Mods that should be core mechanics

[MKMoose]

On 4/20/2026 at 7:31 PM, LadyWYT said:

The problem with it being an option is that someone still has to write the code, create the visual/audio assets, and then maintain those things. Given what Redram has said in the past on the matter, it's not so much a concern about squeamish players, as much as it is some of the devs having issues with depictions of gore and stuff.

One thing that I think people don't appreciate nearly enough is the word "detailed". Redram has said at least on three separate occasions (this one on Discord is the most recent) that they aren't going to be implementing detailed butchering and skinning, but it doesn't mean that more involved mechanics and gameplay are off the table as well. I've argued before that the existing system could be improved with very little time investment while adding nearly zero gore over the current visuals, while leaving components of the system easily modifiable to allow modders to easily add detailed visuals themselves:

 

If I were to point to any mods that the vanilla game would benefit from greatly which haven't been mentioned already, first and foremost I would have to pick and choose from some world generation mods like Watersheds and some of the Floral Zones mods, and maybe even Terrain Slabs. As much as the current world generation has its charms, it produces often extremely repetitive landscapes with samey vegetation and easily noticeable noise octaves, and even putting realism aside I think it kind of just looks bad and boring in too many cases.

There's also smaller mods, even something like Sun Gaze, though there's way too many to reasonably remember and list out.

What I don't like is that many mods tend to hyperfocus on specific features and add minor details and variations that don't mesh well with existing vanilla features. It's often very difficult to keep the game feeling cohesive as a whole when using them. For example, take something like the the Adventurer's Walking Stick mod - it would be a cool thing to add to the base game, but do we really need 14 variants of a walking stick? Two, maybe three, would be absolutely sufficient to get the neat functionality in without creating a large imbalance between the level of detail and depth of different features. The same goes for the Butchering mod to some extent - the mechanic itself is neat, but I can't help but feel like we could do with less than 5 variants of a butchering hook, 3 variants of a butchering table, and 4 different butchering bags, not even counting all the new food items which would arguably also need some streamlining for vanilla integration. A lot of mods are created because they are cool, not because they have a specific gameplay goal to accomplish, and while that's not inherently wrong, it often leads to mods being simply infitting for vanilla integration without cutting a lot of their features back out.

[Lisandro17]

On 4/20/2026 at 4:17 AM, Rainbow Fresh said:

Stone Quarry. Don't have it, can't say. But, personally, I don't feel like getting solid stone easier is necessary. This way products of solid stones (aka. essentially just ashlar bricks) have a sense of rarity and value. And considering the ground is literall full of rock, losing atleast 6 per excavated stone is a non-issue. Gives me more pebbles for stone path roads.

I greatly disagree, the stone quarry mod it´s a game changer, so much that I wouldn´t want to play the game if I didnt have it, I don´t understand why it hasn´t been implemented in vanilla yet.

Once you reach the steel age and have a decent base setted up, you will realize the best thing to do with your world it´s to build and develop your base, but adquiring the materials to make a simple house in vanilla take tens of hours making big projects inviable, the stone quarry mod gives a way to collect this materials in a more efficient less painfull way without making it feel like "cheating". Not only for bricks and smooth stone blocks wich are great building materials, but for pebbles too, I have stone paths stretching + 4 thousand blocks on my solo world wich if it wasn´t for the quarry mod, would be made of packed dirt, even with the quarry mod I had to smith hammers, pickaxes and splitters and then procces each chunk of rock to get the materials I needed.

The point is this mod does not feel like cheating, it´s just a more efficient and fun way to gather materials, makes the procces more diverse adding different steps and tools, I would rather do this than spending hundreds of hours just mindless mining for stone.

[Lisandro17]

I play with culinary artillery and expanded foods and although I don´t agree with everything this mods have, I do think foods really need extra content.

Once you advance into your second and third year food goes from a struggle to a boring hustle. I remeber making bread for the first time in the game and inmediatley thinking "time to do some sandwiches" but guess what, there´s no recipes that use bread.

Limiting foods to only 4 ingredients feels wrong, a good stew should have at least 8 and there should be bonuses for foods that have a wider variety of ingredients, that way you would have a real reason to plant different vegetables other than soil fertility.

I don´t like the mixing station from culinary artillery, they could make it better, but still, I don´t feel that should be a neccesary contraption for cooking, I would rather have a table or cutting board to prepare recipes, use my knife to make a salad or smth like that. I do like the cauldron though, cooking/simmering bigger batches of food makes a lot of sense to me, thinking in a more immersive cooking experience, specially making meat broth, bone broth and gelatin, I think those are great ways to use our ingredients.

And the most important part: food preservation.
Yes you can have animals to slaugther when you running low on meat but I still feel that we could use more recipes to preserve food like ham or sausage making, and the single most important survival food: PEMMICAN, you can´t have a perishable food mechanic in your game and not put pemmican on it.
Also, in history, ice was a commodity, people would harvest it from the lakes in the winter and store it in sheds covered with hay to preserve it through the spring to use it in the summer, they even shipped ice across the world and used it to preserve food on primitive refrigerators, it wouldn´t damage the game to add this mechanic.

And since we are already on it and glass its a thing in the game, I would like to see mason jars and use them to make pickled and canned foods. This can be a late game technolgy requiring bronze lids and we could turn wine into vinegar and use it to pickle food.

To summarize, late game foods feel a bit lacking and I would like to see more content and complexity there but this is just my opinion.

I love this game and want to see it develop it´s full potential.

[Rainbow Fresh]

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

The same goes for the Butchering mod to some extent - the mechanic itself is neat, but I can't help but feel like we could do with less than 5 variants of a butchering hook, 3 variants of a butchering table, and 4 different butchering bags, not even counting all the new food items which would arguably also need some streamlining for vanilla integration.

While your walking stick argument may seem convincing (don't have the mod in question to judge), for butchering the variety of tools makes sense. There are three components to the mechanics of the mod, which are the hook for skinning (step 1), the butchering table for butchering (step 2) and the smoking rack for preservation (optional step 3). More detailed and realistic than vanilla currently is while not being bloated by any means. These then come in three tiers of gear - three "variants"; primitive, normal (copper age), advanced (bronze/iron? age) changing the amount of results gotten from "less than intended" in the primitive stages and "more than intended" in the latest stage. This adds worthwhile progression as you unlock the right to gain more for less work by progressing the game and investing more valuable resources. Essentially the same smithing a bronze falx over a copper one does, which is an unnecessary (technically) but rewarding upgrade to a plain wooden club. You can live with just the club just fine, but it's much easier and comfortable to have a proper high tier sword. The remaining "5 variants of hooks" would guaranteed remain in any vanilla implementation of something like this, because vanilla has variants of all metal object for all supported metal variants. So despite the bronze hook giving 120% drops despite the base material, it will still have visually distinct "variants" for tin bronze, black bronze and bismuth bronze to be made out of.

And as for the variety of additional items added; while I do not, personally, see any real reason for the prime meat to exist (it always drops too few to consider using in soups/stews/whatever), too few and too unnecessary to turn into fat and not that much more satiating to be worth cooking individually (hey, free rot for compost I guess!), the rest does make sense. As I happily agree with others' opinions that the game "needs more food variety". So having at least properly made sausages makes sense. Being able to make more stuff out of bone makes sense. The sinew as alternative for some flax recipes makes sense for harsher, more plant-unfriendly areas where hunting hyenas is the primary source of food. Do we specifically need blood as a resource? No. That I agree with. But it's equally not as if the Butchering mod is too bloated either.

1 hour ago, Lisandro17 said:

I greatly disagree, the stone quarry mod it´s a game changer, so much that I wouldn´t want to play the game if I didnt have it, I don´t understand why it hasn´t been implemented in vanilla yet.

See, and that's why the discussion of "mods that should be vanilla" is such a complex one. It could very well be that the mod is great - again, don't have it and don't know how exactly it works as it has no explanations outside of the game. But I equally never saw the need for it - and I, too, have a couple mods I wouldn't want to play without anymore. That I deliberately did not mention here, because a cool mod is not equal to something the vanilla game needs. Player's needs vary from person to person, and that's why mods are great to customize that experience to your personal needs. I, personally, do not see the need for the stone quarry mod and hence disagree with you saying it's a game changer and necessary. The vanilla game has a sufficiently functioning and logical way to get stones and rocks. It creates a sense of value where stone path roads are not only beneficial but also something you earn by mining lots of rocks. In my world I built my first house using some cobble, some ashlar bricks for fancy accents and mostly wood and clay shingle roofing. It looks nice (to me) and didn't take tens of hours. It took until the copper age for saws just like I'd heavily expect the quarry mod to require copper age for metal tools. But after that, easy enough. And what few ashlar bricks I decided to use so far for subsequent builds gave me enough pebbles to expand my roads in tandem. And while 4k block roads might sound nice as a long term goal, by that point you literally got nothing better to do and don't need even faster mining mods.

So while it might be a great mod for people who think like you, I don't see it being a necessity to add to the game anytime soon. It has a system that works, and having a vanilla-friendly quarry system would certainly require a ton of work and deviations from how the mod solves things.

[Lisandro17]

2 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

So while it might be a great mod for people who think like you, I don't see it being a necessity to add to the game anytime soon. It has a system that works, and having a vanilla-friendly quarry system would certainly require a ton of work and deviations from how the mod solves things.

You should give this mod a try, it´s not that much about the neccesities it covers, although it does for me, I think what´s really good about it it´s that it gives you an alternate, more fun way to farm this resoruces. As I said, instead of spending your time running hitting boulders with your pickaxe or spend it underground mindlesly mining, you can instead smith the splitters (each tier has better capacity, copper 4 blocks, bronze 5, iron 6, steel 7) and cut some stone chunks, you gotta place the splitters at the top and bottom to form a 6x6x6 cube with the iron splitters so you will need 12 of those each requiring an iron ingot to smith, hit the splitters with a hammer to get the chunk of stone, and then you gotta place and hit it either with a hammer or a chisel to obtain the different resoruces so you also gotta smith that. It´s not neccesarily less work than mining with a pickaxe but sure it is much more interesting and fun, if you make an open sky quarry it ends up looking like those marble quarrys in italy.

I understand your point but you should really give this mod a try and you will realize that it feels very vanilla friendly

[LadyWYT]

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

One thing that I think people don't appreciate nearly enough is the word "detailed". Redram has said at least on three separate occasions (this one on Discord is the most recent) that they aren't going to be implementing detailed butchering and skinning, but it doesn't mean that more involved mechanics and gameplay are off the table as well. I've argued before that the existing system could be improved with very little time investment while adding nearly zero gore over the current visuals, while leaving components of the system easily modifiable to allow modders to easily add detailed visuals themselves:

This is true, though it's also something I tend to be pretty skeptical of without knowing exactly what it is the devs are squeamish about when it comes to gore. I also don't think it's a situation where certain details, like a skinned carcass, could be kept to simple pink non-furry retexture of the entire creature, as that's probably not going to satisfy those looking for realism.

The thread you linked definitely had some good ideas, but it's just a matter of what the devs can handle versus what's going too far.

6 hours ago, MKMoose said:

What I don't like is that many mods tend to hyperfocus on specific features and add minor details and variations that don't mesh well with existing vanilla features. It's often very difficult to keep the game feeling cohesive as a whole when using them.

Pretty much. Or it's a case of the mod does its job very well, but ends up resulting in a game loop that feels out of place compared to everything else since it's ultra-detailed. Granted, I would say that a lot of suggestions tend to have these issues as well; they're good ideas, but something about them doesn't quite jive with the game as a whole.

[Thorfinn]

I'm much more interested in seeing where Anego wants to see the game go.

Some specifics:

Step Up, Catch Ledge, etc. -- The game is plenty Super Mario Bros already. The typical NBA player has an occasional 28" vertical, vanilla seraphs already have an unlimited 40". I know the seraph is not human, but the major superhuman power the seraph has is respawn. Oh, and his crafting grid. It would take much longer to make a reed basket if he didn't have that.

Blood Trails, Butchery, etc. -- Hunting is already so hyper-efficient that raising animals is mostly a competionist checkbox.

Bee stuff -- Unless you add limits in how fast flowers produce nectar (which would be a good idea in its own right), anything that increases bee production (even things like reusable hives) seems OP. Stone age skeps are a tad slow, sure, but once you get the scythe?

Quarry -- Someone here posted a method that approaches 40% productive as you approach infinite quarry size. That is, you get 4 solid blocks per 10 mined. There are crags and outcrops that can produce a limited number of 100% efficient, and quite a lot where you can never have to drop below 50% once you learn to look for them. Nothing against the mod, I guess, but if that's what they wanted, they could have just done that like they did with the saw removing one log at a time, leaving the rest of the tree unaffected. Instead they developed code for unsupported blocks.

Foods -- Yeah, I suspect something like that is in the works, though I suspect it might not be as popular as one might think. The more ingredients, the harder it is to be stackable. Unless they develop some kind of "flavor" bonus...

[DeanF]

14 hours ago, Lisandro17 said:

Limiting foods to only 4 ingredients feels wrong, a good stew should have at least 8 and there should be bonuses for foods that have a wider variety of ingredients, that way you would have a real reason to plant different vegetables other than soil fertility.

Personally I would be fine with four ingredients if the first two didn't have to be the exact same... and in the same amount.  You should just be able to plop in four ingredients, and whichever is the largest number becomes the primary one driving what the recipe is called.  So if I have 4 fish, 6 turnips, 4 cranberries, and two chanterelles, that's Turnip Stew with Fish and Cranberries, and chanterelle garnish.  Etc.

[Rainbow Fresh]

14 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Blood Trails, Butchery, etc. -- Hunting is already so hyper-efficient that raising animals is mostly a competionist checkbox.

I disagree, at least for the earlier game stages (that I am currently in) and especially considering that animal spawns in winter have now been fixed to be lower(/disabled?) during winter in 1.22. Further more, the Buthery mod does not necessarily make it more efficient (bar the potential, small 20% increase in potential drops in later stages, though at that point you probably have enough crops to last 3 winters on them alone per harvest), it adds extra steps to even get to the meat. Instead of killing, chopping and then immediately cooking the animal you have to haul it all the way back home, put it on the hook, skin it, wait for it to bleed out, then haul it to the butchering table and chop it up. Extra steps that don't feel wrong imo but are certainly not making things more efficient; in fact, they can be a dangerous game-changer when you are on on your last hunger bar segment and waiting for the darn pig to finish bleeding out so you can harvst it's, like, 3 pieces of meat to last another day in winter. And Blood Trails; granted, as I said before, as much of a nice mechanic I think it is (and hence using the mod) it doesn't do nearly enough right now. Living in very grassy plains, even with a blood trail barely visible between all the grass spotting the deer lying down in tall grass to be virtually invisible before spooking it away by getting too close is not any more possible and in my experience the trail always stops spawning particles (darn magically healing wounds) before the animal even stops running.

14 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Bee stuff -- Unless you add limits in how fast flowers produce nectar (which would be a good idea in its own right), anything that increases bee production (even things like reusable hives) seems OP. Stone age skeps are a tad slow, sure, but once you get the scythe?

I don't think (but also don't know for sure as I skipped vanilla skeps immediately for the "From Golden Combs" re-usable alternative) bee stuff is getting increased. You just get nicer looking, less tedious and more realistic alternatives. In the case of From Golden Combs you still need the normal reed skep to acquire your first bees. And as you said even by vanilla standards, crafting skeps is not a limiting factor. But then instead of constantly having to break the entire darn thing and piss off the bees like a peasant while waiting in-between for them to migrate to a new skep, you can just harvest the honey and leave the hive intact. With the high tier La-something apiary being the good looking modern variant of it that is scalable. More expensively scalable than just plopping a million skeps everywhere. So I think it's not affecting the bee economy much, it just offers something more to do and some more QoL scalability than constantly crafting skeps and running for your life after each harvest. Though tying the whole honey production to flower stats would also be a nice touch.

5 hours ago, DeanF said:

Personally I would be fine with four ingredients if the first two didn't have to be the exact same... and in the same amount.  You should just be able to plop in four ingredients, and whichever is the largest number becomes the primary one driving what the recipe is called.  So if I have 4 fish, 6 turnips, 4 cranberries, and two chanterelles, that's Turnip Stew with Fish and Cranberries, and chanterelle garnish.  Etc.

I would love to see a more free-style cooking system. I get the implementation ease of just having four slots with the balanced amount of ingridients being a cleanly scaled version of the recipe, which is defined by one driving ingredient - but it would be much nicer if you could just throw things in the pot and see what happens. Servings amount is then determined by the combined "value"/mass of ingredients, just like resulting nutrition values can be relatively scaled.

[Thorfinn]

9 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

Buthery mod does not necessarily make it more efficient...

True. My point was vanilla hunting is more efficient. Too much so to bother with raising livestock. When I tried it, it had blood and steaks and viscera and all manner of edible products if you put in the effort. (Probably not remembering the names right.) What I was trying to get at is that it doesn't take much of a hunting trip to end up with enough crocks of meat stew to last all winter. And that's assuming you care about keeping the protein bar filled. If you go vegan, no problem.

I've never tried Blood Trails. Just that if you approach the deer deliberately, and choose the terrain it's going to flee into, it's pretty easy to track already.

9 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

You just get nicer looking, less tedious and more realistic [apiary] alternatives.

Sure. Which is why I think it's better left to mods. Indeed, I use one that just reskins apiaries. Though it looks like wood, you still (admittedly unrealistically) build and harvest it like the vanilla skep. Like someone said, do we really need 14 varieties of walking sticks?

But the tediousness is intentional. Otherwise it's easy to make a couple ceramic hives per night and end up with way too much honey (which is not an issue) and beeswax (which is). You are never forced to wait for reeds to regrow, or range far and wide for more shallow lakes.

9 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

it would be much nicer if you could just throw things in the pot and see what happens.

Indeed. Wonder why no one has done something like that yet. That is definitely something I could see becoming vanilla. Particularly now that they are adding spices.

[Tabbot95]

adding this recommendation: Spirits of Commerce.

being able to sell alcohol to traders is nice, would be cool if it had the "you can only use one kind of bottle" thing fixed to be possibly more flexible about it.