Really questionable changes in 1.22 pre1

[Chuckerton]

 

On 2/5/2026 at 12:37 PM, Urmanin said:

Yeah, just ruin everyone's builds with no way to compensate, that's a great idea man

On 2/5/2026 at 11:58 AM, Tyron said:

existing mechanical power builds that have been up-geared at least 3 times will ignite.

"Ruin everyone's builds" 
"Up-geared at least 3 times" 
genuinely, when on EARTH have you ever up geared anything that much? You would have so little torque with that, that i cant possibly imagine having to build that many windmills to give you any kind of useful work out of that. I think ive only ever upgeared something once and it was for a helvehammer, and it basically needed to be a very windy day across 3 or 4 windmills for it to even do anything. Sure, were getting waterwheels and large windmills, but i dont see that giving you so much power that you can actually upgear stuff like that and still have enough torque left to drive anything. 

On 2/5/2026 at 12:37 PM, Urmanin said:

Glacier ice changes: I suspect this is done entirely to combat ice elevators. In an update where elevators are now no longer in. That's great, man.

When i look up "glacier ice elevator", the first thing that comes up is this discussion post, the next thing is a reddit post from 4 years ago asking what it was 4 (elevators werent mentioned), then another discussion asking how it forms. Looked up specifically "ice elevator" and found one youtube video making it and upon watching it... I just gotta ask, did you honestly think this was intended behavior? Being able to slide vertically on ice to swim up a vertical column of water. Does that sound like something you would expect to see in the vintage story experience? Either way it seems niche enough that, while im sure the 5 people who knew about ice elevators and used them regularly are going to be heartbroken, but i think the community will heal and survive this one. 

Holy paragraph below, got carried away while typing vvv feel free to ignore

I actually do somewhat agree with the spears though. I will say, i dont know exactly WHAT got nerfed, if it was both melee and thrown damage, but i guess since im here i want to make a point on spears... well, you know what i mean. 

They should be strong when thrown, if you make a steel spearhead, throw it, and then lose the spear, youre down an entire steel spearhead. Its an expensive and potentially risky investment. What i think is that falxes should have a slash with a larger hitbox, while spears do not. A falx would be better for fighting faster, less predictable or smaller enemies like drifters and clockwork stuff, but a spear would be better against charging wildlife or larger enemies that are easier to click on specifically. 

Or, alternative wild idea, remove the ability to throw spears and give us javelins. Maybe you can craft 2 javelin heads instead of one spearhead. Then you dont have to deal with balancing of its ranged damage, and you can balance the throwing aspect as a separate item. I thought it was always a little weird that you can throw spears, because i thought that spears were typically NOT throwing weapons. Theyre too long and heavy. Spears were used to hunt hogs in ye olde medieval times, but as far as i can see, they didnt throw them, they used them in melee, even while hunting.

and even looking up "spear" on wikipedia, you get this

"Spears can be divided into two broad categories: those designed for thrusting as a melee weapon (including weapons such as lances and pikes) and those designed for throwing as a ranged weapon (usually referred to as javelins)."

So just make them two distinct options instead of trying to combine the two and have to deal with balancing both parts of one weapon. and, you know, it be kinda cool to have that spear right click be a spear brace that stops creature momentum instead of a throw...

Edited February 8 by Chuckerton

[MKMoose]

11 hours ago, RogueVali said:

When 1 iron bar can last me as little as 9 shots, thanks to horrible RNG based arrow breaking system?

I get being annoyed about RNG, but one iron bar will last you on average 90 shots. I could as well say that due to the RNG mechanic, one iron bar can last you forever, and focusing on that too much is just as pointless as focusing on the minimum.

Granted, the average is still much less than one iron spear.

 

8 hours ago, RogueVali said:

9 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Based on what I've read, the breakage chance is supposed to be very low(maybe even nonexistent) for the first tempering or two

First two only problem being additional resource costs (clay and what have u) sounds reasonable, and the more u tempt fate, the more chance to get shafted, that also sounds good. Hope devs will come with reasonable numbers for all that.

Literally just reading the changelog will tell you more or less everything you need to know. If not that, then reading the handbook will. Or if even that's not enough, you can test it in creative. Here's a few details:

• tempering never shatters the work piece,
• quenching starts off at 0% shatter chance, then increases with each next quenching (so it's always risk-free and worthwhile to quench once),
• you can quench a piece as many times as you wish, and you can temper a piece at most as many times as you've quenched it (and ideally you generally probably should temper before each subsequent quenching after the first one, unless you're short on time or fuel, though in the current balance it seems like it barely makes a difference anyways unless you're going for durability and not power),
• both tempering and quenching only apply their effect once the temperature of the piece decreases to below 100 C (when the piece is considered cooled down and the character takes the item off the tongs into their hand),
• both tempering and quenching have a specific temperature range that the piece has to reach for the treatment to take effect,
• the piece saves its maximum temperature that it has reached since last being cooled down completely - if the maximum temperature that the piece has reached is not within the temperature range of either tempering or quenching, then no effect will be applied (I'm not sure if there's other ways to mess up, but whatever you do, you should be fine to just let it cool and try again),
• if you heat the piece up above the quenching temperature range, you have to cool it down completely and heat it back up (with not shatter chance, interestingly).

 

4 hours ago, TFT said:

Covering the tool in clay to quench for durability instead of sharpness doesn't seem to work right now as the craft is bugged, but I imagine it'll work the exact same as hardening with the same scaling per quench. 

What is bugged? Are you trying to use regular clay instead of fire clay? It currently doesn't use a different model or at least texture, but you can see it in the tooltip and it should work perfectly fine. The durability boost is twice as high and doesn't decrease with tempering (or at least shouldn't).

Edited February 8 by MKMoose
Finish a sentence, rephrase some things.

[pigfood]

4 hours ago, Chuckerton said:

I actually do somewhat agree with the spears though. I will say, i dont know exactly WHAT got nerfed, if it was both melee and thrown damage, but i guess since im here i want to make a point on spears... well, you know what i mean. 

Tinbronze spears went from 3.75 / 7.5 damage to 3.75 / 5.25 (melee / thrown damage). The new steel spears are 4.4 / 6.2.

So high level spear melee damage got a buff, thrown damage was significantly nerfed.

IMO, given inventory size, ranged attackers, fast attackers with erratic movements and wonky hitboxes, spears weren't that great to begin with in recent VS versions. IMO, steel spears should have at least as much thrown damage as the old tin spears.

I just noticed, thrown damage for ornate spears wasn't nerfed (yet) and is still 8.25. So it's still possible to get decent spears by becoming rich.

The whole point of people complaining about iron/steel spears not being available was that spear damage wasn't good enough. Instead of adding spears with more damage, spears were nerfed into non-viability.

Hunting with ranged weapons is the wrong way to go, when the prey requires multiple hits and runs away without leaving a trail. The correct way is using pit traps.

Edited February 8 by pigfood

[Callorn]

 i noticed that there is no player damage damage multiplier for world settings to tip the balance back on the player side. which is weird since creature damage multiplier exist.

Still disabling combat until it fell less like a  placeholder. 

[CastIronFabric]

Anyone playing the release candidate and try to kill a boar? Its super funny, do it guys

 

[williams_482]

In my current playthrough, the strategy of simply picking up every wild crop I can find and planting them all on a mix of medium and high fertility soil (the practical difference between these two isn't nearly as much as it could be) next to water has given me well over a stack of linen sheets and enough grain that I'll struggle to eat it all in the six years before it goes bad. I'm only in early September of my first year and have another harvest on the horizon. Primitive Survival furrows made it easier for me to get the fields looking nice prior to unlocking buckets, but I could have got the same acreage without them and the extra 5% moisture is negligible. 

Frankly I'd be fine with cutting down the yields of vegetables as well as the grains. It's so easy to get huge quantities of food out of a very modest garden in singleplayer. Multiplayer is presumably a different animal as each additional player will bring in progressively fewer additional seeds unless the group is very deliberate about splitting up to explore different regions. SP vs MP is a tricky balance to strike, and I suspect this change was done primarily with SP in mind. 

10 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

For grain fields, I think I might also test skipping the irrigation completely, and just leaving the field to nature's mercy. I'm not sure crops can actually die from a lack of watering, though I don't really expect water to be an issue given the area I settled in has medium fertility soil and decent rainfall. The result I expect is perhaps a grain harvest that's a little slower than in previous versions, but still potentially fast enough to get a couple of harvests in before winter hits. The first in-game year will likely be the roughest though, given that it starts in May(so there's some growing time lost) and the player is scrambling to do everything else.

If you do this, make sure you till the soil while it's raining. There's a bug (I think?) that drastically reduces the growth speed on soil tilled while dry even if it is subsequently watered, and I'm pretty sure un-tilled soil doesn't retain moisture from rain. 

Two harvests of flax or spelt is probably possible, but uncertain. Getting any un-stunted rye harvests is doubtful, as the window between too hot and too cold isn't all that large. 

5 hours ago, Chuckerton said:

Or, alternative wild idea, remove the ability to throw spears and give us javelins. Maybe you can craft 2 javelin heads instead of one spearhead. Then you dont have to deal with balancing of its ranged damage, and you can balance the throwing aspect as a separate item. I thought it was always a little weird that you can throw spears, because i thought that spears were typically NOT throwing weapons. Theyre too long and heavy. Spears were used to hunt hogs in ye olde medieval times, but as far as i can see, they didnt throw them, they used them in melee, even while hunting.

and even looking up "spear" on wikipedia, you get this

"Spears can be divided into two broad categories: those designed for thrusting as a melee weapon (including weapons such as lances and pikes) and those designed for throwing as a ranged weapon (usually referred to as javelins)."

So just make them two distinct options instead of trying to combine the two and have to deal with balancing both parts of one weapon. and, you know, it be kinda cool to have that spear right click be a spear brace that stops creature momentum instead of a throw...

Historical peoples used many different types of spears, with varying degrees of specialization. They can be divided into those categories if one is so inclined, but the most straightforward "sharp metal point affixed to a 6-8 foot haft" design works very well for stabbing people and can also be thrown effectively. 

The game could add all sorts of variants if they were so inclined (pikes, lances, boar spears, light javelins, pilum, etc, each with a very narrow practical use case), but sticking to the straightforward, long lasting, incredibly popular "pretty good at two things" model makes plenty of sense in this game. 

[Thorfinn]

Saying the quiet part out loud of what @LadyWYT said, grain yields appear to work fine in a new game. By the time you harvest everything within maybe 500 blocks, you have way more seeds than you need. But, agreed, if you've cleared everything in an older version, you may not have enough seeds, particularly if you, like me, tend to toss all the extras.

Assuming grain is still bee food, it's nice to have the extra fields anyway. Fiber is also balanced better -- you need to find 20 ripe wild flax to make a linen sack, up from, what, maybe 8? RNG possibly, but my one data point so far is instead of having 3-4 linen sacks on day 1, I had 0, then 2 by the end of day 2. If anything that's still a little fast. That's on track for windmill on day 4 or 5.

Didn't see anything about better balance for terra preta and HFS. In 1.21, it's not really worth the inventory slot to collect the latter, and TP wasn't worth time time and effort. Just put down a few more farm plots. *Fingers crossed.*

12 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

For grain fields, I think I might also test skipping the irrigation completely,

Oh, that's an awesome idea for bees! I've just been planting on LFS, but it takes so long to get to the bee stage. Watering can on MFS until it gets to stage 2 might be the ticket.

 

12 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Might be more worth it to actually purchase cloth from the traders then, at least for the first in-game year. I'll have to play around with that one as well. It's an option I've always ignored before, given that cloth is expensive and it was much easier to just build farms to take care of the supply.

Has been for ages. Linen sacks generally sell for 1, and they buy them back for 1. Deal of the century. Battle jammies in 1.21 were definitely worth buying. For the low, low price of a few aged crates, you can pretty easily be fully kitted out before the first flax gets ripe. Or if you get lucky and find a merchant with a wolf cub? Ka-ching.

 

[LadyWYT]

1 minute ago, Thorfinn said:

Fiber is also balanced better -- you need to find 20 ripe wild flax to make a linen sack, up from, what, maybe 8? RNG possibly, but my one data point so far is instead of having 3-4 linen sacks on day 1, I had 0, then 2 by the end of day 2. If anything that's still a little fast.

Honestly I'd say this is fine. It's a little strong, sure, but I think it's a situation unique to you and not something the average player goes out and does day 1.  Maybe by the end of May/start of June, after they've had some time to pick a spot and settle in and actually collect some seeds.

Most players, I think, should be able to manage a standard windmill by the end of the first year. The really big windmills I expect to be more of a second year item. Brand new players I expect to struggle a big, but that's due to lack of experience and to be expected, and also part of the fun when one first starts to play the game.

6 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Oh, that's an awesome idea for bees! I've just been planting on LFS, but it takes so long to get to the bee stage. Watering can on MFS until it gets to stage 2 might be the ticket.

I'm mostly just thinking along the lines of not needing a bucket to start farming or dig holes for the irrigation. Or fall in said holes when trying to harvest crops. Plus the scythe will be a lot more fun to use on a big field of ripe grain, rather than a backyard garden that I can just...harvest with my hands.

 

1 hour ago, williams_482 said:

Two harvests of flax or spelt is probably possible, but uncertain. Getting any un-stunted rye harvests is doubtful, as the window between too hot and too cold isn't all that large. 

I do agree, but I may just simplify it a bit and plan for one harvest per field per year, and just make another grain field or two. It's more work up front, but I do like making farms in this game, and always wanted a big field of grain. It's not really felt worth it before since there's so much material that would go to waste in the process.

 

11 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Has been for ages. Linen sacks generally sell for 1, and they buy them back for 1. Deal of the century. Battle jammies in 1.21 were definitely worth buying. For the low, low price of a few aged crates, you can pretty easily be fully kitted out before the first flax gets ripe. Or if you get lucky and find a merchant with a wolf cub? Ka-ching.

I've not really paid that much attention. Linen sacks I typically skip, as I manage just fine with baskets until jumping to leather. The gambeson I prefer to just make my own, if I'm even using it, and I typically turn off class-exclusive recipes in singleplayer as I like having fancy colors for battle jammies.  Wolf cubs I definitely take advantage of though, when I find a good deal on one. Buy low, sell high. Otherwise my go-to trades are the boots, backpacks, and candles for the treasure hunters. Bows as well sometimes. They're all easy to make items that sell for quite good prices.

[Thorfinn]

4 hours ago, pigfood said:

Tinbronze spears went from 3.75 / 7.5 damage to 3.75 / 5.25 (melee / thrown damage). The new steel spears are 4.4 / 6.2.

So high level spear melee damage got a buff, thrown damage was significantly nerfed.

My go-to is always brown bears. Bronze used to be 9 hits, now it's 13. Steel is now 11. Yes, nerfed but still pretty good.

[Thorfinn]

5 minutes ago, RogueVali said:

How tf is this any good??

It's just different. If it had been 15, lowered to 11, you wouldn't be whining.

You'd think you were the retired senior citizen. //content.invisioncic.com/r268468/emoticons/wink.png 

[Thorfinn]

Meh. Tin bronze spears were overpowered. IMO, there needed to be a bigger gap between copper and bronze to give people a reason to make copper spears. Maybe it would have been OK with steel spears only a point below what bronze used to be, instead of 1.3 points. Dunno. Try it and see. @MKMoose has posted the exact lines you have to tweak to have the game suit your preferences.

[Thorfinn]

I agree the early spears were nerfed a bit excessively. I cheated in an iron spear just to see, and I've lost only one brown bear fight. And that one was me being cheeky.

Hunting is weird. No idea if it worked that way before, but if you stand still, deer will walk well within spear range. All injured critters, including wolves and bears, also run only a short while and lay down, making them pretty easy to take once you get even a single hit in.

[CastIronFabric]

Just FYI folks.

Fishing now give a lot of meat protein and it can be cooked in meals just as red meat. So the early game meat is most likely going to be fishing. When multiple changes happens sometimes its the combination of all those changes that make things more balanced than one might assume at first.

However, at the moment for us playing the game there is an issue with at least Boars, if not all animals, that as soon as their run mechanic starts while hunting them, they instantly fly about 30 blocks away, which is likely the same distance they would run until they slow down. It makes hunting pretty much not possible for now

For fun, later I am going to spawn some in an enclosed space and see if they bounce around like crazy.

Edited February 8 by CastIronFabric

[MKMoose]

17 minutes ago, CastIronFabric said:

However, at the moment for us playing the game there is an issue with at least Boars, if not all animals, that as soon as their run mechanic starts while hunting them, they instantly fly about 30 blocks away, which is likely the same distance they would run until they slow down. It makes hunting pretty much not possible for now

They switched up animation speed with movement speed. Now fixed in pre.2.

[Dilan Rona]

have anyone played with the new waterwheels yet?

[LadyWYT]

49 minutes ago, Dilan Rona said:

have anyone played with the new waterwheels yet?

I don't think anyone has really gotten to test them, as trying to build/place them seems to crash the game.

[CastIronFabric]

7 hours ago, RogueVali said:

Leather, my dear sir. STEEL spear doesn't match bronzes damage now. Food is good, but there's more to hunting that just protein, and leather was already a massive roadblock. Glad to hear fishing's reasonable addition to food, that at the same time, I dunno how to feel about complete lake depletion, and massive time and resource sink coming with it. Bait gathering, new crops, no mention of fish breeding, no mention of population recuperation, I bet rods require flax twine, as rope would be too easy, also thick ass rope makes for terrible fishing line.  

Oh speaking of. New fat/oil mechanics. God I'm really... "Anticipating" the changes to leather making too. Process already tedious enough. Not hard per say, once u get into it? But god requiring a crap ton of setup, a fair bit of luck, and god I hope u mastered use of the handbook by now.

Yeah I know, that is why I said early game.

My point is, you have a meat source until you can get a copper spear. 

and fishing poles requires 3 rope and 3 sticks. Its not hard to get fishing going and in about 1 min of fishing I had 11 meat. I am currently playing the release candidate 

ADDED: cant make leather without copper. so copper spears

Edited February 9 by CastIronFabric

[CastIronFabric]

51 minutes ago, Dilan Rona said:

have anyone played with the new waterwheels yet?

they are currently not functional. Not as in 'broken' but rather not competed yet so although some devices are in the handbook they do not work

[LadyWYT]

To put the spear argument to bed, Saraty weighed in on the matter: 

 

[TFT]

11 hours ago, MKMoose said:

What is bugged? Are you trying to use regular clay instead of fire clay? It currently doesn't use a different model or at least texture, but you can see it in the tooltip and it should work perfectly fine. The durability boost is twice as high and doesn't decrease with tempering (or at least shouldn't).

I've only tried with an iron axe that's been quenched a few times already so it might be an edge case, but the issue is the result in the craft flickers for a fraction of a second before vanishing and cant be picked. I can see the covered in clay tooltip before the item vanishes so it would work if it wasn't bugged.

[Feycat]

I feel like the spear discussions are ignoring hunters. "Just use a falx," I'm sorry, do I get bonus damage from flinging my sword at things? No?

And before you say "but bows," bows are just not as good as spears, not at all. I need to use twice as many arrows as I do spears, which makes perfect sense, but I need to run around with like 4 spears on my bar to do any level of hunting on the regular. I feel like the fact I'm taking up 4+ slots should make them more damaging by a lot than bows, which you only need one bow and a stack of arrows.

Devs are also *really* sleeping on wool. The "Wool And More" mod is pretty night perfect. That would help take up some of the slack on the loss of flax without it being easy at all (your sheep/goat have to be like gen 3 to start shearing and the wool needs to be processed.)

[LadyWYT]

11 minutes ago, Feycat said:

I feel like the spear discussions are ignoring hunters. "Just use a falx," I'm sorry, do I get bonus damage from flinging my sword at things? No?

Copy/pasting the math I did on a different thread:

Assuming I did my math correctly(this time)...a black bronze spear for a Blackguard will do 6.8 damage when thrown, while the steel falx will do 6.89 damage per hit. The only other classes to get ranged penalties are Malefactor and Clockmaker; both have -25% to range, but since the spear is a shorter range weapon it's not much of a setback and no damage is lost so they will be doing 8 damage per spear throw. Hunter, however, will do a whopping 9.6 damage per spear throw thanks to their ranged damage bonus, in addition to being able to throw said spear farther and with greater accuracy than any other class. They also have faster movement to make chasing down or running away from targets easier, in addition to other bonuses that remain strong throughout the game, with mostly negligible drawbacks. With a steel falx, they'll still deal 4.5 damage per hit.

Just to be clear, this isn't a call to nerf or buff particular classes. But those numbers are why I think 8 ranged damage even for a high tier spear is a bit much. Like I said before, I'd rather see the spear be a solid general purpose weapon but not the best pick, than have specific classes get nerfed or buffed.

---

In other words, there's a balance problem when even the melee-focused class, that has a specific penalty to ranged damage, has a ranged weapon as their best combat option. The spear is also the only weapon that can serve as both a ranged and melee weapon. In my opinion, it really ought to be as I stated above: a jack-of-all-trades, but master of none. It shouldn't be the default best weapon in the game for every class in most scenarios.

 

[LadyWYT]

1 minute ago, RogueVali said:

Get out of ur math cranking lab, and go hunt with the new spears, tell me how that feels.

I did. It feels fine, and I've said as much. Takes maybe an extra ranged shot to kill some targets. Thanks to the health pool adjustments on small creatures, chickens will die in one stab now, and foxes in two. Previously it took two stabs for chickens and three or four for foxes.

 

2 minutes ago, RogueVali said:

Also, can we stop using steel as a base bone for everything?

Steel is the highest tier material in the game, so it should be the strongest pick out of available materials when it comes to both durability and damage potential.

 

3 minutes ago, RogueVali said:

Try not dropping to death from increased hunger rate on the way too, blackguard.

I can't recall having ever died to starvation damage. Hunting is as simple as chucking enough spears at a target for it to die, and then reaping the rewards. For targets like boar, it's as easy as walking right up, provoking a fight, and then nailing them with a spear when they try to run.

[ifoz]

8 hours ago, RogueVali said:

Bait gathering, new crops, no mention of fish breeding, no mention of population recuperation, I bet rods require flax twine, as rope would be too easy, also thick ass rope makes for terrible fishing line.  

From what Tyron said in the Discord when asked, the fish in a given area will slowly repopulate once depleted over the course of 14 ingame days if left alone, so you can't permanently make a lake fish-less. I'm also pretty sure rods just require sticks and rope, last I checked.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

For targets like boar, it's as easy as walking right up, provoking a fight, and then nailing them with a spear when they try to run.

to be fair, it's just as easy for the boars to hunt you.