Streetwind

In what scenarios do you need your mouse cursor unlocked that the game doesn't automatically unlock it for you?

Which version of the game are you running? Is this singleplayer or multiplayer? Do you have mods installed?

The need to break down finished metal products into chunks to re-smelt them is new in version 1.15. Previously, you could just chuck the thing into the crucible as is. So each item displays how many bars it smelts into, because that info used to be useful in older versions. It was not removed in 1.15. Either it was overlooked, or left intentionally so people could still tell what they would get.

Please head over to the Carry Capacity mod thread here on the forums and post your question there. Perhaps others have had a similar problem; perhaps the author is aware and already working on it.

It really does come down to that, I'm afraid. Bauxite is a stone layer, like granite, claystone, limestone, and so on. When it appears, you'll find dozens of square kilometers of it. Until then, you need to keep searching. Once, I saw a place where bauxite was not the top layer. It can spawn below other sedimentary stone. So it's worth occasionally (as in, every couple kilometers) digging down if you're in such an area, to check what's beneath. As soon as you find a stone type that's not sedimentary, you can stop digging. But honestly, Most of the time I find bauxite simply by walking and looking at the map. The color is very obvious when it appears as a top layer - no other stone type is that vividly orange-red. Especially the sand around bodies of water will show it. Do you have olivine yet? Olivine is only found within peridotite, which is another stone type. If you've got none of that, well, your exploration time just became twice as valuable, because you've got two different things to find. I'm also not seeing limestone or chalk on your map, so that's a third useful stone type you may run across on your travels. And you've already been lucky, too. Ilmenite is usually quite difficult to find. It's usually the last thing I need to hunt down. Anecdotal evidence says that stone types change more often in the east-west direction than in the north-south direction. But that may have just been my last world and one other person's similar musings. Could have been random.

@Silent Shadow No, wood does not give a bonus - it doesn't work for the cellar effect at all. It must be soil or stone, nothing else. See here where I wrote a bit about my experience with building them. And while temperature does play a role in food spoiling (it uses the location's average yearly temperature, from the climate data), it certainly isn't the primary deciding factor. A well-built cellar in the blazing desert heat keeps food better than a storage vessel standing around inside your kitchen in the arctic.

That would not do much, considering wind only ever comes from the same direction in the game Already exists - look up the brake in the handbook. ...Why? There's literally no downside to the mechanisms behind the windmill working faster. Processing speed for machines goes up. Why would you want them to run slower? You can have multiple windmill rotors on the same axle system if you need more power. Use the large gear to connect them. That may well exist someday, if/when the crafting grid is ultimately removed in favor of more in-world crafting. But it's a far future topic for the moment.

Before uninstalling anything, continue examining the status quo for clues. Look in %appdata%\vintagestorydata\logs\client-main.txt and check the first few lines of that file. It should list the graphics card the game identified. For example, on my end it looks like this: As you can see, it reports a Geforce GTX 1060 6GB, which is correct for my computer. Also, open your start menu and type "dxdiag". Run the program it finds. This will give you a system overview. Graphics card stuff is on the second tab. Vintage Story is an OpenGL game, not a DirectX game, but dxdiag is still a source of information about your computer and can report problems if there are any. If either the VS logfile or dxdiag (or both) do not correctly report the graphics card and/or driver you believe you should have, that's an indication that something is wrong. After that, you can start trying to replace the driver and such things.

You could start by reading the error message you got No, really, I'm not mocking you, I'm serious. Look at it. It says right there: "Your graphics card supports only OpenGL version 140 (1.40 - Intel Build 9.17.10.4459), but OpenGL version 330 is required. Please check if you have installed the latest version of your graphics card driver. If they are, your graphics card may be too old to play Vintage Story." That's clear and unambiguous: Vintage Story says that your computer cannot run the game. This leads to two possible options. Number one: VS is right. In which case there is nothing we can do to help you. However, you will get a refund on your purchase if you open a support ticket and explain your problem. Option two: VS thinks wrong. This can have any number of reasons. You could have no proper video driver, or just a very old one, installed. You could have a hardware failure in your video card. You could have a laptop with switchable graphics, and your laptop doesn't detect that it should switch when Vintage Story launches. Or even something else entirely. Each possible reason has its own solution, but you must first determine which it is. Start by looking at the minimum system requirements, particularly the "graphics" bit, and compare it to your computer's specs. If you don't know your computer's specs or how to find them, ask someone who can help you IRL.

Not really a bug, no. I can't really tell you how precisely cellars are coded, as I cannot read the code. But I can tell you how it works in practice in the game. Cellars are not truly 'rooms' - you don't need to build a completely enclosed space of certain specifications. No, they work through proximity of stone-type or soil-type blocks. Each storage vessel, chest, shelf, and so on will check around them in a radius of as much as five blocks away, to see if it can find valid cellar blocks. The greater the ratio of valid blocks to invalid blocks, the slower food spoils. The slowest possible food spoilage rate is achieved if the storage vessel detects only valid blocks - that is, there is a wall, floor, and ceiling made up of valid blocks in any and all directions, and none of them is more than five blocks away. It can be much closer - for example, a vessel buried underground by itself essentially occupies a perfect cellar of size 1x1x1. But if it's further away than five blocks in one direction, then it'll detect only air that way and it will no longer be perfect. This is why people tell you that cellars should be 5x5x5 rooms. Not because there's actually a room setup requirement, but because that ensures that there's valid blocks nearby in all directions. By removing the valid blocks in the floor and replacing them with invalid blocks (wooden slabs), you reduced the effectiveness of the cellar significantly. If you feel like you storage vessels aren't updating to the correct value, try picking them up and putting them back down.

Well, not saying that nothing should be done. Clearly there's room for improvements. But perhaps we can do better than offering the choice between two suboptimal setups. When you drill down into the problem, the real issue is the disparity in the passage of time between real life and game time. When you log in once a week onto a server that never goes idle, then somewhere around 200 ingame days will have passed... and at default settings a VS year only has 108 days. So almost two years will have passed since you last played. This does indeed ruin all your food storage except for the really long-lived things, like grain. And your crops will have had to endure the changing weather throughout all this time. But this timescale was actually tuned for singleplayer. With this configuration, it takes 86.4 RL hours of playing for one full ingame year to pass, and that is a lot. Most games on the market are designed for total playtimes shorter than this - and that's only the first year, in the first world you ever try. We definitely don't want an even slower progression of time for singleplayer. We can, however, accept slower progression in multiplayer. Even those players that are online every day probably don't play for much more than a third of a RL day, on average. So if we went and set the length of the month from 9 days to 30, a bit over three times the default length, then such a frequent player would have an experience very similar to singleplayer as far as it comes to seeing an ingame year pass by. And since the year now has 360 days instead of 108, the player who logs in once a week will see roughly half a year pass by since the last time they were there. Furthermore setting food spoilage to 0.3 will roughly triple the shelf life of foodstuffs to match the roughly tripled year length. And hey, if the server is meant specifically for casual players, you could slow things down even further. If you even need to - because whenever the server is allowed to go idle, less time passes for everyone. Unfortunately this approach isn't perfect yet, since the season integration isn't complete yet. Crops, berry bushes, and wild mushrooms, for instance, do not scale their growth times with year length at all. Nor do bee skeps, or the gestation periods and growing times of animals. All sorts of foodstuff you produce now keeps way longer, but still takes the same short amount of time to produce. At the same time, yield of food sources doesn't scale either, so preserving food for the now far longer winters requires much more work. Because of this, I'd say this is the area of the game that should be worked on in order to improve the experience on multiplayer servers. If the game can maintain its intended feel and challenge rating at any arbitrary time scale, then server owners will have a powerful tool to customize their worlds. In the meantime, though, the casual player who logs in once a week can also do some things to improve their own situation. Such as, for example: farming only grain, not vegetables. Vegetables won't keep a single RL week, but grain will last multiple. Select a type of grain that will survive the temperatures around where you've settled - or settle somewhere you know at least one type of grain will survive being left outside. You can trade your grain with other players to obtain vegetables, or set up in an area with lots of natural mushrooms to supplement your diet. Also, go heavily into animal husbandry and beekeeping. Animals never die of old age, and breeding them will actually be easier if you skip forward in time whenever you log off. That supplies you with on-demand meat and milk, taking care of two nutrition meters. Don't bother to make cheese, just drink the milk directly. Bee skeps, and even harvested honey, do not ever go bad either. Do not attempt to store fruit, but instead try to obtain berry bushes, so that you can harvest fruit whenever you log in. Use your honey to cook jam to stretch your fruit supply - it may not keep, but it'll let you get away with fewer berry bushes, which I understand may be in short supply on servers. If you do it right, you should be able to keep your nutrition meters reasonably well satisfied without storing any food at all beyond just grain. I mean... why would you even try to store all the food in the first place? You don't need to last the winter. Even if you happen to log on in mid-winter, you play a few hours and then log off, and you've skipped all the rest of it. Storage of any kind is almost entirely superfluous for you.

The server already stops the progression of time when nobody is online. If you play with a group of friends that gets online together and stops playing aorund the same time, then it won't feel any different from how singleplayer works. The problems you have heard of occur on larger servers that have players on them for most of the day, spread across different timezones. If the server never gets to pause because someone is always online, then 30 ingame days pass for every 24 RL hours. Your other suggestions are unfortunately not as clean-cut and easy as they sound at first glance. They either can be exploited for an ingame advantage, or they lead to unintended, un-fun, and immersion-breaking behavior (such as every single player on the whole server feeling pressured to run into their cellar before logging off, and emptying all of their shelves into their inventory, only to have to sort it all back onto the shelves when they next log back in).

Players can jump onto troughs and walk over it. That means that animals can, too.

Chickens go for small throughs and other animals for large ones. So you can have chickens pretty much anywhere, they don't get in the way. But if you have a sheep pen right next to a pig pen, and put in feed that both of them like, there's a risk. I mean, it's not guaranteed to go wrong immediately, but I have seen this behavior happen when I tried to subdivide my sheep pen so that only the "correct" generations had access to the trough. At some point, the other sheep went crazy.

Farmland blocks refill their moisture level only once every couple minutes. It's certainly not ideal, maybe this will change in the future. But for what it's worth - if such an update tick were to happen while it's raining, then the rain would indeed add moisture.

This is an impractical idea in general, because filled troughs cause nearby animals to want to eat from them. If an animal from pen A gets the bright idea that it must eat from the trough in pen B, it may start throwing itself against the separating fence until it eventually gltiches through. ...Or, at least, that's how it was so far. 1.15.6 is bringing some unspecified improvements to trough feeding behavior. Unsure if it addresses this. Will require testing after the patch goes stable.

Ideally the bug report subforum or github. I see bugs from both getting fixed, not sure if there's an internal priority. In any case though, think less about where you put it and more about what you put in there. The majority of all bug reports are of such poor quality that gleaning any information at all from them is a challenge that might well be impossible, or may take more time than fixing the bug itself. Attaching a relevant log is a start, but if you really want to help, you can do better. Clearly state your game version and OS. Clearly state if you're using mods. Don't report a one-time 'ghost issue' unless it's particularly crippling. Try to figure out what made it happen, and try to force it to happen again. Write down how you made it happen again. In great detail. There can't possibly be too much detail here. If you managed to make it happen again, start a new world at default settings and with zero mods. Try to make it happen again. Describe the result. Provide screenshots if you suspect that they might help illustrate what you want the devs to see. If you're set up to record video (for example, you stream or do Youtube content), a video is even better than a screenshot. Watch your bug report and be prepared to answer questions you get. Even if it takes a week or more for questiosn to come in. Sometimes Tyron is on vacation, or he does focused bugfixing sprints once every so often but works on new features at other times. If you cannot make a bug in a modded game happen again in a new save without mods, don't report it as a bug! Try to find out which mod, or which combination of them, causes it to happen, then go to the mod threads in question and report it there.

...I'm sorry, what? When did you last play TFC, and are you sure you're remembering that, and not some variant/fork with a different implementation? Because you can have TFC-style prospecting in Vintage Story. Natively, without a mod. Just turn on node search mode and make the search radius impractically large. Then you have the same thing, except better, because Vintage Story never gives you false negatives like TFC did on like every second block. I encourage you to do it, and try it out. Play a game without using density search mode at all, working only with node search. You'll find that, despite 100% reliability, prospecting like that is terrible. You'll spend hours fruitlessly searching in areas where the ore can never even spawn, because you have no tool that tells you this fact. A tool like... I don't know... density search mode. Which is designed precisely to tell the player where it is worth looking, and where not. TFC's method of prospecting was exactly what you accuse Vintage Story's method of being: straight-up blindly clicking blocks until random chance smiled on you. It was partially obfuscated by making the propick's range extremely big, at the cost of making positional triangulation far more work than it should have been; and also the game's greater reliance on surface nuggets, which generally (and thankfully) made the prospecting pick unnecessary for the majority of ores. But as far as being placed at a random spot in the world, given a propick, and being told to go find nickel? Yeah, good luck - there was no approach supported by game mechanics there, other than blindly guessing often enough to succeed. You dug yourself a shaft to layer 3, checked if there was any gabbro, and if not, you ran a kilometer in a random direction and dug another shaft. And once you found gabbro? Why, you started digging a tunnel in a random direction, clicked your propick all over the walls, praying that your blind tunnel passed in close proximity to a vein at some point, and that your detection of it didn't get randomly screwed by false negatives. Truly, a shining example of a deterministic, skill-based system... oh wait. Vintage Story tells you where not to even bother digging. Density search mode will never show anything unless the conditions are right, so you can skip finding the right stone type. If if spits out a cassiterite reading, then the right stone type is present and all spawn conditions are fulfilled for cassiterite to exist there. Guaranteed. And you can use it on the surface, without digging a shaft down to check the layers, in contrast to TFC's pick. With this, you have a tool for an actual, structured approach to prospecting, where you systematically map out hotspots on the world map long before ever taking a pickaxe in hand. It is a skill that you, the player, can learn and perfect. You can guarantee yourself that, once you do start digging that first shaft, you've already maximized your chances. If you did it right, then in the vast majority of all cases, you won't need to dig a second shaft. (And of course, you do use node search mode once you start actually digging. Prospecting gameplay is at its best when the player has learned to combine both modes for maximum payoff, IMHO.) That's not to say that Vintage Story's system is perfect. There are many improvements I can think of, from the really elaborate like having a toggleable layer on the map where the game saves and graphically displays your prospecting results for you, down to the really simple like please just enabling node search mode by default already, to stop people having to resort to console commands for something that genuinely makes gameplay better. But if given the choice which gameplay implementation I'd rather use for prospecting, between TFC and VS? I'll choose the latter. In 100% of all cases.

The upcoming 1.15.6 patch fixes bugs in the room registry system, which greenhouses use. There's a release candidate build up right now if you want to test it. But, of course, it's always safer to wait for the stable release, especially where existing worlds are concerned. Not saying that the patch will be guaranteed to fix your issues, but it's probably best to not bash your head against it right now and give it a few more days.

- Make sure your enclosures are large enough so that animals do not push into each other. In my experience, the larger the enclosure, the fewer animals phase through fences. It's by far the biggest contributing factor. - Avoid building your fence across changing elevations. Even if you terraform nothing else, try and make your enclosures flat. - Do not have filled troughs on the other side of fences. Sometimes, an animal will decide that it absolutely must eat from a trough outside of its enclosure, and will throw itself against the fence until it eventually glitches through. Happens a lot to people who like to make enclosures for different animals all next to each other. Troughs have a certain range; try to make sure animals can only detect those they can reach.

...Interesting observation. It was certainly true in my last singleplayer world, but at the time I thought it was coincidence. If this can be proven to be a pattern, it would greatly help with searching.

Could work. Would probably do less than you think it would, though. By their nature, chalk, lime, and bauxite are almost always top-layer stones, and thus visible on the map and in person without any need to dig or prospect. That said, "almost always" is not "always", so there would be a few instances where it would help.

I believe part of it would be to drive progression. Imagine yourself playing Vintage Story. You just made yourself a set of copper tools. These tools never break. You can now mine rocks and pile up cobblestone walls - or heck, shape them into bricks, or quarry raw stone for building materials. You can saw wooden boards. You can scythe grass. You can chisel fancy blocks. You can craft a windmill. You're done. Why would you continue progressing? Why bother looking for tin? Why bother learning how to smelt iron? Why bother digging up meteors and constructing cementation furnaces? Nah, just stick with the tools you have and build a fancy home base instead. Eventually, you might go and do the other things, the mining and prospecting and other metal tiers... but you'd do them because there was nothing else left to do. Not because you needed it. You might say: but you need better weapons and armor to fight the harder enemies underground. But that's not true. Because you have no reason to go underground. There's nothing that you need there. Maybe you'll go explore there, sometime. But not for progression. Rather, because you can, and because there's nothing else left to do. Admittedly: that's an exaggerated picture. But at the end of the day, the fact that your tools break is a progression driver. You want something better than copper, because copper breaks quickly. By contrast, a steel tool will last you a long, long time. One steel prospecting pick lasts as long as eleven copper ones would. It's one reason to want steel. Another part of the goal is likely to facilitate longer-term play, particularly on multiplayer servers. The most common player fantasy about multiplayer in games like these is: let's build a village. A community where everyone has their niche. Where we have a farmer, a blacksmith, a potter, a miller... Let's have an economy, where you trade for what you need with what you can provide to others. It's not just that this allows people to be part of a community, a tribe (and human beings are still hardwired by evolution to want to feel that way). It also facilitates joining a multiplayer server in the first place. You start off with nothing, while everyone else had weeks to play already. How could you possibly catch up, and find yourself a place in the community? Why, by specializing, of course. You don't have to catch up in all the progression systems, but rather just one of them. Just get the prerequisites for one thing taken care of, and you can be useful. Unfortunately, that player fantasy is a lot harder to realize than you might think, particularly if the game is supposed to be playable in singleplayer as well. In many ways, making multiplayer better can result in design decisions that are diametrically opposed to making singleplayer better. And vice versa. It's an incredibly difficult problem with no easy solutions. But, this post is not about that. Your takeaway should simply be that there's a player fantasy that many people really wish to see, but which at the same time is hard for the game designer to provide. And tool/item durability is one of the few methods the designer has that does not automatically result in a conflict with singleplayer gameplay. Imagine again that nothing you crafted would ever break. That means as soon as each player has obtained any given tool, or weapon, they'll never need another one. How, then, does a player become a blacksmith in a multiplayer village? Literally no one needs their services more than once. And indeed - if just making one thing once is all it takes to satisfy demand, why would another player bother with visiting the village blacksmith in the first place? They might not even be online right now! Just make the thing yourself and move on. By contrast, if tools do break, then there's just that little bit more of a reason to have someone in the village who you know always has a chest full of pickaxes you can get at a moment's notice. And it makes sense to get multiple tools from them ahead of time, so you have a reserve for when they are not online. It is an enabler for the fantasy. Indeed, some people would like even more of this. One of the inspirations for Vintage Story is the Minecraft mod TerrafirmaCraft. In it, handheld pottery such as bowls and water jugs have a 1% chance to break with every use. I've seen people ask to bring that to Vintage Story. Why? Because they play exclusively on a multiplayer server. And that mechanic gives the village potter a reason to exist. And well, another part may well be that the game is designed the way it is precisely to make it harder. That there is tool durability precisely to make forgetting to bring a replacement a failure mode. If your pickaxe runs out, you aren't finding that tin vein today, and you'll have to survive some more with lesser tools. If your sword breaks, the drifters eat you and you die. Chances are, the game wants this to happen to you. Because you could have brought more picks. More swords. You could have prepared better. And you didn't. Now you pay the price. Not saying that the mechanics as they are now are the best that could ever be. But, you asked for game design justifications for tool durability. These points are some, if probably not all, of them.

Rejoice: matching agriculture closer to the season system is already on the roadmap.

Correct. If you move far enough north, you'll get a midnight sun in summer: a sun that never sets, giving daylight 24/7. At the same location, in winter, you will have a polar night - where the sun will never rise above the horizon at all for several months. But at least you get to enjoy the aurora borealis while the skies are clear...