Revert Chisel Requirements for Quern.

[Air Regalia]

I seriously just bought the game and this peeves me so much that I want to cheat. So it seems that because of try hard's making it "easy" to survive this way you nerf realism to affect grinding. I should be able to grind with a hammer for one and for two you can make a mill stone with stone and wood irl. This is beyond frustrating for a new player since it feels like non sense. Like a god is beaming all this handbook information to my head and won't let me do the smart thing. Instead it makes me go a long way around. Frustrating nerf in 1.20

Guess i'll just stare at this chunks of flint that i can't hammer cause i'm to dumb. Oh boy can't make a clay oven till i make an ANVIL LOL 

Yes I sound upset I am. Hopefully no one felt targeted except the players that gamed VS so hard you had to nerf.

[LadyWYT]

Welcome to the forums! The good news is that someone else already had similar feelings and made a mod to do just that. https://mods.vintagestory.at/oldquern

Personally, I wouldn't revert the quern change, as it was a good one in terms of early game balance. Before the change, the cost to get to better foods like pies and better materials like bronze and iron was a whopping...two ingots of copper, essentially. You didn't actually need to craft an anvil until you had the materials for bronze. With the change though, it costs the player at least eleven ingots of copper to gain access to things like pies and barrels. A player can still skip the copper anvil and go straight for bronze, of course, but they do so at the cost of unlocking certain useful things much later as well.

26 minutes ago, Air Regalia said:

Oh boy can't make a clay oven till i make an ANVIL LOL 

Not quite. Grinding calcined flint into powder and combining that with clay is the easiest way to get fire clay, but not the only way. Fire clay spawns naturally under black coal and anthracite deposits, as well as in bauxite biomes. It can also be found in certain cracked vessels, or purchased from some traders.

[Echo Weaver]

16 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Personally, I wouldn't revert the quern change, as it was a good one in terms of early game balance. Before the change, the cost to get to better foods like pies and better materials like bronze and iron was a whopping...two ingots of copper, essentially. You didn't actually need to craft an anvil until you had the materials for bronze. With the change though, it costs the player at least eleven ingots of copper to gain access to things like pies and barrels. A player can still skip the copper anvil and go straight for bronze, of course, but they do so at the cost of unlocking certain useful things much later as well.

OK, I'm playing on a game upgraded to 1.20, so I haven't dealt with this, but I'm inclined to agree with @Air Regalia. Why on earth did we need to gate pie making behind an anvil? That makes very little sense to me from a tech level standpoint. Bread and pies exist in stone age cultures. I don't suppose that can be changed with an admin command or something?

This is gating bread not just behind metal but behind smithing, which just seems bonkers.

Edited July 15, 2025 by Echo Weaver

[Kreeate]

48 minutes ago, Air Regalia said:

I seriously just bought the game and this peeves me so much that I want to cheat. So it seems that because of try hard's making it "easy" to survive this way you nerf realism to affect grinding. I should be able to grind with a hammer for one and for two you can make a mill stone with stone and wood irl. This is beyond frustrating for a new player since it feels like non sense. Like a god is beaming all this handbook information to my head and won't let me do the smart thing. Instead it makes me go a long way around. Frustrating nerf in 1.20

Guess i'll just stare at this chunks of flint that i can't hammer cause i'm to dumb. Oh boy can't make a clay oven till i make an ANVIL LOL 

Yes I sound upset I am. Hopefully no one felt targeted except the players that gamed VS so hard you had to nerf.

 

EDIT: Derp... didn't realize there was already a mod for this.  When I started my reply, only the OP existed and I didn't realize someone already replied with an alternative.

 

Drop this zipped file in your mods folder. Quern woes begone.

It replaces the hammer and chisel with simple firewood logs.  Better than cheating, since you still need to craft the quern.

Your mods folder can be found at: C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\VintagestoryData\Mods

 

squern1.zip

Edited July 15, 2025 by Kreeate

[LadyWYT]

5 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

OK, I'm playing on a game upgraded to 1.20, so I haven't dealt with this, but I'm inclined to agree with @Air Regalia. Why on earth did we need to gate pie making behind an anvil? That makes very little sense to me from a tech level standpoint. Bread and pies exist in stone age cultures. I don't suppose that can be changed with an admin command or something?

This is gating bread not just behind metal but behind smithing, which just seems bonkers.

I didn't do the best job explaining it in my initial post, but it's not so much about gating pie-making, as it is a change to smooth out the progression for getting to iron from the stone age. Prior to 1.20, red clay didn't exist at all, and fire clay and blue clay spawned in large deposits like red clay does now(there was also no converting one clay type to another). Once you found a fire clay deposit(which was fairly easy to do), you were pretty much set for the rest of the game.

1.20 changed how clay works--red clay was introduced as a different common clay type, and the natural spawn rules of fire clay were made a lot more strict. The general way to acquire fire clay en masse is to cook flint in a firepit to calcinate it, then grind the result into powder and mix it with blue/red clay. I assume the quern recipe was changed as well in order to help smooth out the early game a bit with the change to clay, since the previous recipe only required an ingot's worth of copper minimum(100 units for a pick, if you consider the quern and nothing else). With the change, the copper cost is increased to 1200(100 for pick, 100 for hammer, 100 for chisel, and 900 for anvil...man I am bad at math sometimes), which feels like a more fair price for what you unlock from it, and helps the early game feel a bit more meaningful.

It's not a change I would revert, personally, but I do think this is perhaps a great situation to add something like a mortar and pestle(I like the way the Ancient Tools mod handles this concept. The mortar and pestle can't grind much at a time and can't be automated, so it's more tedious than a quern. However, the benefit is that it's very easy to craft--a stick and a few hard rocks, no fancy tools or materials required. Adding an item like this would give the player the choice to either spend more resources up front in exchange for more efficiency(the quern), or spend a bit of extra time to achieve the same result in return for not needing to sink as many resources into the grinding tool.

 

[Teh Pizza Lady]

For what it's worth, foods like pies and bread aren't going to really be available until your first crops come in anyway, and by that time, you should ideally have enough copper to make an anvil, if you have been a good boy/girl and marked all those copper nuggets you found on the surface to come back later and dig up the ore veins underneath...

[Echo Weaver]

2 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I didn't do the best job explaining it in my initial post, but it's not so much about gating pie-making, as it is a change to smooth out the progression for getting to iron from the stone age. Prior to 1.20, red clay didn't exist at all, and fire clay and blue clay spawned in large deposits like red clay does now(there was also no converting one clay type to another). Once you found a fire clay deposit(which was fairly easy to do), you were pretty much set for the rest of the game.

1.20 changed how clay works--red clay was introduced as a different common clay type, and the natural spawn rules of fire clay were made a lot more strict. The general way to acquire fire clay en masse is to cook flint in a firepit to calcinate it, then grind the result into powder and mix it with blue/red clay. I assume the quern recipe was changed as well in order to help smooth out the early game a bit with the change to clay, since the previous recipe only required an ingot's worth of copper minimum(100 units for a pick, if you consider the quern and nothing else). With the change, the copper cost is increased to 1200(100 for pick, 100 for hammer, 100 for chisel, and 900 for anvil...man I am bad at math sometimes), which feels like a more fair price for what you unlock from it, and helps the early game feel a bit more meaningful.

It's not a change I would revert, personally, but I do think this is perhaps a great situation to add something like a mortar and pestle(I like the way the Ancient Tools mod handles this concept. The mortar and pestle can't grind much at a time and can't be automated, so it's more tedious than a quern. However, the benefit is that it's very easy to craft--a stick and a few hard rocks, no fancy tools or materials required. Adding an item like this would give the player the choice to either spend more resources up front in exchange for more efficiency(the quern), or spend a bit of extra time to achieve the same result in return for not needing to sink as many resources into the grinding tool.

No, I think the explanation was fine, though the extra detail is useful.

This seems like an interesting philosophical question about what the game is doing. On one hand, you can say that the goal is to have a smooth progression. OTOH, you can say that the goal is to recreate the feel of various tech levels as you move through them.

Cultures have made bread from grinding grain between big stones to make flour and then cooking in a stone or clay oven -- or just in the fire. It might make sense to need to achieve smithing in order to grind flour/make fire clay for a smooth game progression, but it doesn't make logical sense to need this much tech in order to make bread.

I think I agree with your suggestion -- a mortar and pestle is a good early-game addition that could balance this out. The grinding would be slower, but if you're spending time in the stone/barely copper age, you might want to spend some more time hiding, so it feels thematic.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

12 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

but it doesn't make logical sense to need this much tech in order to make bread.

it was never about the bread. #mysterious

It's about locking Iron behind decent copper/bronze progression. Otherwise you could just cast a bronze pickaxe and dig up iron without having spent much time in the copper age. Without requiring at least ONE anvil, the player can take a very obvious shortcut here and start stockpiling iron blooms before even casting a bronze anvil. Once the anvil is made, it's nothing to setup a helve hammer and start working away at those blooms super early in the game. I think the chisel requirement was to stop that shortcut.

 

making a smol edit to say, that perhaps the oven shouldn't require fireclay to make or there should instead be a primitive oven that falls apart with use like the  cementation furnace does when making steel. A more permanent oven can be made out of fireclay after if the desire to make bread is that fierce. I think this would improve the game the most: having two ovens like this. idk I'm just thinking out loud at this point blink blorp listen to my thought stream

Edited July 15, 2025 by traugdor

[LadyWYT]

5 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

No, I think the explanation was fine, though the extra detail is useful.

This seems like an interesting philosophical question about what the game is doing. On one hand, you can say that the goal is to have a smooth progression. OTOH, you can say that the goal is to recreate the feel of various tech levels as you move through them.

Cultures have made bread from grinding grain between big stones to make flour and then cooking in a stone or clay oven -- or just in the fire. It might make sense to need to achieve smithing in order to grind flour/make fire clay for a smooth game progression, but it doesn't make logical sense to need this much tech in order to make bread.

I think I agree with your suggestion -- a mortar and pestle is a good early-game addition that could balance this out. The grinding would be slower, but if you're spending time in the stone/barely copper age, you might want to spend some more time hiding, so it feels thematic.

Pretty much. Plus a mortar and pestle can serve other purposes too. It could be used for an herbalism gameplay loop--perhaps it's even the only tool that can grind plants into a fine-enough powder to use in potions and salves. A mortar and pestle also makes a great decoration, or a useful gadget in the event your friend has occupied the quern with other tasks.

Of course, I could also see removing the oven requirement for bread too, after a fashion. Expanded Foods(I believe it was this mod, anyway) implemented such a concept--you can bake bread in a firepit, but the result will always be the charred variety. A change like that, in addition to adding a mortar and pestle, gives the player another early food option without needing to worry about fire clay at all, while still giving them a good incentive to invest the resources into an oven later.

[Echo Weaver]

3 minutes ago, traugdor said:

it was never about the bread. #mysterious

It's about locking Iron behind decent copper/bronze progression. Otherwise you could just cast a bronze pickaxe and dig up iron without having spent much time in the copper age. Without requiring at least ONE anvil, the player can take a very obvious shortcut here and start stockpiling iron blooms before even casting a bronze anvil. Once the anvil is made, it's nothing to setup a helve hammer and start working away at those blooms super early in the game. I think the chisel requirement was to stop that shortcut.

So.... the goal here is to require a smelted anvil before you can get to iron?

If that's the case, the bread seems like too big a sacrifice to gate the iron progression that way. There ought to be a way to grind flour and make pies while something else is needed for bloomeries.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

Just now, Echo Weaver said:

So.... the goal here is to require a smelted anvil before you can get to iron?

If that's the case, the bread seems like too big a sacrifice to gate the iron progression that way. There ought to be a way to grind flour and make pies while something else is needed for bloomeries.

see my smol edit 

[Echo Weaver]

11 minutes ago, traugdor said:

perhaps the oven shouldn't require fireclay to make or there should instead be a primitive oven that falls apart with use like the  cementation furnace does when making steel. A more permanent oven can be made out of fireclay after if the desire to make bread is that fierce. I think this would improve the game the most: having two ovens like this. idk I'm just thinking out loud at this point blink blorp listen to my thought stream

3 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Pretty much. Plus a mortar and pestle can serve other purposes too. It could be used for an herbalism gameplay loop--perhaps it's even the only tool that can grind plants into a fine-enough powder to use in potions and salves. A mortar and pestle also makes a great decoration, or a useful gadget in the event your friend has occupied the quern with other tasks.

Of course, I could also see removing the oven requirement for bread too, after a fashion. Expanded Foods(I believe it was this mod, anyway) implemented such a concept--you can bake bread in a firepit, but the result will always be the charred variety. A change like that, in addition to adding a mortar and pestle, gives the player another early food option without needing to worry about fire clay at all, while still giving them a good incentive to invest the resources into an oven later.

Both of these seem like great options to me.

Pottery is a tech level between stone and copper, and it seems like the current structure really short-changes it. I was surprised when I first started making pottery as a noob that there were no pottery buckets (or earthenware jugs or whatever you would call them) -- buckets are gated behind a saw, which is smithing. But one of the huge benefits pottery brings is the ability to carry water.

A mortar and pestle seems like a perfect approach to stone age bread -- I like the idea of cooking it in the fire at the expense of charring it. Then, the pottery age brings the ability to make a clay oven, which gives you better-cooked bread and pies. Then smithing levels up the efficiency of your grinding.

Obviously, I should just write all their tech level progression.

[LadyWYT]

2 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

If that's the case, the bread seems like too big a sacrifice to gate the iron progression that way. There ought to be a way to grind flour and make pies while something else is needed for bloomeries.

In all fairness, pies were gated behind the anvil anyway prior to the quern change. Unless I'm forgetting something, pies require a table in their crafting--ordinary blocks won't do. Tables require boards, which requires a saw, which needs to be smithed on the anvil. Given that they're a food source on par with cookpot meals, but stackable, I'm not sure that I would make them easier to obtain. Having a food type that strong is a good reason to invest the resources into acquiring them.

 

15 minutes ago, traugdor said:

making a smol edit to say, that perhaps the oven shouldn't require fireclay to make or there should instead be a primitive oven that falls apart with use like the  cementation furnace does when making steel. A more permanent oven can be made out of fireclay after if the desire to make bread is that fierce. I think this would improve the game the most: having two ovens like this. idk I'm just thinking out loud at this point blink blorp listen to my thought stream

Maybe, although at a glance, it looks like fire clay is required due to the oven needing to withstand high heat without cracking. Though the weirdest part about the oven to me isn't the fire clay requirement...it's the lack of firing.  Every other piece of pottery you need to fire in order to have it be usable, yet the oven is usable as soon as you're done molding it.

[Echo Weaver]

1 minute ago, LadyWYT said:

In all fairness, pies were gated behind the anvil anyway prior to the quern change. Unless I'm forgetting something, pies require a table in their crafting--ordinary blocks won't do. Tables require boards, which requires a saw, which needs to be smithed on the anvil. Given that they're a food source on par with cookpot meals, but stackable, I'm not sure that I would make them easier to obtain. Having a food type that strong is a good reason to invest the resources into acquiring them.

Crap, you're right. So you could get bread without smithing, but not pies. Maybe that's fine.

Kind of shoots me off my high horse, though.

1 minute ago, LadyWYT said:

it looks like fire clay is required due to the oven needing to withstand high heat without cracking. Though the weirdest part about the oven to me isn't the fire clay requirement...it's the lack of firing.  Every other piece of pottery you need to fire in order to have it be usable, yet the oven is usable as soon as you're done molding it.

The heat required for a bloomery is like an order of magnitude more than the heat required to cook bread. It seems like there's a hair you could split there.

As for lack of firing, It's been a good while since I first made a clay oven, but I remember a tooltip someplace that said that the firing effectively happened when you heated it up by burning fuel the first time.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

2 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

As for lack of firing, It's been a good while since I first made a clay oven, but I remember a tooltip someplace that said that the firing effectively happened when you heated it up by burning fuel the first time.

If you watch primitive technology on YouTube, the guy shows that you do NOT need to fire your clay every time, just when making things that NEED the structural rigidity and impermeability to water of fired clay like bricks and roofing tiles that would fall apart in the first rain. Much of the stuff he makes is dried clay which works fine for his purposes. I don't see a reason that this couldn't work in VS as well, especially the clay pots to carry water.

[LadyWYT]

2 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

The heat required for a bloomery is like an order of magnitude more than the heat required to cook bread. It seems like there's a hair you could split there.

It is splitting hairs a bit...mostly it was just what I found with a quick Google. From a gameplay logic standpoint, crafting a limited use oven from lower quality clay seems like a fair compromise, at least on paper.

 

4 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

As for lack of firing, It's been a good while since I first made a clay oven, but I remember a tooltip someplace that said that the firing effectively happened when you heated it up by burning fuel the first time.

Ah, yeah, didn't think of that. Makes a lot of sense!

[Thorfinn]

24 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Expanded Foods(I believe it was this mod, anyway) implemented such a concept--you can bake bread in a firepit, but the result will always be the charred variety.

That's vanilla.

[LadyWYT]

Just now, Thorfinn said:

That's vanilla.

Oh it is? Could have sworn that was a mod thing. You learn something new every day!

[Echo Weaver]

2 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

That's vanilla.

Buh, it is?

I wish somebody had said that sooner in my pontification.

ETA: Though that does give more weight to the original complaint that the quern now requires smithing.

Edited July 15, 2025 by Echo Weaver

[Teh Pizza Lady]

It's more fun to watch you pontificate and ... idk where I was going with this. I didn't know that either.

Edited July 15, 2025 by traugdor

[Echo Weaver]

Reaction limitation rage again.

9 minutes ago, traugdor said:

If you watch primitive technology on YouTube, the guy shows that you do NOT need to fire your clay every time, just when making things that NEED the structural rigidity and impermeability to water of fired clay like bricks and roofing tiles that would fall apart in the first rain. Much of the stuff he makes is dried clay which works fine for his purposes. I don't see a reason that this couldn't work in VS as well, especially the clay pots to carry water.

3 minutes ago, traugdor said:

It's more fun to watch you pontificate and ... idk where I was going with this. I didn't know that either.

[Thorfinn]

You still need a quern and a bucket, because for some reason, you can't make dough in a bowl. And the recipe is 1:1, so it seems reasonable. A good match for a mortar/pestle or a mano/matate.

[Facethief]

2 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

You still need […] a bucket

No, you just need some vessel for water, but a bowl only holds one liter. You could use jugs if you feel the need, it’s just that they hold less water.

[Echo Weaver]

31 minutes ago, Facethief said:

No, you just need some vessel for water, but a bowl only holds one liter. You could use jugs if you feel the need, it’s just that they hold less water.

So you can make dough using a pottery jug? Jugs confused me, and I haven't really used them

[majestik]

Yeah totally, they can hold 3L of water.