Vintage Story impressions after about one month of playing

[Viceroy77]

Hello everyone,

I would like to share with you my experience after playing Vintage Story for about a month. I am going to write down short, straight forward points. My experience comes form playing on private multiplayer server with small, but dedicated playerbase.

Before I get in to the negatives I would like to say what I find great about this game. I love the aesthetics, art style, realistic (more less) weather, built in shaders, smithing and metal working, ore generation, geology aspect of this game, easy to mod.

Now to the negatives:

-issues with food spoilage on multiplayer servers
this so far was and still is the most frustrating thing to deal with that needs to get fixed. The sooner the better. Going on a journey with food in your inventory, needing to log off quickly and after a while coming back on the server I find all my food rotten while in the middle of nowhere. Working on a base is less annoying since your are near your food source, but still nearly 30-40% of my tasks on the server were revolved around solving food situation. Meanwhile your crops are dying, foods in vessels spoiling with winter just around the corner. This mechanic is very punishing and it almost feels like this game disrupts your daily routine, as stupid as it sounds. This was the main thing that drove me away from playing.

-tools, weapons, armor durability too low
Pretty self explanatory. The amount of time and resources I spend making a pickaxe does not quite return the investment. I have to invest so much time in to finding ores, smelting, casting and smiting. Before I get new pickaxe my old ones is almost broken and the circle repeats. This in turn drives me away from doing something else in the game. Not being able to repair my tools is also a handicap.
I stumbled up on this thread where user by the name of PhotriusPyrelus describes it well. https://www.vintagestory.at/forums/topic/5534-tool-durability/

-inventory issues
With amount of items this game has the inventory is too small. 4-5 slots are taken by tools/weapons, about 2 slots for food,  and with backpacks you still need to make frequent trips back and forth from your base to empty stuff. You can't spend much time doing something far away from base foraging or exploring.

-terrain generation, exploration and travel
These three are closely interconnected. Terrain generation does not offer much. You have small lakes, some mountains, deserts, plains, forest and something between. Other thank that it feels barren. I wish there were seas and rivers. Rivers would be nice addition since you could travel on them once boats and ships get added. Slow running speed, difficult terrain, no mounts makes it hard to get to places and trying to explore further away from spawn. I am aware of translocators, but I am speaking about the near area where you spawn. And even if you get thru a translocator you are still limited to near area. Speaking of translocators, I went thru one and on the other side I spawned inside blocks with no translocator to get back.

-trees hard to farm and low seed drops from plants
low sapling drop makes it almost impossible to reforest areas previously cut down. Seeds drops from crops is laughable. Don't understand these aspects when plants normally try to produce as much seeds as possible to ensure their survival. The grains I harvest from flax and other similar crops can not be planted. Don't know why so. Really does not make sense.

-steel making painfully difficult
Having to sit near my furnace worrying about fuel and time it takes to convert is just too much considering how little durability tools, armor and weapons have. And I am not talking how much time it took me to get to this stage where I can finally produce steel. Did not feel rewarding at the end.

-other annoyances

I was once exiting a cave and while looking at the exit I see a ram just charging at me. You might think I punched this ram, but that was not the case. I might have just passed by him and while exiting the cave he was above me but still within the detection range to make him angry? I really did not why, but this happened tom me twice and twice died to this. Once smithing I accidentally clicked on longblade instead of pickaxe. The game did not let me undo this mistake despite not removing or moving a single bit on the steel ingot. Drifters do not make footstep noises so it's always a jump scare for me when I get hit. They make growling noises, but sometimes the ai decides to be silent for a while when it is charging at you.

 

These all combined and other minor aspects makes this game less enjoyable in later stages of gameplay. early game is fun till iron age. My friend got already tired, some other individuals too, some still playing. We both don't spend much time playing due to work and real life stuff. Feels like you have to invest a lot of time in to this game to get some meaningful satisfaction from playing, and a lot of time is something I don't have. I am patient and dedicated, but this game tries my patience a lot. Don't get me wrong. Some aspects of this game are great and if this game gets more content added, bugs fixed, overhauled I can see it compete with other titles like MInecraft or upcoming Hytale, but for that development needs kick to higher gears.

 

Cheers.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 19, 2021 by Viceroy

[PhotriusPyrelus]

13 minutes ago, Viceroy said:

-terrain generation, exploration and travel

 

These three are closely interconnected. Terrain generation does not offer much. You have small lakes, some mountains, deserts, plains, forest and something between. Other thank that it feels barren. I wish there were seas and rivers. Rivers would be nice addition since you could travel on them once boats and ships get added. Slow running speed, difficult terrain, no mounts makes it hard to get to places and trying to explore further away from spawn. I am aware of translocators, but I am speaking about the near area where you spawn. And even if you get thru a translocator you are still limited to near area. Speaking of translocators, I went thru one and on the other side I spawned inside blocks with no translocator to get back.

-trees hard to farm and low seed drops from plants
low sapling drop makes it almost impossible to reforest areas previously cut down. Seeds drops from crops is laughable. Don't understand these aspects when plants normally try to produce as much seeds as possible to ensure their survival. The grains I harvest from flax and other similar crops can not be planted. Don't know why so. Really does not make sense.

-steel making painfully difficult
Having to sit near my furnace worrying about fuel and time it takes to convert is just too much considering how little durability tools, armor and weapons have. And I am not talking how much time it took me to get to this stage where I can finally produce steel. Did not feel rewarding at the end.

-other annoyances

I was once exiting a cave and while looking at the exit I see a ram just charging at me. You might think I punched this ram, but that was not the case. I might have just passed by him and while exiting the cave he was above me but still within the detection range to make him angry? I really did not why, but this happened tom me twice and twice died to this. Once smithing I accidentally clicked on longblade instead of pickaxe. The game did not let me undo this mistake despite not removing or moving a single bit on the steel ingot. Drifters do not make footstep noises so it's always a jump scare for me when I get hit. They make growling noises, but sometimes the ai decides to be silent for a while when it is charging at you.

-useless ores

Why is chromium or nickel in this game? Yes, I can make dyes, but really why have ores used only for dyes? Why are they taking up space when other, more useful ore can generate. I would expect ores have real use instead having them as placeholder for something that might come later in development.

There's at least one really interesting biome (unfortunately I deleted the seed I found it, so I can't get pictures; it was kind of like a 'maze' with these small plateaus about 10ish blocks above the lower level).  Biome variety could be improved and I'm doubtless it will, but there are /some/ interesting things to see even now.  I would also very much like to see horses added.  Though I imagine their upkeep might be pretty high.  Or it could be really low.  Dry Grass makes hay bales at 8:1.  Even if they ate 1 bale per day (which would be way too much, IMHO), that wouldn't be *that* bad.  One chert knife's worth of hay (50) would hold you for almost week.

Trees are easy, to farm, you just have to break the leaves by hand instead of letting them auto-break.  Takes more time, but you'll get LOTS of seeds, and a tonne of sticks.  I'm not sure if this is a bug or what.  I thought I read something on the axe or the guide that said there was no difference in breaking leaves with any tool, but there is most certainly a difference between breaking them manually and breaking them automatically with the trunk of the tree.

As I mentioned in the thread you linked: I've not made it to steel, but I really don't mind things being hard to make... that said, I have absolutely no interest in doing it regularly as my tools break.  If I *want* to upgrade to steel tools?  If I *want* to make a cool decorative block in steel?  Sure x2.  If I *have* to replace my tools?  Bleh.

The silent attacker thing happens with wolves far more often for me.  Just walkin' through the forest and "RAWR!" half my health is gone, and I have to hope I can recover from the shock and sprint away before the follow up kills me.   But I don't spend a lot of time running around in the dark (either at night or underground).

The useless ores don't necessarily take up space other ores could occupy, perhaps all the useful metals are generated before the ancillary ores, and can't overwrite other deposits.  But I dunno.

[Domkrats]

Game is a huge grind. But mostly because of small tasks combined at once - not so much on repeating one thing all the time.
Maybe just take a rest and then try custom single player. Make some changes to spawning mobs, hunger and enemy agression. Make game open to internet if you wish some friend to join. That way food won't spoil when you are offline, yet you can return when want.

Seems you've had similar experience as i did. I was so happy about this game, i got into it deep and joined large  multiplayer server. After grinding hard for some time, players around me left and it felt so useless to continue progression to steel. Huge excitement for this game, had me feeling bad, as there wasn't nooone to share my excitement with.  My friends aren't into this game. I tried to force myself continue playing, but always had feeling i am playing game just to keep food o.k. and having less time to explore caves, which i love in this game.
 

Other dissapointment was having metal armor. I thought that i will have less stress in caves, when i will make that. But armor slowed me down, made healing and hunger worse, thus not rewarding me at all for all the grind i went through to get it. I was still being stressed too much about dying in caves. I love caves with their ambience, but they are too umpredictable with spawn rules this game has. I guess it is realistic that wearing metal armor make you more tired and hungry, but somehow it still felt too punishing for me to feel good about it. Other thing is playing with friends, as then it is not so dangerous, but at server i was playing, not many players were willing to explore caves often.

Playing this game for a long time and seeing as many let's plays on youtube as i have, i can say many players comes to a situation where they love this game, but have hard time to continue going further after reaching steel or even iron. SIngle player is easier, but sharing progress and exploring areas together are much more fun to do, yet this game asks too much time, for it to be suitable to all my friends, who work and have only 1-2hour during day for games.

Game is still under development, so i am still supporting this game and i foresee good future for this game, if they will start to focus more on lore, combat system and achievments in this game, whether it is some leveling, shiny and more durable tools/weapons/armor or cool outfits.

[Saricane]

1 hour ago, Domkrats said:

Other dissapointment was having metal armor. I thought that i will have less stress in caves, when i will make that. But armor slowed me down, made healing and hunger worse,

I made a full steel armor once, thinking I would be the master of the deepest caves. Pffff .... I died so quickly by the first corrupt drifter encountered that I never built something more advanced as the Gambison. This one is very easy to build once you have flax farms.

About the caves exploration, you're not rewarded from going deep. That's the problem. As the underground ruins are randomly placed, you can find a very rich ruin very close to the entrance, no need to go down and risk your life. Thus, the solution is  : exploring more and more caves without taking too much risk, instead of fully exploring a particular cave until you have your feet in the lava. A more classical RPG approach (the deepest you explore a dungeon, the better is the reward) would certainly be more exciting.

Edited September 20, 2021 by Saricane

[l33tmaan]

Multiplayer's rough. I joined a server and we had iron within 4 hours. We didn't even have enough clay for everyone to have bowls yet, and people were already making bloomeries.

So, I've just spent the past 2 weeks being the chef and chiseling stuff. Kinda sucks, since the most fun part of the game is getting to iron, IMO. Now I have to make myself login so I can work on a cool tower for... what purpose? I dunno, so I can have my own place. I don't really need one, though.

 

[Silent Shadow]

 

On 9/20/2021 at 5:00 AM, Saricane said:

I made a full steel armor once, thinking I would be the master of the deepest caves. Pffff .... I died so quickly by the first corrupt drifter encountered

How? Even with the worst conditions (weak character, worst steel armor, no satiety hp bonus) he should have needed 6 hits to kill you.

On 9/20/2021 at 3:11 AM, Domkrats said:

I guess it is realistic that wearing metal armor make you more tired and hungry, but somehow it still felt too punishing for me to feel good about it.

I usually take my armor off to heal unless I am almost dead and still fighting, but it is still fine to heal during a fight since their damage reduction matches your reduced healing. You can also save food by blocking off the entrance to the ore deposit you are mining out and taking off your armor while you mine.

If you really want to save on hunger rate and movement speed, you can keep your armor off and in your hot bar. If you see/detect a threat, you can fully suit up in a second by selecting the three slots and right clicking. You will be vulnerable to surprise attacks though, so awareness (sound and constant visual checks) becomes essential to survival.

[Omega Haxors]

Perfectly sums up the design flaws of the game. I'd like to add another that I recently discovered: Drifters are overpowered in the early game:
Look at this and tell me if you think this is acceptable in the early game.

 

It's like, no matter where you go you're constantly harassed by boatloads of enemies that you can't reasonably deal with. Don't think you can escape up a mountain because not only will you be surrounded by enemies, but you'll also have nowhere to go and will be trapped forced to either run past them or take massive amounts of fall damage.

Edited September 21, 2021 by Omega Haxors

[l33tmaan]

Bro, you have a torch right there. Kill them. Kill them all. The torch even makes them burn!

Drifters are such a non-issue that the only time they hurt me early-game is when they sneak up on me and get a hit in. Surface drifters are very reasonable.

[Omega Haxors]

1 hour ago, l33tmaan said:

Bro, you have a torch right there. Kill them. Kill them all. The torch even makes them burn!

Drifters are such a non-issue that the only time they hurt me early-game is when they sneak up on me and get a hit in. Surface drifters are very reasonable.

It takes like 30 hits to kill them with the torch and they deal like an 8th of your health if they hit you. Even if you do kill them, another one will spawn in its place.
Notice how I have half my health missing? That's from when I thought it was a good idea to try and fight back, yeah it didn't work.

Even if I did have a proper weapon, it's going to break in like 4 kills anyway which is going to require I stay put for a bit to, oh wait there's 2 more now I have to deal with.

Edited September 21, 2021 by Omega Haxors

[Silent Shadow]

3 hours ago, Omega Haxors said:

Drifters are overpowered in the early game:

This is like saying zombies are overpowered in Minecraft or chickens are too strong in Runescape. Drifters are only a problem if you cannot maneuver or block them off, and it is easy to do either on the surface.

Where to start? It is not like combat in Vintage Story is all that complicated.

50 minutes ago, Omega Haxors said:

It takes like 30 hits to kill them with the torch and they deal like an 8th of your health if they hit you. Even if you do kill them, another one will spawn in its place.
Notice how I have half my health missing? That's from when I thought it was a good idea to try and fight back, yeah it didn't work.

Even if I did have a proper weapon, it's going to break in like 4 kills anyway which is going to require I stay put for a bit to, oh wait there's 2 more now I have to deal with

• It takes 24 hits assuming you don't do what l33tman said and burn them, and you have a very fast attack rate with melee weapons (except spear thrust) to the point that killing one takes around 5 seconds. Not great, but if you set a patch of grass on fire and draw them over it, they will die much faster and you can hurt multiple drifters at once.
• If you want easy kills, jump into the water shown above (not anything deeper, unless you place a torch) and abuse their severely reduced speed to safely poke them to death with a spear (works on wolves too).
• If you are missing health, horsetail and reeds are easy to find in most forests. The lighter armors (even improvised) do wonders against the surface drifters too.
• If you find yourself running out of spears, just carry a club around or a small stack of flint spear heads. Each spear can kill 5 drifters with just thrusts, so two should see you through almost all fights. Any sword (like the one you have in your pictures) should be able to kill at least 75 surface drifters before breaking.
• If you need to stick in an area, then you can always (ugh) abuse the pillar strategy while marking your map or making a new spear. You can also make a safe area (fences are cheap to make) or sleep.
• If you are just passing by, then you can easily out pace drifters.

I cannot remember the last time I lost half my health to surface drifters, let alone die, so I kinda wonder if you are just not very skilled in combat (which is fine, but don't assume everyone is playing at that level when making assumptions/assertions about the game) since you are struggling against packs of three drifters with an iron sword.

[l33tmaan]

2 hours ago, Omega Haxors said:

It takes like 30 hits to kill them with the torch and they deal like an 8th of your health if they hit you. Even if you do kill them, another one will spawn in its place.
Notice how I have half my health missing? That's from when I thought it was a good idea to try and fight back, yeah it didn't work.

Even if I did have a proper weapon, it's going to break in like 4 kills anyway which is going to require I stay put for a bit to, oh wait there's 2 more now I have to deal with.

See, the best part is that the torch CAN'T break! My god, it's probably better than 50% of non-spear weapons just for that alone! Add burn damage on top and you have a true weapon of ultimate power. Honestly, sometimes I'll hit a drifter once or twice and it'll get scared and run away - good enough for me! PLUS I can wield the torch in my off-hand, which I can't do with other weapons, and it has non-combat utility on top of that.

I was sort of joking at first, but I'm unironically starting to see the light.

[PhotriusPyrelus]

Just now, l33tmaan said:

I was sort of joking at first, but I'm unironically starting to see the light.

Heh.  Hehehehe.  I see what you did there.

[Domkrats]

13 hours ago, Silent Shadow said:

I usually take my armor off to heal unless I am almost dead and still fighting, but it is still fine to heal during a fight since their damage reduction matches your reduced healing. You can also save food by blocking off the entrance to the ore deposit you are mining out and taking off your armor while you mine.

If you really want to save on hunger rate and movement speed, you can keep your armor off and in your hot bar. If you see/detect a threat, you can fully suit up in a second by selecting the three slots and right clicking. You will be vulnerable to surprise attacks though, so awareness (sound and constant visual checks) becomes essential to survival.

Agree. Also lighting all caves is a good solution and blocking dead ends. Yet all those are extra steps to make exploring caves even more time consuming and stressfull. Also i have died while putting armor up or simply falling before putting armor on in deep cave, thus leaving armor with my lost bags . But sure at the same time i must say - thats cool, as that's the reason we play games like that - to experience those feelings.  Sometimes it is just too owerhelming when you have entered deep cave that goes down even deeper and have 3 ways to go. You are thinking how you will need to return but your bandages are already partly used. So you choose to continue one enterance, but drifters fall on your head from other 2 directions.   So you start panicking and make stupid mistakes.  Usually moments everything goes bad is because of panicking or wanting to simply progress faster not thinking drifters will spawn behind you as you didn't light the cave.

Hard to explain this love-hate relationship with this game sometimes.
 

Edited September 22, 2021 by Domkrats

[Lumber Jackson]

On 9/21/2021 at 1:46 PM, Omega Haxors said:

Perfectly sums up the design flaws of the game. I'd like to add another that I recently discovered: Drifters are overpowered in the early game:
Look at this and tell me if you think this is acceptable in the early game.

 

It's like, no matter where you go you're constantly harassed by boatloads of enemies that you can't reasonably deal with. Don't think you can escape up a mountain because not only will you be surrounded by enemies, but you'll also have nowhere to go and will be trapped forced to either run past them or take massive amounts of fall damage.

I have a few suggestions for you if you feel drifters are too hard to tackle.

First they only come out at night, so sleeping is easiest way to avoid them  Make a straw bed, it's just dry grass. If you go to sleep at dusk, you'll wake up at dawn. You can even take it with you when you explore. I've slept in the open in the wild and not had any drifters attack me in my sleep, but to be safe build a dirt hut.

If you do find yourself getting drifters because you're out after dark, turn and run away with the run key. They are easy to escape from. Keeping on the move helps too.

If you have problems around your base, build pit traps that are two blocks deep around your base to catch the drifters. Then when the sun is up, use a spear to kill them as it keeps you out of their reach. I've found pit traps next to the fence around my crops catch a lot of rabbits too. 

[Omega Haxors]

14 hours ago, Lumber Jackson said:

I have a few suggestions for you if you feel drifters are too hard to tackle.

First they only come out at night, so sleeping is easiest way to avoid them  Make a straw bed, it's just dry grass. If you go to sleep at dusk, you'll wake up at dawn. You can even take it with you when you explore. I've slept in the open in the wild and not had any drifters attack me in my sleep, but to be safe build a dirt hut.

If you do find yourself getting drifters because you're out after dark, turn and run away with the run key. They are easy to escape from. Keeping on the move helps too.

If you have problems around your base, build pit traps that are two blocks deep around your base to catch the drifters. Then when the sun is up, use a spear to kill them as it keeps you out of their reach. I've found pit traps next to the fence around my crops catch a lot of rabbits too. 

Thanks for the concern but this was during a time when the spawning was bugged and far more enemies were spawning than were supposed to. It's been fixed now.

[Thorfinn]

A lot depends on what kind of a "challenge" you want to spend your time on. Day 1 food, for instance, is often feast or famine. Either you have scads of berries and crops or there's nothing to be found. You can trap meat overnight when you stop exploring anyway, and if you stay put for a few days, you can easily grow enough food. If you can find enough to tide you over a night or two, it's pretty much no "challenge" after that.

The tool durability "challenge" isn't even that. It's not hard to wander around randomly, looking for surface copper. (Assuming you are not on a multiplayer server and someone just walked around and collected it all. Then finding copper other than in exposed cliff faces can be an issue.) It's just grindy. Lather, rinse, repeat. Worse, because you have to go full nomad to go from deposit to deposit, pretty much any base building you did earlier is going to be wasted.

What I'm saying is that what is being called a challenge is IMO more tedious than anything. That said, I don't know how to go about adding content that would make an engaging game without involving a lot of grind. Maybe if it were more of a voxel city builder, where you build a village that attracts NPC smiths and cattlemen and growers and such. But if the game model is one of a lone wolf, durability is one of the only ways of giving a goal. It's not like building a nice house, or a  leather sofa, or pretty much anything else is that engaging in single player. Might as well build a small hovel out of cob for all the benefit you get out of having a lavishly-furnished mansion.

[Michaloid]

We have to remember that this game is still in early access, and there's a LOT of things that Tyron wants to add, just look at the roadmap. This game is still in it's alpha/beta stage.

[Philtre]

18 hours ago, Stephan Jerde said:

The tool durability "challenge" isn't even that. It's not hard to wander around randomly, looking for surface copper. (Assuming you are not on a multiplayer server and someone just walked around and collected it all. Then finding copper other than in exposed cliff faces can be an issue.) It's just grindy. Lather, rinse, repeat. Worse, because you have to go full nomad to go from deposit to deposit, pretty much any base building you did earlier is going to be wasted. [...] But if the game model is one of a lone wolf, durability is one of the only ways of giving a goal. It's not like building a nice house, or a  leather sofa, or pretty much anything else is that engaging in single player.

Unless you turned copper surface spawns down, you shouldn't have to go all that far from your base to find enough copper to get started. You'll need to do just as much exploring to find crop seeds, resin, and other basic resources, so just multitask. Later on, as the game progresses, you will continue to find copper by accident while looking for other resources (ores, limestone, ruins, translocators, etc.). So again, just multitask. And since you need quite a bit of infrastructure for later-game activities such as advanced metalworking, leatherworking, etc., you will need a well-developed base; being nomadic is quite difficult unless you are willing to stay in the stone age. I would say the motivation for base-building is *all the stuff you need to have in order to make all the other stuff*. One of the game's strengths is giving resource-processing an engaging level of complexity, beyond just collecting it in the first place.

[Thorfinn]

Right. In single player, it's easy. Much less easy in multiplayer. Sometimes I see a short pillar of packed earth or tilled soil or something and know it's probably marking copper, but you never know how many surface nodes were just collected and not marked, or marked in a more subtle fashion, i.e., 17 tiles S and 5 tiles E of the marker, or even if it's just a dummy marker. Particularly if you are joining a game that's been in progress for a while, the surface nodes are often non-existent. Then it's almost always quicker to just pan for it.

[Rhyagelle]

It's definitely a problem in multiplayer, especially if the server has 3-5 active people on it. And they know what they are doing. I always maintain that games like this, should offer a command to reset/respawn ore to accommodate it, because otherwise, MP serves to be a place of a few and veterans. It's not a place for newbies. 

[Philtre]

21 hours ago, Rhyagelle said:

 I always maintain that games like this, should offer a command to reset/respawn ore to accommodate it, because otherwise, MP serves to be a place of a few and veterans. It's not a place for newbies. 

I'm not sure how you would go about respawning ores in a game like this, where you have to physically remove terrain to extract the ores. And there's many resources that are finite and can be exhausted in a well-populated area, from digging up all the clay or peat to transplanting all the berries or cattails. In general, it seems to me that if you want a long-running multiplayer server with dense population centers, and also want new players to be able to join at any time, there has to be some sort of on-boarding process where the existing players help the new people get kitted out, or a policy of having people spread out so that they aren't all collecting resources from the same area.

[Thorfinn]

Not necessarily. There's no reason ALL copper ore needs to have surface nuggets on mapgen. It's not like people are going to be stripmining in search of copper, so the ore is still there. And don't fret about realism; in the real world, frost pushes rocks to the surface every year. It's why you have to clear the all the rocks out of the hayland every year or two so you don't break out too many sickle sections. In the real world, one would hardly be surprised to find a flint stone very near to where you found one last spring. And in the real world, sticks on the ground replenish themselves every thunderstorm or stiff wind.

Just do something like critter spawning. Once per day or week or whatever, spawn an ore a nugget above a copper vein if there's not already one within, say, a 3 block range. Same with tin, or whatever, and get rid of the prospecting pick, something there only because it makes the game playable, not because it's at all realistic. Realistic would be way too grindy, taking a sample, firing it in a crucible, doing an assay.

It would work out much better in the MP world to do something like that with crops, too, so late joiners aren't completely screwed if the current players won't spare a seed or 4, or aren't actively playing when you join the server, and you have few options but to starve because everything around the origin has been stripped bare.

That said, I don't know what all is running in the background. If you are doing a lot of farming, that might be sucking up a lot of cycles with nutrient and water depletion/replenishment. So far as I can tell, trees appear to have no change through the day; they must just be updated at night or something. But it could well be that adding new crop and rock/mineral spawns on top of everything else might bring a computer to its knees. And I agree you don't want to do that with ruins. Once found, those cracked vessels do not regenerate.

I should have put together an outline rather than just rambling, but I'm too lazy to go back and organize it into something that flows better. 

Edited January 11, 2022 by Stephan Jerde
Precision - nugget, not ore

[Credinus]

On 9/19/2021 at 3:02 PM, Viceroy said:

-issues with food spoilage on multiplayer servers

 

this so far was and still is the most frustrating thing to deal with that needs to get fixed. The sooner the better. Going on a journey with food in your inventory, needing to log off quickly and after a while coming back on the server I find all my food rotten while in the middle of nowhere. Working on a base is less annoying since your are near your food source, but still nearly 30-40% of my tasks on the server were revolved around solving food situation. Meanwhile your crops are dying, foods in vessels spoiling with winter just around the corner. This mechanic is very punishing and it almost feels like this game disrupts your daily routine, as stupid as it sounds. This was the main thing that drove me away from playing.

 

 

 

 

 

For dedicated servers, spoilage rates and time progression have been the most difficult things to balance in my experience. Using conventional preservation methods such as pickling/curing ingredients, storing in cellars, sealing crockpots, etc work great for a lot of things, but there are some mechanics that are downright impossible if you play on a dedicated server where you only have limited hours per day but other players are running the time forward constantly. For example, cheesemaking: you've got to be able to be on during a window in which your animals can be milked (this is decently forgiving at least, but still difficult to manage depending on how frequently you are able to play). Then you've got to go through each of the steps in making the cheese, and the spoil times for each step here are not so forgiving, and there's not much you can do outside of modding to fix this. And unfortunately, the only "easy" fix to this would be a blanket reduction on spoil rates either globally or for certain containers (such as barrels), which could in-turn trivialize a major survival factor in the game. Perhaps more control of room temperatures and their effects on spoil rates could address this to some extent, but again, balancing making those mechanics impossible for casual players versus trivializing them for all-day players is a tall order. I'm curious to hear how other server managers are juggling this.

Time progression can also create difficulty in farming. I have not yet found an easy solution to this, but I am looking at greenhouses as the easiest fix: if you can make greenhouses work as a true safeguard for your crops, then you don't have to worry as much about your crops dying from seasonal temperature shifts before you get a chance to harvest them because you took a weekend away. If you could just throw your crops into a greenhouse and have the peace of mind knowing that they're going to be safe from seasonal shifts while you're away from the game, then that concern goes away. One suggestion I've seen mentioned in other threads makes a lot of sense, but I imagine would require quite a bit of rework to the code structure of greenhouses; the suggestion was essentially to make it so that greenhouses will never let a crop go below its minimum growing temperature or above its maximum, so while it would still be subjected to reduced yield and slowed growing rates if the temperatures are too extreme, they at least won't wither away. There could be an argument here that that also presents a major balance issue, though, in that players could then essentially use greenhouses as forever storage for crops.

Even with mods, I have not found a good existing solution to tackle either of these in a way that doesn't make the game's survival aspect too underwhelming for the players that are on far more often than others, and I'd venture to say that it may be the biggest sticking point that is holding dedicated server popularity back over anything else. The time progression works wonderfully for single player or for set playtime servers, but unfortunately it just unfairly limits the amount of game mechanics that casual players can participate in on dedicated servers, and that's a problem that needs addressing sooner rather than later since it is wrapped up in the core mechanical foundations of the game.