grinning_serpent

You're only going 2 blocks deep even for pigs and deer? They can leap out of a 2-deep pit can't they? 2-deep is enough for bushmeat critters, for sure.

Yeah, but how do you actually kill them once they're stuck? Spears have a ~2.5 block reach, right? I'm mostly looking for something that will passively "catch" animals as they wander around. One world had a deep pit spawn naturally that ended up having several pigs, raccoons, and a couple of deer running around in it constantly. I wasn't able to properly weaponize it and it was difficult to layer in more dirt (mostly by placing it on the side of the pit and letting it fall down) without giving the critters an escape route. I'm looking for something that will passively catch critters as they wander around, and maybe can be used to lure or chase them into it in a pinch, and that I can then sit at the top of or maybe hang from a ladder to poke them to death with a spear, unless it's possible to somehow use fire or some other indirect means to kill them more efficiently. Smothering doesn't seem possible. Dropping blocks on top of them does damage them, but they're also automatically pushed up on top of the new block. Otherwise I'd think about making 1x1 pits 3-deep or 4-deep and just dropping sand on them.

In terms of options, I think the most immediate one might be to split up the temporal creatures options into one for creatures in general, and one for temporal storms. Because I agree, in vanilla play the temporal storms are largely pointless. It might make more sense to try and make them interesting, however. The biggest issue is that they aren't something you really interact with. You go afk in a room or small cubbyhole until it's over. Later in the game you might go out and fight the monsters for lack of anything better to do, but temporal storms spawn high tier monsters while you're still using, at best, maybe some copper gear so you're not going to come out ahead in that equation. So why not make the storms interactive? - Make them spawn enemies tied to the strength of the storm, so that the first storm of a game probably isn't much that you haven't been seeing already. Ensure that enemies cannot spawn inside what the game defines as a "well-lit room." - Make slaying enemies accelerate the storm, with the tier of the enemy reducing the storm's length by a greater amount. - Make enemies able to break low-tier blocks like soil or wood (only when in pursuit of a player they have detected), and able to open unlocked gates and doors, to encourage players to defend themselves and their home instead of just afk in a corner somewhere. This also makes storms more of a threat to be prepared for. That wattle gate is stopping monsters right now, but that storm coming up tomorrow will make it stop being an immovable object to them. - Players dying during the storm reduces its duration. If all connected players die during the storm (TPK), the storm ends immediately and the current built-up "strength" of storms is cut in half (the next storm will be weaker than the one you just fought, down to some established minimum.) This could be abused, but if players deliberately abuse features to get around gameplay mechanics, maybe they should just turn off those mechanics in settings? I'd also recommend disabling sleeping during storms so that the player *must* interact with them. It could be limited to just Wilderness Survival if that sounds too strenuous for normal mode. Like it or not, combat is a major element of normal/WS gameplay in VS and it's odd that what should be a regular dangerous time to be prepared for is, in actual play, just a mild annoyance at best. It might also make sense to integrate monsters into the progression curve. A mod I've been playing a lot lately, for example, has monsters have a chance to drop a new item that's required to free things from molds, making slaying monsters and accumulating some of this material a hard requirement to advance into the copper age and something you will always need more of throughout your playthrough. It's a small thing, but it encourages the player to kill isolated monsters or even small packs of them when they'd normally just want to sprint away until they despawn.

Youtube is kind of a crapshoot and the wiki doesn't seem to have all the information I'm looking for, and a forum search didn't return any obvious guides or how-to's. I've learned that bears can climb 3 blocks high when one invited itself into my hut one day, and it seems like pigs can *reach* up to 3 blocks high when angry, because I've been hit while lurking at the top of a 3-high pit (pig was at the bottom and jumping up), but can't actually climb that high. That would suggest a 4-high pit is necessary for safety, but a spear certainly can't reach that far. I've seen that bears can't fit into 1-block gaps, but I don't know how far their reach is. Ideally, I can dig an appropriate pit early in the game and wait for mobs to passively trap themselves by walking in, or maybe by baiting them in via jumping across the pit and then they'll be hanging out there and I can deal with them at my leisure. Throwing spears takes a *lot* of spears if there's more than one or two mobs in the pit, so ideally we're trying to setup something where I can just poke the mobs to death from safety. Is fire an option? I've come across dead animals after burning a prairie out of my way, so clearly fire can and will kill animals, but I'm not aware of any way of setting a fire in a pit from a distance. Would be it possible to place a log or logs in the pit and rely on burning dry grass around the lip of the pit to ignite the logs? I've seen fire travel up (such as an open flame igniting a wood/log roof that isn't sufficiently far away), but haven't yet seen it travel down.

Yes, the in-game screenshot function works properly. It's only taking a screencap using printscreen or similar that returns something very different than what's currently displayed, and is one of the reasons I'm here asking about it because it's very odd behavior. I know I've seen it happen in a few other games, but none of the names are coming to me right now.

Yes, although RAM usage is obviously much lower without mods.

Yes, it's a problem. I wouldn't ask otherwise. Once the RAM usage hits ~29GB the game must frequently "close" for moments (black screen with the Windows blue circle "thinking" mouse cursor or sometimes the initial world load/startup screen) in between normal play. I don't understand why the game is seemingly choosing to hold onto information and assets that aren't in use. Performance in programs other than VS also tanks while VS is running, adding hitches and delays even to something as simple as writing text into notepad. That's another thing I haven't had any luck finding information on, but games and applications that are much more demanding don't cause this so I'm assuming it's something to do with how VS runs. I've wondered if VS just really hammers a few cores while leaving the rest untouched - that would leave CPU usage showing fairly low overall, but I'd have to reinstall hwinfo or something to be sure.

I've noticed that RAM usage increases over time when creating new worlds, and it often never goes back down. When taking screenshots with printscreen, it'll often be a picture of something several minutes old, potentially even a previously-loaded world. This can also happen when quitting out of a world, particularly as RAM usage approaches the total system memory. Why does this happen? Is there anything that can be done about it? It's very odd behavior that I haven't been able to find any explanations for, maybe because I don't have any specific terms to search with. It's a source of frustration when attempting to generate a good map (or even just checking behavior of worldgen) with various combinations of mod or even just stock vanilla, as I have to quit out of VS entirely for it to finally let go of the RAM it's grabbing. As an example, upon launching VS, it holds steady at about 10-11GB of RAM use (counting Firefox, which I'm using to write this post of course.) RAM usage climbs to 17-18GB upon creating and loading into a world for the first time. If I quit out and then go create a new world, usage climbs further into the low 20's, and will eventually hit around 29GB of my 32GB of memory on a third repetition. Even if I leave the game idle on the menu for a few minutes between iterations, the RAM usage never drops back towards the original 10-11GB or even the 17-18GB used when only a single world is active. Why is the game seemingly holding onto assets for worlds that aren't in use anymore? Shouldn't it discard all of that once the world has closed and been saved to disk?