What next from the roadmap?

[coolAlias]

Status effects, herbalism, and flower/herb/mushroom farming would all be great, for sure.

I'd also really like to see rivers fully implemented, with at least some of them navigable by boat, as well as whatever else they have planned for world generation. The ultimate hope behind my wish is that if the world generation were "complete", we could keep playing in the same world without missing out on whatever content comes next.

[Arasine]

World gen is the thing Im hoping gets the next look. Its just so bad for immersion to have all of those random sink holes in the landscape, no rivers and entire areas that are practically non-traversable. I would love caves to make sense also, along with the procedural dungeons being somewhat rational rather than just random buried sets of rooms for no apparent reason.  

[Silfrenbirce]

On 2/24/2026 at 8:24 PM, LadyWYT said:

I don't know that I would add in penalties for lack of certain nutrition either. Fruit is easy to get, so unless the player is deliberately sabotaging themselves they really shouldn't be running low on fruit nutrition for extended periods of time. Aside from scurvy being easy to avoid, the other issue is that if lack of fruit nutrition causes problems, lacking the other nutrients should cause problems too. Dairy is the biggest problem there, since in reality it has some rather important nutrients but is difficult to acquire in the game since it requires acquiring appropriate livestock or otherwise trading for it.

Heatstroke/heat exhaustion and frostbite/hypothermia I'd expect to see as potential ill effects, perhaps the common cold as well since it's nonlethal with simple treatment options. Broken bones would be an obvious consequence of intense combat or hard falls, and would be a great deterrent to players taking swan dives off cliffs and relying on bandages to heal after. Food poisoning could result from eating spoiled food. Bleeds/bruises could be less serious injuries that still require medical attention to avoid the injury becoming infected.

I wouldn't mind seeing a malnutrition penalty, so long as it wasn't overly complex.  And I'll add that dairy wouldn't be the biggest problem. Milk doesn't supply nutrients that are otherwise hard to come by - the "in reality" context of milk is solely that milk is readily accessible to the vast majority of people in ready-to-consume format. Realistically, we're not generally designed to consume milk past infancy in the first place - hence why the majority of the world is lactose intolerant.  So there's no reason why the lack of dairy itself should lead to a nutrient penalty on its own. I'd think it would be simpler to have a mechanic that pushed players to keep things in balance: i.e. not having your protein bar maxed out while your vegetable and fruit bars are hovering near zero, etc, rather than something that require more minute control.

I would definitely love to see heatstroke as a game mechanic; I've only played for a couple of weeks or so and I was surprised that it wasn't already in place, given that hypothermia is.  I'd also expect that there should be a thirst mechanic.  If anything, I think the game's default setting goes a bit hard in dropping the hunger mechanic as quickly as it does - but water would be a different story.

Food poisoning seems tricky.  On the one hand, players have an obvious incentive not to eat spoiled food if it will cause detrimental effects.  It would need to be balanced by providing some incentive to eat it in the first place: upping the hunger bar enough for someone who is low enough on food to be desperate, to feel like dealing with the food poisoning status effect would be worth it for restoring some hunger before they starve to death. 

[LadyWYT]

1 minute ago, Silfrenbirce said:

given that hypothermia is.  I'd also expect that there should be a thirst mechanic.  If anything, I think the game's default setting goes a bit hard in dropping the hunger mechanic as quickly as it does - but water would be a different story.

Hydrate or Diedrate does a pretty good job of such a concept. I do agree that a thirst mechanic would fit in VS, however, I disagree that it's a mechanic that should be made vanilla. Given its similarity to the hunger mechanic, it seems like it would probably be more micromanagement than what many players might want to deal with, and it doesn't seem like the kind of mechanic that should just be toggled on/off either.

The other problem is story locations: some of them aren't designed with a thirst mechanic in mind. It's quite easy to spend a handful of days in a few of them, and the player will likely go through beverages faster than is comfortable for completing/exploring the locations, and probably won't want to lug around lots of liquid containers or otherwise drink what's essentially wastewater.

Thus I'm more inclined to leave such a mechanic to the modded realm.

8 minutes ago, Silfrenbirce said:

Food poisoning seems tricky.  On the one hand, players have an obvious incentive not to eat spoiled food if it will cause detrimental effects.  It would need to be balanced by providing some incentive to eat it in the first place: upping the hunger bar enough for someone who is low enough on food to be desperate, to feel like dealing with the food poisoning status effect would be worth it for restoring some hunger before they starve to death. 

I mean if the player is desperate, they'll probably eat it even if it's a little gross. Otherwise, I think "player logic" might be an advantage here. Some players don't like to waste resources, and will eat food that is starting to spoil because hey, food is food and might as well use it(especially if the player doesn't want to bother with compost). Thus there could be some sort of adjustable chance of poisoning depending on how spoiled the food was when the player ate it. Unspoiled food is obviously fine. Food that's slightly spoiled is probably fine too, but the player could get really unlucky and acquire a very mild food poisoning status effect for a few in-game hours. Food that's spoiled enough to look off, but not spoiled enough to be covered in mold might still be okay to eat, but there's a decent chance the player is going to get a case of food poisoning for the next in-game day as a result. Obviously rotten food could always poison the player for a couple of in-game days, since, well, the player had multiple clues by that point that the food wasn't fit to eat.

[Silfrenbirce]

17 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

The other problem is story locations: some of them aren't designed with a thirst mechanic in mind. It's quite easy to spend a handful of days in a few of them, and the player will likely go through beverages faster than is comfortable for completing/exploring the locations, and probably won't want to lug around lots of liquid containers or otherwise drink what's essentially wastewater.
...
I mean if the player is desperate, they'll probably eat it even if it's a little gross. Otherwise, I think "player logic" might be an advantage here. Some players don't like to waste resources, and will eat food that is starting to spoil because hey, food is food and might as well use it(especially if the player doesn't want to bother with compost).

My answer to that would be to keep such a mechanic fairly simple.  Insofar as this game tries to give a nod toward realism, the fact remains that people can survive longer without food than without water.  And yet we have a hunger mechanic in the game that, at the default setting, drops pretty quick.  So folks already have to plan for that by keeping food readily available in their inventory...and I don't see anyone arguing that the hunger mechanic impedes exploration in that regard.  

So to my mind, the answer here would be to either implement a thirst mechanic while not making it more onerous to deal with than hunger. Alternatively, it would be to give an actual nod to realism and go against the grain of most survival games: prioritize thirst instead of hunger in the first place (while, again, balancing it so that thirst has to be managed but not in a way that makes it tedious or making exploration difficult.  I don't see that happening, but that's what I would implement if it were up to me.

As to the other, I was thinking about it from the position that any detrimental effects from food spoilage would have to be balanced against the reward.  Even a desperate player who is starving likely isn't going to be keen on eating spoiled or spoiling food if the poisoning effects leave them at a significant disadvantage - at least I wouldn't think so. Spoiling food currently has a reduced satiety rating depending on how advanced the spoilage is.  I guess I'm saying that there would be no point to a food poisoning mechanic if it wasn't impactful enough to make a player have to weigh the risk/reward factor, but past that, you have to balance the utilty of eating spoiled food to avoid outright starvation against coping with negative status effects for a set duration.