Various QOL Suggestions

[Mac Mcleod]

1) When you pick up an item, if you have a stack going and the item is in the center of a block, you can only pick it up with an open hotbar slot.
i.e. you have 3 iron bloom.   There is an iron bloom in the center of a ground storage square.  You can not pick it up.   But you can pick up ironblooms on the corners of the square.
You can't even pick the item up with a partial stack of that item!
The fix is- check if the person has a legal stack in their inventory and pick up the item.

2) When lighting torches, the last torch lit doesn't transfer to the stack of torches like all the others.

3) Regarding quenching, when an item shatters, you should be able to recover some steel bits from it.   It's unrealistic that it completely poofs.

4) When placing slabs there's no indicator of how it will place.   It's common with setups like this to have a "ghost" version of the slab showing you how it will place based on where you are pointing.  This would prevent placing glass panes only to have to break them and place them again.   This is especially annoying if you are placing glass in a window in a high tower and it falls outside onto the ground.

5) Many items have to be broken when they should really be easy to pick up ( small animal skeletons, coffin lid parts, etc.)   

6) Recipe patterns that share items (like hammers, saws, chisels) are not organized to have common parts in common crafting grid locations.   I.e. if there is a hammer, always make it the top left corner.   If there is a saw, always have it in the middle crafting grid.

7) This is more of a feature request:  Please please look into auto-populating the crafting grid from the handbook.   This is a carpal tunnel issue.

8 ) And on that note: PLEASE implement auto-stepping up one block for players.   This is a serious carpal tunnel issue.  It's a common feature in other games.   You should not have to jump 1000's of times to go up 1 block.  I try to mitigate it by placing half slabs everywhere but I frequently log off due to physical real life pain from jumping.  And you WILL cause your players to develop the same pain that I have with the current approach.   

[SnapJelly]

On 8/28/2026 at 2:20 PM, Mac Mcleod said:

8 ) And on that note: PLEASE implement auto-stepping up one block for players.   This is a serious carpal tunnel issue.  It's a common feature in other games.   You should not have to jump 1000's of times to go up 1 block.  I try to mitigate it by placing half slabs everywhere but I frequently log off due to physical real life pain from jumping.  And you WILL cause your players to develop the same pain that I have with the current approach. 

I'm not sure if this would help but you could hold the spacebar down to just keep jumping when you have to climb, else you might be able to reroute the jump button to one that is easier to press for you, like if you have a mouse with buttons on the side for example one of those might be easier for you to press

[PhotriusPyrelus]

On 8/28/2026 at 12:20 PM, Mac Mcleod said:

3) Regarding quenching, when an item shatters, you should be able to recover some steel bits from it.   It's unrealistic that it completely poofs.

Shouldn't even lose any bits.  Actual damage to a metal object being quenched poorly is either warping or cracking, not complete shattering.
Generate a crack in the tool head, and shift the voxels left or right of the crack one space to the left or right respectively.

On 8/28/2026 at 12:20 PM, Mac Mcleod said:

6) Recipe patterns that share items (like hammers, saws, chisels) are not organized to have common parts in common crafting grid locations.   I.e. if there is a hammer, always make it the top left corner.   If there is a saw, always have it in the middle crafting grid.

I don't think the tool positioning should have any bearing on the recipe.  Like when you use a saw to make boards.  Doesn't matter where the logs or the saw is in the grid, as long as they're in the grid, the recipe works.  The materials having a specific arrangement is okey (even when it doesn't really make sense; like in most of the gear recipes - why does it matter where the resin and fat are?).

[SnapJelly]

On 8/28/2026 at 2:20 PM, Mac Mcleod said:

3) Regarding quenching, when an item shatters, you should be able to recover some steel bits from it.   It's unrealistic that it completely poofs.

1 hour ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

Shouldn't even lose any bits.  Actual damage to a metal object being quenched poorly is either warping or cracking, not complete shattering.
Generate a crack in the tool head, and shift the voxels left or right of the crack one space to the left or right respectively.

It's not about it being realistic, it's a game mechanic designed to push the player towards interacting more with the world and with other mechanics, aka going out into the world and gather more recources.

If you recover any meterial from the quench then the penalty is lower, which would encourage players to try more for better stats. So it encourages gameplay that is just sitting in a single room and grinding until you got the best gear. it rewards a gameplay style that avoids interacting with the rest of the world and mechanics, which is not good gamedesign.

[PhotriusPyrelus]

Just now, SnapJelly said:

It's not about it being realistic, it's a game mechanic designed to push the player towards interacting more with the world and with other mechanics, aka going out into the world and gather more recources.

This excuse (and it goes for durability, too) is really old and unsatisfying:  There's more to do with metal than make tools ad nauseam.

It's a mechanic that's just going to be (and *is*) ignored by people who aren't drowning in enough resources (or able to easily go get more than enough) already.  Abject failure of design if that's the purpose.

[SnapJelly]

1 minute ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

This excuse (and it goes for durability, too) is really old and unsatisfying

Huh?? wym old and unsatisfying? That's how game development works??? It never stops being the case for any game at any point in time.

 

2 minutes ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

There's more to do with metal than make tools ad nauseam.

Correct, and what does that change?

 

3 minutes ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

people who aren't drowning in enough resources (or able to easily go get more than enough)

Oke so when does this happen though? Give me a scenario where a player can not find an iron vein in a 2000 block radius or is otherwise unable to take more than a single stack and can never return?

[LadyWYT]

On 8/28/2026 at 12:20 PM, Mac Mcleod said:

1) When you pick up an item, if you have a stack going and the item is in the center of a block, you can only pick it up with an open hotbar slot.
i.e. you have 3 iron bloom.   There is an iron bloom in the center of a ground storage square.  You can not pick it up.   But you can pick up ironblooms on the corners of the square.
You can't even pick the item up with a partial stack of that item!
The fix is- check if the person has a legal stack in their inventory and pick up the item.

As far as I'm aware, items placed in the center of blocks won't prevent you from picking up said items, as long as you have space for it in your inventory(partial stack or empty slot).

 

On 8/28/2026 at 12:20 PM, Mac Mcleod said:

2) When lighting torches, the last torch lit doesn't transfer to the stack of torches like all the others.

Why shouldn't it stack with the others though?

 

On 8/28/2026 at 12:20 PM, Mac Mcleod said:

3) Regarding quenching, when an item shatters, you should be able to recover some steel bits from it.   It's unrealistic that it completely poofs.

And it's also a videogame and not going to be 100% realistic. There's at least a handful of cases where the player could realistically recycle material into other useful things, but can't actually do so in the game since the general idea is to push players to acquire new resources and make new/better things. And some of the gameplay design also helps cut down on junk cluttering up the player's inventory.

The main question to answer here is, if it's going to be a thing, then how does the player recycle the steel bits? Currently, there's no fuel hot enough to resmelt steel, so you would need to add some sort of additional processing just for this specific material in this specific circumstance. 

On 8/28/2026 at 12:20 PM, Mac Mcleod said:

4) When placing slabs there's no indicator of how it will place.   It's common with setups like this to have a "ghost" version of the slab showing you how it will place based on where you are pointing.  This would prevent placing glass panes only to have to break them and place them again.   This is especially annoying if you are placing glass in a window in a high tower and it falls outside onto the ground.

To be fair, you don't really need an indicator when you can just pop the slab into the crafting grid to have it orient itself only along the vertical or horizontal planes.

 

On 8/28/2026 at 12:20 PM, Mac Mcleod said:

5) Many items have to be broken when they should really be easy to pick up ( small animal skeletons, coffin lid parts, etc.) 

Carcasses probably have to be broken since they aren't exactly an item. I also wouldn't call a stone coffin lid "really easy to pick up". A linen square used for pressing cheese? That should be easy though, so I do agree that a simple right-click would work for this specific item. Other items though are quite arbitrary.

 

On 8/28/2026 at 12:20 PM, Mac Mcleod said:

6) Recipe patterns that share items (like hammers, saws, chisels) are not organized to have common parts in common crafting grid locations.   I.e. if there is a hammer, always make it the top left corner.   If there is a saw, always have it in the middle crafting grid.

Probably because crafting recipes try to arrange the crafting materials in ways that make sense for what you're trying to craft. Thus it's not necessarily going to make sense to always put the hammer in the top left corner, or always have the saw in the middle crafting grid.

Of course, if the eventual plan is to eliminate the crafting grid altogether, then it also doesn't make sense to try to standardize everything to specific crafting slots.

On 8/28/2026 at 12:20 PM, Mac Mcleod said:

7) This is more of a feature request:  Please please look into auto-populating the crafting grid from the handbook.   This is a carpal tunnel issue.

This one I can agree would be a nice QoL feature to have.

On 8/28/2026 at 12:20 PM, Mac Mcleod said:

8 ) And on that note: PLEASE implement auto-stepping up one block for players. 

It would be a good accessibility option, but it should definitely be something that can be toggled on/off in the settings. As for me, I would absolutely be turning it off since I prefer to have more precise control over my movements; auto-step leads to way too many accidents.

[SnapJelly]

10 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

To be fair, you don't really need an indicator when you can just pop the slab into the crafting grid to have it orient itself only along the vertical or horizontal planes.

I didn't know this was a thing, that is SO useful!!

[Rainbow Fresh]

On 8/29/2026 at 10:53 PM, SnapJelly said:

Huh?? wym old and unsatisfying? That's how game development works??? It never stops being the case for any game at any point in time.

Correct, and what does that change?

Compare the cost of making one steel pickaxe with the cost of making enough lanterns to light up a base, assuming you only have precious steel available. Even just a single small lantern costs twice as much as the pickaxe. That is without you gambling on making the pickaxe last for the entire rest of the game by quenching it to 3x durability. The argument that making quenching a *fun mechanic* that doesn't piss the player off through RNG-induced loss of material (which also entirely removes a QoL feature as you *always* risk shattering even if you just want to quickly cool down the workpiece as you can do with *any* other non-quenchable metal piece for free) is bad game design doesn't hold up, neither does the argument that fun quenching would "disincentivize the player from interacting more with the rest of the world." Again, even without quenching a single iron vein would produce enough steel that a normal player during a normal length playthrough would never burn through it all in steel tools alone. The majority of your resources gets gobbled up by anything BUT tools, quenching or not. And if nothing else, the tedium of acquiring high-tier metals (aka. making steel) already innately incentivize the player to go look for cheaper materials to make non-durability things that wouldn't benefit at all from steel. Also mind you, the game loop was working fine before quenching was ever introduced.

On 8/29/2026 at 10:53 PM, SnapJelly said:

Oke so when does this happen though? Give me a scenario where a player can not find an iron vein in a 2000 block radius or is otherwise unable to take more than a single stack and can never return?

What does it matter if they can return or not? Steel is incredibly boring and expensive to make on top of taking forever. The loss of even a single ingot due to an unavoidable baseline 5% chance feels shit. It doesn't matter the person can go back to their iron ore vein and mine a couple more blocks to get the necessary 20 bits to replace the ingot when the nearly 7 days process of burning all your charcoal is still in the way. Something you have to actively babysit as you cannot put all the coal in at once and do other things, so you are stuck to your base for those 7 days. This, mentally, is a much much higher price and detriment than *not* having to go back for that one ingot because you can retry the quenching. The solution is simple. Put an upper cap on it. Try and make quenching skill-based instead of RNG-based. Make it fun. The gameplay loop doesn't change.

[PhotriusPyrelus]

On 8/29/2026 at 3:53 PM, SnapJelly said:

That's how game development works??? It never stops being the case for any game at any point in time.

...what?

 

On 8/29/2026 at 3:53 PM, SnapJelly said:

Correct, and what does that change?

Golly, I dunno, maybe I mean that you don't need shattering or tool durability to provoke players to go out into the world? Or - in your own words - the specific words that I was responding to and quoted:

On 8/29/2026 at 3:45 PM, SnapJelly said:

to push the player towards interacting more with the world and with other mechanics, aka going out into the world and gather more recources.

 

On 8/29/2026 at 3:53 PM, SnapJelly said:

Oke so when does this happen though? Give me a scenario where a player can not find an iron vein in a 2000 block radius or is otherwise unable to take more than a single stack and can never return?

If a guy already has 3,000 iron, he doesn't care if a tool shatters; it doesn't force him to go interact with the world.  If a guy can "literally get 10 stacks of iron ore in less than a day" (sound familiar? it should, it was you who said that and that post was specifically why I included 'or easily go get more'), it doesn't matter if a tool breaks.

128 bits per stack, is 1280 bits.  20 bits per ingot, that's 640 ingots.  That's probably well more than enough iron for an entire play through if *all* you care about is "winning" and not building cool stuff.  So please, tell me again how shattering tools and having to make the same tools over and over again "push[es] the player towards interacting more with the world and with other mechanics, aka going out into the world and gather more recources."

It doesn't.  That's why that excuse is old and tired.
 

 I

[LadyWYT]

6 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

Something you have to actively babysit as you cannot put all the coal in at once and do other things, so you are stuck to your base for those 7 days.

Not quite. It's not going to hurt the production if the coal burns out--progress will just grind to a halt until you add more fuel. The coal piles burn for about a day, so it's pretty easy to just give the refractory a check, load more piles of coal when the old burns out, and then go on about whatever other business you need to attend to. Regarding fuel, any kind of coal can be used; coke/charcoal is only a requirement for the stuff that goes in the coffin itself.

I will also note that in my experience, running two refractories at once is an optimal setup. Just one refractory is too little, while three or more gets a little unwieldy. Wintertime is a great time for steel refining, since the days are shorter and the weather isn't so good for long trips and certain other activities. Likewise, the warm spots under the forge are a handy spot to warm up, if you find yourself working outside.

[SnapJelly]

2 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

If a guy already has 3,000 iron, he doesn't care if a tool shatters; it doesn't force him to go interact with the world.  If a guy can "literally get 10 stacks of iron ore in less than a day" (sound familiar? it should, it was you who said that and that post was specifically why I included 'or easily go get more'), it doesn't matter if a tool breaks.

Exactly so why wouldn't this be the case for every player? Iron exclusively spawns in enormous veins so???? Why not just grab more?

 

2 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

128 bits per stack, is 1280 bits.  20 bits per ingot, that's 640 ingots.  That's probably well more than enough iron for an entire play through if *all* you care about is "winning" and not building cool stuff.

This doesn't apply, what's stopping you from going 500 blocks in another diraction and finding another ultra high reading for iron and just grabbing more? Iron is everywhere, when would a player ever be in a situation where they can't go out to grab more?

 

2 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

So please, tell me again how shattering tools and having to make the same tools over and over again "push[es] the player towards interacting more with the world and with other mechanics, aka going out into the world and gather more recources."

Because it makes you lose recources... which means you have to go get more recources??? Idk what's complicated about this?

 

2 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

It doesn't.  That's why that excuse is old and tired.

It's not an excuse, it is the reason. That's how good game design works in any game that you play the mechanics are build specifically to push you towards interacting with the rest of the game, you seem to be really specifically bothered about the iron but VS is full of this exact same gamedesign choice in other aspects that you don't seem to be aware off so let me give you some examples to make it clear:

Food related only:

- it doesn't make sense for a portion of fish to give less protein than a portion of meat, but fish is easier to get so it's nerfed to push people towards other protein sources.

- it doesn't make sense for pountry to give less protein than pork but since chickens also lay eggs with is also a protein source their meat is nerfed so push players towards other protein sources.

- it doesn't make sense for bear meat to be less nutritious than pork, irl bear meat is highly prised and very nutritious but bushmeat is nerfed in orther to push people towards interacting with the animal husbandry mechanics instead of prancing around the woords in full armor living only off bear and wolf meat.

- which is also why you can't add bushmeat to meals, realistically this makes no sense but it is to guide people towards protein sources that can be used in meals

- it doesn't make sense for cranberries to give less nutrition than other berries but because they (ispired by real life) keep longer the nutrition is nerfed to push people towards other sources of fruit and discourage exclusively relying on cranberries.

Need me to continue? this is just 1 aspect of the game and It is stocked with gamedesign choices that aren't ''realistic'' but are made to guide the player towards other aspects of the game, you don't NEED to do any of them, the game is fully playable in any way you desire but it is up to the damedevs to make game mechanics that benefit from eachother, not bypass eachother.

If mechanics are added to games without keeping this in mind you get what happened to the other block game; a bunch of fluff that has nothing to do with eachother and a very clear and obvious meta way of playing, this is not good gamedesign and other than minecraft games tend to not get away with it. You idea of it being an ''excuse'' is based on you not understanding how gamedesign works, It's not an excuse. ALL GAMES ARE BUILT LIKE THIS to an extend and Vintage story is exceptionally good at it.

[SnapJelly]

Oh sorry, I didn't see your reply earlier

11 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

neither does the argument that fun quenching would "disincentivize the player from interacting more with the rest of the world

that wasn't the argument, I am arguing that having the material be partially recyclable would cause the player to have to interact with the world less, the mechanic can change, I don't care about that. But as it is now the risk of losing the material is essential to how the mechanic works, else it is rewarded for the player to just sit and home and grind till they get the best gear, cuz there's no downside other than time investment. It incentivises boring gameplay, while losting the material (while a little frustrating) incentivises engaging gameplay.

 

11 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

Also mind you, the game loop was working fine before quenching was ever introduced.

Yes, the gameplay loop hasn't changed, it's only been added to. Unquenched items aren't nerfed, quenching is 100% a choice that gives a slight benefit to players who are willing to take the risk of losing their material, take away that risk and how you've turned quenching into just something you gotta spend time on.

 

11 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

What does it matter if they can return or not? Steel is incredibly boring and expensive to make on top of taking forever

Well it takes a while sure but boring is a strange way to describe it, you mostly just have to wait till it's done and a single furnace gives you 16 pieces in like (6 or 7 days, not sure exactly how long it takes). if you set up 2 furnaces that'll give you 32 pieces of steel in 7 days, how much steel are we trying to burn through here? It's a completely reasonable amount.

 

11 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

It doesn't matter the person can go back to their iron ore vein and mine a couple more blocks to get the necessary 20 bits to replace the ingot when the nearly 7 days process of burning all your charcoal is still in the way. Something you have to actively babysit as you cannot put all the coal in at once and do other things

This is not true, you can let the furnace go out and light it again later with no ill effects, the timer is just paused as long as it is off but the percentage of how done the steel is stays the same so you are free to go and do whatever else you want.

 

11 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

so you are stuck to your base for those 7 days.

again, you can leave. There is no penalty.

 

11 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

Put an upper cap on it. Try and make quenching skill-based instead of RNG-based. Make it fun.

Sure but that is not what the OP suggested so it's not what I criticized. The OP said: ''when an item shatters, you should be able to recover some steel bits from it.   It's unrealistic that it completely poofs.'' That is what I replied to, the mechanic being fun or not wasn't part of the argument

Edited August 31 by SnapJelly
Spelling error

[SnapJelly]

@Rainbow Fresh I did some testing just now to make sure what I said actually holds water so I tried burning 2 stacks of charcoal, brown coal and black coal next to eachother the same way they're lit in a furnace to see how long it takes to burn out, turns out they all burn at the same rate.

The coal was lit on 1 may at 09:58 and fully went out at 2 may 17:56

So if you want optimal steel production time you can go anywhere in the world as long as you are back within 32 hours.

But if you're not, again no harm no foul, you can just light the furnace again with no debuff to the steel

[Mac Mcleod]

Somewhere between returning 1 steel bit and returning 20 steel bits is a more realistic loss that isn't so unpleasant.   I'm sure you don't see it as game breaking if you got 3 bits back.   And I imagine even new players would be less traumatized if they got 19 bits back.   I think 17 would be a good number.
You still lose the time and the charcoal/coal invested.  That's a huge penalty.   Time is the ultimate commodity.
I think this is an area where a compromise can be found that is okay with most people (including the devs).

I agree any auto-step option should be client side optional setting.    It is autostepup and not autojump.   Of course, players can autostepup 1/2 block up, and Elks autostep up to 2 blocks up.   

Regarding the crafting tool placement.  I suggested this after looking at them and in most of the 'fixed' recipes there is no problem with moving the hammer / chisel / saw to a standard location.  The current location is random and arbitrary from some fixed recipe set up years ago.

Carcasses and coffin lids being broken is a holdover from old code.  It's probably just an item property since you can place the carcasses.

Picking up items.  You have 
88  <- these four "o" items can be picked up with a stack of the same item in my selected hotslot.
O   <- this same exact "o" item can't be picked up except with an empty hand.

I'll look into the crafting to set the slab facing.   I'm doing very short runs of a half dozen window panes in a greenhouse as well as stone slabs between them.  Thanks for the suggestion.


 

Edited September 1 by Mac Mcleod
left out some words.

[Rainbow Fresh]

15 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

so it's pretty easy to just give the refractory a check

Does that mean every time you let the coal go out the RNG roll for breaking refractory bricks is done? Then hell nah that stuff needs to be babysat, otherwise constantly getting and pulverizing more stuff to replace the bricks just comes on top of the bill.

11 hours ago, SnapJelly said:

But as it is now the risk of losing the material is essential to how the mechanic works, else it is rewarded for the player to just sit and home and grind till they get the best gear, cuz there's no downside other than time investment.

The risk of losing the material is essential to how the mechanic works and that is the biggest pain point as to why people don't like it, mod it differently or just outright ignore it. And what is the point of a mechanic designed to be ignored?

Consider the following: How high is the chance for an item to break with maximum tempering to reduce the odds before you hit a +100% durability? How much easier would it be to just... not bother to use this mechanic at all, ever, and just make a guaranteed second pickaxe/axe/whatever with the second ingot? It's gambling for diminishing returns. If at least the process was any more skill than luck based it could atleast feel like achieving something yourself, or failing because of something you did. If the cost wasn't a full 100% loss of everything maybe it would be more interesting to use. And to drag in your earlier response with the examples of how food values are balanced - yes, those are tweaked numbers to incentivize gameplay and it works; food is essential, quick and options a-plenty. You can eat predators in a pinch because bushmeat sucks but unless necessary people will just ignore them. Why bother if redmeat usually doesn't fight back and is much better. Fishing is a new contender and kinda nice for viable variety. Chickens are the easiest to domesticate so they give the least. Makes sense. Quenching is fully optional and just a dice roll. With the cost statistically always outweighing the benefit. A second ingot is worth a +100% durability quench, but by the time you get a +100% durability quench on an item, it is essentially guaranteed to break. And losing the whole thing to a 5% base roll for a base - what, 15%? 20%? increase feels bad. It disincentivizes using the entire mechanic to boot.

I know this thread isn't about the quenching system - there have been others for this before - but if you could just realistically apply a *single* non-stacking quench buff depending on how you quench and the risk of failure was to instead get a debuff, that would be a more enticing system. Having a failed quench give you 20% less durability is still better than giving you hot air. And as mentioned otherwise, the loss of 1 ingot due to a broken (or not broken) tool during quenching is not gonna change anything about the balance of resource management or the need to interact with the world more. It worked fine before quenching became a thing where tools never broke unless you used them up fully and people still had reasons to go out and dig up entire ore veins to turn into big projects.

11 hours ago, SnapJelly said:

Sure but that is not what the OP suggested so it's not what I criticized. The OP said: ''when an item shatters, you should be able to recover some steel bits from it.   It's unrealistic that it completely poofs.'' That is what I replied to, the mechanic being fun or not wasn't part of the argument

That is correct. However, intentions of game design and balancing or not, the current system isn't incentivizing anything other than not interacting with it. Incentive comes from better results. You want to domesticate pigs over chickens despite it being harder, taking longer and costing more food because pigs give you better results. You want to cook meals over eating raw food because it gives better results. The whole food balancing you mentioned is about making options hierarchical as to incentivize to get higher "tiers" of food instead of the easy and cheap options. Quenching just loses more than it gives, guaranteed, depending how lucky you are - the shittiest "stat" to balance around. The OP's suggestion was to give some, if not all, material back when the quenching shatters. To which your counter-arguments were that it would disincentivize "playing the game" (going out, interact with the world more, get more resources) but incentivizes boringly sitting and waiting until the best quench result is achieved across many, many RNG tries. That isn't wrong per se as the notion is surely there, however the de facto result, as discussed in the rest of the thread there so far, speaks of a different outcome - the consideration of the cost of a single ingot isn't able to skew the "playing the game" part, getting bits back instead of just being able to immediately re-forge the tool for basically free still requires - in the case of steel, which everyone eventually gets to once having iron as it is just one additional step for much higher durability gear - a lot of time and resource investment and the sheer amount of time and resources needed to keep rerolling for a single tool that has notably better stats is so pointless noone who actually *wants* to play the game would do it. So much like following "realism" doesn't necessarily make for a good game, neither does solely designing things for balance. Because currently quenching feels neither balanced, nor worth interacting with on a larger scale.

As such, the discussion naturally brought up the topic of how alternative ways to implement quenching could look like to try and find a middle ground between your complaints about the negative effects of changing quenching like the OP stated and still changing quenching in a way that is actually a good gameplay element.

[MKMoose]

On 8/28/2026 at 7:20 PM, Mac Mcleod said:

1) When you pick up an item, if you have a stack going and the item is in the center of a block, you can only pick it up with an open hotbar slot.
i.e. you have 3 iron bloom.   There is an iron bloom in the center of a ground storage square.  You can not pick it up.   But you can pick up ironblooms on the corners of the square.
You can't even pick the item up with a partial stack of that item!

I've fixed this in a PR, and it was a pretty trivial fix, but whether or when it makes into the game is another matter for a number of reasons.

 

19 hours ago, SnapJelly said:

- it doesn't make sense for bear meat to be less nutritious than pork, irl bear meat is highly prised and very nutritious but bushmeat is nerfed in orther to push people towards interacting with the animal husbandry mechanics instead of prancing around the woords in full armor living only off bear and wolf meat.

- which is also why you can't add bushmeat to meals, realistically this makes no sense but it is to guide people towards protein sources that can be used in meals

The funny thing about this is the recently-introduced fishing. I've been converting bushmeat into fish fillets at an ~1:4 ratio lately, which translates to a ~1:15 satiety ratio. One piece of bushmeat into 1500 meal satiety for practically free. Getting your meat from wolves and bears can genuinely just be better than hunting animals for red meat if you have a good fishing spot.

 

2 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

Does that mean every time you let the coal go out the RNG roll for breaking refractory bricks is done? Then hell nah that stuff needs to be babysat, otherwise constantly getting and pulverizing more stuff to replace the bricks just comes on top of the bill.

Breaking bricks only occurs once at the end of the process.

 

2 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

Quenching just loses more than it gives, guaranteed, depending how lucky you are - the shittiest "stat" to balance around.

That seems like a very odd way to put it. The first two quenchings are for most purposes always beneficial on average. Maybe a bit less when considering the miscellaneous added costs.

 

15 hours ago, SnapJelly said:

I am arguing that having the material be partially recyclable would cause the player to have to interact with the world less

I could potentially see this argument for recycling broken tool heads. It still doesn't hold up all that well, because a significant portion of metal (in some cases the vast majority) goes into infrastructure and building in general.

But for quenching? Quenching was added in 1.22, and everything had been fine before that. Unless you're going for large power buffs in the range of ~5+ quenchings, the material loss isn't even all that significant on a scale that would matter for this context - for a smaller number like for example 3 quenchings with no tempering (which is already a significant ~25% power buff), you'll on average spend ~1.4 metal per tool.

 

5 hours ago, Mac Mcleod said:

Somewhere between returning 1 steel bit and returning 20 steel bits is a more realistic loss that isn't so unpleasant.   I'm sure you don't see it as game breaking if you got 3 bits back.   And I imagine even new players would be less traumatized if they got 19 bits back.   I think 17 would be a good number.
You still lose the time and the charcoal/coal invested.  That's a huge penalty.   Time is the ultimate commodity.

I find that returning material wouldn't really change much here, frankly. You're still losing the tool, so you need to resmelt the bits and forge a new one. Not to mention that for iron you currently need to accumulate multiples of 20 bits to smelt them at all (since you can't mix them like you can mix nuggets in a crucible) or 120 bits for optimal resmelting (at the minimum fire clay cost), and steel bits are currently unusable - unless that changes, I don't think returning bits makes much sense at all.

Personally, I believe that the theoretically ideal way to go about it would be to make quenching skill-based, non-stacking and retryable. Any kind of quenching failure would just result in a weak or sometimes unusable tool, and simply heating it up again (or potentially a more elaborate process in certain cases) would allow to bring the tool back to the base state and reattempt quenching. I don't see material loss as necessary for any reason except perhaps as a consequence of gross mistakes, and maybe an opt-in risk of quenching in brine.

Edited September 1 by MKMoose

[SnapJelly]

10 hours ago, Mac Mcleod said:

Somewhere between returning 1 steel bit and returning 20 steel bits is a more realistic loss that isn't so unpleasant.   I'm sure you don't see it as game breaking if you got 3 bits back.   And I imagine even new players would be less traumatized if they got 19 bits back.   I think 17 would be a good number.
You still lose the time and the charcoal/coal invested.  That's a huge penalty.   Time is the ultimate commodity.
I think this is an area where a compromise can be found that is okay with most people (including the devs).

 

7 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

The risk of losing the material is essential to how the mechanic works and that is the biggest pain point as to why people don't like it, mod it differently or just outright ignore it. And what is the point of a mechanic designed to be ignored?

Let me rephrase it to see if I can get you to see my point of view:

Imagine a scenario where a player wants to get what are technically the best tools possible in game regardless of time, effort, or cost (currently that would be steel tools with however many quenches would be the maximum possible before it has 100% breakchance)

As it currently is there is RNG involved ofcourse but statistically speaking the player is likely to lose a lot of steel attepting this, so in order to achieve this goal the player has to:
1) go outside to find more bausite and quarts
2) find or make more fireclay
3) pulverize materials to make bricks
4) fire the bricks
5) make bricks into steel
6) try and forge them into the best possible tool

in ths scenario the player is not only required to travel possibly thousands of blocks but is required to intetacht with the kiln mechanic, the mechanical power mechanic, the steel making mechanic, and the forging mechanic. And while 100% optional and not at all required to play the game; if the player is willing to go through the effort and heavily interacts with all these mechanics they are rewarded with the best tools in game.

In the 2nd scenario the player wants the same thing but now when quenching fails the steel is recycled, now in order for the player to get the best possible tools in game the player has to:
1) try again

Thats it, there is rng involved in both, both are a grind, there is frustration involved in both, in both cases it is 100% an optional choice the player decided to do by themself just because they want to.
BUT the key difference is that in the 1st scenario the player who interacts with the world and it's mechanics is rewarded, in the 2nd scenario a player who stays in the same room and is willing to just flip a coin over and over again until through pure luck the RNG gods happen to make the coinflip land in his favor enough times is rewarded.

It's not about if steel breaking is frustrating or not or ''how many chucks'' returning would be realistic or not, you can not design your game so that a playstyle that causes the player to be less ivolved with the rest of the game get's rewarded with the best gear.

 

And if you think this is not a valid concern look no further than the other block game: netherite is technically an upgrade from diamond but in actual gameplay a netherite swords doesn't take less swings to kill most mobs other than bosses and netherite armor makes you live only a single tick longer than diamond armor if you fall into lava, so basically useless in practice. On top of that you can get full diamond casually in less than an hour but netherite can take several weeks and yet players STILL try to get it.

People are going to minmaxx any game they play, you can not have the best possible gear in game be locked behind somthing that is nothing but an RNG based timesink, AT LEAST make your players have to go out and gather more resources and do other things in game else your game turns into runescape.

Edited September 1 by SnapJelly
spelling

[LadyWYT]

9 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

Does that mean every time you let the coal go out the RNG roll for breaking refractory bricks is done?

Nope. The brick calculations don't happen until after the refining process is done, and doubles as a handy way to tell the process has finished without needing to peek at the coffin itself.

[Mac Mcleod]

I like the idea Rainbow mentions of a durability debuff as an alternative to complete failure.   
It looks like they intend to eventually add oil quenching which lowers the risk of a crack.

MkMoos, I researched quench cracking in real life and it usually ruins the piece but does not destroy material.   You can cut away the cracked part (which happens often on edges) or you can use the ruined piece in a new worked.    So simply changing the status to "ruined piece" that could then be chiseled down to bits or remelted in a bloomery would be closer to real life.   Cracks from quenching on edges are a random challenge faced even by highly skilled blacksmiths.   

Optimal durability quenching is +37%.  Anything past their results in a net loss.   The critical point of failure is the 5% complete loss of the ingot for new players just breaking into steel when it is still precious to them and making it took them hours of real life.  It's completely unrealistic (the piece should be ruined, not the steel lost).   A middle ground (especially one that matches real life experience of real blacksmiths) would be less unlikely to lose new customers.

Snap... in real life blacksmiths do not have entire steel items shatter to unrecoverable dust.   The piece is simply ruined.   You did leave out...
Go out and chop down more trees, turn them into firewood, wait 20 minutes while more burns into charcoal, retrieve the charcoal (another 5 minutes of digging).   
If they allow resmelting steel bits, it's going to require a 1500 degree heat and that means bloomeries which means fireclay.   Critically, new players won't quit if quenching is easier.  There is a difference between "uncompromising" and "both unrealistic AND unfair that regularly drives players to fury and logging off."

And a work item without enough steel bits to make the item can only be used for larger pieces (pretty much just steel plates only).  You might be able to make it into a steel knife instead.  If a falx requires 16 bits to make and it shatters to 14 bits, there is no way to make a falx from it- you just have 14 bits of steel that you could use in a steel plate, a spear, a knife.

For context, this is my fifth play thru, I've done the steel route many times and I've made a couple dozen  quenched items now.   I have not rage quit over the a loss but I was able to upgrade 7 items before my first loss.   I haven't lost a 2nd piece yet.

[SnapJelly]

1 hour ago, Mac Mcleod said:

Snap... in real life blacksmiths do not have entire steel items shatter to unrecoverable dust.   The piece is simply ruined.

Did you read what I said? I specifically keep repeating that realism isn't the concern here, this mechanic is not about realism, it's about pushing the player towards interacting with more of the game, I know it's not realistic and that doesn't matter, most of the game is not realistic, why should the quenching process be held to a higher standard in terms of realism then the rest of the game?

 

1 hour ago, Mac Mcleod said:

You did leave out...
Go out and chop down more trees, turn them into firewood, wait 20 minutes while more burns into charcoal, retrieve the charcoal (another 5 minutes of digging).

I mean strange argument, I didn't include coal in my argument because it is a renewable recource and extremely easy to get in bulk, a bloomery takes 6 coal and heating an ingot only takes 1 so that is 7 coal. Make a single 3x3 charcoal pit and you'll have over a stack, it's very unlikely you'd have to do that twice unless you only decide to make tiny charcoal pits.

And digging up the coal is not gonna be more than a minute... unless you have a HUUUGE charcoal pit which again just repeats the point that you wouldn't have to do this twice.

 

1 hour ago, Mac Mcleod said:

If they allow resmelting steel bits, it's going to require a 1500 degree heat and that means bloomeries which means fireclay.

1 item which you can with the tiniest bit of preperation get in abundance beforehand, bloomeries also give you a percentage of the bricks back so hardly a hurdle, but if you wanna count this then sure that is 1 thing that would still have to be done compared to the 6 other things I gave in my example.

 

1 hour ago, Mac Mcleod said:

Critically, new players won't quit if quenching is easier.

New players deciding to ragequit after a 100% optional mechanic that is RNG dependent doesn't go their way? I don't think that's the game's fault man...

 

1 hour ago, Mac Mcleod said:

And a work item without enough steel bits to make the item can only be used for larger pieces (pretty much just steel plates only).  You might be able to make it into a steel knife instead.  If a falx requires 16 bits to make and it shatters to 14 bits, there is no way to make a falx from it- you just have 14 bits of steel that you could use in a steel plate, a spear, a knife.

Sure but this is a different argument entirely, this would require a rework of the entire smithing system as it is. You have to decide what to make beforehand after all and you have to start with a full ingot or plate so the final item requiring less voxels doesn't change anything, you still gotta have a full ingot to start

Edited September 1 by SnapJelly
spelling

[Rainbow Fresh]

16 hours ago, SnapJelly said:

Let me rephrase it to see if I can get you to see my point of view:

I do get your point of view. I also got it before - and you are certainly not wrong. On a fundamental level, taking everything away and forcing the player through the entirety of the acquisition process again is, in a way, getting them to "interact with the world more". And yes, quenching is completely optional. But I hope you can equally see how there is value in our counter-arguments as well. Focusing on *just* one thing is usually not a good idea. A game that solely argues with "this is realistic" is gonna be a boring and frustrating as one that solely goes "this is balanced" - because in a truly, fully balanced game every single thing has the exact same stats so that imbalances cannot possibly happen. Yes the current quenching loop forces the player to do more which results in "more game being played" but simultaneously it doesn't make quenching any better, RNG any less frustrating and the question of if it is worth it any less debatable.

Because if you consider that the player *has* to go out and 1: find more bauxite and quartz, 2: get more fireclay, 3: make bricks, 4: fire bricks, 5: make steel and finally 6: try again at an RNG roll every* time an item shatters; both when they go for min-maxing and when they just try it out once for fun but get unlucky - In turn it just drives players to not bother quenching at all. At some point you'll burn through entire tools in the process of just getting repeat materials to try and get a single "best" tool that is still just... a normal tool, that will eventually break. It's not like we're quenching for Efficiency V, Unbreaking III, Mending Netherite here. We're just adding less than another, guaranteed tool worth of durability (unless someone actually goes for power, which I personally deem unworthy and any min-maxer would likely agree) at the cost of the entire process of a full new tool from scratch everytime RNG strikes - and when *truly* min-maxing it WILL strike countless of times before you reach the theoretical max.
(* people would obviously fire more than a single steel ingot at once so the process does not have to be repeated every single time.)

So while yes, the "Oops, sorry lad go digging again" quenching system we currently have is theoretically incentivizing "playing the game" over "sitting and throwing dice" - it is still throwing dice, just with a much more disincentivizing cost to the point the system can easily be considered "not worth it" and ignored entirely. And if you have to make a mechanic so unwanted just to follow the game design principle of "make the player do stuff", was the mechanic worth it to boot?

That's why voices asking for a better quenching system frequently arise. How does a better quenching system look like? I can't really say. Luckily it is, however, also not my job to decide on that. Getting some material back sounds nice but agreeably, that would just feed the min-maxing as everyone can now easily spend x amount of time and y amount of renewable resources to get the best tools, so why wouldn't they. Long winter nights need to be passed somehow anyway. Not that it would break the economy as, as mentioned previously, the few ingots to make steel tools are nothing compared to anything else requiring metal. A waterwheel costs more than an entire set of tools. That's why I threw in my idea of an overall less impactful quenching system. The upper limit is heavily capped so it is, at best, "a nice buff" to make min-maxing less alluring and less impactful while simultaneously reducing the perceived loss and subsequent frustration if it does go wrong. I still think the RNG component should be replaced by a skill-based one but I have no idea how that would look like.

11 hours ago, Mac Mcleod said:

And a work item without enough steel bits to make the item can only be used for larger pieces (pretty much just steel plates only).  You might be able to make it into a steel knife instead.  If a falx requires 16 bits to make and it shatters to 14 bits, there is no way to make a falx from it- you just have 14 bits of steel that you could use in a steel plate, a spear, a knife.

10 hours ago, SnapJelly said:

Sure but this is a different argument entirely, this would require a rework of the entire smithing system as it is. You have to decide what to make beforehand after all and you have to start with a full ingot or plate so the final item requiring less voxels doesn't change anything, you still gotta have a full ingot to start

This idea is also a very good suggestion in my opinion. Sure, it would require changing a small little something about how smithing as a whole works internally - but the game is constantly evolving anyway with many mechanics changing. This would atleast be the most indepth and immersive approach to the lossy philosophy. The ability to salvage the cracked item directly into something else, or deciding to scrap it fully and start over properly once having smelted enough of the bits into fresh steel again. It incentivizes creativity and making something better out of a "bad" situation. It still takes away the feeling of unnecessarily costly loss for something not necessarily incredible while also not simply incentivizing wasting endless amounts of time waiting and hoping min-maxing tools. Leading into this...

16 hours ago, SnapJelly said:

People are going to minmaxx any game they play, you can not have the best possible gear in game be locked behind somthing that is nothing but an RNG based timesink, AT LEAST make your players have to go out and gather more resources and do other things in game else your game turns into runescape.

11 hours ago, SnapJelly said:

New players deciding to ragequit after a 100% optional mechanic that is RNG dependent doesn't go their way? I don't think that's the game's fault man...

I don't think there is more the game needs to take responsibility for. As you said, people will always try to min-max to a degree - some will go to any length. But a game should never be balanced solely around a specific edge. If people want to rather waste their time rolling dice than playing, even the most enticing game won't convince them otherwise. Meanwhile designing everything to be a costly loss just so the player cannot min-max without playing and those who don't care about that will feel frustrated about all the stones thrown into their path for no reason. There should be another way that does its best to accommodate both unless, of course, the developers want to specifically say "Fuck them" to a specific type player. Which would also be fair, can't make everyone happy and otherwise it leads to feature creep and washed down content. But yeah, new players getting frustrated and potentially quitting is not the game's fault? When it specifically introduced a mechanic that, albeit "optional", cannot be ignored as you said yourself people will always min-max to a degree? I think there is a fair amount of responsibility in there. I just think quenching could be better and the immediate thorn in most complaining people's side is the immediate atomar vaporization of hours of work producing steel due to a mechanic that is just RNG and nothing more. Either make it *feel* less lossy or make it less RNG to make it a better mechanic.

[SnapJelly]

6 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

(unless someone actually goes for power, which I personally deem unworthy and any min-maxer would likely agree)

I haven't actually done the math but I only go for power with steel tools, mainly because I find that the base durability of steel is already crazy long so I don't feel the need to increase it, so might aswell increase it's speed/power. My steel falx has a damage of 6.9 which does decrease the amount of hits many drifters take quite a bit at higher lvls compared to the base 5.25

I also personally haven't used any meteoric iron since the quencing was introduced so I only got base iron and steel as a reference point.

[Rainbow Fresh]

3 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

mainly because I find that the base durability of steel is already crazy long so I don't feel the need to increase it, so might aswell increase it's speed/power.

*me, burning through +37% durability steel chisels like they are still made out of copper*

[SnapJelly]

26 minutes ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

*me, burning through +37% durability steel chisels like they are still made out of copper*

Oh yeah good point, it doesn't apply for tools like hammers, chisels and shears and whatnot