General Items from Outsider

[Robler]

This game has so much to offer. It is just very difficult to survive as a new player. This is what I would do to make the game more enjoyable to the masses.

-Make food more satiable. Its very hard to find food around the game especially in the beginning. I died many times already and starting to get frustrated.

-Make food more filling

-increase amount of bushes,

-make animals easier to hunt.

-allow the recipes to work even if items are out of order. I have to memorize recipes which is quite annoying.

-provide a recipe list similar to minecraft. figuring out recipes takes the fun out of the game because its dry stuff to deal with.

[Echo Weaver]

These things should be moddable, but I have to say that my first winter kicked my butt, and I consider that to be a plus. I made naive decisions with farming and preparing for winter. I ran out of food, even with careful planning and eating all my flax grain (which really should be animal feed because it's not very nutritious), and I ended up digging cattail and tulle roots out of the ice and racing home before I froze to death. That there is immersion. When I got my farm and livestock in line the following spring and began bringing in enough food that I didn't need to ration, that felt so good. I'm still dealing with a bit of post-starvation trauma and am hoarding more food than I need.

This game is hard enough that it feels real. I don't want stuff to get easier.

OTOH, I agree about the recipe list.

[Guimoute]

1 hour ago, Robler said:

This game has so much to offer. It is just very difficult to survive as a new player. This is what I would do to make the game more enjoyable to the masses.

-Make food more satiable. Its very hard to find food around the game especially in the beginning. I died many times already and starting to get frustrated.

-Make food more filling

-increase amount of bushes,

-make animals easier to hunt.

-allow the recipes to work even if items are out of order. I have to memorize recipes which is quite annoying.

-provide a recipe list similar to minecraft. figuring out recipes takes the fun out of the game because its dry stuff to deal with.

From what you told us, I'm pretty sure you did not read the handbook. It tells you how to make more filling food, how to craft anything (you can move windows so that you have both the handbook and the crafting grid visible).

[Thorfinn]

Welcome to the forums, @Robler!

1 hour ago, Robler said:

-Make food more satiable. Its very hard to find food around the game especially in the beginning. I died many times already and starting to get frustrated.

-Make food more filling

I'm not sure what the difference is here. You can't exactly do that, but you can turn your hunger rate way down to 25% at world creation. And there's probably a command to do it, too, if you want to keep your existing world.

 

1 hour ago, Robler said:

-make animals easier to hunt.

Rabbits are pretty easy. It just takes practice figuring out how to aim your spears. The rest, yeah, a lot more of a challenge, since they bolt on being hit.

 

1 hour ago, Robler said:

-allow the recipes to work even if items are out of order.

Good idea. Don't know why it's done the way it is, but my guess is that it makes it easier to determine what you intended to cook from the first two ingredients.

 

1 hour ago, Robler said:

-provide a recipe list similar to minecraft. figuring out recipes takes the fun out of the game because its dry stuff to deal with.

I don't know anything about Minecraft except that it is apparently some sort of game that has a superficial similarity to VS.  

But all the variant crafting recipes are already annoying enough, IMO. I suppose cooking is no different than cycling through all the possible wood, tool and stone combinations it takes to make a given item, but I'd really much rather the hover said "Any Axe" instead of rotating through all the various materials axes are made of.

[Echo Weaver]

10 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

 don't know anything about Minecraft except that it is apparently some sort of game that has a superficial similarity to VS.  

But all the variant crafting recipes are already annoying enough, IMO. I suppose cooking is no different than cycling through all the possible wood, tool and stone combinations it takes to make a given item, but I'd really much rather the hover said "Any Axe" instead of rotating through all the various materials axes are made of.

The one place I will say Minecraft is superior is the recipe book. A there's no reason to have separate recipes for every single wood/metal variant. The VS recipes need a generic "any of type" abstraction in its recipe representation. I know this is a thing.

This actually nailed me when I tried to make a longbow. That spar can only be crafted of hardwood, so I tried it in the pine I had handy, and it didn't work. But how the heck are you going to see the wood blocks cycling through on the recipe and realize some are missing? Just not good.

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, Robler said:

-Make food more satiable. Its very hard to find food around the game especially in the beginning. I died many times already and starting to get frustrated.

As @Thorfinn already noted, there's already a solution for this problem: turning down the hunger rate. You can also pair that with turning down the food spoilage rate, so the food that you do have lasts a lot longer. Finding and securing good food sources is one of the first challenges a new player faces, but one that's also fairly easy to overcome with a little experience and planning. It's also a reason that classes such as hunter and malefactor are recommended for beginners, and classes like Blackguard are typically recommended for more experienced players.

2 hours ago, Robler said:

-Make food more filling

This is also already part of the game. Raw ingredients aren't very filling, but keep you alive. Meat is better than vegetables and fruit, generally. Combining ingredients into proper meals provides a hefty amount of both nutrition and satiation. It's also not terribly difficult to accomplish once you figure out pottery.

2 hours ago, Robler said:

-increase amount of bushes

No. I might hold an unpopular opinion here, but there should actually be fewer bushes. Or rather, I think bushes should be turned into sticks when broken, instead of dropping a bush that you can just move elsewhere. Bush cultivation should instead rely on the pruning function with shears, which provides a cutting that can then be planted wherever you'd like, with a 75% chance of growing into a bush. That way the player can still get the full advantage of the berries the first year, but will need to be a bit more deliberate about putting in the effort to both gather the fruit and start their own berry patch close to home.

2 hours ago, Robler said:

-make animals easier to hunt.

Animals are a lot easier to hunt pre-1.20, really too easy once you acquired a decent aim with spears/bows. Now they behave more realistically and run away or attack when you hurt them, although rabbits and chickens are easy enough to kill with one shot. In the case of rabbits, it's also fairly easy to build a "bunny trench" around your farm and just kill whatever gets traps there.

In any case, the idea is for the player to shift their focus from hunting to livestock, which are a much better, safer sort of meat and fat. Not that hunting ever loses its purpose, but if it's too easy then there is both no survival challenge and no incentive to sink resources into acquiring livestock.

3 hours ago, Robler said:

-allow the recipes to work even if items are out of order. I have to memorize recipes which is quite annoying.

Disagree here. The only recipes that works for is shapeless recipes. If every recipe is shapeless, then you need some way to figure out how to allow the player to select which item they want to craft. Some items use the same ingredients, so the only real solution I see there is forcing players to scroll through a list and pick out exactly what they mean to craft each time, every time, which is incredibly tedious. Putting ingredients into a crafting grid in a specific order and quantity to get exactly what you want is a lot faster and less frustrating than needing to scroll through a whole list of things every time you want to craft. I will also note that simple recipes that the player will likely craft a lot of and often, are also often shapeless(like refractory bricks).

3 hours ago, Robler said:

-provide a recipe list similar to minecraft. figuring out recipes takes the fun out of the game because its dry stuff to deal with.

Vintage Story already provides this, in the form of the handbook. The handbook is also a huge improvement over what Minecraft offers, since it not only provides the recipes for items(assuming they are craftable), but also provides detailed information on how to acquire certain items, what those items can do, and whether or not they have any functional overlap with other items and processes in the game. A simple recipe list just will not do here.

2 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

These things should be moddable, but I have to say that my first winter kicked my butt, and I consider that to be a plus. I made naive decisions with farming and preparing for winter. I ran out of food, even with careful planning and eating all my flax grain (which really should be animal feed because it's not very nutritious), and I ended up digging cattail and tulle roots out of the ice and racing home before I froze to death. That there is immersion. When I got my farm and livestock in line the following spring and began bringing in enough food that I didn't need to ration, that felt so good. I'm still dealing with a bit of post-starvation trauma and am hoarding more food than I need.

This game is hard enough that it feels real. I don't want stuff to get easier.

Beautifully said. This game kicked my butt mercilessly when I first started playing, even if I did have a vague idea of what I was doing from watching a couple of YouTube videos. And it still kicks my butt if I'm not careful, even after a few hundred hours of experience. Did I get frustrated? Absolutely, but that's also been a refreshing change of pace and a valuable quality that Vintage Story has going for it, in that it really challenges its players and pushes them to improve. At the same time, it also provides a large selection of various options, so those who are looking for an easier, more relaxed game can find what they're looking for; same goes for those who want the absolute nightmare levels of difficulty.

And if the vanilla options aren't enough, Vintage Story is very mod-friendly, so there's likely to be a mod that does whatever you're looking for. If not, it's relatively easy to make your own mod, provided you're willing to put in the time and effort.

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

Good idea. Don't know why it's done the way it is, but my guess is that it makes it easier to determine what you intended to cook from the first two ingredients.

For cooking I would agree. For other stuff in the game, as I noted earlier, I would assume it's the simplest way to allow players to craft whatever they want without needing to select an option from a list every single time. I'd much rather memorize recipes/write them down, than have to go through a list every single time I want to craft something.

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

I don't know anything about Minecraft except that it is apparently some sort of game that has a superficial similarity to VS.  

That's an accurate summary, really. The two share blocky visuals and similar ideas about crafting items with a grid. The similarities end there though. Vintage Story has proper lore and story for a player to experience if they wish, and challenges players in several many ways. Most of Vintage Story's gameplay loops are also intertwined in some form or another, so you'll often need to utilize multiple things to accomplish goals. And I can't think of any gameplay loops that you really do once and then never do again.

Minecraft does none of that; you can easily get to end-game equipment within about an hour of playing, and there's really not much risk of player death unless they're deliberately playing as recklessly as possible. As far as its gameplay loops...there's really not a lot of overlap, and many of them you can outright ignore as the only function the "gameplay" serves is netting the player some kind of decoration and nothing more. Replacing tools and armor isn't even a necessity, as you can simply slap an enchantment on them so they can be essentially repaired for free. Getting that enchantment isn't difficult at all either, so unless you somehow manage to die and lose all your items you'll never need to make new stuff.

1 hour ago, Echo Weaver said:

The one place I will say Minecraft is superior is the recipe book. A there's no reason to have separate recipes for every single wood/metal variant. The VS recipes need a generic "any of type" abstraction in its recipe representation. I know this is a thing.

This actually nailed me when I tried to make a longbow. That spar can only be crafted of hardwood, so I tried it in the pine I had handy, and it didn't work. But how the heck are you going to see the wood blocks cycling through on the recipe and realize some are missing? Just not good.

Disagree here, for the reasons I stated earlier. Minecraft just gives you the recipes, and even then only when you pick up certain things that unlock the recipes. It doesn't provide information on what you can do with the stuff, where you can acquire stuff, or where areas of gameplay overlap(if any). In contrast, the Vintage Story handbook gives you a complete list of items right out of the box, along with detailed information on how to acquire most of it and where it overlaps with other items and game concepts. Having all of that information at the beginning of the game allows players to flip through the handbook at will and make a plan for what they want to pursue. Additionally, if a player is a bit lost on how to proceed, the handbook also includes several specific guides to help push players in the right directions.

1 hour ago, Echo Weaver said:

This actually nailed me when I tried to make a longbow. That spar can only be crafted of hardwood, so I tried it in the pine I had handy, and it didn't work. But how the heck are you going to see the wood blocks cycling through on the recipe and realize some are missing? Just not good.

I've found it easy enough to get a sense for whether a recipe will accept any material of a certain type, or whether it requires a more limited range of options based on how fast it can cycle through the variants. If it seems to be cycling through every variant, then it will probably take any variant, so I'll just throw whatever into the crafting grid. Now if it requires a more specific quality of ingredients, then it doesn't take long to cycle through whatever variants it will take. For example, the kiln doors accept variants on the metal parts, but the metal must be some form of iron or steel in order to work. Therefore it doesn't take long to cycle through the variant materials. In contrast, crates will accept any variant of boards or saws in their recipes, so it will take quite a while to cycle through every variant.

In regards to the bowstaves, I think the reasoning behind requiring certain wood instead of just any wood, is that only certain woods have the strength and flexibility required to make a good quality bow. It's a bit similar to why you need oak wood to make tannin, instead of just tossing any logs into a barrel and calling it a day.

[Echo Weaver]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

Disagree here, for the reasons I stated earlier. Minecraft just gives you the recipes, and even then only when you pick up certain things that unlock the recipes. It doesn't provide information on what you can do with the stuff, where you can acquire stuff, or where areas of gameplay overlap(if any). In contrast, the Vintage Story handbook gives you a complete list of items right out of the box, along with detailed information on how to acquire most of it and where it overlaps with other items and game concepts. Having all of that information at the beginning of the game allows players to flip through the handbook at will and make a plan for what they want to pursue. Additionally, if a player is a bit lost on how to proceed, the handbook also includes several specific guides to help push players in the right directions.

I'm not sure I follow all of this, but I think you're blending several issues, and I was only talking about one specific thing. I am talking about how you search for recipes in the book and how they're presented when you read them. I don't mean how recipes are acquired. The learning of recipes through gameplay in Minecraft never really worked. I usually had all the recipes, which was probably a mod, but I could toggle on/off which recipes I had the ingredients for, which I'm pretty sure was vanilla.

The VS handbook containing a separate search entry for every block variant and the cycling of variant ingredients is slow and confusing. There's no reason I can see that the VS handbook needs to do it that way. Presenting recipes with block variants seems like a problem that was solved a long time ago. (The wiki does it much better.) I'd really like to see VS update its handbook presentation, especially as it adds a whole bunch of new block variants.

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

I've found it easy enough to get a sense for whether a recipe will accept any material of a certain type, or whether it requires a more limited range of options based on how fast it can cycle through the variants. If it seems to be cycling through every variant, then it will probably take any variant, so I'll just throw whatever into the crafting grid. Now if it requires a more specific quality of ingredients, then it doesn't take long to cycle through whatever variants it will take.

Strongly disagree with this. I guess I don't spend that much time staring at a recipe and don't want to. There are a lot of hardwood blocks, the ingredients on the handbook grid don't cycle that fast, and if you roll your mouse over to see what something is, then it stops scrolling. 

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

In regards to the bowstaves, I think the reasoning behind requiring certain wood instead of just any wood, is that only certain woods have the strength and flexibility required to make a good quality bow. It's a bit similar to why you need oak wood to make tannin, instead of just tossing any logs into a barrel and calling it a day.

The reasoning for only accepting hardwood makes total sense, and I really like that -- not all woods are equal, and I appreciate that we need to get the correct wood to do the job. It's just the handbook recipe that was confusing.

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

And if the vanilla options aren't enough, Vintage Story is very mod-friendly, so there's likely to be a mod that does whatever you're looking for. If not, it's relatively easy to make your own mod, provided you're willing to put in the time and effort.

I play with what looks like a big mod list, but almost all of them are small tweaks I've installed individually, mostly gameplay replacements for grid recipes. VS gameplay is really solid, and I haven't wanted to change much of substance. I'm sure I'll get used to vanilla enough that I want a challenge at some point, but I'm not deep enough yet.  

 

Edited December 19, 2024 by Echo Weaver

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

No. I might hold an unpopular opinion here, but there should actually be fewer bushes. Or rather, I think bushes should be turned into sticks when broken, instead of dropping a bush that you can just move elsewhere. Bush cultivation should instead rely on the pruning function with shears, which provides a cutting that can then be planted wherever you'd like, with a 75% chance of growing into a bush. That way the player can still get the full advantage of the berries the first year, but will need to be a bit more deliberate about putting in the effort to both gather the fruit and start their own berry patch close to home.

Sure, but rather than a chance of failure, I'd prefer a chance of dropping a viable cutting, similar to the way you have a chance of dropping a viable seed. Maybe something like 25% on Wilderness, 50% on Standard, 75% on Homo? Put the cutting on a spoilage timer, maybe the same as the berries that come from that bush, so cranberries are easier to "transplant" ? It's insane that it's pretty easy to end up with several hundred berry bushes in a month's time, and are quickly to the point you quit doing it because what the heck are you going to do with all the berries you already have?

 

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

For cooking I would agree. For other stuff in the game, as I noted earlier, I would assume it's the simplest way to allow players to craft whatever they want without needing to select an option from a list every single time.

Agreed. Not exactly thrilled with a crafting grid, but any alternative I've seen suggested seem way slower and more tedious. Kind of like how I lost my command line and have to make do with a GUI monstrosity where  they change where things are every release.

[Echo Weaver]

6 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Sure, but rather than a chance of failure, I'd prefer a chance of dropping a viable cutting, similar to the way you have a chance of dropping a viable seed. Maybe something like 25% on Wilderness, 50% on Standard, 75% on Homo? Put the cutting on a spoilage timer, maybe the same as the berries that come from that bush, so cranberries are easier to "transplant" ? It's insane that it's pretty easy to end up with several hundred berry bushes in a month's time, and are quickly to the point you quit doing it because what the heck are you going to do with all the berries you already have?

Seems like this is mostly like the fire pit -- berry bushes feel like a very old object that needs updating, and eventually I'd guess the devs will get to it.

[Thorfinn]

7 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

 I guess I don't spend that much time staring at a recipe and don't want to. There are a lot of hardwood blocks, the ingredients on the handbook grid don't cycle that fast, and if you roll your mouse over to see what something is, then it stops scrolling. 

I'm in the same boat. If it works with any log, when I hover, I want to see something like " Log". If it's specific to pine and acacia (resin), I want to see something like "Log (Pine, Acacia)". I don't remember what it was, but in my early VS days, there was something that when the recipe paused, it had Black Bronze Chisel and Ebony. I never did manage to get it that game. Then next game, it paused at something different and I realized what it was trying to tell me.

[Echo Weaver]

1 minute ago, Thorfinn said:

I'm in the same boat. If it works with any log, when I hover, I want to see something like " Log". If it's specific to pine and acacia (resin), I want to see something like "Log (Pine, Acacia)". I don't remember what it was, but in my early VS days, there was something that when the recipe paused, it had Black Bronze Chisel and Ebony. I never did manage to get it that game. Then next game, it paused at something different and I realized what it was trying to tell me.

Haha. I don't know if it was for the same recipe, but I went hunting for (and did find) meteoric iron because I thought I needed a meteoric iron chisel for some midgame thing. When I got it, I realized that I'd just had a bad mouse-pause on the recipe, and any chisel would work. 

That's a new player fail, but hey, I'm still pretty new.

[LadyWYT]

56 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Sure, but rather than a chance of failure, I'd prefer a chance of dropping a viable cutting, similar to the way you have a chance of dropping a viable seed. Maybe something like 25% on Wilderness, 50% on Standard, 75% on Homo? Put the cutting on a spoilage timer, maybe the same as the berries that come from that bush, so cranberries are easier to "transplant" ? It's insane that it's pretty easy to end up with several hundred berry bushes in a month's time, and are quickly to the point you quit doing it because what the heck are you going to do with all the berries you already have?

I'd be more inclined to have a guaranteed cutting and leave the original bush intact as well, but make the original bush need to grow back before it can produce fruit again. That way you still have the original bush in case the cutting fails to grow, but you'll also have to make the choice of whether to take cuttings for a garden or leave the bushes alone for a harvest of berries. As for the higher chance of growing opposed to fruit trees: berries spoil much faster than fruit trees, while producing crops faster. They also feel like something that's easier to propagate than a tree cutting. In any case, the comparative ease of getting the cuttings to grow doesn't mean you can just harvest all the nearby bushes without a care; you'll definitely want those berries for your first winter, and if you take cuttings from everything at the wrong time the original bushes may not grow back in time to produce much for crops.

Either method you choose, the other main benefit is that it makes the early game more challenging since players now need to go forage for their food. The same food is still there to be found, of course, but if you have to go forage you could find some furry friends along the way if you aren't careful.

59 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

I'm not sure I follow all of this, but I think you're blending several issues, and I was only talking about one specific thing.

I was. I do that a lot, and it's easy to do given my brain tends to operate much faster than my body.

59 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

I guess I don't spend that much time staring at a recipe and don't want to. There are a lot of hardwood blocks, the ingredients on the handbook grid don't cycle that fast, and if you roll your mouse over to see what something is, then it stops scrolling. 

It might just be a quirk for me. I think I stared at most recipes that did that long enough to watch the full cycle, and it just stuck in my head from that point on. I've also found it fairly easy to pick up on the general pattern if there's a specific category of resource that it requires, like only iron-tier materials.

45 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

I'm in the same boat. If it works with any log, when I hover, I want to see something like " Log". If it's specific to pine and acacia (resin), I want to see something like "Log (Pine, Acacia)". I don't remember what it was, but in my early VS days, there was something that when the recipe paused, it had Black Bronze Chisel and Ebony. I never did manage to get it that game. Then next game, it paused at something different and I realized what it was trying to tell me.

This explanation of the issue makes a lot more sense to me, and yeah I can get on board with shuffling materials into categories like that. It would streamline a lot.

42 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

Haha. I don't know if it was for the same recipe, but I went hunting for (and did find) meteoric iron because I thought I needed a meteoric iron chisel for some midgame thing. When I got it, I realized that I'd just had a bad mouse-pause on the recipe, and any chisel would work. 

That's a new player fail, but hey, I'm still pretty new.

I don't know about that. I've done similar, though it was when I was a newer player too. But one of the great things about Vintage Story, in my opinion, is that it's very good about catching the veterans off-guard as well as the newbies.

Edited December 20, 2024 by LadyWYT