Conveyers and Mechanicals

[Pickled Peaches]

Hi! I am fairly new to Vintage Story and haven't perused the forums much, so apologies if this has already been asked. I think conveyers, and other mechanical bits would be a phenomenal addition to the game, there are already watermills and windmills, so i feel that having a conveyer or some kind of moving parts would be awesome! same with having functional gears to move, or rotate structures potentially? I think it would be cool to have something to make a clock or something with moving parts where you can adjust the speed with gear ratios or some such, i think it could bring a lot of life not only into the technical game, but also building itself. With functional/moving blocks or specific parts there could be a lot more depth put into builds. Maybe like having smoke stacks shift up and down, or the previously mentioned clock. I think an almost steampunk idea would fit with the games aesthetic, it doesn't even need to be something like fully autonomous things, that may be out of the scope of what the game is trying to accomplish, but some sort of moving block would be really neat!

The other thing i was thinking was hot air balloons for travel, I don't know how feasible that would be, or if it fits the direction the devs want to go, but i think more forms of movement like that would be really cool!

Thanks, PickledPeaches

[Rainbow Fresh]

Ideas/Suggestions/Wishes for more mechanical powered content float around every so often - a testimony to how underused of a gameplay concept it currently is - but I don't think conveyor belts have been brought up recently. Which is a very basic, staple feature of any sort mechanical power system and could be an easy and cool addition. However, the reason why this might not have been brought up more often is because conveyor belts are just the moving parts of a bigger system, and we are lacking the bigger system. Because if we add conveyor belts we first have to ask the important question of what do you even need them for? We don't have any machines that could utilize this yet. Unless we make the large bellows be able to cool down items lying in front of it (like blowing on your hot food) where you could then build a machine that... moves items you smithed/smelted in a 4x4 circle with a large bellows inside. A rather niche usage that only really has meaning for as long as quenching is so unsatisfyingly RNG. Feeding the helve hammer wouldn't work because in order to smith it needs an anvil-solid surface; which a moving conveyor belt isn't. Feeding the quern doesn't make sense. And neither does the pulverizer, really. So yes, while conveyor belts are an easy staple of mechanical power systems, we'd first need the machinery that could utilize it. By itself, even chutes are more purposeful and useful right now. So we'd first need more dedicated, mechanical automation-based machinery for this to make sense.

As for moving blocks/structures Minecraft Create mod style; we already had the 4D quern. Jokes aside, making entire in-world block structures movable like entities is a huge undertaking and even said Create mod over in TOBG only does so with notable drawbacks compared to fixed machinery. While the potential is huge with what you can create (pun intended) it is also really whacking and artistically out of style for the rest of the game suddenly having a 10x10 structure rotate off-grid. And most things you'd want to move like this we already have, as dedicated moving parts. Windmills exists, so do waterwheels now. The helve hammer is a moving part. Playing with mods like "Immersive Woodworking" what the game might be lacking still is a mechanical saw for chopping logs into planks or similar but that, too, would be a fixed contraption with animated parts rather than free-style slapping a saw onto some blocks that rotate in space-time. Having more moving parts in the game and expanding on the mechanical side of things is certainly a good thing but I don't feel like going as far as to just add free-style block transformation devices is a good fit. Vintage Story's moving contraptions and multiblock system already add the foundation needed.

You also mentioned building your own clock this way. That... would be huge. People have already talked about clockmaking and there are mods that add it - but those are for normal-sized clocks not ones build manually out of the giant gears we have. This would be akin to building a computer with Minecraft Redstone - possible, but not achievable in any survival world and taking up the entire render distance to build. Having clocks would still be cool but at best a mechanically powered 3x3 multiblock I'd say. Anything else would be overkill for the simplicity of having device that tells you the time.

And finally, hot air balloons. Certainly not the most overpowered form of aerial travel suggested/requested. As with any suggested form of travel/transport, especially of the limit-free aerial travel kind, the balancing question stays front and center lest we end up repeating Minecraft's biggest mistake of adding Elytra; a single item (well technically two, you need rockets) that single-handedly made 90% of the game obsolete as nothing ever will nor can compete to the ability to go wherever you want, whenever you want, at speed faster than the world can generate. Steampunk-style airship have already been modded into the game, I can see hot air balloons potentially be fitting enough for the base game though. As the naturally come with lots of drawbacks and limitations. Opposite to motored airships, you'd be at the whimsy of the wind and they'd be hard and skill-based to control if modeled realistically. However that said, the first problem would then already be "being at the whimsy of the wind". We don't have dynamic wind with varying directions yet. So at best you could control balloons by holding down W/A/S/D to go veeeeery slowly into the given direction. Yet once more we'll have to ask the question of the "why". What exact purpose would balloons fulfill? Exploration? They'd be a lesser choice to elks (or horses now that they've been teased) in terms of speed while being severely more end-game expensive and being up high in the air only does so much if render distance is the major limiting factor. Mods like Farseer would need to become vanilla game mechanics for this to add merit. Transport? If we see balloons as rafts of the sky you might be able to carry chests full of goodies at once; a welcome upgrade to elks/horses. Risking your big haul to unfavorable wind directions though seems like a sub-optimal move. And the ability to predict wind directions on a large scale and longer timeframe to plan trips would need to be added.