Some idea's i came up with!

[VintageDutchie]

- Make rain increase the crops water level % automatically
- Rain can be used to cooldown your molds
- Enhanced celestials, lunar events such as Blood moon,harvest moon,blue moon which can give positive/negative effects
- Hot air balloon, which can be crafted with fiber,cloth. Used charcoal to fire up. used for faster journeys in long distances
- Ether Energy , generated in a selfbuild chamber with inside copper blocks/wires & crystals/minerals we still see today for example: amethyst,emerald.jade,serphenite which act as a force field you can't see or touch.  
  Used to give the player certain bonuses or effects like healing,speed,resistance,vision,lootdrop
- Add fruit trees
- Small wooden boat
- Refined Obsidian (Strong and used for tools,weapons) , created by by finding the rare ore osmium. 
  Obsidian & Osmium dust needs to be crushed & liquified together in order to make things with it
- Damascus Steel (Optional:create your own patterns on blade) , created by combining Iron & Bronze dust. 
  It has higher durability in comparison to bronze or iron. making it an effiecient tool to create

[Philtre]

23 hours ago, VintageDutchie said:

- Make rain increase the crops water level % automatically
- Rain can be used to cooldown your molds

Pretty sure those are already features in the game.

Obsidian is a type of naturally-occurring (volcanic) glass. Refining it would just give you regular glass. In the real world it was used for cutting and piercing tools such as arrowheads because it can be broken to create an extremely sharp edge, not because it's particularly durable (quite the opposite - it's very brittle).

[Malfiros]

I love a lot of the ideas you have here, particularly the hot air balloon! 
 

Edit:

This got me curious and I found this mod:

https://mods.vintagestory.at/viescraft
 

Haven’t tried it yet but definitely will be!

Edited October 24, 2021 by Malfiros

[Fredrik Blomquist]

Yes, obsidian is pretty brittle. But it's hard, much harder than iron or copper - that's why its sharp. I blow can destroy the blade, but it doesn't wear down as quickly. Flint and quartz is pretty much the same as obsidian - glass. The crystals are not formed so tightly since it isn't melted together as properly. Flint and obsidian are usually pretty impure, which can be seen by the colorr, so therefore it never been used for glassmaking. IRL making pure clear glass is the thing that's pretty hard. Pure quartz is the best way, but also really hard to find.

[Fredrik Blomquist]

Sharpening a knipped stone tool isn't easy, it mean knipping of a new edge, so that might mean that the tool wears out sooner than metal tools. I wouldn't mind seeing ground stone tools that could be more easily sharpened later in the game. Right now the game has no sharpening mechanics.

[Fredrik Blomquist]

Then flint or obsidian knifes work really bad on wood where the blade easily brakes. But i not know how complex the game should be. You could add a lot of new tools. An adze for woodworking, a scrape for leather working. Perhaps simply make it so that stone knifes dont work for woodworking och branchgathering and make the player use the axe instead.

[Maelstrom]

On 10/22/2021 at 9:34 PM, VintageDutchie said:

- Hot air balloon, which can be crafted with fiber,cloth. Used charcoal to fire up. used for faster journeys in long distances

Sounds good but balloons are subject to being carried where the wind blows.  Winds blow in different directions at different altitudes but it wasn't until fairly recently that balloons had the ability to control ascent and descent.  Given the technology of VS, hot air balloon rides would likely carry you east and you'd have to walk back.  But you'd travel east faster than walking/running.

Edited October 26, 2021 by Maelstrom

[Philtre]

On 10/24/2021 at 12:16 PM, Fredrik Blomquist said:

Yes, obsidian is pretty brittle. But it's hard, much harder than iron or copper - that's why its sharp. I blow can destroy the blade, but it doesn't wear down as quickly.

Hardness, when used in the technical sense, refers to scratch resistance, not general durability. Which is why diamonds are used only for teeny-tiny cutting edges; they're extremely hard, but also extremely brittle, so you end up making them very small to reduce the chance they'll shatter. Obsidian is a similar but milder case; obsidian knives are actually used for modern dissection and even surgery, but they're very small - the cutting edge is maybe 2-3 millimeters. In real prehistoric tools, when you needed to make a tool with a large cutting surface out of obsidian, such as a sickle, you typically embedded multiple small blades in a wooden or bone shaft. Like most stone tools, obsidian tools wear out either by fracturing / shattering, or by accumulated chips in the cutting edge that make it uneven and therefore inefficient. In terms of hours of use before needing to be replaced, iron and in some cases even copper will get you much farther for most types of tool. There's a reason stone tools died out so fast in every culture that invented effective metalworking... TL;DR, I think there's no even halfway realistic way to implement improved durability of stone tools.

The Damascus steel idea might be interesting, and maybe justify an extended smithing mechanic? Although it would mainly apply to longblades and possibly spearheads; you wouldn't want damascened axes or shovels (the slight flexibility caused by the interleaving metals is the main reason Damascus steel swords are more durable, but that would be a negative in an axe or shovel).

Edited October 27, 2021 by Philtre