This game seems to discourage traveling, even in Exploration mode

[BearWrestler]

We have a small 3-player private server and we decided to make a trip to the equator. The distance to cross is huge, even though we generated the world with Exploration settings.

What we soon realized is that this game tends to punish you a lot for a nomadic lifestyle. Temporal gears are really rare and getting enough to change the spawn for three players takes dozens of hours of play (despite killing any drifters we encounter). Given how easily this game spawns enemies on top of your head in confined spaces, we had to interrupt the trip several times because a team member died and spawned all the way at the base, which was further and further away. Nowadays getting back wastes the whole play session, and we still have only found two temporal gears out the three needed to make one base switch.

I feel like a system similar to Minecraft (switch spawn by sleeping in any bed) or even Ark (respawn at any bed) would be more conducive to actual exploration. All this beautiful world generation is kinda wasted if you're forced to stick within a close radius of your base forever. In the spirit of the game, some investment could perhaps be required to make a bed safe for respawn, for example putting it in a 7x7x7 room - a bit like cellars work. Requiring the walls to be made of wood, cobblestone, stone or glass would be a good way to require investing. Or instead of a bed, perhaps a more thematic alternative like building, perhaps even sculpting a kind of totem pole to set up your tents around (there a mod that provides pretty nice tents).

Not being able to take long trips feels weird especially since our prehistoric ancestors were mostly nomadic. Curious to have the devs' and players' opinion on whether you think it's a problem, and how it could be fixed.

[LazyRoll]

I cannot agree more! Even more impossible to explore further when you play standard. Some mechanics needs to be reworked for better player experience, not punishment...

[Streetwind]

TL;DR: supporting this gameplay style is best provided by the modding community, not by the game itself. Read on to find out exactly why.

 

You are absolutely correct, Vintage Story does not support groups of people moving all other the place without severe consequences for dying. But in all fairness, that is a bit like saying that Doom Eternal punishes you for attempting to be a stealthy sniper-assassin type. Like, that's a perfectly fine way to play an action game, even a completely linear one - but Doom Eternal is built from the ground up to be a game where you rush forward guns blazing and screaming bloody murder at the top of your lungs. Even if you really like the way Hitman, Sniper Elite, and Assassin's Creed play, expecting Doom Eternal to support that kind of gameplay is a wee bit unfair to the game.

Games are often built with a specific kind of gameplay in mind. Sometimes, they also support alternatives by happenstance, and that is certainly a plus. But there comes a point at which supporting an alternative starts infringing on the original gameplay design and actively makes it worse.

 

To really properly support nomadic group gameplay like you and your friends are looking for, what you need is a player-count-agnostic mobile respawn point. Take, for example, Space Engineers. In that game, the player can respawn at any medical bay they have been given access to, and by the very nature of the game, any block can be mounted on a vehicle. That is Space Engineers' core gameplay concept: from the smallest remote-controlled drone to gigantic mobile bases and warp-capable space stations, the player can build any vehicle their heart desires. Everything in the game is designed to facilitate this core concept. In fact, for the greatest part of its 8-year history, the creative building mode was the game's main mode. Despite the fact that a survival mode was available from early on, it was limited to "you need to dig up ore and wait for this machine to spit out parts, and by the way, your oxygen supply is limited". That was it. It pretty much only existed because some people liked to grind. It took a very long time for the survival mode to be anything more than a token effort, and even today, you practically need mods to make it feel truly complete.

But, it does have an unlimited mobile respawn system. It does have that going for it, which is nice, because it does support nomadic gameplay quite well. There are youtube series where people set out with the specific goal of living on a mobile base that they need to build from scratch and move it around the whole planet or take it to space or some other far-flung goal. With the right selection of mods, it can be a genuinely difficult challenge.

On the other hand, it kind of is part of why the survival mode isn't very good, because you can simply corpse rush any challenge in the game with zero penalty beyond losing your inventory. You even get free tools on respawn, so you can get right back to what you were doing. And for Space Engineers, that is okay, since the core gameplay concept is "build cool stuff". The game will never be a hardcore survival experience out of the box, because it doesn't want to be.

 

Getting back on the topic of Vintage Story, and you can immediately see the difference in design direction. Vintage Story wants to be that hardcore survival experience out of the box that Space Engineers intentionally avoids. Vintage Story wants you to be genuinely afraid of dying, and it wants to make taking measures against the dangers inherent to death feel like an achievement. This is why setting your respawn point is harder than in many other games. And why Wilderness Surival Mode goes the extra step of intentionally respawning you far away from anywhere you've been before.

But it's not the only difference - and perhaps not even the biggest one.

Where in Space Engineers, anything can be mobile if you want it to, Vintage Story does not support that. You cannot make a charcoal pile on a wagon. You cannot make a windmill, a quern, a helvehammer on a wagon. You cannot make an enclosed space with warmth bonuses on a wagon. Heck, you cannot even make a campfire on a wagon. The game does not have the physics simulation required to support a concept like a wagon - a moving entity that can support a block grid on top of itself, and keep it independent from the world's own block grid.

So let's say Vintage Story goes and implements support for easily-accessed mobile respawns for a group of players, so they can have their nomadic lifestyle. What will the nomads find? Well, they'll find that they keep having to stop for increasingly long times. Because they need to make charcoal so they can smelt metal. Because they need to grow flax which gates so much content in this game. Because steel takes forever to process. And the further they progress in the game. the more stationary infrastructure needs to be raised every time they stop, and then torn back down to get back to moving. Maybe it'll no longer take a whole play session for one dead player to return to the group, but now it'll take one whole play session to tear down the base and get it ready for moving. You also cannot do classic nomad things, like keeping herds of livestock with you on the move.

So the result is mainly that the nomads feel dissatisfied with other aspects of the game, which do not really cater to how they want to play it. And meanwhile, the base-building players will find that the change cheapened their experience, as it is no longer an achievement to ensure that your eventual respawn is adequately prepared.

In essence, in trying to please everyone, you have truly pleased no one. You've made the core gameplay concept worse, and gained very little for it, if anything at all.

 

So what's the solution here? Mods. It needs to be mods, because the only way to truly get the nomad experience down pat is to break a lot of what the base game is. Beyond just the respawn mechanic, you'll need to adjust many other things to avoid requiring so much stationary infrastructure and processing time. Making all those changes in the base game would kill what the base game is meant to be.

[Thalius]

The nomadic lifestyle is indeed a challenge in Vintage Story, and I love it. The longest single trip I've made in survival mode (and as a side-note, only using stone age tools the entire time), covered a span of around 80k blocks. It ranged from 37k-ish south to 40k north to the huge arctic range in my server world.  I survived eating cooked red and bush-meat, and scavenging for berries along the way.  I slept in quickly made cob huts on grass mats, and spent the early morning time killing drifters through murder holes in the side of my cob dwelling as I waited for the beginning of sunrise.  I set waypoints for interesting features, and occasionally made reed storage baskets to place things in that I found along the way and wanted to perhaps come back later to gather.  A goal I have is to make the run again, establishing markers and campsites along the way, so a full day's run lands me at another camp along the route and an occasional base in interesting areas that I'll want to spend more time in.

I say all that to explain that, in my opinion, the nomadic lifestyle is entirely possible and rewarding- the more so because of the risk of dying along the way and having to restart the journey.  Take that risk away and you don't really have any challenge at all.  What does it really matter if I die? I can keep my things and respawn at or very near to where I was killed and resume the trip.

The challenge and proposed problem at the root of the OP is that the nomadic group game style is much more difficult.  If you want to stay together as a group along that whole route, then anyone dying becomes a major hindrance to progress.  The trek I made took several hours a night over a period of about one real life week.  If I had been part of a group and any one of us had died along the way, we either would have had to continue without them or wait for longer and longer periods of time for up to several real life days in order for them to catch back up to us the longer the trip went on.

Even with this though- the game still provides the solution. Before setting out, the group needs to stock up on temporal gears, have good leather armor and weapons, poulitces, etc.  This means some significant prep time is needed before setting out, hunting drifters for temporal gears in particular.  Higher tier drifters have higher temporal gear drop rates, so if you want to gather the needed gears in a more reasonable time period, you'll need to head under ground. Grinding out a few temporal storms while at your respawn point is a great way to get them.

So the take away from all that- In my experience, the nomadic lifestyle, even for a group, is entirely doable under current game mechanics.  What the op is asking for is that it be much easier to do, which I can't vote for. There are always mods to make things less or more challenging as you desire.

Or, in place of all that, you can always switch over to creative mode and swipe the needed gears to set a respawn point for the group without the hassle of having to grind for gears.

Just my two rusty gears' worth of opinion on the subject.

~TH~

[junawood]

Just a few thoughts:
VS might be a bit more about plans and preparation than just running extreme distances without any consequences like in games where you always respawn close to where you died and then just keep going. And the planning starts when you create a world, because it makes a huge difference whether you respawn at or close to your set spawn point or up to 10000 blocks away from it, and whether you keep your inventory or your stuff just drops wherever you died. So one extreme could be losing your inventory and respawn 10000 blocks away in whatever direction, and start all over again or try to get back to your home or jump all over the world with respawns with just basic things you gather along the way. Or you keep your stuff and set your respawn point in your house and use dying as an easy and fast way to get back home whenever you don't feel like running around anymore.
So people can play this game in very different ways with just these two settings, but one important point is always that, if you want to reset your spawn point, you need a temporal gear. And if you know how to get them, it can actually be something you just keep collecting while you play and have a chest or more full of them after a while.
And I think, if you want the safety of being able to reset your spawn point on a long trip, a bit of work to collect some temporal gears is worth it and a nice goal in the game, something to be happy about when you achieve it. You could also use some temporal gears to repair translocators and travel far distances back and forth in seconds once you put some effort into finding and repairing them.
Well, and if you want to compare it to our prehistoric ancestors...... I'm pretty sure they didn't have respawn points. They had to make sure that they survived, that they always had everything they needed wherever they were and had to choose wisely what they wanted to carry around, what they could find where (and ruins or traders with all kinds of stuff was not an option) and where to travel at what time of the year.

[l33tmaan]

Just let the player use a temporal gear to set their spawn point to another player and not a specific location. Problem solved, everybody's happy.

[Thalius]

1 minute ago, l33tmaan said:

Just let the player use a temporal gear to set their spawn point to another player and not a specific location. Problem solved, everybody's happy.

Not sure how I feel about that at first glance, but it could be a fun compromise.

Set spawn to group leader on the expedition, and make it a priority to keep them protected and alive. If they die, trip resets. Some risk there, I suppose.

Of course, in a three player group, player A sets spawn to B, B to C and C to A, and there is always a way to get back to where you were in the journey as long as not all of the group dies.  That would feel awkward though, but up to the players to do it that way if they like, I suppose.

Might be a good option for a mod to work in though. I think it would feel odd as a base game feature.

[l33tmaan]

That doesn't sound awkward to me at all.

[Satras]

Another idea:
Make corpses revivable for like 5 minutes using a temporal gear.

[Thalius]

52 minutes ago, Satras said:

Another idea:
Make corpses revivable for like 5 minutes using a temporal gear.

But in the op, the problem is that temporal gears are hard to get in the first place which is why they are asking for easier spawn set mechanics.  This suggestion does not really make it easier, it just makes it a different way to use temporal gears for respawning, but still requires temporal gears. Might even require more of them.

[l33tmaan]

There being only one source of temporal gears seems like part of the issue. It would be nice if there were a more reliable source than just killing drifters and getting good RNG. Maybe if they were guaranteed spawns in certain kinds of ruins? Presumably these could be a bit more dangerous to make up for it, but that might defeat the purpose.

[junawood]

10 minutes ago, l33tmaan said:

There being only one source of temporal gears seems like part of the issue.

Great that that is actually not the case. Drifters, traders, ruins, boney soil... you got some options. And some traps around your base and drifter "harvest" every morning can get you a really good amount of temporal gears after a while.

[Satras]

22 minutes ago, Thalius said:

But in the op, the problem is that temporal gears are hard to get in the first place which is why they are asking for easier spawn set mechanics.  This suggestion does not really make it easier, it just makes it a different way to use temporal gears for respawning, but still requires temporal gears. Might even require more of them.

I think it would add an option for temporal gear management. You want to do something dangerous? Use one temporal gear to set a spawn point nearby and return quickly. You want to travel in a group for a long distance but don't expect to die a lot? Keep your temporal gear for a revivification in case one of you dies anyway.

[l33tmaan]

25 minutes ago, junawood said:

Great that that is actually not the case. Drifters, traders, ruins, boney soil... you got some options. And some traps around your base and drifter "harvest" every morning can get you a really good amount of temporal gears after a while.

I always forget about panning, and I don't think I've ever seen a trader with a gear before... still, most of these options rely on RNG or farming drifters. Like I said, something more reliable would be nice. I don't think a nomadic lifestyle has to be so different from the rest of the game that it can only be done with mods, that seems silly. 

[BearWrestler]

Thanks guys for your well thought-out input.

For our game, for now I decided to mod in a large increase in temporal gears spawn rate from drifters and see how it goes. Unless I'm missing something this rate is the exact same in Wilderness Survival, Survival and Exploration. Without removing all sense of danger, it would make a lot of sense to be able to change your group's base at least every thousand blocks you travel, in a mode called "Exploration" - as long as you hit a few caves and ruins along the way. So I think there should be a multiplier to the temporal gear spawn rate according to the difficulty, just like there seems to be for rusty gears.

I've considered all the ideas that have been put forward, and in the end I think this game would benefit most from having multiple bases on the map you can respawn from, in Survival and Exploration mode (not Wilderness Survival). I don't like everything about Ark, but it has a pretty nice balance in that you can cut down on repetitive travel by teleporting naked to other beds you own, but when you want to actually move your stuff around, you need to mount a proper expedition with a bunch of dinosaurs that can carry heavy stuff, with a real risk of losing everything in an ambush. In short, sticking close to current Vintage story mechanics, if using a temporal gear created a new spawn point to pick from after death instead of replacing the existing one, it would encourage you to go further from your original base and make more risky journeys, knowing that you don't have to lose your main base's spawn point just to create intermediate ones along your trip.
It also increases the potential play variety: take a break from your main base by respawning at your jungle base and working there for a while. You can't easily transfer materials between the two without finding a translocator, but the change of scenery keeps things fresh.
For sure this would gradually increase the total area on the map where you can "corpse-rush" (which amounts to a radius around each spawn point), but given the pretty much infinite world, most of the world would still remain a hostile wilderness. For players who dislike the map feeling more and more conquered and civilised, we can always have a maximum number of respawn bases: having two, i.e. your main and one that you leapfrog every 1000-3000 blocks would already be much more conducive to exploration.

TL;DR here are my suggestions to improve Exploration Mode:

• Increase temporal gear drop rate.
• Let the player set multiple spawn points (potentially with a configurable limit on how many you can set, and/or a minimum distance between them).

@Thalius Stocking up on more than 2-3 non-stackable temporal gears is not really an option given how limited inventory is, if we want to gather materials during the trip. So even if we had spent our precious game time grinding those (which TBH would probably kill any desire to play this game due to sheer boredom), assuming we set a new spawn every 1000 blocks or so to keep downtime after death somewhat reasonable, we wouldn't get far.

@Streetwind I think keeping herds of livestock would be a wonderful addition to the game. Both for a fully nomadic lifestyle and a seasonal one where you head for the greener pastures in the mountains in the summer. I don't think we need or want a mobile helve hammer - semi-realistic heavy industry means having a fixed base somewhere, at least unless the game one day extends to the age of petrol-based heavy machinery. But pack animals that can carry a lot of your heavy stuff would be welcome, as well as UI commodities to make packing and unpacking a bit less cumbersome.
In the current state of the game I see the fully nomadic lifestyle as either something temporary until you settle down at your ideal location, or just a lifestyle choice whereby you give up on the higher tiers of the tech tree. Eventually, perhaps the game can spawn in some poor villagers whose main purpose in life is to be raided Viking-style for their delicious flax, or provide some other loot and exploration-based way to unlock the advanced stuff.

[Onsdag]

The problem I see is this game both actively encourages exploration while simultaneously punishing exploration.

The game encourages exploration by:

• Being a survival game. By their very nature survival games require you to explore your surroundings, gather resources, and craft items to better increase your chances of survival.
• Being a 'civilization' game. Closely related to the above, Vintage Story touts itself as a game where you "Progress through the ages," from the stone age to copper, bronze, iron, and steel age. More than just simply survival, advancing your civilization often requires you to travel far and explore many different aspects of the game in order to "Progress through the ages."
• Having "Immensely large, immensely diverse procedural worlds." The default world size is 1 Million x 1 Million voxels or meters. Having such a mind-bogglingly huge and procedurally generated world encourages the exploration of said world. According to the VS homepage "Vintage Story utilizes a great deal of procedural technology to create immensely diverse landscapes, climate conditions, and geological features to always keep exploration fresh and exciting." By the very nature of this procedural generation you will need to explore far and wide to find certain minerals, plants, trees, animals, etc., not to mention looking for a place to settle down and call home that has the right aesthetics, weather conditions, resources, etc.
• The lore and storytelling. In Vintage Story you "Find yourself in a ruined world reclaimed by nature and permeated by unnerving temporal disturbances." For all intents and purposes you are in something of a post-apocalyptic world where civilization has been destroyed and "it is up to you to piece together who you are and what has happened from the little evidence that remains." The game encourages you to explore ancient ruins, lost civilizations, read journals, books, and just dig deeper in search of what has happened to this ancient world.
• Having traders. Some things may be hard to come across, and having a nearby trader can somewhat alleviate the problem of finding those resources. However, you will need to do a lot of exploring to find these traders.
• Being multiplayer. Whether you're part of a nomadic tribe (as in the OP), or you're somewhat of an introvert, or are just looking for a place apart from the rest of the world to claim as your own, or you're part of a larger clan dividing out community labors, or even a merchant looking to sell rare goods for a profit, multiplayer worlds tend to expand out and explore the world more than single player worlds.
• Weather. Different regions have differing climates and weather patterns. Looking to build a windmill? You'll need to do some searching to find a place with sufficient enough winds to consistently power it. Wanting to grow a killer garden? You'll be looking for areas with good rainfall and good soil qualities. Don't like thunderstorms and want to avoid the rain? Searching for the right weather conditions can take some time and travel.
• Seasons. Grass and foliage changing colors can make the landscape look completely different from season to season. It may be worth revisiting some areas just to take in the changes that the seasons bring.
• Exploring caves. You can find evidence of lost ruins, ancient civilizations, and even translocators in cave systems. Furthermore, it is often easier to find different minerals and ores in caves than by digging for them. This makes going out of your way to find caves a useful endeavor.
• Animal husbandry. If you're looking to get started in animal husbandry and beekeeping then you'll need to do a lot of exploration. Different animals spawn in different regions and climes.
• Farming. To first get started in farming you'll need to find and harvest the wild plants for their seed. Or find the seed from ancient ruins. This again necessitates exploration. Especially for the more rare and hard to find seeds/plants.

All of these (and probably a bunch more not mentioned) game design elements actively encourage and reward the player for exploring the world around them and traveling to far off regions. And yet, at the very same time, the game actively discourages the players from exploring or traveling far distances by having:

• Hard to set respawn. In order to set your respawn you have to first obtain a temporal gear, which are difficult to get - the primary method is by fighting hostile mobs which can easily kill new players. And the drop rate is extremely low - whether from Drifters or from panning, it's going to take you a long time just to get one temporal gear. Not only that, but temporal gears also have other uses, such as repairing translocators (you need 3 gears for each translocator), and as an emergency way of restoring sanity (temporal stability). This means once you've established your respawn point then you're pretty much stuck within 1,000 blocks or less of that location. Is it possible to go out further? Sure, but the farther out you go the riskier it is and the harder it will be to retrieve your corpse should you die.
• Easy to die. Especially early in the game. From wolves, to rams, to falling down an unexpected pit or cliff, to Drifters, to freezing or starving - death is a constant threat. This means, coupled with the respawn problem above, that you're actively encouraged to quickly set up a home base or place of safety and stay near that location for the rest of the game.
• Limited inventory. At the very start of the game you only have your hotbar for inventory, and it'll take some work to get your first inventory space. Longer for anything decent. With limited inventory space comes more frequent trips back to base. This means it'll be a long time before you can comfortably start making extended trips into the wilderness to explore.
• Travel speed. For as ginormous as the world is, there is only one method of travel - by foot. This means you'll be walking everywhere. Sure, you can sprint for short distances, but that consumes hunger quickly. And with only walking available this means you're not going to be doing much exploring. If I remember correctly it takes about a full in-game day to travel about 1000 meters. There is one form of fast travel - temporal translocators - but these are locked behind actually finding them and also finding the rare resources required to repair them.
• Food availability and hunger issues. Wild grown foods is only a temporary and limited food source. Once you've harvested that food source it's either gone for good (vegetables) or takes some time to regrow (fruits). Hunting is a possibility, but comes with its own risks. Another thing to note is that food, especially early game food, has a limited shelf life. This means if you're out exploring then half of the time you're more worried about finding food then doing actual exploring. Otherwise you'll need to establish a base and work your way up to getting long-term food production going before you can comfortably start exploring without worrying about starving to death.
• Harsh winters. Winters are no joking matter. Food all but becomes impossible to procure. Nights are much, much longer - you only have about 8 hours of daylight - and so you're stuck indoors for 16 hours a day while Drifters roam. And then even during daylight hours you can only be outdoors for 3 hours at a time before you'll start to freeze to death. And since it's so atrociously cold outdoors then your hunger rate is greatly increased, meaning you'll burn through your winter reserves like it's nothing. During the winter you're pretty much stuck indoors at your base for all intents and purposes. And if your server/game is set to 30 day months like mine is then you're in it for the long haul. Which means you also have to spend most of the summer preparing for winter - growing your gardens, raising livestock, preserving your food for long-term usage, etc. There's just absolutely no way you're going to be doing any exploring for long periods of time.
• Multiplayer. While multiplayer may encourage exploration it also discourages it due to the progression of time. Everyone has to sleep in bed for time to progress, or you have to have some people log out if they don't have a bed. Since time is always progressing in multiplayer then if someone died then it's less likely they can get to their corpse before their items despawn.
• Nonintuitive game mechanics, poor documentation. Finding out how to do things within the game is not very intuitive and this game has a steep learning curve. Learning how things work or how to do something often requires players to go online to the wiki or watch youtube videos. This translates to spending less time actually exploring, enjoying, and discovering the game within the game itself, and more time in frustration trying to find information online.
• Temporal instability. Heaven forbid you should unwittingly build your base in a temporally unstable area, forcing you to leave your base regularly to regain sanity. Or up and relocate everything after you are already well established. Also, the deeper you go the higher the instability, which makes exploring caves extremely dangerous, annoying, and can only be done in short bursts before having to return to the surface.

I'm sure some of these can be mitigated by changing the game settings or using mods, but then again doing so changes how the designers intended the default game to be experienced. Furthermore, one wouldn't know what game settings they like or want changed unless or until they have played the game for some time. For example, you could change your starting health to be much higher so you don't die as frequently early game, but how does that affect long-term gameplay? Would it make it too easy when everyone is kitted out with the best armors? How about temporal storms - should they be enabled or disabled? Well you really won't know unless you've experienced one in-game and decided whether it's for you or not. I like harsh winters, but then again with having 30 day months then harsh winters can be a bit too much and it's starting to kill the enjoyment for me.

And again, the default game settings is arguably how the designer has chosen the game to be experienced and is optimized for that. And yet, as pointed out above, the game seems to be at odds with itself. It really wants to be an exploration game, with a huge massive world to explore, different procedurally built regions and an interesting backstory, but then at the same time it punishes the players for exploring and discourages them from going very far in order to discover such a wonderful and beautiful world.

[Rai'jin]

I Agree to the need of multiple spawnpoints, like 3 slots or something you could set with gears. But i don't think the drop rate should be increased. got like 2 chests full of this things. I think there should be some quality of life content instead. Like Mounts, Livestock, easy buildable bases, that keep you safe during the night, some palisades or something, killing attacking drifters. There would be a need for some activity during those nights in the camp though. On the way cooking, fishing maybe. Or some not too easy craftable tent that lets you sleep wuite some hours. In my opinion you should still have to prepare a bigger Trip, but i agree thats travel in gerneral should be more easy. A nomadic lifestyle is charming yes, but it should be still really challenging. Maybe there should be some changeable setting for spawn near friends. then everyone is happy i guess  

[AngryRob]

On 6/6/2021 at 7:47 AM, Streetwind said:

To really properly support nomadic group gameplay like you and your friends are looking for, what you need is a player-count-agnostic mobile respawn point. 

You mean like a yurt or a trader cart? 

There is an extreme fundamental flaw with your argument: vintage story is all about resource gates. Want iron? better be in a biome with it. Want leather? better have access to leather making chems. Need salt? maybe you magically spawned ontop of a slat dome?  The resource gates are no joke, and depending on your world settings you WILL have to explore. nothing spawns close to you. you have to find it. So either there needs to be all sorts of alternate ways to make stuff, or the respawn system has to be reworked. 

I think the respawn system needs to be reworked. Have bedrolls set the spawn point, and have temporal gears allow you to respawn with your inventory intact. I have spent months hunting iron, and it's a great reward to find it. So this game very much requires a nomad play style, so why make it hard? A lot of players burn out at the iron age, because of the gates. it stops being fun because iron is hard to find. So, without taking away the realism how can we fix this? we allow them to explore. 

[l33tmaan]

58 minutes ago, AngryRob said:

I think the respawn system needs to be reworked. Have bedrolls set the spawn point, and have temporal gears allow you to respawn with your inventory intact.

Ooh, I like this. I'm not a huge fan of beds being the respawn point, but I can't entirely argue against it either.

[junawood]

On 6/25/2021 at 10:52 PM, Onsdag said:

I'm sure some of these can be mitigated by changing the game settings or using mods, but then again doing so changes how the designers intended the default game to be experienced. Furthermore, one wouldn't know what game settings they like or want changed unless or until they have played the game for some time.

They gave us a loooooong list of options to choose what we like, to have the experience we prefer. That was their intention. And yes, gather some experience to find out what you like and then choose the settings accordingly. I would recommend starting the first world with Exploration Mode (and because it seems like people tend to choose "standard", for reasons like "it's standard", even if the description is not matching what they like to play, I'd also recommend to rename it to something more neutral and descriptive, just like the other game modes, so that people actually choose what sounds like they'd enjoy), and maybe turn on temporal stability to try that or change some other things you might like. And after gathering some experience, try another world with different settings.

 

[junawood]

 

14 hours ago, AngryRob said:

Want iron? better be in a biome with it.

Iron spawns in most rock types, and even though I prefer to build in sandstone areas (no iron in sandstone), I don't really have a problem finding iron, in other stone layers underneath the sandstone or by exploring other areas as well.

14 hours ago, AngryRob said:

Want leather? better have access to leather making chems.

There are some options for what you can use to make leather, and where to get that, so it can be extremely easy or a bit more work, but that work can normally be done or just happen while you progress to the point where you actually have all the other stuff you need for leather.

14 hours ago, AngryRob said:

Need salt? maybe you magically spawned ontop of a slat dome?

You never really NEED salt, unless you WANT to make some special things like cheese. So even though I found salt a few times, and could have bought it from traders quite often, I never really used it.

14 hours ago, AngryRob said:

you WILL have to explore

Yes, you WILL have to explore in most worlds, and exploring is a huge part of the fun. No time for in-game couch potatoes who want to stay in a 1k block radius around their spawn.

14 hours ago, AngryRob said:

nothing spawns close to you.

Err... What? A lot of stuff can spawn really close to you, or even you spawn right on top of it.

 

14 hours ago, AngryRob said:

I have spent months hunting iron, and it's a great reward to find it.

That it's a great reward sounds great, though I don't think you should need months to find iron... I don't know what you did, but maybe change your tactic?

 

13 hours ago, AngryRob said:

we allow them to explore.

Allow yourself to explore by choosing settings you like or are able to deal with. For example, simply choose that you don't lose your inventory when you die, if you don't enjoy the thrill of potentially losing your stuff if you can't make it back to that spot in time (a lot of people seem to enjoy that quite a lot - I don't). Or choose "passive" or "never hostile" for creature hostility if you feel like that keeps you from exploring. In my last world I explored a lot, with mostly standard settings, except for keeping inventory and a few other minor changes, and I think I never reset my spawn point. Right now I'm in a new world (mostly exploration mode settings), exploring a huge area, up to 21k south. I chose "never hostile" and keep my inventory, but I also chose to not reset my spawn point until I find an area for a home, so if I die, it's a long way back (that I can use to pick up some of the stuff I left in baskets along the way). And I love it.

[Heiress]

As for how much the game has things that can only be gotten via exploring it is nevertheless very hard to move long distances, and the consequences are great for dying far away from your spawn point which is hard to change, I don't think this really needs to be changed; Rather I feel this game should as you progress you not give more ways to change your respawn point or move it, (although an interesting way for a mobile respawn point is one that consumes a temporal gear everytime someone respawns at it or something.) but rather to allow the player to gain tools and resources that allow them to move long distances more easily, the teleporters are already a step into this direction, though hugely RNG currently with no control over where you will end up they're nevertheless a perfect example of how player progression can increase the distance you can travel.

So to me the game is lacking in horses, boats, and other methods to travel further faster with more room to carry food and supplies to support that journey, this can even tie into the nomadic playstyle as nomadic players could potentially use these new tools to support themselves in their journey and in well established servers you should have a much less hard time reaching your friend on horseback than on foot if they've decided to venture a rough 50k blocks out from spawn. (though in that case, maybe allowing one to spawn at a friends spawnpoint is still the better way to solve the issue)

I believe this would help the game a lot in its balance of encouraging exploration while also encouraging to set up a sedentary well developed settlement.

If one wanted to fully support the nomadic playstyle the aforementioned mobile respawn point could be on a cart, though as others have discussed I do see how this can detract from the game, but if regular vehicles are added it should be a lot easier to add that to a mod should one want it.

[LuuBluum]

Given that "mountable" entities are already a thing (that's how beds work), I imagine horses and whatnot are already intended to be worked on at some future point.

[Heiress]

Oh yeah certainly, its on the roadmap already, but I believe its still good to talk about them and our expectations as the roadmap isn't very indicative of the exact way the planned features will function and be implemented.

[Maelstrom]

Consider that there's basically 1.5 people coding.  I'm sure they aren't sure how most of the roadmap will function yet.