Echo Weaver

So.... the goal here is to require a smelted anvil before you can get to iron? If that's the case, the bread seems like too big a sacrifice to gate the iron progression that way. There ought to be a way to grind flour and make pies while something else is needed for bloomeries.

No, I think the explanation was fine, though the extra detail is useful. This seems like an interesting philosophical question about what the game is doing. On one hand, you can say that the goal is to have a smooth progression. OTOH, you can say that the goal is to recreate the feel of various tech levels as you move through them. Cultures have made bread from grinding grain between big stones to make flour and then cooking in a stone or clay oven -- or just in the fire. It might make sense to need to achieve smithing in order to grind flour/make fire clay for a smooth game progression, but it doesn't make logical sense to need this much tech in order to make bread. I think I agree with your suggestion -- a mortar and pestle is a good early-game addition that could balance this out. The grinding would be slower, but if you're spending time in the stone/barely copper age, you might want to spend some more time hiding, so it feels thematic.

Yeah, I think VS survival is exactly what it wants to be -- a world that has been through an eldritch apocalypse. I'm far from burned out on this style, but I ended up taking the VS Villages mod out of my game because a default world just feels like it OUGHT to be desolate. But when asked what I wanted to see in an adventure mode, my first thought was VIBRANT COLOR PALETTE. Fantasy, not horror. I want a populated world, preferably with different races that are friendly as well as hostile. Meet folks while you're wandering around and fight, interact, trade, help out. And then I went off to see if it was possible to build a modpack with that kind of style, and the answer is... sort of? A lot of the fantasy elements in mods are still horror-style for understandable reasons. I might try it out when I've done more vanilla-style.

OK, I'm playing on a game upgraded to 1.20, so I haven't dealt with this, but I'm inclined to agree with @Air Regalia. Why on earth did we need to gate pie making behind an anvil? That makes very little sense to me from a tech level standpoint. Bread and pies exist in stone age cultures. I don't suppose that can be changed with an admin command or something? This is gating bread not just behind metal but behind smithing, which just seems bonkers.

Thanks a lot for all this inspiration building out of the Hytale vision! I've seen the trailer, but I don't really know what Hytale was promising people or what direction the development was going. All I can talk about is generic high fantasy. We're talking about the possibility of an adventure mode inspired by Hytale, but what was Hytale intended to be? I'd love more information!

Oooooh, that seems like a great idea. Come to think of it, I play a totally different game that uses notice boards for quests. This is a fixed landscape game that has randomly generated NPCs. The notice board could be used to find quests that were then assigned to NPCs. When the quest was generated, it would find an NPC that fit certain criteria who then became the NPC who "posted" the message to the board. This allowed you to have some multi-stage quests with at least a little bit of story and an NPC to interact with. The game didn't fully handle the situation where an NPC died while a quest chain was active, so that would be a warning to devs if they explore this route.

I totally agree. It was definitely true in 1.19 that rust monsters needed to spawn in air. In fact, you could cheese this by placing stones on the floor, which you could walk over as if they were air but did not count as air for the spawn calculation. I totally did this. If it is true that they no longer need to spawn completely in air, I take issue as well. Hiding should always be an option. It's never happened to me, and I'm not going to stop playing or stop loving the game, but I agree it's a problem.

Does this happen to you a lot? Maybe I haven't played 1.20 long enough. I thought that rust monsters needed a 1x2 block of air to spawn, but it could be right beside you or above you. I generally fight temporal storms from 2-tall tunnels so that they can't spawn above me, and none ever have. I would consider the ability of a foe to spawn literally on top of you to be a bug, and I would report it. They may be supernatural creatures, but that doesn't even make sense.

@CastIronFabric I'm almost certain this is the quote you think you read, and you got almost every detail of what I was saying wrong. 1. I was talking about procedurally-generated landscapes, not specifically block games. As in the map is generated new, based on an algorithm, every time you start a game. 2. I offered Diablo 2, a different traditional quest RPG, as a couterexample to EQ2. 3. Though Diablo 2's structure is closer to what I personally think we'd need, I think Adventure Mode would need a quest system that is still more flexible. 4. I never said anything about "universally understood." I just offered my opinion. Does that help? ETA: Diablo 3 has the same system, and I think there's a Diablo 4, so I guess I just mean the Diablo series. 2 is the one I played the heck out of, and I appreciated how much replay value you got from doing the same quests on a totally different map.

Can we just say you're right and get over this point? Everyone agrees with you.

I just made myself a Clockmaker in my current game, and when I read about the class in-depth, I realized that a lot of the code we'd need for either summoning or other minion spells is already in the game. That has so much possibility.

Please stop refuting a position that everyone on the thread has already said they don't support. Whatever you read, it was not how you interpreted it.

I don't know if it's the most recent version, and I shouldn't be the one to report because it's hearsay. I saw folks complaining about it very recently, though, so I think so? It's good to know that this isn't intended behavior. There's also a mod about it: https://mods.vintagestory.at/zippysbashfulbowtorns. It seems to consider itself necessary for the most recent version. On the subject of bugs, my daughter experienced a hilariously bizarre bug in our game. She put a partially worked iron ingot on the helve hammer anvil, left the room, baked a pie, came back, and found that the helve hammer had produced a bismuth bronze prospector pick....

Is this server still running?

So.... I've played a lot of two- and three-person multiplayer VS, just us together on a single base helping each other out. I tried to hang out with a group on a new hosted server and found that I had NO IDEA what I wanted to do with it. And that was a brand new hosted server, not one where a bunch of people were already playing. I love the idea of RP in general, and this seems like a great setting to RP in, but what does that look like minute-by-minute? What do folks do? Also, do folks set times to be online together, or do they just hope some folks will be on when they are, or do they even care?

That actually made me gasp. It's not just gorgeous, it looks playable. It makes me wish I had any aptitude for builds at all

Let's TOTALLY derail this thread onto another Bowtorn showdown. I AM HERE FOR IT. I also have no idea what I'm talking about because my teenager made me mod them out of the game we're playing together (she's heavily into range attack and didn't want the competition), so you could say that I'm VS-experienced blank slate for everyone's take. I have heard so many opposites. Folks say: You're just standing around and taking damage, and you have no idea why because they can fire accurately from so far away. You can hear them with plenty of warning to dodge. They don't despawn after a temporal storm like the other rust monsters, and you end up with like 40 of them hanging out around your base at an inconvenient distance, waiting to overwhelm you with arrows when you try to go anywhere. They actually do very little damage if you have any armor at all. They're easy to chase down, and their melee combat stinks, so they're easy to kill. I feel like there's a play style issue here between the Bowtorn-fun crowd and the Bowtorn-horrific crowd, and I'm curious to get more detail.

If you have valuable feedback about your experiences, just post it. Don't argue about whether or not to post it or complain that other people don't agree with you. If you actually want to help the devs, explain your experience for them to read and then, if you don't want to engage in a general conversation, go away. You're not going to get a red carpet experience for having feedback. OTOH, if you say something specific, like the tutorial could be better of the Bowtorns have problems, plenty of long-term players are going to agree with you. The fact that other people disagree with you is also not insulting in and of itself. It's not saying your opinion doesn't matter. It's just expressing a variety of opinions. It turns out that healthy conversation involves differences of opinion. I'm sorry if your concern is that we like a game you don't like, but this here is exactly what your statement above is saying. If you say you don't like something, other folks who do like that thing are going to say so. That's how conversations work. It doesn't mean that your feedback is not valuable. It just means that it's not universal.

Tyron is the creator of the game and the person who has the vision of what is being created. (And several other issues that involve the game giving you more information when it's relevant.) I think almost everything you said seems very reasonable. It sounds like you're talking about adjustments to player tutorial rather than any change in the gameplay loop. When I started playing Minecraft, I had to spend a lot of time googling specific recipes or survival information. VS comes out of that tradition. OTOH, other great difficult survival games like Green Hell have a much more involved tutorial system, and it makes for a much smoother introduction -- you still die horribly a lot, but you almost always know more about why it happened. I would totally not say that. If you have no armor and only stone-age weapons, you should probably hide. But honestly, I built a pit trap (just a 2-deep pit) and killed a lot of drifters in the trap with a spear right after storms for quite a while before I considered myself ready to take them on. It worked pretty well and got me some temporal gears I wouldn't have found otherwise. Bowtorns are polarizing. There are so many argument threads about them from serious fans of the game. I installed a mod to make them actually despawn after a storm like all the other rift foes. It seems like they really do need more adjustment. I just can't reconcile what you're saying here with the stuff I quoted about it being, "some of the most boring, mundane gameplay I'd ever experienced in a video game; period" or, "Convincing even experienced survival nerds to sit in a body of water for 30-60 minutes holding one button down while desperately trying to convince themselves to not jump out their bedroom window on their 70th floor suite is a difficult conversation to have." I assume that last is a reference to panning, which is a totally option game mechanic I'd never advise anyone to focus on. So does this sound like your concerns are heard? What are you looking for from the forum?

I'm saying that, in general, I love early gameplay. If you have some very specific things that you consider unappetizing, you don't need my permission to list them. I'm pretty sure Tyron or other devs are monitoring this thread. Convincing me or others on this thread is really irrelevant. If they think you have a point, they'll take it under consideration. OK, maybe I have indeed misunderstood. Are you saying: 1. Vintage Story default mode should change to be more appealing to Hytale fans. or 2. Vintage Story is looking seriously at creating a new game mode with Hytale in mind. Here are some things it should take into account. If you're saying #2, then that sounds like it could be useful to the devs.

That's where we are never going to line up. You hate some gameplay. I love that gameplay. You think that keeping said gameplay is bad for attracting new players. I say that the game is written for people who like that gameplay. As for whether you've talked about gameplay in a specific light, the piece I quoted at the beginning of this was: Why is this not "literally talking about elements of gameplay in a specific light"? If you hate it that much, and the fans of the game love it, who wins? And why?

Is your position that the gameplay you hate is not part of VS's identity? I think that's a major place where you and I, and most of the game's fans, would disagree.

(Also, actually making leather has a bunch more steps o.O. You could make an entire simulation game about making leather. I'm not sure I'd want to play it, but you could.)

How do you think I would respond to that as someone who loves the game, and whose favorite part so far was nearly starving my first winter in my current game? This is what I actually say when asked: "Vintage Story is a survival game with extreme focus on detailed survival simulation. In Minecraft, the first thing you do in a new world is punch a tree. In Vintage Story, the first thing you do is find two pieces of flint and knap yourself a knife. That attention to detail continues throughout the game." So I DON'T say that it's hard, but I love that it's hard. I love that running a farm feels like running a farm. I also love places where it decides to be less accurate -- leathermaking has a nicely-thought-out simulation, but it skipped the parts with uric acid and/or animal feces. Not to say that I would never mod that in, but I'm glad I get to choose. If you think the early gameplay is deadly dull, this is not the game for you. I'd suggest Exploration Mode to reduce the early kills -- it exists specifically for folks who want to reduce the danger -- but it sounds like if you did this, you'd still be stuck with a gameplay loop you hate.

Just a small comment on the longer post. Most enemies have warnings, don't they? Drifters moan and throw rocks. Wolves growl. Bears growl in a way that is harder to catch, but it's there. It's been a while since I fought a Locust, but I don't recall it being hard to know they were coming. Bowtorns seem to be the biggest issue, and they probably could do with another round of balancing. If this is the foundation of your position, you're just not the game's target audience. It can't be fixed without making a different game. It's totally OK if this game is not for you. The thing to do is not to argue about it with people who love the game. It's to just not play it. Most folks are on this forum because they love the game, so an opinion like this is just not going to get a good reception. In general, you can't reason with people to convince them that a game they love actually sucks. I hate FPSs. My partner thinks Minecraft is so annoying and boring I can't even get her to try VS. We were able come together and play Green Hell (mentioned someplace above), which I love, because the crafting/action balance is different, and it was the crafting rather than the difficulty that bores her. It's all subjective.