Multiplayer survey

[Luk]

Here's another poll, separated for the sake of discussion and clarity. We've also been discussing the multiplayer experience, and we're curious to see how our players like to enjoy the game. Do you only play solo? Do you like large servers, or just small groups with friends/family? And what kind of configuration do you prefer? Please let us know what you think! And again, feel free to comment below to describe your own multiplayer preferences.

Thanks!

[XavierAB]

I personally have always wanted to play multiplayer but have never been able to find an active server.

[Pestilence]

I can't imagine being anything other than extremely frustrated by food rot on servers.  Having to deal with that sounds like the opposite of fun.

[Stefano Da Giau]

Only play on solo, multiplayer idea is fascinating, but even in similar games whom have inspired VS, I almost always travelled 15-20k of distance to get alone lol

[ThreeHeadedDingo]

23 minutes ago, Pestilence said:

I can't imagine being anything other than extremely frustrated by food rot on servers.  Having to deal with that sounds like the opposite of fun.

Can just adjust the rot time. What I find way less fun is everyone just saving up infinite food that never perishes and then eventually it's all meaningless (basically what happens in Minecraft).

Besides, rot feeds into the gameplay loop because you can compost it.

Edited August 30, 2021 by ThreeHeadedDingo

[Ashantin]

I play on a large server intermittently. Food rot is a real problem playing in that way. 

[Pestilence]

3 hours ago, ThreeHeadedDingo said:

Can just adjust the rot time. What I find way less fun is everyone just saving up infinite food that never perishes and then eventually it's all meaningless (basically what happens in Minecraft).

Besides, rot feeds into the gameplay loop because you can compost it.

Make no mistake, I'm not advocating zero food rot.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with the food rot system in a single player game where nothing happens while you aren't playing.  What I couldn't handle is logging off for a day or two and coming back to find literally everything I've worked to accumulate completely rotted away.

[Tyron]

2 hours ago, Pestilence said:

Make no mistake, I'm not advocating zero food rot.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with the food rot system in a single player game where nothing happens while you aren't playing.  What I couldn't handle is logging off for a day or two and coming back to find literally everything I've worked to accumulate completely rotted away.

There's food items that can last many in-game years. Those should greatly mitigate loosing all your food each day.

[Сёмка]

The last question is not entirely correct as I have a lot of mods but they are small. And so in 99% of cases I play with friends on my own server (thanks, radmin VPN). P.s. it's not me who write with errors it's google translate bad X)

[Streetwind]

1 minute ago, Tyron said:

There's food items that can last many in-game years. Those should greatly mitigate loosing all your food each day.

In all fairness, that means grain only, and perhaps pickled soybeans. While it's easy to avoid starving outright even when not logging in every day, it's also quite hard to keep all of your nutrition meters supplied. You end up spending a good part of your already limited playtime on obtaining food you cannot store. It can be demotivating.

Of course, I also realize how difficult that would be to fix from a development standpoint. Trying to reliably determine what "belongs" to an offline player for purposes of slowing down the decay is not only hard to implement in code, but will pretty much automatically be exploitable by other players for improved food storage. And that kind of metagameplay can ruin the experience even for those who willingly participate.

Still, assuming a non-exploitable solution could be found, would you be willing to at least consider a system that helps offline players preserve their supplies?

Another solution might present itself almost by accident, by the way. Once the game reaches a state where everything that's calendar-dependant can be scaled uniformely in the settings, then multiplayer servers can be set up with longer year lengths, while scaling food decay down appropriately. This will result in one RL day being a smaller slice of a VS game year, meaning that more food will survive longer offline times. If memory serves, a VS day spans 48 minutes (please correct me if I'm wrong), so a 30-day-per-month timescale would result in 24 RL hours being 1 VS game month exactly. The game isn't quite at this state yet, I think, but it's probably headed there, right?

[Waringham]

IMHO this poll is a bit flawed as I have to select an answer for question 2 and 3 even if I don't play any multiplayer. Therefore your answers probably won't reflect the actual amount of people who don't play multiplayer and question 2 and 3 will have more "noise" because people who don't play multiplayer may choose an answer at random or one that is not relevant in this context.

[evan37]

I play multiplayer, but LAN only.  My wife and son play with me.  We have worlds for all 3 of us, combinations of 2, etc.  That is how we avoid the major problem of food rot but also seasons changing.  My wife really enjoys the build-up to winter aspect of the game and that's lost on servers.  Don't play for a few days and all of the sudden it's spring again.  We tried hosting a server ourselves and attempted to tinker the length of months and what not, but it kept bugging out - we'd log out in spring, then log in 5 minutes later and it was January 1 again, so we gave up.

[f33dback89]

I tried playing Multiplayer, but my schedule made it too hard to play regularly. IMO, multiplayer is only fun if you have time to play on a regular, predictable time period. Whenever I was unable to play for more than 1 week IRL, I basically had to restart my food supply from scratch. Also, one of my favourite features of the game is the progression of the seasons. Playing online (infrequently) made the season cycle completely useless as it was pretty much a random season whenever I rejoined the server.

I love single-player! I also see the incredible potential of playing on a small private server with a group of friends with a regular play schedule (pausing the server when nobody is connected), I just haven't found a group to play with in such a manner.

[Thalius]

8 hours ago, Pestilence said:

I can't imagine being anything other than extremely frustrated by food rot on servers.  Having to deal with that sounds like the opposite of fun.

A lot of comments right off about the food spoilage issue on multiplayer servers. 

If you want to try multiplayer but are dissuaded because of food spoilage while you are offline and the community and time move on without you, I'd suggest finding a server that has drastically reduced the calendarSpeedMul setting (slowing the passage of time).

My server, for example, passes time when empty but still takes about three real life months to pass one full game year (sleeping every night speeds things up quite a bit).  It takes some getting used to, given that some things that take a while in the default game (like pit kilns and higher tier metal work) take a much longer real life time on such servers, but food rot is not a problem if you are reasonably active and you store food properly in containers and cellars.

Edited August 30, 2021 by Thalius

[junawood]

2 hours ago, Streetwind said:

2 hours ago, Tyron said:

There's food items that can last many in-game years. Those should greatly mitigate loosing all your food each day.

In all fairness, that means grain only, and perhaps pickled soybeans.

I think he means grain, honey, jam, pickled vegetables and cured meat.

[Pestilence]

1 hour ago, junawood said:

I think he means grain, honey, jam, pickled vegetables and cured meat.

I've yet to find halite outside of a trader, but I've only played a couple hundred hours at most.

[Tyron]

On a server where players are very active, and thus food spoils faster, I would assume the likelihood of salt being found is a lot higher too.

1 hour ago, junawood said:

I think he means grain, honey, jam, pickled vegetables and cured meat.

And cheese. But yea, cured meat last like 12 years or so.

[Polraudio Zion]

When I play I usually like to play either Singleplayer or with a few friends because most servers don't config or like to use a major mod that makes the game easier on time.

I usually change the config to lower the hunger rate to 25%, the tool durability to 200%, and turn off temporal stability and storms. The storms are super annoying with the waving screen effect(please make a setting to turn it off thats different than the waving foliage setting) and stability is annoying because i just want to build and hate it when an area i really like is unstable.

Suggestion: Make it so food in a players inventory doesn't spoil when they are offline. It sucks to come back online after my week of work to my entire inventory of food being spoiled and it being winter and hard to get food. At that point i usually just quit for a few days or week till winter is over to play again.

As for mods the only 2 things i really do are make a recipe to turn logs into sticks(im always running out) and my Server Utilities mod for the /home command because i dont want to spend 3 hours exploring to an area to find what i need for building something cool and spend another 3 hours to get back home. That's 6 hours wasted when i only get 2 days off a week from work(Cant wait for minecarts(please allow copper and wooden rails but with a speed penalty)).

Just a few nitpicks but overall a good game and very fun with friends.

[Thorgil]

In most games I do play multiplayer, I play it with my brother's although in VS we all share one account and can't join the same servers.

Edited August 30, 2021 by Thorgil
Grammar

[Silent Shadow]

If you do not want your stuff to spoil when not playing then do not harvest it, leave it on the bush, crop, or animal until you need it as is done in real life. You can still do the preservation for the long lasting foods too.

[Pestilence]

40 minutes ago, Silent Shadow said:

If you do not want your stuff to spoil when not playing then do not harvest it, leave it on the bush, crop, or animal until you need it as is done in real life. You can still do the preservation for the long lasting foods too.

Honestly, I didn't know that was an option with crops or berries.  I've found berries lying on the ground in item form after hearing them pop off the bush during the night and assumed it was because of a coincidental cold snap.

[Tels]

"Do you play on default settings?" only offers you choice with "I use mods" or "I change the settings". But I do both, some changes to the world settings and a bunch of mods. It also doesn't really describe the multiplayer aspect - I do make the choices for my own server, but the other servers I'm on make that choice for me. So I found it quite hard to select an appropriate answer here.

[Tels]

10 hours ago, junawood said:

I think he means grain, honey, jam, pickled vegetables and cured meat.

Pumpkins and pineapples do not spoil when set down on the ground. And when grain is near the spoilage age, you can grind it into flower and extend it's shelflife. Actually, ou can even do that while the grain is rotting

I do have to say the rotting food is the one thing that keeps me off servers like Aura, everytime you login, most of the food has spoiled, depending on long you have gone, even the sealed crocks, and having to spend quite some time everytime you log on to make food is just annoying and if you just started out, can even be deadly. It's just not fun to log into a game and start your day with grind.

It might be better if you can freeload on a group of people who log in regulary and cook for you, but not everyone has that on a MP server.

[Kolyenka]

I have tried playing on non-LAN servers, but my computer lagged and the screen kept flickering black constantly (as opposed to... occasionally, when I play solo or on LAN), so I haven't been able to really participate in those bigger servers, although it sounds fun. However my sister and I have a LAN MP together. I probably do 60% singleplayer, 40% multiplayer. Ideally I'd play entirely in multiplayer servers, but... computer/internet issues. And my sister and I have divergent ideas of what constitutes a fun multiplayer game (I enjoy individual bases and trades and the occasional co-operative agreement, and she prefers just having one big base and sharing resources and responsibilities).

I use a few mods sometimes. I always heavily change the default settings (I like cold mountainous worlds with few trees and dangerous predators). I also bump tool speed up to the highest setting, and tool durability to 200%. And then, usually, map, minimap, and co-ordinates off.

Edited August 31, 2021 by goaliemagics

[Domkrats]

I have played on large server. It was fun while i do everything to survive and progress to better armor/tools. Once you get to iron, there is no difference - multiplayer or single player - game becomes less fun unless you have friends to go for adventures with. Food is an issue, but mostly because i had to make it all by myself the time because and it spoiled while i was offline. That got me into circle, where i enter game to play it for fun, but end up just making food for next days all the time. So yea. Multiplayer is fun, but it needs to be played as multiplayer (not everyone makes his own base so basically it's single player on multiplayer server) so  players cooperate on tasks and share resources.

ATM i am playing singleplayer which i open to LAN sometimes when i wan't to play with my kids. I've found that the better solution to food spoiling. But not because it is too hard to keep food supplies. Mostly it is because i have limited play time during day and that time i want to spend in caves or adventures not farming all the time. And if is one day spend time on food... other next days i can focus on other tasks. So this suits me better. But again... I got to iron and game suddenly lost its attraction again. You think that  once you will become safe in game (regarding armor, tools, food), the real adventures would start as then you can enter caves more safely, but no... Exploring caves is still stressfull to explore alone and becomes useless as there isn't much you need from them anymore. (other thing is coop with 1-2 friends. Then i love caves as i feel more safe and comfortable).

As i am not so much into farming, homesteading or building as i am into action, i am waiting for some updates on that, yet keeping game friendly for those who feel already that game is too hard. So that shouldn't be more dangerous or swarming mobs, but some mobs, that would actually be somehow summoned using some ruin symbols (or even resources like iron, gold, silver) by players choice. And after you fight those mobs, you could get some exclusive resources, gear, armor or tools. Dunno if that is somehow planned, but thats my dream about this game. It is great at everything it does, except keeping game fun, once you get to some certain point. Othwerwise it seems a little strange - you grow, expand and become more prepared for something...which doesn't come.

Love this game anyway!