if you ask them to grant you their powers by standing near their Totem or by transferring them a Medicine Bag, they will leave their Poles. So you'll have to return in the Land of Spirits to refill the Poles regularly. With the Totemic Staff, you can see how many Spirits are remaining in the Poles. You can also use it to lock them : it will prevent them from leaking out, but also you from getting their Buffs.

Little things

• I read that you already changed the Poles models, but may I ask for modifying some of them a second time ? I wonder how the Rabbit Pole, for instance, is able to support 4 other Poles with its only ears. I think a better model for every Pole would be like the Buffalo's : the back half looks blank and the front half is carved (with tainted eyes to avoid confusion if necessary).

• After destroying a lot of Cedar Leaves, I didn't manage to get Cedar Saplings. Am I very unlucky, did you forget this feature or is it on purpose ?

• It also seems some textures are "missing" in Totemic, so while I was designing the Dream Catcher GUI, I made some tries :

Spider Buff	Bat Buff	Ocelot Buff	Cedar Door	Cedar Trapdoor

The Ocelot Buff isn't displayed at all when you're supposed to have it. The Bat and Spider Buffs don't have their own icon and use the Speed icon instead. And maybe the Cedar Trapdoor will have to wait the port to 1.13+.

Thank you for your suggestion, I might look into changing the way how the buffs are obtained. In my opinion though, the Totem Effects are overrated since they are confined to either a small area or a short timespan.

As for the little things:

• I agree that some of the models have really flimsy ears supporting other poles above them. If your offer still stands, feel free to change the models.
• I think you were being unlucky, the drop rate is supposed to be the same as for vanilla leaves.
• Thank you for the textures, I would be glad to use them.
• The Ocelot buff is not showing since it is not a potion effect, instead affecting Creepers directly. But it might be a good idea to add a "proxy" potion effect just to indicate the presence of the Ocelot effect.

My offer still stands, however I don't now how to extract the models from the mod files. Could you send me the Techne models as well as the textures so I can rework them ?

That would be great, thanks a lot :)
The models were not created using Techne but rather with opl's model creator, so I can't send you Techne models unfortunately.
Here are the models in JSON format: totem_pole_models.zip
(the models don't have their own textures, instead they use the stripped log textures. But I included textures in that file).

I think this should work, but tell me if you want some more adjustments : totem_pole_reworked.zip
Buffalo's and cow's horns are now "off block", as well as bat's wings and horse's nostrils and ears. The ears of the wolf, ocelot, rabbit and bat will purposely either overlap or merge with the pole above them.
I've noticed how you changed the eye color with the tint index, and I wish I could have set a different eye color for each pole, but since I don't know the correlation between color and number, I leave it up to you.

Thanks for your work, I like the looks of the new poles. There are some technical problems, though.

I generally like the idea of the ears merging with poles above, but unfortunately it leads to z-fighting, e.g. when the Blaze pole is on top of the Bat pole. The same thing happens with the horns when you place two Buffalo poles next to each other. Not sure how this can be fixed, maybe by using cullface on the parts that are sticking out?

Those sticking out parts also need explicit UV coordinates, otherwise they will use neighboring textures and look like this:

There is also some z-fighting on the underside of the Horse and Wolf muzzles.

Regarding the tint index, right now there are four different values that can be used: 1 is black, 2 is red, 3 is purple and 4 is yellow. But I can easily change the code to allow arbitrary colors.