Fence/Wall/Building erosion

[Hafthohlladung]

Had the game for a few weeks and enjoying the experience, a real breath of virtual fresh air!    

However one of the first things that I'm noticing is that currently most building structures are seemingly designed to last forever, and I've looked at the roadmaps etc but it's not obvious that building damage/erosion is something that is planned to be addresed?

One area where this seems most apparent is farming, as it seems a bit too easy to just Bunny proof a plot of land, import a load of Terra Preta and then the only thing to worry about going forward is crop rotation.

I think most outside objects should be subject to erosion, the speed of which could be influnced by climate & weather.  A suggestion might be if Wooden fences incurred about 3% damage per day, which could be reduced to 2% if treated with Wood stain.  Drystone walls could also reduce by maybe 1% per day.  In addition there would probably need to be a semi-random element to this, to avoid entire fences and walls collapsing on the same day!

I realise players might shift to using other tactics to enclose their fields, but if the damage/erosion model was more broadly applied it would limit such workarounds.

The problem at the moment is that everything just feels a little bit too static and permanent, and I think a bit more dynamism in the world model would be welcome.  But at the same time I recognise this needs to be optional and when enabled also to be "light touch" to not overwhelm the player with constant repair work.

Edited April 10, 2023 by Hafthohlladung

[Maelstrom]

Just wait until you get bronze tools and start travelling very far afield to get rare resources, like bauxite, borax, iron.  There's enough chores with forging new items, farming and animal husbandry (not to mention farming trees) that more chores will actually tip the balance towards unfun for the greater amounts of time spent on chores and reduced time in doing more fun things.

[Hafthohlladung]

As I said in my post, I recognise this would need to be "light touch" to stop it being too burdensome.  But even at my suggested max deteriation rate of 3%, these will be tasks that would only need attention about once every 30 days.  Plus the same advanced tools and resources you mention could have an additional application of reducing the effects of erosion in certain areas (e.g. Bronze fences?)

However, maybe the other solution to this is to enable Drifters and some Animals to actually damage blocks/fences at random intervals.  Which would have the added side-effect of hopefully putting an end to the abomination I see on Youtube all too often, of Soil being overused as an early building material. (At the very least people, just craft some Cob!)

But anyway, what I feel needs to be the case though is that when you do go off travelling for a few days, hunting for rare resources etc.  You then shouldn't be able to automatically assume that on your return to base, that every single block/fence has a 100% chance of being exactly the same status as when you left it days before.  There should be some anticipation as you traverse the last hill/valley of what you're going to find back home.

Edited April 11, 2023 by Hafthohlladung

[Thorfinn]

What's wrong with using soil as a building material. Yeah, I get that it doesn't work if you set gravity to wilderness settings, and have to go to packed earth, but if not, sod roofs, right?

[Hells Razer]

On 4/10/2023 at 5:08 PM, Hafthohlladung said:

Had the game for a few weeks and enjoying the experience, a real breath of virtual fresh air!    

However one of the first things that I'm noticing is that currently most building structures are seemingly designed to last forever, and I've looked at the roadmaps etc but it's not obvious that building damage/erosion is something that is planned to be addresed?

One area where this seems most apparent is farming, as it seems a bit too easy to just Bunny proof a plot of land, import a load of Terra Preta and then the only thing to worry about going forward is crop rotation.

I think most outside objects should be subject to erosion, the speed of which could be influnced by climate & weather.  A suggestion might be if Wooden fences incurred about 3% damage per day, which could be reduced to 2% if treated with Wood stain.  Drystone walls could also reduce by maybe 1% per day.  In addition there would probably need to be a semi-random element to this, to avoid entire fences and walls collapsing on the same day!

I realise players might shift to using other tactics to enclose their fields, but if the damage/erosion model was more broadly applied it would limit such workarounds.

The problem at the moment is that everything just feels a little bit too static and permanent, and I think a bit more dynamism in the world model would be welcome.  But at the same time I recognise this needs to be optional and when enabled also to be "light touch" to not overwhelm the player with constant repair work.

Sounds like a wonderful idea for a mod. Make it and let those who would enjoy such a thing play with it.

[Hafthohlladung]

On 4/12/2023 at 3:50 AM, Thorfinn said:

What's wrong with using soil as a building material. Yeah, I get that it doesn't work if you set gravity to wilderness settings, and have to go to packed earth, but if not, sod roofs, right?

For the first game I started on 1.17, I set Gravity to default because I wanted to concentrate on learning the basics.  But after a few weeks I started a new map with 1.18 and set Gravity to wilderness settings.

Can honestly say I will never go back to default, it adds so much more to the game whilst forcing you to actually play more properly.  I don't know why Tyron doesn't just make wilderness gravity the default and let people opt-out rather than opt-in.  It's clear from the building materials list that when you have Packed dirt + Cob available so early, that soil was never intended to be a viable building material apart from maybe temporarily plugging gaps in walls.

[Thorfinn]

There are reasons not to build with dirt. I'm just not one to care much about the aesthetics, or do whatever someone else thinks is playing the game "properly".  Kind of like  in Terraria. There's no benefit to using some special building material, or to give the NPCs more than the absolute minimum, so why bother? In VS, rooms bigger than 7x7 work inconsistently, or at least I have not figured out all the rules yet, so why bother with larger constructions, either?

It's not like gravity is consistently applied anyway. Place a dirt on the ground, set any of a wide variety of things on top of it, remove the dirt, the crazy thing just floats in mid-air.

[Hafthohlladung]

2 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

There are reasons not to build with dirt. I'm just not one to care much about the aesthetics, or do whatever someone else thinks is playing the game "properly".

I respect that but I suppose there-in lies the point I was making, that currently in some areas the game allows you to play "unproperly" far too easily at the moment.  And too many features are opt-in rather than opt-out.

 

Edited April 18, 2023 by Hafthohlladung

[Thorfinn]

I get that you have a vision of what gameplay should be, but why are they a good default setting?

For example, I prefer to play with higher difficulty than Wilderness. Greater spoilage, greater hunger, fewer HP, tougher monsters, etc. Surface copper at Extremely Rare and surface tin at Never. At defaults of Very Rare, I'm usually making a pick mold by noon day 1 to pour a pick by sometime day 2. But I don't think that should be the default. I remember having trouble sourcing copper in early game, and threads pop up every once in a while about others having trouble. People new to the game have a hard enough time getting to copper age. Rather than make them go through changing default settings when they have no idea how much each setting will change the experience, it's just better if I adjust difficulty up since I do understand the difference.

If all unsupported objects fell, that would be a great argument in favor of falling dirt. But when baskets and chests hang in mid air while storage vessels behave like one would think when you remove the support beneath, suspension of disbelief is baked into the experience already.

Now if you could save your custom settings so that creating a new world is as easy as just selecting "Ultraviolence" instead of "Wilderness", I'm right there with you. Offhand, the only setting I'd like to see made a default is propick radius. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a n00b to realize he should change it, or to look up the console command to change it if you didn't do so.

As for wear and tear, good idea. I'd certainly give your mod a go. As said above, though, chores can already take up a lot of the day as you go along. Maintenance may not as big a problem for me, as if a block of packed earth or a redwood log wears out, it's easily replaced, but I don't think I'd run your mod if I were into heavily chiseled mega-structures that I had to spend the entire game repairing the special blocks on my buildings. I would be a little concerned about the amount of computational power involved. Or would weathering and erosion only affect player-placed blocks?

Edited April 19, 2023 by Thorfinn