Crafting is killing me.

[Kiko]

The crafting is killing me, nothing ever lines up. I need a 1 x 4 ratio for slaked lime, but quicklime is created at a ratio of 1/2, so i need 80 lime to create 40 quicklime, but lime stacks at 64. Mortar stacks to 64 but it comes out of the barrel above its stack limit. 

If I want to make leather I need 50 lime (out of stack of 64) to create a full barrel of lime water, but you actually only need 2L of liquid per leather produced. A full stack of metal bits is 128, but that stack creates 6.4 ingots. The extra 8 pieces will only be fully used after creating 30 ingots (which stack to 16). Metal stacks are a multiple of four, but their actual unit value is base 5. Metal bits crush into 0.3 of crushed metal powder. A stack in base 4 with a unit value in base 5 pulverizes into 0.3 units of crushed material. If I were to make stone blasting bombs I would be able to make 4.8 bombs per stack of 128 iron bits. 

Items stack in base 4. Metal units are in base 5. The barrel works in 1L increments except for when it doesn't. The meal system works in 4x6 with foods that stack to 64. 

I know that this is supposed to be an uncompromising survival experience but it's not really any more difficult, just annoying every time I want to produce something. Like Oh no! I've got two extra daub left over since daub produces in batches of 8 and each wattle requires 3! I can't overcome the burden! Anyway that's my rant. I'm frustrated and it feels bad to craft stuff.

[cjameshuff]

The fact that buckets stack to 5 is a constant annoyance for me. To turn a stack of 64 flour into dough I need 7 buckets of water, meaning either going back to refill two or holding two stacks of buckets, and then I have to dump the excess. More than once I've accidentally created water sources by messing this up somehow. Similarly, while cooking up some potash, I found it most efficient to fill a stack of 5 buckets, plus one additional bucket, so I had a multiple of six liters total, but this meant juggling two stacks of water buckets.

If buckets just stacked to 8 (and if dough took a ratio of 8 flour to 10 L water instead of 1:1) this would be significantly less annoying.

Also, crushing chunks with the pulverizer gives more material than crushing nuggets produced with a hammer (ilmenite, for example). However, crushing some things with the pulverizer gives you a useless product (iron ore, IIRC). Easy to get wrong and wind up accidentally destroying material.

[Broccoli Clock]

So what you are both saying is that we should remove this daft notion of stack sizes, and alter the game so your inventory is purely weight based?

Yup, I agree!  

 

[Kiko]

7 hours ago, Broccoli Clock said:

So what you are both saying is that we should remove this daft notion of stack sizes, and alter the game so your inventory is purely weight based?

Yup, I agree!  

 

I honestly wouldn't be so opposed to that. I assume that the concept of stack size would be based on the theoretical ratio of how much weight to volume a person can carry. I as a human can lift a mattress by weight, but by volume and distribution it's a real pain to do. The main issue that you come across is that 1 sqM of granite weighs about 2700kg. Asking players to quarry stone and roll it to their desired location chunk by chunk like an ancient egyptian. While that may sound neat, from a gameplay perspective it's pretty disrespectful of a player's time to expect them to spend 40 hours quarrying stone and gathering log rollers to build a 3 meter high wall. This game has to straddle the very fine line between being in depth enough to be fun and interesting and becoming so much of a chore that it has to compete with vacuuming and doing the dishes for leisure. 

[Broccoli Clock]

9 minutes ago, Kiko said:

I honestly wouldn't be so opposed to that. 

A realistic inventory mechanism for our realistic game? Say it's not true...!

Although I would like to see this done, this is a decision you make at the start of development rather than implement it mid way through. Mostly because the way weighted items would affect so many systems that retrofitting it would be too much work (or not enough payoff for the effort put in).

I feel people so accustomed to the MC meta would pushback, especially those who like to do large builds because in a 'weighted inventory' you're not filling your pockets with 64 cobblestone blocks.

So, yeah, nice idea, but too much work to retrofit and would likely be divisive within the community.

Edited Friday at 03:34 PM by Broccoli Clock

[Kiko]

I've always been particular about volumetric inventory systems like in deus ex where you rotate items to fit them into your inventory. Still, I doubt any restructuring of the inventory mechanic would make me any less frustrated while I'm trying to craft. You'd still have the issues of x amount of leather requires x liters of liquid in a barrel that holds 50 liters, or x units of metal crushes into .3 of its crushed variety. It's the ratios that get me fired up, the actual system for putting things in my backpack is just tangential to it. I'm just grateful that none of these recipes have decided to use 7 x 1 of something, or else I might actually have a panic attack.

[Maelstrom]

A large part of the community are over 2 years since first playing the game and are accustomed to the oddities of crafting.   Personally, I like it that I have to think and calculate what material I need for crafting a particular item, or batch of items.   but I'm an odd duck that was built different.  probably more of a platypus, tbh.

Edited Friday at 04:32 PM by Maelstrom

[Broccoli Clock]

3 minutes ago, Maelstrom said:

Personally, I like it that I have to think and calculate what material I need for crafting a particular item, or batch of items.   but I'm an odd duck that was built different.

I think the overarching thing here is you like to, and will lean into, a game's restrictions/limitations. I am the same. It's the realism which, although all games need to cater for them being games rather than real life, is the pull. It's why we don't 'play' creative.

 

On a side note, I do play 7 Days to Die, which has a similar inventory as VS, except you expand your inventory space via perks not items, but there is an overhaul mod called Undead Legacy (that sadly hasn't been updated for a while) that introduced a weighted inventory and it works well (imo, anyway). So I could see how it could with VS, but again, it's a total overhaul mod and it's huge (half the reason it's not been updated for the newest 7 Days version), a lot of work, a lot.. so yeah. Definite hurdles to the idea of putting it into VS.

[Kiko]

1 hour ago, Maelstrom said:

A large part of the community are over 2 years since first playing the game and are accustomed to the oddities of crafting.   Personally, I like it that I have to think and calculate what material I need for crafting a particular item, or batch of items.   but I'm an odd duck that was built different.  probably more of a platypus, tbh.

I've also been playing for over two years. I think my problem isn't necessarily that I have to do calculations and rather that my calculations consistently end up with weird remainders. If I want to even things out I could just find a common denominator and aim for that number of inputs for my output, but then I end up massively overproducing some items. The gameplay result is that most remainder items end up getting thrown onto my roof to despawn because it would take more recipe iterations than I care about to justify the accumulation.

 

[Maelstrom]

2 hours ago, Kiko said:

The gameplay result is that most remainder items end up getting thrown onto my roof to despawn

Indeed.   Isn't realistic game play grand?    Where do you think toxic waste comes from?   

[Kiko]

1 hour ago, Maelstrom said:

Indeed.   Isn't realistic game play grand?    Where do you think toxic waste comes from?   

Update 1.23 is the official pollution update. Fish were only added in to be a water quality indicator.

[cjameshuff]

16 hours ago, Broccoli Clock said:

So what you are both saying is that we should remove this daft notion of stack sizes, and alter the game so your inventory is purely weight based?

Yup, I agree!  

 

I do think hiding the stacks might be a good idea in some places. Basically, things that are identical (like stacks of stone) would all collapse together, but would take as much inventory space, determined by their max stack size. No change to the actual capacity, just in presentation, maybe even something you could toggle on and off (since I do sometimes care about setting aside stacks of items for specific uses, and it could be unclear what's using up all your inventory space if you're carrying a bunch of temporal gears or something). With the stacks displaying as merged, you could transfer all your stone to a trunk with a single action, and it would make it a lot easier to take inventory or find the needle in the haystack when you have a trunk with a lot of one or two item and a few other stacks.