2 Issues With Progression Balance

[VaelophisNyx]

Just to be fast on this:

1. Querns should not be post-anvil. Either RNG for ore spawns needs to account for this, or, it needs to be reverted
2. Beehive Kilns come too late. FAR too late

By the time I can build a beehive kiln, I have already baked literally everything I will ever want or need in pit kilns, because their cost and setup is extremely painful

[VaelophisNyx]

To elaborate on the quern point:

Now locked behind finding enough copper to make an anvil at minimum (something that may take long enough to kill interest in the game!), is:

• Leather (Lime, borax)
• Sulfur for poultices
• Salt from Halite
• Potash from Sylvite
• Flour from grains

None of this should mandate the ability to make advanced metal tools.

Edited March 4, 2025 by VaelophisNyx

[VaelophisNyx]

In the interim, for issue 1
https://mods.vintagestory.at/oldquern

I made a mod to fix it

[Zane Mordien]

2 hours ago, VaelophisNyx said:

To elaborate on the quern point:

Now locked behind finding enough copper at minimum (something that may take long enough to kill interest in the game!), is:

• Leather (Lime, borax)
• Sulfur for poultices
• Salt from Halite
• Potash from Sylvite
• Flour from grains

None of this should mandate the ability to make advanced metal tools.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but these are my thoughts. Some of these to me are items people think they need but they are really optional to the game or just long term goals.

• Leather - This is the most basic one you list. I've gotten used to just finding it so I may be the wrong person to comment.
• Sulfur - Sulfur is more common than you realize, unless you spawn no where near sedimentary rock I guess. I feel like this one falls into people get stuck trying to find the mythical high reading instead of just mining the decent or poor readings.  That one prospecting video leads people down a primrose path of time wasting looking for higher readings instead of using what they find.
• Salt - I don't even bother with finding salt. You don't really need it except to check a box that you made cheese or pickled stuff. It's nice to have but I just buy enough to salt some meat from the merchants and call it a day.
• Potash - I just buy this from the merchant. Much better way to spend my time.
• Flour - Not sure why this one is an issue. You can use the grains as food until you progress to make the quern. I guess if you want to make pies immediately this is an issue.
• Quern - Not sure why the change really. I guess I didn't care as I said before I just cook the grains. Bread and pies aren't a big deal to me.
• Beehive Kiln - Yeah this is just a something if you want to decorate your house with different colour clay stuff. Completely unnecessary IMO so it doesn't offend me.

 

[Michael Gates]

1) No, and
2) No.

Every item you make with a quern for is the *advanced* version of something. Bread is the endgame grain food after porridge and just eating it, with more satiety per stack than anything else in game. Leather is for the third carry item you make (backpacks > bag > basket), and the advanced armors. Sulfur/honey poultices are the advanced healing item. Each of these also has ingredients that mean you have to have made progress in other areas.. a hog farm, an apiary, the skill to murder wolves daily and not die. If you have the skills and the items, you should also have bronze, and it's routine to include an anvil in your first bronze pour.

Beehive kilns are for high-volume production of custom colored bricks and shingles. Really it's for multiplayer servers where a group wants to build something like a replica of Renaissance-era Florence. It's reasonable that one would be expensive and hard to run; it's what you do AFTER you have a head-high pile of steel ingots.

[VaelophisNyx]

Some things are realistic because that makes it hard
some things are realistic because that's realistic

thus the game's pacing and immersion feel strange, disjointed. Inconsistent.*

You can absolutely make most of that without metal. And most importantly you need to care about the singleplayer experience, not just multiplayer, otherwise why even include it?

 

 

*this is a complaint I have with other indie titles like Zomboid, which has a lot of "this is realistic because it makes it harder to survive" and "this is very gamified so it can't be beneficial by being realistic" stuff

[Thorfinn]

For the record, leather does not depend on quern. Hammer works, too.

For the reasons @Michael Gates cites, I'm fine with it being gated behind a chisel, I respect the effort to mod back the old quern. I just don't see myself ever using it.

[LadyWYT]

I agree with @Michael Gates and @Thorfinn--the beehive kiln is fine and the current quern recipe is an improvement over the old(because how do you get that kind of refined millstone by just slapping blocks and sticks into a grid). That being said, I can respect putting in the time and effort to make your own mod so the game does what you'd like, as you have also done.

In my experience, the change to the quern smooths out the overall progression significantly and gives much more value to sinking time and resources into a copper anvil, instead of waiting until bronze to cast your first anvil. You don't need to do that to progress, of course, however if you try to rush things you'll end up running into a bottleneck when trying to progress to iron due to the changes to fire clay. Chances are, you're not going to have a natural deposit nearby to work with, so you'll need to craft it...which requires a quern. However, if you opted to sink in the time and resources to build an early quern, you can get a head start on making your fire bricks and have an easier time later.

As for the beehive kiln, it's something that's nice to have if you're intending to do a lot of pottery or brickwork, or if you want specific colors of certain ceramics. But otherwise, pit kilns will do just fine.