LJim

There's also talk about new methods of transportation, though exactly what that entails remains to be seen.

On the topic of literature, besides Lovecraft, I'd also suggest checking out Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote similar weird tales as HPL. Some of his earlier stories like The Abominations of Yondo, The Ninth Skeleton, and Metamorphosis of the World feature altering states of reality that feel like the portrayal of rust world in VS. IMO they're not the best stories of that era (I much prefer adventure stories from authors like Howard and Burroughs) but they're still very good. Might be up your alley @Maelstrom

Yeah I'd use the Farmland Drops Soil mod until Tyron figures out a way to implement farmland dropping soil properly.

6 hours ago, Robert Johnson said:

Space Rangers? Do you mean this game?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/214730/Space_Rangers_HD_A_War_Apart/

If so, there is a sequel? I mean, besides this (below)? I wouldn't really classify that as a sequel just by looking at it, but I've never tried it.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/503450/Space_Rangers_Quest/

EDIT: After reading the description of the first link above, I discovered it is a remaster of the original Space Rangers 2, with added content. It released way back in 2004 in Russia and then got translated and released in Europe in 2005 and North America in 2006.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Rangers_2:_Dominators

Yeah A War Apart is basically Dominators but with more content. You can ignore Quest, it's just interactive fiction set in the SR universe. And what Thorfinn said, it's on sale at GOG at a price that's basically a steal for one of the best non-linear games ever made.

1 hour ago, Velifax said:

I play a lot of economic simulators and I'm imagining a system where in the background traveling merchants are simulated. They would exist only on the pathways between trade wagons. So if you are going from trader to trader chances are you'll meet an additional traveling trader. Always enjoyed meeting the llama man travelers in other games.

Have you played Space Rangers 2 before? What you described reminds me of that game, where the entire universe is simulated, from NPC trader schedules to faction wars. You could play the game twice and it would never be the same experience because of how the systems procedurally interact with one another.

28 minutes ago, Maelstrom said:

Welll...  There was this one time I was building a pathway over a sea of sand.  No holes in the ground indicating potential danger lurking until the sand gave way.  It's really fun when the seconds turn into hours waiting to land.  Half my health departed when I landed and the wonderful help of the friendly neighborhood den of drifters I found kindly relieved me of the burden of the remaining half of my health.   

I love that you can never predict when sand or gravel falls. It'd be nice if it actually falls on and buries hostile creatures though haha!

I grew up on a long line of immersive sims: Ultima Underworld, Thief, Deus Ex, Dishonored. I adore them as they offer so many ways to play a game, sometimes even unintended by the devs.

Vintage Story is not advertised as an immersive sim, but it does have some of those features in. There were a number of experiences that didn't seem to be designed in a certain way, but which one could use to his/her advantage.

1) One of the things I like is how lit torches work in the game. I thought it was one of the coolest things ever the first time I threw a torch into a chasm to see how deep it was.

2) Another time, I started a fire in the wilderness when I still didn't have enough flax to make proper clothes for the winter, and ended up burning up half the land (peat) just to avoid dying from the cold.

3) There was one night when I was running through a patch of hills, when the gravel suddenly collapsed and I fell into a deep cave. It caught me by such surprise that I really panicked.

4) I set up and lit some pit kilns at night. The next morning, a dead rabbit was found next to one of the kilns. I guessed it must have run through that patch to get to my crops, and got roasted in the process. That was cool.

What are your favourite emergent gameplay moments, and what kind of emergent or imsim features would you like to see in VS?

It's a recent glitch. I might be wrong, but it could have been introduced when the team changed how unlit torches interact with fire sources.

Holy cow!

Any update that makes bears less of a nuisance is a huge win in my book!

Yeah I don't really like the current implementation of gliding, which is also affected by fall speed calculation. I've been using these two mods, Alternative Glider Implementation and Fall Damage Options, which have vastly improved the experience. 

https://mods.vintagestory.at/altgliderimplementation

https://mods.vintagestory.at/falldamageoptions

20 hours ago, Maelstrom said:

If rifts are the portal drifters use to come from the rust dimension, shouldn't seraphs be transported TO the rust dimension?

But people should realize that the game has very strong elements from Lovecraft.  Read Lovecraft to understand more behind the eldritch aspect of the game.  If interested, I'd suggest reading The Shunned House, Colour Out of Space, The Case of Charles Ward and the Dunwich Horror as examples of what is inspiring the developers.  The longest of these readings is 50 or 75 pages.  BTW, Lovecraft is a master story teller!

Have you read Robert E. Howard's stories too? Conan's adversaries include some pretty badass eldritch horrors too, which is unsurprising considering Howard and Lovecraft were friends.

Would strongly suggest Clark Ashton Smith's stories too.

Ctrl + A FTW!

Yup agreed. If you press buttons "1" to "9" on the keyboard when mousing over items in the inventory, they'll get assigned to the respective slots. It would make sense when pressing "X" to have the same happen with the off-hand too. 

20 hours ago, Maelstrom said:

To my knowledge they are global events.  Seems like something broke in your world.  Perhaps enter the command that sets the temporal storm frequency to your desired setting?

Good idea, let me try that. I mean, it's not that I don't appreciate the lack of temporal storms as it ensured a relatively smooth journey to the Resonance Archive, but I really miss temporal gear farming haha. 

I haven't had a temporal storm for about one and a half in-game years. The last one I had was some 1000 blocks away from my base, and that was a light one. I haven't made any changes to our world and "/worldconfig temporalstorms" is still set to "sometimes". Are they location-dependent?

Temperature/season definitely has an impact on bees. If it's in November and temp's too cold, then that will inhibit bees from populating skeps. 

Log in to the server console on PingPerfect and type /op yourname

My opinion is that if a game is good, people will buy it regardless of how easy it is to pirate. An example is Factorio, where the dev actually encourages people who can't afford it to just download off a torrent. Yet, despite never having been on sale, and even with a price increase, it's one of the highest grossing indie games. I think there was a study done too that showed DRM could have an adverse effect on a game's sales (but I might be remembering wrongly). 

But I'm not Tyron or Saraty or any of the devs. Ultimately it's their sales, their livelihood, and thus their call. 

Yeah the "hurt" voices jumpscare me more than the mobs themselves lol.

Yeah it's one of those janky situations that I think can be done better. I would use either Anvil Metal Recovery or XSkills to get the bits back; it's more in line with other aspects of the game, like clay forming.

Also, if, like me, you're tired of the smithing and knapping minigame, I would suggest getting the Knapster mod. It makes the process less tedious.

3 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

I'm not trying to knock it.

I see what you did there!

Yup got ladders running up the towers. I place lanterns at the top so they're easily identifiable at a distance even at night. I also use CrazyAluminium's autowalk mod so it's easier on the wrist to go up the ladder. 

Mind, I still find gliders underwhelming lol. But it makes it more bearable. 

31 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

?

I build these 100-block tall structures, then glide off from one to the other. We can travel 3000 blocks in a couple of in-game hours. 

16 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Sure. But remember you have to balance risk and reward or there's no point in even going near the ocean. Looking at how low-key ruins are, as in if you loot enough ore vessels, you MIGHT be able to find enough tin to more or less skip the copper age, but very unlikely. The loot it would take to make me tangle with Leviathan -- don't know that it exists. Maybe a device that let you choose which translocator you want to be sent to? Might be worth it, but in practice, it would mean you need to bring at least temporal gears with you in order to get back home. Though I don't find translocators worth the hassle in the first place.

Love the idea. Just not sure it's a good fit for the game.

Yup right now there's no point to it. I hope eventually something like that makes it into the game, though, when it gets more dejanked and balanced out.

I like triggering my thalassophobia.

Dirt blocks make for great bear-slaying outposts, like what @Thorfinn mentioned.

Also, glider airports. 

4 hours ago, l33tmaan said:

I would like it if none of the NPCs in this game just spawned out of nowhere. I remember posting about this years ago, but I'll bring it up again: Creatures should spawn in 'nests' (or animal dens or whatever) that are physical blocks that generate in logical areas for that specific creature - you can track variables in this block such as creature capacity, food storage, territory size, aggression level, and basically anything that can influence the creature's behavior. Ideally, this would be on top of the creature's normal AI package. 

For animals, as time goes on and they exhaust the available resources in an area (grass and berries for herbivores, prey animals for carnivores, everything for omnivores [AKA: bears]), the nest checks for nearby areas that would be suitable to respawn in, sends the creatures in that direction, then deactivates itself and respawns somewhere else, starting the cycle again. If the nest reaches capacity for an extended period of time, maybe that could cause new nests to spawn nearby as the creatures move away to deal with less resource competition. 

Most importantly, this gives the player something to track and react to. Too many wolves in the area? Just fight through them and destroy their nest.

How would this work for drifters? I dunno, make rifts spawn less frequently but last longer and tie them to an area's temporal stability. That way they spawn underground, but also in unstable areas above ground, which would be logical. 

This 101%!

In the 2022 trailer (which was what sold me on the game), observing wildlife was marketed as one of the features of VS. While the AI is not bad for the most part, I would say it still leaves a lot to be desired, especially in how they interact with one another. I was disappointed that drifters could actually spawn 2m away from you in thin air, or wolves could rubberband back to their spawn (assuming my eyes didn't deceive me). I am hopeful the AI will continue to improve instead of remaining at status quo, since it can open new doors to gameplay opportunities.