Trying to address the elephant in the room

[Sageskully]

Now I have t read everything single change note and logs to know how when where things went wrong. But I have had this game about a month and one of the glaring issues is the handbook. Yea Im gunna be the one to say it. Some of the handbook entries are just straight up wrong. My main example is the Quran! When automating It says it spits the output items out. This is not the case or may be the case after the output becomes full but from my understanding of the handbook it doesn't state anything about having a output slot this mislead me and so I didn't set it up for automation because I made my windmill little bit too far from my base and when I was doing other things I found that the hammer will just despawn the item if no player is around it may be time to reword some of the handbook entries to remedy this misunderstanding information so I thought the Quran would do the same. I'm sure I can find a few more examples of misleading information when I'm actually looking at it 

[Diff]

I'm not sure I understand where the confusion is on the quern's behavior. The note on mechanical power for querns says:

Quote

For mechanized milling: Craft a quern from any igneous rock, then use axles and gears to connect the rotor to either the top or bottom of the quern to be automated. If the quern's output slot is full or occupied the quern will begin to drop items on each of its 4 sides. Placing a block beside the quern will prevent the quern from dropping items on the blocked side, but reduces the grinding efficiency. You can use this fact to place hoppers and chests below the sides of the quern to catch quern output. Placing one hopper above the quern allows you to grind multiple stacks of material automatically.

And you can see the output slot when you place items inside. If you stick around, you can watch them fill up the output slot just like when you power it manually. There's no such slot for helve hammers, so I think it's reasonable to assume that it will just drop items immediately. I think there could be room for a note that mechanically dropped items aren't protected from despawning like normal, since right now it's left in between the lines about hoppers and chests catching quern output.

Edited November 10, 2025 by Diff

[Teh Pizza Lady]

The quern's output slot should have become immediately obvious when you first attempted to load it with grain or calcinated flint to make your first bread or pie. It is possible to somewhat automate the quern because of it's nature, it ejects items from the sides which can be collected into hoppers. You would need 5 hoppers to fully automate it and it would be somewhat limited in terms of what it could produce because the output slot would need to be filled before items would eject from the sides. You have discovered this property already.

As far as the helve hammer is concerned, it's not intended to be an autonomous device, but rather a time-saver. You can toss heated iron blooms on the anvil and the hammer will do the heavy work for you, saving your hand-held hammer from wear and tear and your body from fatigue (shown by your rapidly depleting satiety bar when working the anvil). The helve hammer is exceedingly good at producing ingots from blooms and plates from ingots. It needs minimal attention save to put a new work item on the anvil when the current one is finished. I can forge chain mail very easily with a dual setup, two anvils, one with a helve hammer and the other with my hand-held hammer. The forge can hold up to 4 ingots. Two of them go under the helve hammer to make a plate. The other two get worked by hand by me, thus doubling my output. Then the plates are collected and turned into chains faster than if I was working alone with only my hand-held hammer.

But in all, yes the handbook does need some rework and that is on the todo list for the developers. As you are probably aware, their todo list is quite large and continues to grow each day from the looks of things.

The man's todo list... I quake at the thought of how large it must be.

[Maelstrom]

1 hour ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

first attempted to load it with... calcinated flint to make your first bread or pie.

Uhhh....   Are you a lithovore? 

I'm surprised that ornery blackguard companion of yours would even consider your rock based fare. 

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

it's not intended to be an autonomous device, but rather a time-saver.

That could be said of pretty much any contraption in Vintage Story, really.

 

24 minutes ago, Maelstrom said:

I'm surprised that ornery blackguard companion of yours would even consider your rock based fare. 

Well if the Blackguard ate all the food, I guess stone soup is the only option. 

[Teh Pizza Lady]

28 minutes ago, Maelstrom said:

Uhhh....   Are you a lithovore? 

I'm surprised that ornery blackguard companion of yours would even consider your rock based fare. 

3 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Well if the Blackguard ate all the food, I guess stone soup is the only option. 

Both of you... behave! LOL

The implication is that the calcinated flint would be used to make fire clay for an oven.  I just didn't bother to type that.

[Alonso7]

The handbook needs to be concise enough to serve as a quick reference guide for recipes, basic mechanics, and so on. We have the wiki for more in-depth explanations. Actually, I have some complaints about the wiki, some entries still don't exist, but I guess that's understandable for an early access game.

[Maelstrom]

3 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Both of you... behave! LOL

We ARE behaving! badly

[Vexxvididu]

4 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Both of you... behave! LOL

The implication is that the calcinated flint would be used to make fire clay for an oven.  I just didn't bother to type that.

For what it's worth, I knew what you meant!  lol.

[Broccoli Clock]

17 hours ago, Diff said:

I'm not sure I understand where the confusion is on the quern's behavior. 

I'm confused, but my confusion arose from OP's spelling error/correction of the word quern into Quran! 

[Facethief]

16 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

The implication is that the calcinated flint would be used to make fire clay for an oven.  I just didn't bother to type that.

REAL seraphs eat BURNT bread!

[Sageskully]

why no description???? seems a bit important 

[LadyWYT]

9 minutes ago, Sageskully said:

why no description???? seems a bit important 

Probably because the handbook is still very much a work in progress, and therefore the information within isn't as polished. This page would be a prime one for polishing though. I do recall the Archimedes screw having a description in the Guides section, under mechanical power, unless I'm recalling incorrectly.

In any case, what the item in question does, is transport items via chutes, but only when powered. Under normal circumstances, the player must rely on gravity to do the work.