Make stone edge more fun

[heptagonrus]

After I suggested adding visual effects to knapping here, I was trapped by this idea and have a wider suggestion.

What do you guys think about adding nice small things to the early game, when players has no powerful tools, big inventory, house? 

Like adding more visual significance to all simple tasks, or giving small gifts/power-ups for tasks, ... To encourage and amuse newcomers from the beginning.

And maybe shift the first impression a bit into humorous and adventurous one.

Later in the game the player is a bit more safe and can enjoy game's beauty more when exploring.

Also smiting with all the sparks and sounds. Molding. ... Variety of tools and stuff to do.

But at stone edge - weak tools, lack of inventory, constant danger, most likely low knowledge of game progression, low knowledge of surroundings ...

Achievements with good small rewards, like an extra inv slot for cutting first cattail, might be nice.

Or some nice items from first killed animals, like golden ring from a wolf or seeds from deer ...

And visuals. Unfortunately I can't think about anything else except knapping.

[redram]

I think some good fur-based clothing would be fun.  Really caveman-looking stuff.  Also more stone-age weapons (sling), and also animal-powered contraptions.  Aside from that I don't know that anything is going to make the vanilla stoneage more 'fun'.  I think that it would probably be better if there were a mod that extended the content in the stone-age (including allowing farming), and either disabled or greatly increased the difficulty of obtaining metals.  Stuff like eliminating copper nuggets on the surface (or making them just 1 unit of metal each), and requiring Stroam's firepit-breaks-stone mechanic, and making all ores extremely burdensome.  Then those people really interested in stone-age stuff could go that route.  Personally I'm not all that interested in hanging around the stone age for extended periods of time.

[tony Liberatto]

Personally, I would like the game to be coded in a way that players would have to follow the western historic technological development.

So players would only be able to create any metal tools once they had built a base, developed farms, and domesticated animals.

Metal tools are not essential for surviving or even building nice things, they just make the job easier. Just Ask the Incas who did not even had the wheel, but built cities bigger than anything existing in Europe at the time.