Streetwind

This is not new in the latest update. Drifters have gained the ability to ignore almost all spawn restrictions during temporal storms a long time ago. If necessary they will spawn in midair to get to you. The one thing I have found that works (at least it hasn't failed me yet) is being somewhere completely enclosed, with no full block spaces being open on the inside. For example, a one block deep, two blocks tall closet with ladders stuck to the wall. The ladders reduce the available block space to less than full, so no drifters can spawn there, but you can still be in that same space.

I think that anything in the player's inventory is fixed at x1.0 perish speed, but I don't actually know for sure. I might be wrong.

This is new with 1.18, in a way, though not as new as you may think. Food spoil speed has always scaled with temperature. The hotter it gets - and I notice in your screenshot that it is summer - the more quickly perishables will spoil. In previous versions, storage containers like clay vessels would display only their own modifier to food spoil speed, while the modifier from temperature was applied silently in the background and was not shown anywhere. From 1.18 onwards, storage containers show the sum of all modifiers applying to food stored within.

I would start by simply appending the word to the same command you already entered to get this message, and resubmitting it that way.

The default location for the game's logfiles under Windows is: %appdata%\vintagestorydata\logs

You're more likely to get an answer to this if you hop on Discord and talk directly to admins from large servers like Aury Fury, or even the official test server. There's probably only a dozen people or so in the entire VS community who even have the experience required to give a non-speculative answer.

It's something meant to appear during temporal storms, or while you have 0% temporal stability. If you see it at any other time, it's likely a bug.

I think they might spawn less frequently because the world is "noisier" with the new terrain generator. There may be fewer places where it can spawn. That said, I've seen surface copper deposits generate. Spotted around a dozen in my current 1.18 playthrough.

Alternatively, if the world is set to have soil affected by gravity, and there was a cavern below the dirt layer, it may have collapsed. That said, given that there are indeed burning pit kilns in this screenshot, I wouldn't be surprised if Digitalr was right

/worldconfig foodSpoilSpeed 0 Although I'm not sure if 0 is a valid value here. Some of these worldconfigs have minimum lower limits, you'll have to experiment. The closer to 0 you can set it, the slower food will spoil. After you enter this command, exit to main menu and reload your world, then enter the command again without a number to let it print the currently active value. If you entered something invalid (for example if it doesn't like 0) it will likely display the default value of 1. Then you can try something else, like 0.1.

That "square that indicates the area" is probably drawn by the mod VsProspectorInfo. It is not a feature of the base game.

Auto-pause during character generation is a feature in version 1.18, which is currently undergoing final bugfixing before its stable release. Until then, I recommend that you make a test world, take your time to try out all the customization options and read all the classes, and decide what you want. Then you can speedily click through it all in the world you actually want to play. Or, you could install the latest 1.18 release candidate. It is quite playable already.

Yep, I have four parallel installs at the moment: 1.14.7, 1.16.1, 1.17.11, and 1.18.0-rc.6. Although admittedly I haven't touched the two older ones in a long while... I start each one with a custom shortcut that remaps the data folder, so they don't interfere with each other. The default VS data folder under %appdata% is completely unused. When I updated rc.2 to rc.6 from within the game, only the 1.18 instance was touched. The other installs remain as they were.

The integrated update worked fine for me. Went from rc2 to rc6 without issues.

This is not possible, but you can achieve the same look by using multi-material chiseling.

I brought this up to Tyron after the release candidate went up, asking whether the team was planning further work on world generation. The answer was yes, there is further work planned, but not in 1.18. The lore update was already delayed too much to spend even more time on this at the moment. So for the time being, we'll need to wait until this update is out and refined, and work on 1.19 starts. IIRC Tyron suggested once before that the theme of 1.19 could be "de-jank 2.0", and if the players consider the terrain janky, that seems perfectly in theme to tackle for that update In the meantime, I've been trialing this mod, which shifts the weighting of landforms around some and adds a few custom ones. It doesn't get rid of all the sins, like floating islands and shattered mountains, but my gut feeling says its made them a bit more rare and the world feel a bit more natural. Sample size of about a dozen worlds tested without the mod (creative flight exploration), and one world currently in testing with it (actual gameplay). Maybe give it a try as well?

Perhaps this might help you:

That, at least, already exists. In the inventory, when hovering over an item, pressing H opens the handbook at that entry. Out in the world, when pointing the mouse at a block, pressing shift+H does the same. (Or possibly sneak+H, in case you rebound your sneak key to something other than shift.) I agree with the CTRL+A part, would very much like that for all text fields in the game (handbook, waypoints etc).

Craft some tongs and hold them in your off hand The recipe is in the handbook. You will need them to handle anything hotter than 300°C.

Take a look here: https://wiki.vintagestory.at/index.php/Chisel Particularly at the section "Microblock Chiseling" and "Multiblock Chiseling". You can also find people demonstrating how to in various youtube videos.

Not currently, no.

It does not, no. But that's not unbalanced, that's just a minor lack of convenience. Game balance is for default settings. As soon as you go and play with the rules of the world, you're changing the balance of the game in myriads of ways, some more obvious, some less. This is then on you, as the player, and no longer on the game. When a player goes and changes their days-per-month setting, it is honestly not asking too much to expect them to also adjust other worldconfig settings, like cropGrowthRateMul or playerHungerSpeed, to dial the game in to where they need it to be. You're not getting extra meat from slaughtering animals either when your months are 30 days long, even though you still need to eat just as often, and animal breeding takes much longer, and wild animals are no more numerous than before. Ever thought of that before? There are tons and tons of unexpected consequences from deviating that strongly from the default settings. The game allows you to do this, but it leaves you with the responsibility for your own actions.

Have you tried restarting the PC completely, to ensure that no zombie process is hogging the address?

Well, either 1.17 changed crop growth times in general and 1.18 made them scale to month lengths, or the other way around. Both changes were made, I'm just not sure in which order. Expect your harvests to become even more rare in the future though, because the average crop now has a growth time around two months, no matter how long your months are. (They drop twice as much produce once fully grown, though.)

No, certain things have always been independent of the seed. Additionally, some world customization settings (particularly the world size itself) will cause completely different terrain for the same seed.