Jump to content

Few negative impressions after playing 1.15 (up to .1)


heptagonrus

Recommended Posts

So 1.15 update is huge and super cool. Lot of new beautiful features to enjoy. ❤️

But after playing for few weeks, few new features, or older features keep annoying me, making my gaming less enjoyable.
Just want to describe them here, maybe to get some insight from other players or devs.

Some sections are of lesser quality - I recalled them later and was a bit tired already from the writing.
Will update the post and put additional comment if I recall anything more in futire.

 

Rare trees

Summary: impossible to propagate, encourages extermination of forests.

So we got several cool new rare trees: bald cypress, greenspire cypress, ebony, purple heart, larch, walnut.
(I have not found purple, larch, walnut and too lazy to experiment in creative with them. Maybe they have the same "issue", maybe not.)

Ebony and purpleheart are described in changelog as "rare and hard to propagate". But all these trees seem to share the same problem.
They give approximately 0.2-0.5 seeds for fully sheared tree. Even "non-rare" like both cypresses. The tiny greenspire gives a seed per like 5-6 trees (and they are quite rare).
So no way to cut and replant for others. No way to propagate artificially at my base.
All I can do is to travel few times and exterminate the forest to get the logs and few saplings.
Or scavenge vast distances for greenshire cypress and exterminate it everywhere.

I really don't like exterminating stuff, even flowers and berry bushes.

I did hope that "hard to propagate" means some hard mechanics, some additional actions necessary, e..g. to have a special south forward base = tree farm. Or (like a person on Discord or ingame chat said) resin-like mechanics, encouraging keeping forests intact and visiting them to get more seeds. Or mushroom-like.

 

Dead crops / climate info absence

Summary: makes me enjoy farming much less, having no instrument to control the danger to my crops

So now planted crops die if accumulated heat/cold damage is greater than 48 hours. Before 1.15 they just gave reduced harvest.

The problem is that if crop died before maturing, it returns no yield and sometimes returns no seeds.
This is very punishing especially when you have only few seeds to start.

This is tightly connected to another "issue", which now becomes more important:

We don't have any mechanics in game to forecast approximate temperatures in future. Moreover, temperatures may have random swings to cold or heat, thus killing crops even if we have accumulated statistics.

For a new player, who have just found some seeds, there is no way to predict what would temperature be in the next few days.Sure, now at noon it is 20C and at midnight it is 0C. Does it mean that tomorrow there will be no -5 at night? Nope :( Or maybe it is today when the anomaly happened and whole next week it will be 10C noon, -10C midnight.

So planting crops becomes risky and unpredictable, without any way to control it. Especially on servers, where time goes by, and if real life not allows me to login one evening, I will definitely get at least reduced yields.

Maybe some calendar can be added, showing average temperatures per day with possible deviations?

 

Food updates make travelling hard

Summary: absence of foods dedicated for traveling makes traveling less enjoyable

Before 1.15 we had a decent traveling food - bread. It had decent satiety, good fresh time, can be made in decent quantities by manual management of multiple firepits.
And when eaten freed the inventory, so we can carry more stuff on the way home.

Now charred bread is kinda useless - satiety is nearly the same as grain, so not worth wasted time to prepare.
Ordinary bread has less fresh time and requires multiple ovens and lot of firewood.

Pies are decent, but also not much of a fresh time iirc. Also probably don't stack much.

Whole pumpkin stews were removed, so meals are not that worth for travel. Also require to carry pots/crocks/bowls, taking precious inventory.

So it kinda hard to forecast how much food should I carry into the journey, how long will it stay fresh, etc. Instead of exploring I have to do food management.

 

Inventory size stays the same while number of items grows

Summary: despite having more items in game and more items char has to carry, inventory size does not grow from release to release

6 of 10 hotbar slots are usually taken by weapons and tools, only 4 are free. There is no way to quickly swap hotbar slots, e.g. buy some prepared belts, so I ether have to use only 4 slots when doing some work, or constantly manually swap the 6 slots into inventory and back.

Same with inventory. We have more and more stuff to explore, to carry with use when exploting (food), and carry home, but still the same inventory size.

Maybe increase capacity of mid and end game carryable containers with every big release?

Hotbar quick swap would also be cool. E.g. I can pre-fill my forestry tool belt, my warriot tool belt, my builder or miner belts, farming belt. And quick swap them when needed?

 

Chat

Summary: with lot of people actively playing, chat may be distracting, without a way to opt-out

Game becomes more popular, 1.15 attracts people to servers 🥳

General chat contains both chat and in-game events notifications - temporal storms.

When people actively play together, they talk a lot, and this is good. But this makes chat window to constantly appear on the screen, distracting me from my gameplay if I want to just focus on game for now.

And if I disable chat auto-opening, I will miss temporal storm warnings.

Sure, I can ask people to create a group. But it is not a very easy task, with all the commands.
And most people are not comfortable with asking others to stop talking in general chat :(
And it will turn problems of less talkative people into problems for more talkative :(

So imho some improvement is required. I guess I would like to have an option to make chat window appear only when a global notification comes, e,g. of temporal storm,
Or when somebody really asks everyone on the server of something.

 

Multiplayer game becomes too disruptive on real life

Summary: playing VS multiplayer controls my real life too much

So in single player mode we can just press Esc and game will be paused indfinitely. Or can exit the game at any moment and resume when convenient.

In multiplayer this is impossible ofc. Which is expected. But with the mechanics becoming more complicated and punishing, game starts to disrupt real life.
With all the food spoilage, crops dieing - I have to login often just to make sure I harvested the crops before the season, used the food, not just letting it rot, etc.

While it might be fun and even good for the game, sometimes it actually makes me think of stopping playing. Game kinda controls when I should play.
Sometimes I would prefer not to plant crops or manage meals because don't know when I login again. And after not playing for few days it does not feel good to come back to the game to dead crops and rotted storage and spending time on all that instead of just finishing a build.

Also I can't just afk for a bit, because a temporal storm may come and kill me or if I am safe  ruin the game for everybody else who wanted to sleep through :(

And if I am exploring far lands, I can't just logoff for the day - food will rot. I have to keep playing. Or make a temporary cellar which mitigates the issue slightly.

 

Some dropped 3D items are too small

Summary: new 3D item models are beautiful but tiny when dropped, stressful to eyes and players are missing the beauty

The surface copper bits are one of the first achievements of a player and one of the first detailed shiny 3D item objects they see.
They are beautiful, but when dropped - they are too tiny to enjoy their beauty.

Same with the new tree seeds - they are so cool with their simple but detailed enough 3D model, but we NEVER see it in 3D - in inventory it is 2D, on the ground it is kinda just a small dark dot.

And searching for them puts a lot of strain on my eyes. Sure, I can just run around and pick them up.

But it would really be cool if finally getting some seed from a tree was a very distinguishable moment, you clearly saw a decent sized beautiful seed dropping from leaves and falling onto the ground.

Many games exaggerate the size of dropped items or highlight them with outline or spark effects, to make them more visible for players.

Btw, a similar thing with e.g stone tools/weapons. E.g. spears are quite big and enjoyable when thrown and stuck, but when dropped from inventory or put on tool rack - they are small.
Good thing we can enjoy their models when carrying them in active hand.

 

Wind pushing player

Summary: wind pushing player has no use, supports only some graphical settings and is frustrating

This is mostly a repetition of other player's messages, but I agree with them after experiencing it.

The new wind mechanic, pushing player around is extremely annoying and not fully implemented.

Multiple people said they disable "waiving foliage" either because of FPS drop or because it makes the game too stressful to eyes and harder to hit plant things with tools.
E.e. when shearing trees the leaves are shifted from the hitbox, so it is not always easy to hit the correct block to shear. Waiving foliage makes it worse.
And in general, even though it makes the game prettier, I prefer to disable it to reduce visual noise on the screen.

As others said, with it disabled I have nearly no clue when wind starts to blow and push me around. Basically what I feel as if my controls are bugged or the game has some lag.
Imho when the wind is able to push the character, it should be quite a storm clearly visible by lot of debris flying around and heavy sound.
And the visual/hearing clues should come first, before the actual pushing is happening.
Because if not - why not just randomly shift player position from time to time, making him/her fall into ravines or miss targets etc.

This mechanics kinda has no use, feels like it was added just to annoy people and mess with their controls. Which is fine since the game is "lovecraftian survival", i.e. a bit of horror, but definitely not my type of games.

Edited by heptagonrus
added about wind
  • Like 9
  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I do agree and disagree with a few points. I support the reasoning behind making rare trees hard/impossible to farm. They are supposed to be a limited resource, something truly rare. It's not like this has any gameplay implications, there are other trees to use. Thought the tiny cypress seed drop rate may be a bit too small indeed.

For farming, I'd want some definite info on the tool tips when the temperatures will drop out of that plants range or when they will drop into the range. Something like "Growable here for 16 more days" or "Growable here in 4 days" when looking at the seeds or crops themself. It wouldn't be realistic, but it would allow proper planning, which I feel would be much more valuable from a gameplay perspective. The user still has to manually calculate or estimate if that is enough time to fully grow the crop.

I don't think the bread "nerf" was too bad. Meals in crocks are the intended food for travel and they last for a long time, a cellar can also be build everywhere really quickly.

While I don't think the update caused a lot of inventory problems, I'm generally for a bit of a rework in form of a weight based system, as it would solve all these problems and allow for more inventory management improvements.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Oh, really like the "Growable here" approach, both summarizes and hides all the complexity from the player and still gives stuff to calculate and plan.
But it might revert all the complexity developers wanted to add with crops dieing, seasons etc.

Btw, a similar thing may be good for food. In addition to "fresh/spoil" tooltip, it could have "will keep satiated for 8-10 days", where 8 is when doing lot of physical activity and 10 when just walking steadily. Maybe I should make it a separate suggestion.

I hate crocks for travel :( So tiny. I would prefer to take cooking pot, since it has 6 portions and doesn't rot too soon. Crocks are imho more for harsh winters.

Yeah, weight system would allow to pick flowers and similar light stuff just along the main travel, nice.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Talking about food spoilage only, everything would be kinda fine if there would be horses (or other mounts)/hot air balloons/gliders/surface TL's (custom ones?) for faster travelling & extra storage... Everything else is just 1 step forward, 2 steps back, they should introduce some buffs with every nerf to the game for staying or becoming more enjoyable IMHO. 🧐

Edited by LazyRoll
  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

We aim to be 2 steps forward, 1 step back ... :) 1.15 adds new crops and foods and makes it more viable to live permanently in a warm climate (which looks beautiful btw) although food does spoil faster in hot places.  Some of the other things you've mentioned are going to be on the future roadmap, players need more ways to travel far and wide.  Interesting that you mentioned airships, I've noticed a splendid-looking new Airships mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/viescraft

Meanwhile careful consideration is being given to all the points @heptagonrus has raised.

The weather forecasting tooltip suggestion would be extremely complex to implement.  Even if it is possible to forecast the future in-game weather with perfect accuracy (it probably is) there is then the question of the exact impact of that future weather on the crop. It's complex bearing in mind that the new crop damage is an hour by hour system, for example if it's cold in the night and warm in the day the crop should be OK or at least not take too much damage.  The game would therefore have to simulate a lot of weather, it's not just a question of creating a weather forecast for a time 14 days from now.  Even if it is possible to do all that, that still won't be an accurate guide to whether the crop will live or die.  The growth time of crops is extremely variable depending on crop type, moisture levels, and fertilizer levels, and fertilizer levels for example will go down over time while the crop is in the ground (unless a slow-release fertilizer was added to the farmland).

An easier approach would be simple rules of thumb for players: don't plant warm or hot climate crops in colder regions and expect them to survive the winter ...  We can probably figure out a general guide to the temperature range in a region, month by month (although there will still be some anomalies, as in real life).

Edited by radfast
  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

31 minutes ago, radfast said:

The weather forecasting tooltip suggestion would be extremely complex to implement.  Even if it is possible to forecast the future in-game weather with perfect accuracy (it probably is) there is then the question of the exact impact of that future weather on the crop. It's complex bearing in mind that the new crop damage is an hour by hour system, for example if it's cold in the night and warm in the day the crop should be OK or at least not take too much damage.  The game would therefore have to simulate a lot of weather, it's not just a question of creating a weather forecast for a time 14 days from now.  Even if it is possible to do all that, that still won't be an accurate guide to whether the crop will live or die.  The growth time of crops is extremely variable depending on crop type, moisture levels, and fertilizer levels, and fertilizer levels for example will go down over time while the crop is in the ground (unless a slow-release fertilizer was added to the farmland).

I will disagree here (I could be wrong in my assumptions, I'm not a developer of the game like you, but I have some knowledge of the code), it should be rather easy to implement. I wouldn't disagree without a specific reason, but the weather already gets forecast: For the snow-accumulation simulation. Admittedly, that whole implementation is rather complex. The thing I want is much simpler and easier to implement: Just getting the time when the temperature will be too low or high (or low or high enough) for a plant to grow without taking frost damage. It's not a telling the player if it would be wise to plant the crop, but it helps.

The implementation would just be sampling the local temperature until the value gets too high/low or high/low enough for damage. This can be done rather fast, so it can be done on the fly. Since sampling is not entirely accurate (even with sampling each hour within the year), the value isn't either, but that is not really a big problem, since even the worst case scenario wouldn't have a lot of frost damage.

Temperature sampling is already something that is technically in the code (https://github.com/anegostudios/vssurvivalmod/blob/master/Systems/Temperature.cs), but the current implementation is broken for some reason, probably not updated to recent changes.

All of this is based on the assumption that forecasting frost damage would only require knowing the temperatures and that getting temperatures at specific times is rather trivial, which could be wrong, I'm not an expert, but even if it is wrong, I'm interested in what assumption is wrong.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You make some good points.  I'll discuss in detail with Tyron what is possible, bearing in mind we are also strongly desirous of getting 1.15 out even if it is not quite perfect.  There is also more general "climate" forecasting which is used by the worldgen system for wild crops, plants and trees, all of which have a specific temperature range.  It's less precise but maybe more useful to players in the end, as it is effectively an indication of whether the crop should be viable all the year round.

My main concern with your proposal is not the forecasting code / math, but the fact it could be misleading - it might say the weather will be good for the next 14 days, but 14 days later the crop is only 20% grown and it still dies before it reaches maturity.  Some crops (especially Pineapple) can be slow growing by design.  All crops can grow significantly slower than expected, if moisture or fertilizer are lacking.

Edited by radfast
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

@RobinHood You might have mixed up your breads there. In 1.15, the bread you know has been moved to require a proper oven. The stuff you make in the firepit is a different, new, lower-quality bread. It intentionally has less saturation.

If you want the old bread back, you'll need to build yourseld an oven.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm okay with the inventory size (coming up with ways to deal with that is a part of the game I like), but the rest are things I'm also a bit sceptic about, but I haven't played any 1.15 yet.

In general, please don't make the game more complex, complicated and...annoying, just to make it "more realistic", without real benefit in gameplay. Yeah, this game is supposed to be not too "magical" and easy like others, and a lot of stuff kinda realistic, which is fun, but if you get too close to all the problems you have to face in real life...... :/ Real life tends to suck in a lot of ways, and I really don't want too much of that reproduced in a game, cause... it's still a game, and I want to play it to have fun. You need some obstacles and challenges, but if there are too many rules to consider, too much to keep in mind, organize and memorize, too much stuff is out of your control and can ruin things for you, it gets annoying and stressful. Especially for casual players who don't want to "study" the game or people on multiplayer servers where time and processes don't stop when you log out. An oven for bread? Great. Crops damaged and not growing in winter? Realistic. Crops damaged or dying when it gets too cold in winter and too hot in summer and constantly checking C for the temperature and guessing how much it could change the following days and nights until you can harvest, and doing that for each type of crop or even every single plant because they have different numbers for temperature and growth time and even moisture and fertilizer for each block having an influence....... *sigh

 

14 hours ago, radfast said:

The weather forecasting tooltip suggestion would be extremely complex to implement.  Even if it is possible to forecast the future in-game weather with perfect accuracy (it probably is) there is then the question of the exact impact of that future weather on the crop. It's complex bearing in mind that the new crop damage is an hour by hour system, for example if it's cold in the night and warm in the day the crop should be OK or at least not take too much damage.

 

15 hours ago, radfast said:

The growth time of crops is extremely variable depending on crop type, moisture levels, and fertilizer levels, and fertilizer levels for example will go down over time while the crop is in the ground (unless a slow-release fertilizer was added to the farmland).

But why adding even more complexity to an already complex system to a point where it's really questionable what the benefit to gameplay is, and then countering it with a forecasting system or whatever or that even being too complicated because it's too complex...? That doesn't make much sense to me. Please just don't add unbeneficial complexity that creates problems that you then have to invest a lot of time and effort in to solve.

 

15 hours ago, radfast said:

new crops and foods and makes it more viable to live permanently in a warm climate (which looks beautiful btw) although food does spoil faster in hot places.

Yes, I love playing in hot climate and building something in a beautiful jungle, and the new plants make me really excited to move back there after the update! ❤️ But then I created a test world again and found a stunning area where I would have loved to build and live and already had an idea in mind that I was really excited about, and when I checked C, it was again one of those rain "almost all the time" areas that are basically ruined since we got that weather update, even with the changes later. :( And I really, really don't know what the benefit was to add those areas, ruined by almost constant rain and rain sound and dark clouds. And I really, really do hope that that might be changed again with an update so that we can enjoy those areas again and can build great stuff there.

 

Or winter is kinda nice (definitely really beautiful!), but mostly has negative effects and for a lot of people ends up as something to avoid as much as possible by sleeping as much as possible, and some struggling to find something to do and finding it a bit boring, and instead of just doing whatever you feel like doing and would enjoy the most, you start planning if it wouldn't be better to do X instead and keep the other thing for another season, and then you do a lot of Y in one season, and a lot of Z an another, maybe more than you would want to do of that in a row, and it kind of gets in the way of just enjoying the game and doing the things you want to do whenever you want to do them. Yes, you can create a world with spring forever or move to a warm or hot climate to avoid winter, but it's still a bit sad that winter becomes another part of the game that makes people think of how to avoid it. Like areas with temporal instability or areas with rain almost all the time or like temporal storms, as discussed here in another thread. I think it could become a problem if we get too many aspects of the game that are more in the "how can I avoid this" category than the "this is really fun" category.

 

Back to 1.15, a couple of days ago, Tyron posted on Discord "Storm level wind will now affect your movement - wind applies a constant force, so walking downwind is faster, walking upwind is slower.", which is another thing I'm a bit sceptic about. :/  I turned "waving foliage" off a long time ago to make forests less horrible for fps and potentially my GPU, and because it was annoying when there was a strong wind that blew the texture out of the hitbox, so you see the texture of the leaves block in one place, but have to hit somewhere else to break it. So now I can only hear wind, but not see how strong it is or in what direction it blows. That means I'll be pushed around by an invisible force in a direction I'll only know/guess when my movement is already affected? That does not really sound like something to look forward to. :/

 

Okay, that's a lot of negative stuff (and maybe too much for this thread, then: sorry), so I want to add that I really love, love, love this game (almost 1.5k hours now might be proof ;) )!  ❤️ And there's so much great stuff in every update! But there are some things that make me worry a bit in what direction the game is heading. Yes, this is not my game and it might end up as a game for other people who enjoy different things than me, but as I love this game so much, I can only hope that it stays a game that I love with as many aspects of it as possible. ;)❤️ 

 

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 hours ago, radfast said:

My main concern with your proposal is not the forecasting code / math, but the fact it could be misleading - it might say the weather will be good for the next 14 days, but 14 days later the crop is only 20% grown and it still dies before it reaches maturity.  Some crops (especially Pineapple) can be slow growing by design.  All crops can grow significantly slower than expected, if moisture or fertilizer are lacking.

There are rough grow times already on the tooltips, but you are right that growth time can vary a lot from that, since all the mechanics around plant growth (nutrition, water) are influencing growth time. But I still think providing potentially lightly misleading information would be better than no giving information at all.

Moreover, growth times are planned to be changed to be longer, more realistic in the future, iirc. So players would likely only get one harvest of grain in a year. Then faster growth times don't really make sense as the reward for fertilizing and watering, as the player would likely still only get one harvest per year, regardless if he "maxed out" on fertilizer and watering. The plants may grow a bit quicker, but since there is no time for another full cycle in that year, that doesn't translate to additional harvests, it has no real benefit at all.

It would then make sense to move to a new balancing lever: Yield. With longer growth times, yield would need to be increased anyway, so it would make sense to then move the whole system over to a yield based system. Growth time would change to be static, unaffected by nutrition or water, so the tooltip on the seeds wouldn't even be misleading anymore, the plant would become harvestable after the fixed growth time. Nutrition and water would now determine how many yields (and maybe even seeds) the plants will drop upon harvest. Plants could potentially even be grown beyond being harvestable to increase yields further, rewarding trying to maximize growth times and the additional fertilizer and watering investment.

1 hour ago, junawood said:

Yes, I love playing in hot climate and building something in a beautiful jungle, and the new plants make me really excited to move back there after the update! ❤️ But then I created a test world again and found a stunning area where I would have loved to build and live and already had an idea in mind that I was really excited about, and when I checked C, it was again one of those rain "almost all the time" areas that are basically ruined since we got that weather update, even with the changes later. :( And I really, really don't know what the benefit was to add those areas, ruined by almost constant rain and rain sound and dark clouds. And I really, really do hope that that might be changed again with an update so that we can enjoy those areas again and can build great stuff there.

I don't think areas with common rain are such a big issue. The problem probably is that rain can last rather long, I think shorter but more frequent rains would serve areas like rain forests in the tropics better. You have to understand that weather is intentionally a bit on the longer side, because the snowfall simulation needs it, for it to be accurate and performant enough, but since it never snows in the tropics, some tweaks could probably be made.

1 hour ago, junawood said:

Or winter is kinda nice (definitely really beautiful!), but mostly has negative effects and for a lot of people ends up as something to avoid as much as possible by sleeping as much as possible, and some struggling to find something to do and finding it a bit boring, and instead of just doing whatever you feel like doing and would enjoy the most, you start planning if it wouldn't be better to do X instead and keep the other thing for another season, and then you do a lot of Y in one season, and a lot of Z an another, maybe more than you would want to do of that in a row, and it kind of gets in the way of just enjoying the game and doing the things you want to do whenever you want to do them. Yes, you can create a world with spring forever or move to a warm or hot climate to avoid winter, but it's still a bit sad that winter becomes another part of the game that makes people think of how to avoid it. Like areas with temporal instability or areas with rain almost all the time or like temporal storms, as discussed here in another thread. I think it could become a problem if we get too many aspects of the game that are more in the "how can I avoid this" category than the "this is really fun" category.

I think this is a critique that can be applied to many areas of the game: Timed events (winter, night, temporal storms) locking away gameplay options. I don't think it in itself is a problem, but when there are no or too few gameplay options left, it leaves the player in a state where he isn't playing but waiting, which is a problem. Ideally, these events open up new gameplay options, like combat in temporal storms or nights or temperature management in winter, but these are currently not really enough, considering how much especially temporal storms and winter lock you out of huge gameplay chunks. Temporal storms currently only allow for either fighting (or waiting/fleeing, which I wouldn't consider a valid gameplay option) and winter doesn't allow for any agriculture, gathering or hunting (since animals have reduced drops), which are huge chunks of the game, agriculture is arguably the most fleshed out gameplay aspect of the game currently. I left out the night, since I think it is in a good state right now. The night limits options, since monsters will spawn, but there are tools to diminish its impact (building a house and setting up light sources) and nights, while frequent, are rather short. Vintage Story is first a survival game and a sandbox second, time management is a very important aspect of the survival side, on the day the player may travel and gather resources, hunt and care for crops, in the night they may cook meals, do pottery, work metal and craft.

Winter however has two problems: First, the default winter is way too long in singleplayer or coop. A month has 9 days by default, which makes 108 days in a year. Roughly a quarter of that is winter, 27 days, which are each 48 minutes long, totaling at over 21 hours. I suggest turning the single player default down to 3 days a month, which makes the year "only" a third as long. Still rather long, but much more reasonable for singleplayer in my opinion, the player shouldn't have to play almost a hundred hours to experience a whole year. The second problem is that I think there is not enough to do. Agriculture, hunting and gathering are a huge chunk of the game that becomes impossible or significantly less rewarding in winter. I think at least hunting should be encouraged to to in winter, since it realistically makes the most sense. While I understand domestic animals dropping less meat in winter to encourage feeding, I feel non-domestic ones like wolves shouldn't have reduced drops and potential additions in this category like deer also shouldn't. When bears are introduced, they would likely sleep inside their den during winter, encouraging hunting in winter even more, since it would be less dangerous. A deeper, more involved hunting system could then help further.

  • Like 7
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Erik said:

I don't think areas with common rain are such a big issue.

I'm not talking about "common" or even "very common". I'm talking about areas with rain "almost all the time". When we got that update, you could take that literally. And after a while that rain sound would start eroding your brain and mess with you like a constant tinnitus sound. Add to that the darkness because of those gray clouds and almost never sunshine...o_O Whenever you got out of that area and into one with sunshine, it would feel like such a relief! It got changed a bit, but those areas are still something between uncomfortable and depressing. It's okay if the region is not that interesting anyway, and you just move on. But if the region itself is stunningly beautiful and you want to build a special base there, it really sucks. And the areas around it are also affected because the weather of course doesn't just stop at the edges.

 

1 hour ago, Erik said:

nights, while frequent, are rather short

Not during winter, if you live in a "temperate" (default) or colder climate. Then the dark nights are long and looooonger. Realistic, but in the "not so much fun" way, at least for me personally, as I already really dislike the long dark winter nights and short days in real life.

 

2 hours ago, Erik said:

I suggest turning the single player default down to 3 days a month, which makes the year "only" a third as long.

Nine days as default might be a bit long for new players that don't know yet what it actually means in the game, but just 3 days sounds way too short to me and like way too many season changes in a short time. But of course it's a nice option in the settings to choose the length of the months, in either direction.

I don't have a problem with a rather long year with long months as that also means that I get longer spring and summer months, but winter just doesn't have enough positive aspects to counter the negative parts, and it's a huge chunk of the year if you play in temperate climate or colder, a huge chunk that also influences what you do when during the rest of the year.

 

2 hours ago, Erik said:

When bears are introduced, they would likely sleep inside their den during winter, encouraging hunting in winter even more, since it would be less dangerous.

That definitely sounds like something that could add a positive aspect to winter, not in a really fun way, but at least in a "less problematic" way.

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I just wanted to add that with one of the last updates it was changed that snow now also accumulates on path blocks... Realistic and a seemingly small change, but it still adds to the negative aspects of winter. That you could at least run really fast on those roads during winter and easily see them in the snow-white scenery was something I liked and that made building those roads really worthwhile.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ohh, thank you guys and devs for reading this and discussing! Because of sudden personal matters I haven't read most of the answers yet, hope to get some time today ...

Also I have recalled another thing about 3D item objects being too small: surface ore bits, new seeds, ... Updating the original post with it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 7/3/2021 at 3:35 PM, heptagonrus said:

So we got several cool new rare trees: bald cypress, greenspire cypress, ebony, purple heart, larch, walnut.

(I have not found purple, larch, walnut and too lazy to experiment in creative with them. Maybe they have the same "issue", maybe not.)

Purpleheart is really rare ! Only in jungle type biome, hidden in kapok forests, most of the time single or in very small clusters of 3-4 trees. But this purple wood is so nice to build a slab ...

Larch is THE tree of the icy and frozen lands. Mixed with some birchs and a few pines.

About walnut, it seems there was a bug until very recent pre versions, but now it can spawn. So we could encounter some of them, in newly generated chunks.

 

I play 1.15 till the first pre release, and I must admit I really love this new version. Don't ask me to rollback to 1.14.

One thing about this version, and this has already been reported by players, is the increased difficulty to travel. The pit kiln and the clay oven are good tools to improve the immersive feeling, but it's real, when you travel (for me, travel = max 2 nights in the same place), it's frustrating. In order to not clutter the inventory with cooking tools and basic molds, I used to make a burrow right near a clay deposit (or sometimes inside the deposit), and to make a basic cooking set I don't take with me when I leave. With the pit kilns, it's not really possible (too much baking time, materials, etc ...)

About the increased "level" required for many other aspects of the game (wood farming, farming ...) I always have a little voice in my head, whispering : "don't forget you play a survival game. If you want to spend a comfortable living dancing in the flowers with unicorns, play something like My Sweet Pony." So I approve the new functionnalites recently added. Moreover, everything is relative : When you come from Dwarf Fortress universe, every other game looks easy and relaxing 😂

Once again, thanks to all the devs for bringing us such a good game.

 

Edited by Saricane
  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Really liked the "how to avoid this" vs "this is really fun" point.

And lot of other interesting stuff ❤️

I also disabled waiving foliage long ago, after few tries to play with enabled. It is beautiful, but makes kinda problematic shearing leaves and such. Even with it disabled it is often kinda hard to understand where exactly I need to aim to shear a specific leaf block, because the textures are randomly shifted. This adds beauty ofc, but ...

In real live the chaos of natural structures is kinda compensated by our 3D vision and very unique shapes of branches and leaves. With 2d rotated textures filling cubes and us looking at it in 2d it is less easy to sense.

 

Interesting, just now @Drakker wrote something very similar to this discussion in Discord about crops and MP:

Quote

I kind of disagree that temperate is the best now, I planted all my fields on the OPTS, it was early august, so I should have been able to harvest everything by the end of august, except, there were people on 24/24 because of 1.15, the next day, when I logged it it was November, and everything was dead. Not cold damaged, dead. Logged in again in January and March, haven't been able to log back in yet, but I bet next time I log in, it will be fall. I have no idea how I'm going to harvest any food if I don't play every day, or, say, plant in the morning before getting to work, and harvest at night? But then, the game becomes just more work if I have to do that. I'd much rather have half my crops die from heat damage in the south, than lose 100% of my crops to cold in a temperate climate.

 

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 7/3/2021 at 3:35 PM, heptagonrus said:

Chat

Summary: with lot of people actively playing, chat may be distracting, without a way to opt-out

Totally agree with this. Sometimes it's a bit too much.
It would be nice to have 2 distinct "toggable" windows: one for chat and one for game info like storms, prospecting, etc.
The "toggable" could have 3 states:

  1. off
  2. on (like it is now)
  3. notify (only a line or an icon).

Of course it's just an idea and I have no clue of how hard would be to implement it :)

Edited by Drayton
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Drayton said:

Totally agree with this. Sometimes it's a bit too much.
It would be nice to have 2 distinct "toggable" windows: one for chat and one for game info like storms, prospecting, etc.
The "toggable" could have 3 states:

  1. off
  2. on (like it is now)
  3. notify (only a line or an icon).

Of course it's just an idea and I have no clue of how hard would be to implement it :)

+ when someone mentions you in-public-chat window, you get the message delivered in notifications channel as well.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Didn't see this covered and I'm not sure if this was already changed, but:
 

On 7/3/2021 at 8:50 PM, Erik said:

I do agree and disagree with a few points. I support the reasoning behind making rare trees hard/impossible to farm. They are supposed to be a limited resource, something truly rare. It's not like this has any gameplay implications, there are other trees to use. Thought the tiny cypress seed drop rate may be a bit too small indeed.

On the contrary: If the seed-drop rate from a single tree is less than 1 seed / tree, then it is not "hard to propagate", but impossible to propagate and the trees will go extinct! Harvesting 100 trees and getting 80 seeds means the next round you have 80 trees and get only 64 seeds, then 51, then 41,  and so on, until there are no trees left.

This might be fine for a single player world where you can go explore new areas all the time, but even here this is mightly tiresome if you just want to do a nice build with wood X and have to do longer and longer travels to get some. In MP, it will be a desaster, as busy players will deforest all the nearest areas and leave no trees and there is no real way to grow them back, as every tree results in less seeds to replant.

And the whole point of new wood colors is so that people can actually use them in their builds. That's the whole point of adding new stuff, isn't it?

Edited by Tels
  • Like 6
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, RobinHood said:

I wish also, we would have also other windirections, because wind has now more influence if you walk, only westwind thats bit weird. I think 4 (+east, +north, + south) would be fine or even 8 directions (+northeast, +northwest and so on).

Wind coming from the west isn't as weird as you'd think.  That's actually the "default" direction of all wind on Earth due to it's rotation.  At least at the midlatitudes, ignoring terrain, and even then only inbetween weather events, and even then only while the jetstream is behaving itself, and even then...

<Insert Wall Of Text Here>

....but if you ignore all that, wind basically always comes from the west, regardless of hemisphere or continent.  If you want a better explanation, look up "polar ferrel hadley" on youtube.  It will blow your mind.


Rant aside, it would be cool to have more interesting weather.  The "normal" pattern is for the wind direction to slowly rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere, with the transition from southerly to easterly winds being associated with precipitation.  That's another oversimplification, of course, because...

<Insert Wall Of Text Here>

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I believe that the tree propagation mechanics should be changed overall. Instead of having to cut the tree downs to get seeds, give each tree a chance of generating seeds near and around it. You can then collect the seeds to replant, or, if the seed is generated on good enough soil, it'll end up growing. This would allow rare trees to still be farmable, without the diminishing returns and still remain rare.

On the whole, it would also encourage sustainable tree husbandry. Instead of clear cutting entire forest, you can do selective cutting, allowing the forest to generate back over time. Prefer a particular tree? Cull the others and keep only the ones you want growing.

This would make edible nut bearing trees more beneficial too, like the new walnut,, allowing repeated harvests without killing the tree.

  • Like 4
Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.