Echo Weaver

OH, in those screenshots, the notation IS 0/00. I could have sworn it was %% when I last looked, and I even remember another thread about it. So maybe they fixed it.

Except that half of the people on the thread reject your premise. Mods are there for a reason. If the goal is to enjoy the game, use them. Don't try to make everyone play like you. Anyway, the devs know what's going on, and they've been active in adjusting systems that fail to meet the difficulty they're going for.

I think this comes down to having differing expectations of the game. I don't expect it to move quickly. I want reason to explore. As @LadyWYT said, I think the time and effort is about right for the kind of game I want to be playing. Advancement feels like an achievement. I didn't know that. I bet that's the source of the repeated failures on high readings. I do think I found iron on my third try. That just didn't violate my expectations.

Better Prospecting seems to do this and some other stuff on your wishlist: https://mods.vintagestory.at/bettererprospecting

Oh, I see. I think it's parts per thousand. The actual notation is 0/00 rather than what's used in the game %%. That's why I couldn't Google it. Seems like one could have used an extended unicode character or something.

C'mon. This isn't real life. Some folks like playing on PvP servers and the like. Those people are not me, but I don't judge.

How does the guide on the wiki hold up? https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Guide:Prospecting (ETA: Dur, you already linked to it.) It seems like it has a lot of detail. One thing it doesn't seem to mention is what those "percent" readings mean. My understanding is that these are NOT percent. The symbol is actually %%. Googling the symbol, I get the answer that it's a modulo symbol, but since the results are all decimals, that doesn't seem right. I thought I remembered from a previous forum thread that it's actually some kind of parts per volume, but I'm not sure of that. From a practical point of view, my understanding is that higher is better WITHIN the same quality rating for the same ore. How does the Better Prospecting mod line up with what folks would like to see? I'm happy with the current system, but this looks like a cool approach: https://mods.vintagestory.at/bettererprospecting

I'd rather not go too far down the "survival bias" route. All that means is that we're having fun playing the game as it is. I think we can talk about reasonable improvements to the mechanic without treating the folks who like the game as somehow suspect for liking it. As I've said earlier, I think prospecting has gone for me the way it's "intended" to, as in I have wandered around taking samples with my propick in probability mode, zeroed in on a high or very high probability of whatever I'm looking for, then dropped a mineshaft and found the ore I want with the node search setting. I think I dropped a couple of shafts where I didn't get any node search readings for the iron I was looking for, then I found it on the third try, and it even turned out to be colocated with halite. I did read some advice on how to deal with node search, and my big takeaway on how to home in on a reading in 3 dimensions was in retrospect pretty head-smackingly obvious. The other piece of advice I picked up here was that the qualitative result (miniscule, very high) was the primary one as opposed to the %% result (which is not actually percent but something like parts-per-volume), and I'd pretty much already figured that out on my own. The amount of research this took was less than a lot of stuff I needed to look up for that other block game or even for THIS block game (go search for my forum drama on soil quality). This style of game just assumes you're pulling in some outside resources. At any rate, this gameplay loop seems fine to me. What seems not-fine is that folks on the thread say it often doesn't go that way for them. I think the biggest question is WHY it doesn't go that way. Have I been really lucky? Possibly. As I've said, I've put most of my effort toward one "forever world" where I've been doing All the Things and not been focused on fast progression. I may be an outlier on the forum, but I submit that behavior is closer to what a lot of the average users are doing. So, how can we adjust the mechanic without throwing away its spirit? Or do we just need to overhaul the mining guide in the handbook?

Yeah, I think I have finally built a large enough oak farm to be able to keep up with my leather making. I assumed that hardwoods like maple would also grow slowly. Agreed -- birch and pine, at least for the default temperate start zone. I don't actually use a ton of charcoal, though. Maybe because I have been advancing at a slower place than some folks, I've found plenty of brown and black coal while exploring or mining. I've only made charcoal for the stuff that requires charcoal, like making terra preta.

Right. My point was that I don't know what rock is below me unless I see it, and that's only good for the first layer or two.

Also, there are lore reasons that the predators behave differently -- and much more aggressively -- in the game world.

FWIW, I've actually found dropping a mineshaft in a high+ area to be at least as effective as caving. It's not immediately intuitive, and maybe it wouldn't hold up under a lot more iterations, but when caving you only see what the cave happens to drill through. That's been a great way for me to happen upon coal and more common ores, but my hit rate for stuff I'm actually looking for hasn't been that great. Plus, of course, caves get more dangerous as you get deeper. I like to cave, at least as much because I love exploring ruins, but when I'm looking for a very specific ore (e.g. for making a tin bronze pickaxe), I poke around with the propick and drop a shaft at a local maximum reading that's high or better. Node search covers a pretty good range. The trick is zeroing in on the deposit when you get readings. Well, we can only see the first couple of rock strata on the surface, so I'm not clear how useful this is.

If you're on the same version and seed, wouldn't the chunks always regenerate the same?

I just love it. Thanks for sharing!

Yeah, there's something going on with .Net 8. Take a look a this thread and try the solution linked at the end: It worked for me on my M3.

I think I accidentally found a node search hit for limonite while mining for something else. It's marked on my map, but I haven't returned to it. I get limonite and ilmenite completely confused. I'm not regimented with search mode to the degree that the Streetwind describes. I use ProspectTogether with its lovely heat map, and that helps a huge amount. I do think something like that should be in vanilla. I think I've always found a deposit in a high probability chunk, but I take my progression more slowly than a lot of forum-dwellers, so I probably have done a lot less prospecting than many of you. It took me quite a while to figure out what my strategy should be with the node search, and even so you hit all sorts of weird edge cases. I just got myself confused mining for tin because I apparently dug my shaft right along the transition edge between medium and small for a deposit, so when I tried to follow up, I got different readings on the side of the shaft I tested against. Since the area was really low stability, I could only do so much before having to surface to stabilize. Quite a pain. I think the system could do with some gameplay improvements, but I'm not sure what exactly I'd suggest.

As I understand it, the percentage is specific to the ore type, e.g. 0.37% is an ultra high probability for cassiterite, but it's not great for bismuthinite. If you have an area where the chunks are all showing "high" for a given ore, you can pick the best one by choosing the one with the highest percentage. Just don't compare the percentage between ore types. The propick readings don't tell you there's actually any ore there at all, just the probability that ore was spawned there. It's quite possible to mine in a high area and not find any ore at all, though it shouldn't happen very often. Changing the reading based on where the ore actually is would be a big change.

I was kind of cranky that the spawns were so low on 1.20, even during the night. In 1.19, a nearby rift produced a lot more monsters. I think I recall that 1.20 adjusted the light threshold to keep beasts from spawning in bases and the overall beast spawning dropped. This appears to be difficult to get quite right.

One can always try pruning on a copy of your world, but yeah, point well-taken. I've been playing on my world a long time. Probably just exploring outward is a better suggestion, but I'll take a look on a copy to see if that's horrendous. So we have two sets of numbers on this thread: landcover: 0.7 oceanscale: 1.0 and landcover: 0.975 (that's very precise -- where did that number come from?) oceanscale: 5 (not 0.5 right?) Any reason to try one or the other?

Re: phylite and kimberlite, I really would like to be able to make a survival house in multicolor drystack as a stretch goal for a long-playing world, so ways to find it are very interesting to me! Re propick -- I have always found the ore when my pick tells me there's a high chance of finding it. I haven't had that kind of result for decent, and I don't think I've ever tried to find something at a level below decent. It really seems like there's a problem if the reading is very high and there's no ore nearby. Maybe that could happen once with really bad RNG, but twice within any length of time seems like a big stretch.

Yeah, this really clarifies what the issue is. Thinking aloud... I can't go-toe-to-toe with a nightmare rust beast regardless. I suppose if it were alone, I had an open field, and I was generally better at either dodging or dealing ranged damage, I could do it. I only see nightmares during temporal storms. I assume you can go deep enough to find them, but I haven't seen a reason to go that deep, and if I do I'm willing to go to serious lengths not to be in an open cave while doing it. My storm strategy is that I have pit traps along one side of my base that can be accessed from vertically-placed trapdoors in my basement. I can open a trapdoor and stab them with a spear or falx and dodge most damage, then open the second one if I need access to loot them. In this situation, using iron weapons, I haven't found that it takes an absurd amount of time to kill a nightmare. The trick is making sure they don't have opportunity to hit me.

Huh. I'm not sure I understand how that would work. To be able to use that you'd need to be able to drop a backpack or empty it out so that you could put it inside an existing backpack. I just keep an mining bag in my usual backpack slots. Since I can put my pickaxe and propick in it, and I usually carry around a stack of obsidian for emergency tool replacement, I have a few items that can hang out there when I'm not mining that make it better than deadweight. And it guarantees that when I go out mining, I will have space for my haul. Re: light. In early and midgame, I carried around a backup oil lamp in case my stack of torches got extinguished. Now that I've moved on to lanterns it's not much an issue, but I'm still paranoid and like having a backup light source in inventory. All this contingency stuff is directly related to why I need a mining back to be sure I can have space for my mining.

Dang, if that video was something that could happen in 1.20, I'm glad my teen made me mod them out. Yeesh. I'm glad to hear they've been tuned more. I figured I'd use Zippy's Bashful Bowtorns when I start a fresh 1.21 game, and I was looking at Bowtorn Balance to possibly grab just the range reduction. Neither of these have been updated, and it sounds like their entire use case might be gone. Do temporal storm bowtorns still fail to retreat or despawn?

I first goal was to reduce feed consumption because I wanted to be producing enough eggs to hatch and get eggs to eat, but yeah I want to get to gen 10 too. I wasn't able to get the grown chicks to go up stairs through a trapdoor in the floor, but when I moved the exit to horizontal, it's been working great. Thanks for the idea.

Yes, I've been using cave art to track my way through caves, and particularly to mark them with an X when I know I'm done with them. But the beacons are really fun, and they're great for caves with wide open spaces. Practical and cool to look at.