Echo Weaver

Salty's not trying to increase usability. He's trying to make the game more immersive. So I'm sure the issue is not whether you remember to look at the gear but that the gear is not a natural part of the world. His approach might actually have fewer obvious cues, at least to start with.

This does sound like just the kind of system that VS excels at. You made me excited to play it. There are several salt-from-saltwater mods, but I don't know how much they simulate this mechanic. I'm thinking of Fields of Salt on particular. I've never played with any of them, though.

Awesome!! I haven't actually seen any readings for Chromium at all.

Yeah, I see a bunch of mods wandering by on ModDB that restore the ability to crush various things with a hammer. I'm completely lost on what you can still crush with a hammer in vanilla.

This is true. And while it will take a long time for the calf to finally be born, the cow will then lactate that much longer. I'm not expecting to be able to get a ton of milk out of a wild cow, though, assuming they're at least as hard to milk as a wild bighorn ewe. Getting past the wild generation is a big time sink. Perhaps the real issue is the giant deer. Those are rideable at Gen 10, but I'm not sure I can imagine playing a single world long enough to get them to Gen 10.

Yeah, in singleplayer, I play Commoner and turn of class recipes in the world config. In multiplayer, classes are fun. I'm usually a Clockmaker.

+1

You don't need mechanical power to build a quern, but you do need to have achieved copper smithing -- querns require a pickaxe and a chisel to craft. Once you have one, you can fill it with something that needs to be ground and then right-click the quern to grind it manually.

Today in Extreme Animal Husbandry, my three male giant deer calves grew up. I've had these guys for months, and my auroch cow has been pregnant for at least two months. I think their realistic lifespan might be a bit too realistic. Anyway, I immediately discovered that the walkway I'd put over the auroch pen in order to interact with the aurochs without being gored was in fact within jumping distance of the deer. ARGH. I managed to fix things with only one getting out. I then put together my pit trap and food trough bait system and went off looking for another female to replace the dear departed doe who was probably killed by a drifter. I knew there was one over the hill in a neighboring valley, so I went off to look for her. I've found that I can chase deer (giant at least) with reasonable precision. I get them close enough to my bait, then sneak and watch. If all goes well, they'll calm down and eventually start heading toward that alluring trough of grass. If they don't fall into the pit trap, I can run up behind them to scare them into falling in. This was about my third try on that female, but this time it worked perfectly! I got the new female into the pen with the two remaining males. Jackpot. Then I discovered that she was actually a he -- I'd re-caught the male deer who escaped earlier.

I have not had the problem of enemies spawning in my base when I light it up, even with oil lamps. It might be that I've just been lucky. I'll throw in with the others who want to be able to fortify and light up a base and consider it safe.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of the clutch.

Why wouldn't you want the clutch? Sure, it loses some torque, but you also can only power what you want to use.

Please do. It is the BEST THREAD. It should be its own subforum

Re bronze: I've had much better luck with bismuth bronze (bizmuth + zinc + copper) than tin bronze. You only need tin specifically to make a tin bronze pickaxe needed to start the story quests. Bismuth is incredibly common, and zinc still seems to be more common than tin, though it might just be the way things rolled in my worlds. At any rate, look for those too.

I have not seen this yet. I've usually just seen a single beast spawned by a rift in the daytime. I'm not that wild about it, but it hasn't been a big problem. I wonder what the difference is. I tend to go out and run around the area during the day. Are you guys hanging out at base/near the rift during the day? Maybe that can stimulate an escalating number of spawns? That still doesn't sound like intended behavior, or I hope it isn't.

I have found three traders in my current game, and they were ALL Local Goods. That makes me a bit nervous about something screwing up RNG, but these stories of weirdness are comforting that way. That said, I can buy lime, which is nice.

It didn't take me until year 8, but yeah I prefer to build my farm and especially my livestock. After all that's settled, I'm interested in ranging farther away to find resources :). Going in to fall without much in the way of crops is ominous. I might suggest digging up a lot of tulle roots. They don't start to spoil until you cook them, so you can store them a long time. Cattail roots are the same, but since cattails are important resources, you don't want to dig them all up and leave yourself without reeds. Roots are not particularly great sources of nutrition. You can't cook them into meals. But they'll keep you from starving. Then there's hunting. You'll have to work harder to find prey in the winter, but if you enjoy hunting you should be able to keep yourself in enough meat to get by. If you have sheep you can breed, then there's a source of dairy. It's almost impossible to milk a wild ewe, but in the harshest part of winter, you can take a lot of time to try over and over again.

I don't recall saying anything about salt extraction being easy. I was saying the opposite. Panning exists, yet it doesn't doesn't give you 1-4 nuggets every time. Salt extraction from water, if it exists in the game, should be cumbersome and slow. Like panning, it can be an inferior option when the primary method is not yielding anything. We should keep in mind that, though salt has been extracted from salt water since time immemorial, salt was NOT, historically, an abundant resource. However we acquire it, it should not be easy. I think that labor-intensive tedium can be a decent tradeoff for hard prospecting for folks who lean that way. It's not a high priority for me, but I appreciate the argument that locking salt behind halite feels pretty artificial. (ETA: I like to do a spot of panning as a relaxing activity in my base, and I've reached the conclusion that it's way too easy to get copper this way. This underscores how different my expectations of the game are, I guess, since new players complaining about how hard it is to get copper from panning is a forum mainstay. I'm messing around with a panning mod that better distinguishes bony soil drops from sand/gravel drops and nerfs copper drops in favor of infrequent drops of actually hard-to-find resources like sulfur and halite.)

I appreciate both satisfying progression and immersive simulation, and it annoys me when these things don't line up. I agree with @Thorfinn that the current salt output from halite is a bit nuts from a realism point of view. Also, since the challenge is FINDING the halite, having individual stones output a more reasonable amount of salt doesn't affect progression much. I could imagine a mechanic around evaporating salt water if the quantities were realistic (as in you have to evaporate a huge quantity of salt water). It could end up being sort of like panning vs prospecting -- panning is slow, but it's safe and delivers resources. Prospecting is more active, and when you find ore it delivers a lot more resources.

VS is designed to make it very simple to add mods. You have a Mod Manager menu option. Click it and you'll have an option to open the mod folder. Do that. Download whatever you like from the ModDB -- make sure you search on the version of the game you're playing (I assume 1.21). Drag the zip files into the mod folder you opened from the game client. Click Refresh on the mod manager. Bob's your uncle. ETA: Wait, did you mean writing your own mod? Derp. If you want to deal with ventilation, I'd recommend Real Smoke. For an alternative stove, Kevin's Furniture linked above is very nice. There's also Potash Making if you want to use ash from the cook fire. Metal Cooking Pots, which are larger, though not as large as the one recommended here. Dana Tweaks has an option to heat ovens with a firepit.

I believe that instead of "survival", you just want to use "game".

I love your pit house!

The male has also been fed? Usually if male is fed and female is "ready to mate" and they're physically close (others do fancier containment, but I prefer to put them in the same pen as if they were real creatures), then the female just instantly becomes pregnant. I'd've thought you'd be able to mate them, but maybe not....

Blockbench seems like overkill? I don't think so. It's the go-to model creator for Minecraft. It does simple stuff pretty simply.

Dangit, I tried to find that on the wiki and apparently. managed to search on all the wrong things.