Extending the grace timer past its usual max· length?

[catcrazies]

i always get into fights like this with new apps...

because i am a scaredy cat (ha), i wanted to set a very long grace timer before creating my world. i wanted to try for 200 days, but the menus only let you set up to ten... tried that, but it turns out i could barely get on my feet and now i am too terrified to leave my own house because i worry something will trip over one of my pit kilns and aggro on me xˣ_ˣx. the wiki states that you can set the grace timer using commands, but also that this can only be done during world creation; and as far as i can tell the earliest time i can enter commands is not "during world creation", judging by that setting it to 200 in the character creation screen decidedly Did Not set it to 200 in-game (chat still says i have "over 9 days" after day one).

i really hope it is possible to bump the grace timer like this... i am sick of playing games completely neutered, but also WAY too anxious to just jump right in xˣ_ˣx

[dakko]

8 minutes ago, catcrazies said:

i really hope it is possible to bump the grace timer like this... i am sick of playing games completely neutered, but also WAY too anxious to just jump right in xˣ_ˣx

What about installing a mod that disables monsters, and then remove the mod when you're ready to face them?

Here is one: No Monsters (I've not used this one - "No Monsters, Really" is a good mod but has not yet been updated for 1.22).

eta: Oh! That chat dialogue may not change to reflect the updated days. With "No Monsters, Really" installed, it still gives that chat dialogue.

Edited Sunday at 03:36 AM by dakko

[LadyWYT]

11 minutes ago, catcrazies said:

as far as i can tell the earliest time i can enter commands is not "during world creation", judging by that setting it to 200 in the character creation screen decidedly Did Not set it to 200 in-game (chat still says i have "over 9 days" after day one).

Welcome to the game and forums! How many days have you played the world after using the command? It's possible that the command worked, but the message doesn't actually account for the exact days remaining if the value was higher than ten. If that is the case, the daily message should be the same even after several days have passed. If it's actually counting down though, then the command probably didn't work, or ten days is the hard limit.

 

14 minutes ago, catcrazies said:

i really hope it is possible to bump the grace timer like this... i am sick of playing games completely neutered, but also WAY too anxious to just jump right in xˣ_ˣx

@dakko has a pretty good solution, but if you don't want to mess with mods yet, there are a few vanilla settings you can tweak to make the experience a little less intense. 

Grace Timer: Set this to 10 days, or whatever value you feel comfortable with. Do keep in mind that a single 24 hour day in Vintage Story is equivalent to 48 real life minutes, so even a shorter grace period will be quite a lot of time to familiarize yourself with things and build a basic shelter.

Death Punishment: Setting this option to "Keep inventory contents" does make the game easier, but it can make things much less frustrating while you're trying to learn how to play, since frequent deaths are a common experience.

Timer for items dropped on death: By default it's 10 minutes, which is a decent amount of time, but if you aren't playing with "keep inventory" enabled you may want to increase this amount.

Creature hostility: Setting this to Passive should make creatures neutral to you until you attack them. It gives you a little more breathing room to pick your fights, without rendering enemies completely harmless.

Creature strength: You may want to turn this value down to make fights a little easier, since there are several enemies that hit quite hard.

Temporal storms: Setting them to every 30-40 days will still allow you to experience them, but should keep them from getting too strong and keep them from interfering with your plans too much.

Temporal storm length: By default, temporal storms only last a few in-game hours, but you may want to shorten their duration if you're more interested in them as background flavor rather than a challenge.

Sleeping during temporal storms: Allowing this feature will let you choose whether or not you actually want to deal with the storm. If you've changed the above two settings to make storms shorter and less frequent, you may want to leave this feature turned off to remove the temptation to sleep through storms.

[catcrazies]

17 minutes ago, dakko said:

What about installing a mod that disables monsters, and then remove the mod when you're ready to face them?

Here is one: No Monsters (I've not used this one - "No Monsters, Really" is a good mod but has not yet been updated for 1.22).

i want to at least try to acclimate to the full environment of this game; i think having to see the monsters in my day to day without them trying to harm me would help reduce my irrational anxiety about them. that and i think the creature designs are neat. i play passive but not no-hostility because being attacked out of nowhere out of any time is not my cup of tea, but it feels kinda silly when my prey, no matter how capable, does not even try to defend itself when i injure it... but i have heard horror stories about monsters aggroing onto players after tripping over their open pit kilns and i REALLY do not want a shiver to come in and gank me out of nowhere, without me picking a fight with it, because i was firing a watering can...

26 minutes ago, dakko said:

eta: Oh! That chat dialogue may not change to reflect the updated days. With "No Monsters, Really" installed, it still gives that chat dialogue.

ooh, maybe it is just bugging out... i dont feel particularly like waiting another ten days to see, though XXp

[catcrazies]

16 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Welcome to the game and forums!

hi haiiii!!!!!

16 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

How many days have you played the world after using the command? It's possible that the command worked, but the message doesn't actually account for the exact days remaining if the value was higher than ten. If that is the case, the daily message should be the same even after several days have passed. If it's actually counting down though, then the command probably didn't work, or ten days is the hard limit.

on world one (tried with the grace timer as ten days, ran out, got scared and only then tried using a command to bump the grace period up) there was still a bowtorn running around behind my house, which makes sense with what the wiki said about not being able to set it after world creation... on world two i ran the command to set it while in the character editor, and then after day one passed and i got the message again, i went into... serverconfig.json and, finding world two with its file path in there, also tried to set it from 10 to 200 in there. (no idea how that works though...) thing is, i really really dont want to have to play world two for another six hours just to see whether any of my measures worked...

i think my big issue here is just that i see a lot of... implications floating around about the nature of all this stuff, but being very new i have no idea what to make of any of it, let alone how any of it actually works xˣ_ˣx i think i would really like to know what in the world serverconfig.json even actually is...

Edited Sunday at 04:13 AM by catcrazies
wait do i need to put a reason in here. clarification sentence

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, catcrazies said:

but i have heard horror stories about monsters aggroing onto players after tripping over their open pit kilns and i REALLY do not want a shiver to come in and gank me out of nowhere, without me picking a fight with it, because i was firing a watering can...

Putting drystone fence around the kiln area should help prevent that. Fences aren't climbable, and as long as there aren't any blocks close to the fence to allow creatures to scramble over anyway, nothing should be getting in or out(except you). Be careful if you place a gate though, as those are flammable.

 

1 hour ago, catcrazies said:

on world one (tried with the grace timer as ten days, ran out, got scared and only then tried using a command to bump the grace period up) there was still a bowtorn running around behind my house, which makes sense with what the wiki said about not being able to set it after world creation... on world two i ran the command to set it while in the character editor, and then after day one passed and i got the message again, i went into... serverconfig.json and, finding world two with its file path in there, also tried to set it from 10 to 200 in there. (no idea how that works though...) thing is, i really really dont want to have to play world two for another six hours just to see whether any of my measures worked...

i think my big issue here is just that i see a lot of... implications floating around about the nature of all this stuff, but being very new i have no idea what to make of any of it, let alone how any of it actually works xˣ_ˣx i think i would really like to know what in the world serverconfig.json even actually is...

Gotcha. Honestly, I would set the grace timer to the maximum 10 at world creation and leave it at that. Not that you can't mess around with commands and config files, but it can get complicated rather fast and sticking to the basics will probably be a little easier while learning the game.

If it helps, I found the game and monsters a little overwhelming when I first started--my general strategy was turning the grace period up to 10 days and picking the 30-40 day interval between storms so I could still get a feel for those things without dealing with them too often. You might also consider turning off temporal rifts to limit monster spawns to temporal storms and the underground only.

1 hour ago, catcrazies said:

wait do i need to put a reason in here. clarification sentence

Only if you think there needs to be a note about what was edited in order to avoid confusion. 

[dakko]

11 hours ago, catcrazies said:

ooh, maybe it is just bugging out... i dont feel particularly like waiting another ten days to see, though XXp

You could make a copy of your save, go into it as if to play and use the "/time calendarspeedmul" command to shorten the day to something ridiculous. Default is "/time calendarspeedmul 0.5".

We must have had a command to disable monsters way back when (or Tyron may have provided one for me) because I remember being concerned that the countdown continued as if the command had not worked. I think that was when there were only drifters though, and my memory is pretty sketchy. eta: but it was the countdown that was incorrect

Btw, the same command could be used to give yourself a more relaxed game experience (to simulate what you are trying to achieve by having a longer grace period). I play with /time calendarspeedmul set to 0.1

eta2: Now that I think about it, maybe that was a command to lengthen the grace time. This would have been before we had customization of worldgen.

Edited Sunday at 03:16 PM by dakko

[williams_482]

I remember being very anxious about the monsters when I started playing about a year ago, with feelings similar to what you're expressing here. My recommendation is the following:

1. Build yourself a small home with a door (ideally made from two fence gates, the crude door is total garbage) and adequate illumination to prevent spawns. This is your safe place of retreat, whatever happens. Make sure there's a big, relatively flat area nearby, with minimal vegetation. This is ideal terrain to fight monsters in. Then do whatever normal game stuff until the grace period you set runs down.

2. Knap 3-5 flint spears, and craft some improvised armor (or wood lamellar, if you're rich in hides and resin)

3. Remove everything else of value from your person and put it on the ground or in a container. Light a torch and put it in your off hand. Scarf down a big meal, and have a few more ready.

4. Get yourself hyped up. 

5. Attack! Run out into the night, find a monster, charge it, and stab it until it dies. Repeat. Prioritizing charging bowtorn: this is tactically smart because they have a powerful ranged attack, but it's also psychologically beneficial because the horrific, grotesque, terrifying creatures will turn and run in a blind panic once you get close enough to them. 

Remember to keep moving. Don't bother to loot corpses right now unless there really doesn't seem to be anything else around. Practice stepping up to drifters, stabbing them, and then backpedaling to evade their counterattack. For shivers, notice that if you get a couple hits in they will often run away for a bit. They also have this odd habit of curling up on the ground twitching, which is a perfect time to attack them. Try to learn what works against these things, and apply those lessons. 

Eventually something will kill you. Good! Dying isn't that bad, and the only way to reinforce that is to have it happen. Run back in there, retrieve whatever weapons you dropped when you died, and go again. 

It might or might not help to have a target number of deaths in mind. E.g. "I am going to kill as many drifters as I can before I die five times or the sun comes up." But the goal is to push through the initial anxiety and deliberately suffer consequences for rash actions, to internalize that these consequences just aren't as bad as the anxieties built up around them. 

Once your night of berserker rage is over, gather up your equipment and assess the condition of your character, your gear, and your own feelings. If you're anything like me you'll probably be feeling pretty excited, and your anxiety about monsters won't be gone, but it will be greatly tempered. You CAN fight these things, and win. Sometimes it will go wrong and you will die and that will be okay too. 

Note: do not try this approach with real life terrifying violent creatures, unless you are actually an immortal being capable of returning fro the grave. It will not go so well. 

[catcrazies]

@williams_482

...woah, the way you speak of this kinda reminds me of my therapist and how he would discuss confronting issues with my anxiety... this is really useful advice and you are also now instantly a cool person in my book ::D

basically what you are saying is i should waddle back into World One, get out of my house and go chop down a tree, make myself a new door, make myself some armor, push that one shiver in my forge over the pit kiln and go ham. i actually have keepinventory on, so the only thing i have to worry about losing is location... also, your comment about which monsters to target made me realize that aggroing one monster, as far as i know, will not instantly cause all the others to also gang up on me xˣ_ˣx. for some reason that was what i had set up in my hindbrain, which is also a total anxiety disaster scenario WHOOPSIES. if i can find the constitution to rejoin that world, i will certainly go do that... maybe i should set up some kind of one-way fence system at the mouth of my forge`s cave-proper to herd bowtorn into also, sounds kinda fun...

anyway; this did not answer my question at all so i will not be marking it as solution, but i think it is actually better than what i was looking for... you are REALLY REALLY cool!! imma go pick a fight with some demons >::D