Rift spawn rate and shrooms

[CyberFrog]

I'd like to address a couple of issues I've found with this game, especially the features implemented by the most recent update.

• The first issue is that rifts appear too often. The only thing they really do is just being an inconvenience. No matter where I go, I cannot walk for 3 minutes without hearing the sounds of a rift. I find it annoying and simply unimmersive that everywhere I go I encounter an otherwordly entity that is supposed to be something the player should fear, but is not. This even happens on medium rift activity which is present 90% of the time.
• Many people probably don't have a problem with this and I understand, but in my opinion the second issue is that there are simply too many shrooms. I'd find it better to leave the number of distinctive mushroom species at 5 or 6, maybe even 12 but 30 is just way too much. It actually blows my mind that someone thought it was a good idea. I fear that this game will become eversaturated with vanilla additions which will turn it into a mainstream mess that everyone hopes for.
• The last issue is that this game has severe logical problems. A lot of actions are completely counter-intuitive, for example that digging out a forest floor and placing it again, creating "medium-fertility soil" makes the soil have 0% of everything, water and PKN. At first I thought that it's a feature and you're supposed to dig out the forest floor to "plow it" before planting seeds, but after I've noticed that the soil is just dead and has nothing in it I ragequited because I've just had enough. This makes the idea of deforestation useless since you'll just be left with dead soil without trees, and I find the sole idea of "soil hunting" unimmersive and just absurd. There is also a problem that the player is only able to transport water via a bucket, made from wooden planks. Really? Seriosuly? It may work in game-made mechanics, but are you telling me that the primordial man had not a way to trasport water? The player should be able to transport water with clay pots or something. This would require a rework of some in-game systems, but this is the most intuitive way of doing it.

Thank you for your attention.

[Streetwind]

2 hours ago, CyberFrog said:

I fear that this game will become eversaturated with vanilla additions which will turn it into a mainstream mess that everyone hopes for.

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... what? o_O

 

2 hours ago, CyberFrog said:

digging out a forest floor and placing it again, creating "medium-fertility soil" makes the soil have 0% of everything, water and PKN.

Sounds like a bug. Forest floor is a new addition in the latest update. It's not unexpected for new features to sometimes require fixing.

[CyberFrog]

In my opinion the problem with modern games is that they have too many features, for an example like No Man's Sky that was ""fixed"" (and now you can build bases, ride alien creatures and have 3 different space cars as far as I know, which is not the game I bought before the ""fix"", however it seems that this type of game appeals to a wider audience). Of course one could argue that it's not a bad thing, but nevertheless I do not support the idea of having too many items that serve the same purpose in Vintage Story.

[Philtre]

7 hours ago, CyberFrog said:

digging out a forest floor and placing it again, creating "medium-fertility soil" makes the soil have 0% of everything, water and PKN.
[snip]
The player should be able to transport water with clay pots or something.

The forest floor turning into zero-fertility land sounds like a bug. Forest floor is new for 1.16 and may have some issues.

As for water, you can gather small amounts for cooking etc. in clay bowls, and you can water your crops with a clay watering can. You only need a bucket to make a new water source block. Considering that in the real world it's not possible to create an inexhaustible source of water by dumping water in a hole in the first place, no matter how much water you use, needing a specific tool to do so doesn't break realism any further.

[Smile]

12 hours ago, CyberFrog said:

rifts appear too often.

They are new and being tweaked a lot, I can see them being reworked a ton in the next major releases.

[DessertOverlord]

This seems a bit gloom & doom for what is an early access game.

Additionally, we're on patch 0 of 1.16 right now so a lot of things will be funky. I would like to see the new mushrooms types maybe spread across larger regions (say, 3 or 4 spawn in different areas) but do remember that VS is meant to be semi-realistic in its depiction of things. There's a lot more than 6 types of mushrooms irl. Of course, with it being an early access title that's just how it'll be sometimes until things get tweaked and tuned.

As for the zero nutrient soil, that's likely to be a bug.

As far as transporting liquids, you can now use jugs to carry liquids (though I've yet to test whether you can place water blocks down or use them in a cooking pot or whatever) but I can't even fathom what you'd need such a large amount of water for anyways. Cooking and farming are all I can think of but just use a bowl or jug for cooking and if you need watered farmland just use a watering can.

TL;DR it's only week 2 of this update being out and VS's team is rather small compared to other games of its scale. It takes a while to patch and bugfix stuff. Hell, there are already as of today 3 unstables in the works for patches to fix a lot of the issues from before. Just give them a little time to iron the update out a little.

Good feedback all the way around though!

[Philtre]

On 1/21/2022 at 3:48 AM, DessertOverlord said:

As far as transporting liquids, you can now use jugs to carry liquids (though I've yet to test whether you can place water blocks down or use them in a cooking pot or whatever) but I can't even fathom what you'd need such a large amount of water for anyways.

You can't place source blocks with jugs. IIRC, you can use them to add water to cooking pots. Note that each serving of soup requires one liter of water, which is one bowl or one-third of a jug, so if you wanted to make a full pot of soup for some reason you'd need multiple trips with a jug or bowl.

[Thorfinn]

IMO, the biggest problem with a plethora of berry types and eleventy-five mushrooms and a shabillion species of trees is that the inventory space was designed around a much more limited set of blocks you could carry around. While 10 spaces and 4 three-slot reed baskets was OK a couple versions ago, it's getting pretty tight in 16. I'm to the point I'm often throwing away the second knife blade and knapping a new one when I need it. If I knap a shovel at all, it gets either used up or thrown away.

[dakko]

On 1/20/2022 at 2:22 AM, CyberFrog said:

No matter where I go, I cannot walk for 3 minutes without hearing the sounds of a rift.

I'm not experiencing that in my game (newly generated in 1.16.1-rc2), and I'm not seeing that in the LP that I'm following. Maybe you've had bad luck.

 

[Pestilence]

21 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

While 10 spaces and 4 three-slot reed baskets was OK a couple versions ago, it's getting pretty tight in 16

You know you can replace those baskets with linen sacks and backpacks, right?

[skam]

Although there are so many kinds of mushrooms，as far as I know, there are limited types of mushrooms that can spawn in an area.

[skam]

the rift spawns too often, 3 rifts spawned next to me within a minute

[Irulana]

I don't have problems with rifts, I don't see many of them,I have sometimes them in my base but they don't spawn drifters as the lighting is high. The looks nice and interesting.

Mushrooms are nice edible decorative addition and I would love to find some at last, I only find those on tress. It's something broken with their generation, I can't find any on floor after a week of play in new chunks.. I would like to ability to collect them, I like collecting things in VS.

For me biggest issue is currently the extremely rare fruit tress and no new ground mushrooms ><

 

[Thorfinn]

On 1/23/2022 at 9:58 AM, Pestilence said:

You know you can replace those baskets with linen sacks and backpacks, right?

Not before mid-spring, unless I've been insanely lucky with drifter drops or cracked vessels. By which time I have a home set up and don't much care anyway, and won't care until I start doing significant caving. And not even then. It's pretty common for me to leave caches all over the place rather than having to head home to resupply.

But berries have a much shorter freshness, so I'd rather use those up first, even if berries weren't generally the smaller stacks anyway.

Day one, I've generally got a knife, an axe, flint, obsidian, grass, logs, sticks, horsetails or poultices, and some kind of dirt I can use to nerdpole away from wolves if necessary. That's almost the entire hotbar. Reeds and roots take up 2. A couple three types of berries I have not eaten yet. Four to six spaces for crops and seeds. Not a lot of space left for mushrooms and polypores. Of course, I'm ignoring or caching any cracked vessels I encounter which are not sacks or packs. I try to camp out on some form of clay so I can start cooking. Day 2 is worse, as I also now have a torch or two, a stack of clay, possibly some peat, a cooking pot and bowl, possibly a crock or two. Maybe a few unfired storage pots. And by the end of the day, several more spaces filled with mushrooms, berries and crops.

Up until I decide where to settle, I'm often setting down caches of a half-dozen firepits to offload everything I don't absolutely need. And, yeah, usually that means things like grain, vegetables and mushrooms get cached, and hopefully I can find some of them before they all go bad.

[Pestilence]

5 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Not before mid-spring, unless I've been insanely lucky with drifter drops or cracked vessels. By which time I have a home set up and don't much care anyway, and won't care until I start doing significant caving. And not even then. It's pretty common for me to leave caches all over the place rather than having to head home to resupply.

But berries have a much shorter freshness, so I'd rather use those up first, even if berries weren't generally the smaller stacks anyway.

Day one, I've generally got a knife, an axe, flint, obsidian, grass, logs, sticks, horsetails or poultices, and some kind of dirt I can use to nerdpole away from wolves if necessary. That's almost the entire hotbar. Reeds and roots take up 2. A couple three types of berries I have not eaten yet. Four to six spaces for crops and seeds. Not a lot of space left for mushrooms and polypores. Of course, I'm ignoring or caching any cracked vessels I encounter which are not sacks or packs. I try to camp out on some form of clay so I can start cooking. Day 2 is worse, as I also now have a torch or two, a stack of clay, possibly some peat, a cooking pot and bowl, possibly a crock or two. Maybe a few unfired storage pots. And by the end of the day, several more spaces filled with mushrooms, berries and crops.

Up until I decide where to settle, I'm often setting down caches of a half-dozen firepits to offload everything I don't absolutely need. And, yeah, usually that means things like grain, vegetables and mushrooms get cached, and hopefully I can find some of them before they all go bad.

Well you certainly seem to have a unique play style.  Personally, I'm glad the game isn't designed specifically for it.  I think variety is nice and I'm willing to temporarily settle early in Fort Dirt™ and rush flax and a saw to support it before I decide where to permanently reside.

Edited January 25, 2022 by Pestilence

[Thorfinn]

I don't see a whole lot of difference there. At least so far as I usually play.

For me, every home is Fort Dirt. I've never been interested in the building aspects of really any game, but only the survival aspects. Yeah, maybe it's a challenge to get enough of a certain kind of material for your architectural design. That's just not the kind of challenge I enjoy. I prefer the less "grindy" challenges.

I just create homes about a day's travel apart, using whatever materials are at hand. Which is usually cob or packed dirt. Cobble on occasion. Plant every seed I have. Next morning, head south, build a new shelter, and prepare some fields. Go back in time to harvest the crop, and head out to my new camp to repeat the process. One harvest per camp, one day between harvest and planting, which means never worrying about crop rotation. If the game is still holding my interest come winter, I will have pushed into warmer climes by then.

I am intrigued, though. How do you rush flax enough to get linen sacks earlier than mid spring? Is there a way I don't know to get more than 2 harvests per month?

Edited January 25, 2022 by Thorfinn

[Maelstrom]

On 1/25/2022 at 1:51 PM, Thorfinn said:

I am intrigued, though. How do you rush flax enough to get linen sacks earlier than mid spring? Is there a way I don't know to get more than 2 harvests per month?

Run around gathering all the wild flax crops.  I haven't upgraded to 1.16 but I carry a hoe with me and till the soil under immature wild crops.  Next day, PRESTO! they're mature.  All I need do is beat the wild bunnies to the harvest. It's May 7 and I've got my linen sacks.

[Thorfinn]

Oh, cool. I can do that. Surround them with fences and so long as I get there sometime that day, we are probably fine. Works for all crops, I assume? Though I don't have much use for carrot seeds, I don't mind adding carrots to a stew.

[Maelstrom]

Works for all crops on tillable soil.  Cops on sand, gravel or clay - just harvest.