Some suggestions about the game and its mechanical aspect

[Livarbesaru]

I've played this game only to copper age, but has alredy taken my interest in all of its aspects, but there are quite few things lacking in term of contents:

1. Its the lack of falling meteorites , since the game has meteoric iron but no meteorite falling from the skies. This must be implemented in the game, and while searching for some mods i've found someone made a mod about it, the meteoric expansion mod, and it is beautiful, i was amazed while running in the night in search of food and a big meteor was crushing on the surface with its strong reverbering in the night sky;

2. the oceans are empty without fish or other aquatic creature, this is another aspect to be added since it will bring a very important survival method, fishing and boats;

3.I read all about ores in the wiki, but had a very bad luck to find any iron or even tin to proceed to bronze age. I don't want to use the propick since it seems like a radar and it'is far away from a survival aspect without high tecnology. So i was thinking it would be a good implementation to bring a chance (like 1% or 3%) to drop iron nuggets and other type of minerals dependig on the type of rocks it will be crushed with some type of crusher. I alredy know about panning and while it is a good implementation, it takes a lot of time to have enough ores, it took me 2 hours to have enough copper to make a pickaxe, maybe it's only my bad luck, since i found  few stones with copper in it, and the ore deposits beneath them were few poor copper blocks. i would like to see a more enginereeing way to do the panning, like smashing rock to make them in gravel and then grinded in sand to then be passed to a shaker table to extract materials including ores. While the crusher will drop a lower amount of minerals, the shaker table should extract them with an higher chance to pay off the extra work;

4: more ways to obtain energy like water wheels or even steam engines like the aeolipile, its simple design will fit perfectly with the medieval age in game, since it wouldn't require high engineering knowledge. Or even a rudimental boiler wich would increase its pressure with an increasing temperature and then transfer the accumulated energy in form of steam to a turbine wich will transform it in kinetic energy.

Edited January 27, 2021 by Livarbesaru

[Streetwind]

43 minutes ago, Livarbesaru said:

I don't want to use the propick since it seems like a radar and it'is far away from a survival aspect without high tecnology

It is actually more or less as close to reality as you can reasonably get within the confines of a video game that's meant to be fun. Look up some youtube videos of how hobbyists prospect by hand. You might be surprised!

The propick requires you to take three different samples in moderately close proximity to get an estimate of the chance of ore to spawn under the prospcted spot. This represents the real life act of ging somewhere, smashing open some rock outcrops, and examining the mineral makeup inside in order to make estimates about the composition of the local rock layers. This was done all over the world in times past. It's not as accurate as modern drill core sampling with chemical analysis, but it was good enough to determine the presence or absence of veins of ore - and that's all we need it to do. And yes, methods like panning are also things that prospectors use to get additional data points from local sediment, but at some point you have to step back from the real world and consider game design.

For a game - especially one with a multiplayer component that can lead to local resources being exhausted - you want things like fallback solutions when the main solution falls. Vintage Story decided to make panning the fallback solution. If you really can't find enough copper in surface deposits or cracked vessels to get those first 40 nuggets to get started, then panning is there as a reliable, if tedious, backup. It works completely independent of any actual ore deposits in the area, and that is fully intentional. You get about one copper nugget per block of material, so if you're seven nuggets short, grab yourself eight blocks of gravel or sand and a wooden pan, and in 99% of all cases you'll be good to go a couple minutes later. If panning was meant to be used for prospectng, then it would have to yield results based on the local ore distribution - and that removes its reliability as a backup solution. Clearly that doesn't work. So the prospecting pick will have to continue to be the singular tool for prospecting.

Knowing what you know now, perhaps it is time to learn to use it...

[DrEngine]

As Streetwind has said: use propick without hesitation. It's quite difficult to locate ore even with propick results. You'll work hard believe me... Once or maybe twice I was not able to locate ore even with propick and I gave up.

Explore caves as much as possible and you'll hit some Zinc or Tin ores sooner or later. Get both. Bismuth isn't problem - they are plenty of Bismuth sources and mining two or three places will give you Bismuth for long time.
When smelting bismuth bronze use the lowest possible zinc % level.

Move to iron age as soon as possible. Iron tool have some using speed advancements but most important much longer durability ! And finally if you find one or two huge iron ore deposits you'll have iron for very very long time.

Steel is another story. Producing steel is time and source (coal) consuming process. Steel has only slightly increased tools using speed and a lot increased durability. But it costs the price (fuel and time).

My personal strategy of using metals:
STEEL:
- sword: slightly higher attack power counts (less count of hits of enemy needed), and long durability;
- pickaxe: only one for occasionaly mining of titanium ore;
IRON:
- pickaxe: standard pickaxe material; good mix of mining speed/durability and cost;
- knife: knife is not so often used as pickaxe BUT producing of any knife has the same complexity as iron one (every metal knife should be smithed); thats why I prefer iron knife;
BRONZE:
- shovel/axe: these tools aren't so much in use as pickaxe so lower Tier is enough;

EDIT: corrected wrong info concerning knives...

Edited January 28, 2021 by DrEngine

[Hal13]

17 hours ago, DrEngine said:

As Streetwind has said: use propick without hesitation. It's quite difficult to locate ore even with propick results. You'll work hard believe me... Once or maybe twice I was not able to locate ore even with propick and I gave up.

which mode did you use? one of them only gives you a percentage how likely you'll find generated ore in that chunk (no matter if there really is or was any), switching between modes seems to be the way to go.

On 1/27/2021 at 2:09 PM, Livarbesaru said:

1. Its the lack of falling meteorites , since the game has meteoric iron but no meteorite falling from the skies. This must be implemented in the game, and while searching for some mods i've found someone made a mod about it, the meteoric expansion mod, and it is beautiful, i was amazed while running in the night in search of food and a big meteor was crushing on the surface with its strong reverbering in the night sky;

Even seeing a meteor is a relatively rare occurence (sure there are meteor showers every so often and theoretically about 44,000kg of material enter earths atmosphere daily, but outside of meteor showers you rarely see even only one meteor, heck even while there is a shower you only see it if the sky is clear and there isn't much light around you and it's night), but actually meteorites (stuff not burned up in the atmosphere, but actually hitting the surface) are even rarer (according to NASA "Typically less than 5 percent of the original object will ever make it down to the ground. These meteorites, pieces of meteors that are found, typically range between the size of a pebble and a fist.", not too mention most, about 95%, are just stone meteorites), chunks of the size you find in craters in the VS world are once in several centuries or even millenia events, the last ones comparable in size (but not iron) were the one exploding above Chelyabinsk in 2013 and the Tunguska event in 1908, sure every few years a meteorite of a few kilograms reaches the ground (still nearly never iron) but that's barely comparable to the meteors you find in VS.

Meteor showers as some aesthetic thing in the sky once in a while would be a nice thing to have though as i'm never able to see one here.

 

On 1/27/2021 at 2:09 PM, Livarbesaru said:

2. the oceans are empty without fish or other aquatic creature, this is another aspect to be added since it will bring a very important survival method, fishing and boats;

 

On 1/27/2021 at 2:09 PM, Livarbesaru said:

4: more ways to obtain energy like water wheels or even steam engines like the aeolipile, its simple design will fit perfectly with the medieval age in game, since it wouldn't require high engineering knowledge. Or even a rudimental boiler wich would increase its pressure with an increasing temperature and then transfer the accumulated energy in form of steam to a turbine wich will transform it in kinetic energy.

afaik that's both on the roadmap to be added, the Steam Age is the planned end age of technology for the vanilla game.

 

 

i personally use bronze only for 1 hammer, 1 anvil and 1 pickaxe (and it takes ages to find enough not copper to make that), with the bronze pickaxe i then mine the iron i normally hae found until then and go to the iron age right away (and then normally go over to make everything out of iron, might change now with steel introduced, but am not that far into the new game, i start anew each major update).

Edited January 29, 2021 by Hal13

[DrEngine]

On 1/29/2021 at 4:15 AM, Hal13 said:

which mode did you use? one of them only gives you a percentage how likely you'll find generated ore in that chunk (no matter if there really is or was any), switching between modes seems to be the way to go.

 

I used both of them. The first one (density) to localize suitable place (maximum %) at the surface. I mine down then to find maximum by the second method. And finally mine horizontally in both directions to find maximum. However some ores (typically sphalerite) - huge amount means not much blocks. So I missed easily ore during my first attempts to use propick without much experience.
I'm able to use propick effectively now. However I have got so much ores now I don't need to mine a lot now and ore occasionaly founded by exploring caves is enough.. Only that damn sphalerite is very rare to find and I'm out of the zinc sources again and again.

[RobinHood]

Maybe we could upgrade the panning also into tier2 or tier3 ....

Bit more sphalerite by upgrading would be nice, and no flintsone e.g. after upgrade, after upgrading. First panning are from wood, second panning from bronze, last panning from iron or silver? or kine of automatic/mechanic panning as the second or third panning.