Echo Weaver

Well, he said he has 20-something staff now, which seems pretty decent for an indie studio. I guess the game is officially early access, but I really consider the new content releases to be expansions. They're certainly large enough. With that in mind, an expansion and a major bugfix release a year isn't too bad. Tangentially, I kind of think "early access" as a term is getting over-used. I think of that as a game that is essentially an open beta, where you purchase the final product at a discounted price in order to play the beta and help the dev team see how the game plays. VS is far more refined than that -- it seems more like a completed game to me with expected regular content additions. If Tyron really has ideas going out 10 years, then if it's classified as early access, it's essentially early access forever. Defining it as a complete game with future expansions included in the price looks a lot better than a perpetually incomplete game, and I think it also is more accurate. ANYWAY. It sounds like he keeps a pretty tight ship to keep the game consistently on-vision. And I can't complain because as a crafting/survival game goes, I don't think I've ever played one that felt this seamless. But that's at the price of speed. He said that comments to his announcement was prompting him to review his oversight structure. That might lead to things getting faster or maybe not?

It could be exactly what he said officially, which is creative differences. Since he was able to realize his vision with Vintage Story, and the vision of Hytale is now the focus, those problems might not exist. I'm impressed to see Tyron say that money is not the constraint. I have very seldom seen anyone in his position in software say that. I have been skeptical that this financial model of charging a (low IMHO) one-time fee that includes all future expansions is a viable financial model, but apparently VS is doing just fine. The hosting service might be a big part of that, but it's not like I have seen the books. That makes me hopeful for other indie game efforts I'm following that are going the same route.

Is this still going on? 1.20 has been out a long time now. I just updated my 1.19 game, and .charsel is giving me the error in the OP. It looks like ".charsel" is the command I should be using in a single player game. I started this game as a Commoner, and now I know enough about classes to choose one. It'd be a bummer if now I can't. ETA: Nvm. I didn't realize I needed to use the admin command "/player [name] allowcharselonce" and THEN ".charsel"

I don't know exactly when that acquisition happened, but I'm pretty sure it was before. Like a professional, Tyron doesn't detail exactly what the difference were or whether it was a hostile departure, so we don't really know if they're able to work together or not.

That would be epic, but I imagine that they'd have to hammer out their hierarchy really carefully. Tyron left because their visions didn't match up. Somebody has to be responsible for the final decisions.

Would it need to be a race? I don't know if there was acrimony over Tyron's departure from the Hytale project. But maybe there would be something they could do that was mutually beneficial.

I thought I had read that restrictions on what you could put in meals had been lifted in 1.20, but it appears I was wrong. Is this a game setting I could set? I don't see a mod that allows me to just put any nutrient type in a meal. The fact that I can't make chicken and rice is bugging the heck out of me. Who said that stew never has grain?

@Cladow A related question -- does applying potash to terra preta permanently increase the K nutrient, or is terra preta's max K as high as you can get?

Well, I don't really want to be watering my garden manually. The point to moving water source blocks into the farm is to keep the farm irrigated without extra watering. I'm barely keeping ahead of all the other farm work, and I need to do more exploring. So I'd prefer to see an irrigation system I can set up and leave for a while. This makes sense. I'm probably saying something kind of obvious, but it was a gee-whiz moment for me. I'd love to be able to play without moving source blocks around, but the only options I saw discussed involved either building out a farm onto a pond or using elaborate craftables to direct water away from said pond. I thought I saw it discussed that easy manipulation of water source blocks was a barrier to introducing water power, and that makes sense. Your water wheel is trivial if you can make your own waterfall to run it. But obviously, people have been getting water to their farm and household for centuries. Duh. They dug a well. And that seems like a mechanic that could be pretty straightforward and voxel-game-friendly. I'd love to see it.

I don't know how close I want the magic system to be to science, but it's definitely more immersive if there's some sense of how/why it works. I was thinking heavily about a zap-with-wand sort of magic system like Electroblob's Wizardry, but I do really dig the idea of of something with more arcana. Craft a stone table and etch it with magic symbols. Say the right word under the right phase of the moon. That stuff is pretty interesting and immersive. It feels magical.

Yes, I found your post after making mine. I didn't immediately realize it overlapped because yours was much broader. All the stuff you described sounds interesting but very ambitious. I think just having the ability to dig a well would be a big improvement for immersion by itself.

I have played with the default number of respawns in a location for a gear. The major problem I had with this is that I used up a bunch of respawns in the middle of a temporal storm where I screwed up and let a nightmare drifter into my base. So there I was in a kill cycle, and BOOM, I was back in the random game default spawn in the middle of a temporal storm. Fortunately, my base wasn't so far away that it was a huge mess to get back, but that could totally happen. I rather think the permanent respawn setting with a gear ought to be default, and that's what I'm setting my world to now. (Or at least I will when I look up the world code.) I decided so far not to go with bed respawn, though I can see how it could make my game more fun. I don't like being too far from my respawn point because of the difficulty that makes for retrieving my stuff if I die. If I could more trivially change my respawn, I'd probably be less cautious about exploring large areas. But I also like the close connection to my base.

This is a seriously brilliant idea. At this point, I have enough bones to build a fence around my farm. +10 would totally do this.

So, there's a game option now where you can't move water source blocks. This makes way more sense for immersion, but it's just a huge PITA. I'm not planning to play with this option. OTOH, moving water source blocks isn't terribly immersive. So, I want to be able to bring a steady source of water to my crops, but I seriously hate building out onto ponds because it wrecks the landscape. I'm the kind of person who goes back and replace dirt blocks in my environment if it looks too weird. But in real life, what do you do when you need a steady source of water? You dig a well. That could be a much more involved crafting process than just picking up water source blocks in a bucket, but it still allows you to put your base anywhere you want and irrigate your crops. We'd probably need some more irrigation paraphernalia to craft, but I can't see that as being a bad thing.

The first underground ruin I ever found had wallpaper. In fact, that ruin had a unique feel to it -- it had multiple rooms and really felt like someone had lived there. I haven't seen one like that since, so maybe that style really is rare. It's where I discovered that wallpaper was destroyed when the block was broken and got a mod to fix that. I mean, seriously. If short beds are supposed to be for children, they look exactly like every other kind of bed. And also, most children sleep in full-length beds. (I did note that "short" was in the item ID. But you get two blocks long for a bed. They're all the same length, so why distinguish?) I don't see the point of glue. I'm keeping that option off. If I could use glue to make unusable clutter into a functional item, that would be different. But we're talking about decorations here. I agree with you. I'm not interested in jumping ahead either. If I wanted a quick fix, I wouldn't be here. In fact, I'm hanging out in the iron age building out my base. I'm excited because I now have bees and can make lanterns. Speedy advancement is not my goal I don't think ruins should be filled with powerful stuff. They're too common, for one thing. But there's a difference between powerful stuff and interesting stuff. That said, there are a decent number of good think you can get from them now.

IKR?? I'm free! For a few hours at least. Honestly, I can see that spamming wolf bait or something, but what's so bad about spamming "like"?? Or maybe this is related to our rank? (You know, Iron Smith and Steel Worker and whatnot.) I think I read someplace that the rank is related to both your posts and the way other people react to them. So everyone could spam everyone with likes so they all rank up faster? Partly, I'm a bit exuberant, but partly I just come from a social networking culture where "like" is a baseline way to let people know that their contributions are read and appreciated. It's easy to feel invisible on the Internet. ANYWAY. Oooh, that's great. And, again, it has a crafting tie-in. You could craft a golem and animate it. Wood golems, standstone golems, granite golems, iron golems, plant golems (?). Perhaps some could be assigned to guard your base like That Other Block Game and others come with you to assist in combat or other tasks. Summons don't have a craft tie-in that I can think of, but they're classic dramatic fantasy spells.

I just upgraded from 1.19, but furniture and such found in ruins isn't functional. Beds don't sleep, tables can't be used to make pies. (The last seems particularly silly.) Unmodded wallpaper is destroyed rather than pulled off walls. Are these things different in 1.20? If so, that'd be welcome. ETA: Yeah, torch holders. I haven't seen a candelabra but would be happy to get one. I think there are chandeliers? Seeds. Lore documents. Functional items that are currently clutter. Also, I mine up the polished stones when I find them to use as floors in my base.

The one thing I've noticed so far is that I destroyed 3 skeps in my apiary and none of the bees were bothered at all? Are bees docile in 1.20, or is it that these are skeps upgraded from 1.19, or perhaps I'm just got lucky?

Thanks for the reassurance @Zane Mordien! We have done it. The biggest issue seems to be a bunch of unrecognized stuff from Vanilla Variants because I guess those items were changed in vanilla, e.g. my birch trapdoors were not recognized because now there are two different kinds of trapdoors and the variant ones couldn't be upgraded. I haven't tried messing with clutter, but I'll check and be ready to change the setting.

Hmmm. I've been playing in my world with my teenager daughter a lot recently. She likes playing an archer and didn't want the competition, so I modded out the Bowtorns when I upgraded. The shivers were left alone, however, We'll see how that goes. I don't like modding out a vanilla foe like that. I prefer to come up with an in-game way to neutralize it. I'll just have to wait until another time to see what I think of them. I may see if I can find that thread, since I'm pretty conflicted about them myself and am curious to see the viewpoints. I honestly don't know how quickly we might see a few features. Tyron is proud of his engine being versatile and future-proof, so I guess we'll now put that to the test. For the mode to be different from VS with texture pack, I think we'd need some different major mechanics such as the aforementioned quest system. I'd be happy to playtest something they make available early, though. To be fair, I think Tyron is literally just looking at resumes right now. It's going to take months just to assemble the dev team for this effort.

Sheep eat grass, so I don't need fruit or vegetable. I'm in year 2 with gen 4 sheep, so that makes some sense, though due to shenanigans my first wild ewe didn't give birth until winter. So it seems like one could get shearable sheep in year 2.

I don't see anything that would require that we get OP items. I just think there should be more useful or interesting items. It makes good motivation to explore and look for them. I think clutter items that look just like usable items should be usable items, though. There's nothing OP about that. It just means that you can decorate your home differently if you can gather neat stuff from around the landscape.

So, there's the sheep shearing mod that produces wool fiber. I actually think this is the direction to go, though I'd happily use cotton if it was provided. This has been brought up a bunch, I know, and longhorn sheep don't produce much wool, but that's the point. You need domesticated sheep to produce a lot of wool, and we have a domestication system. I think we need domestication to mean something. 5th or 5th-gen sheep could start producing usable amounts of wool with more every generation. I haven't messed much with the wool mod, but I think I may install it when my sheep get to 5th or 6th generation. I can add some recipes if I can't use it to repair armor or whatnot.

More to the point of the thread, I wouldn't mind some weeds and mulch, but overall I like the design of farming. The big thing I see is that by the time I can make enough terra preta to matter, I don't care anymore. Also, I need to look at the full list of crops available, but it certainly seems like the crops are heavily weighted toward K. That may be accurate from a simulation perspective, but it makes crop rotation difficult, especially when you have a huge need for flax. I think a better irrigation system would be nice, something better than building out on ponds or moving water source blocks. Moving water source blocks isn't very immersive, but I find the alternatives too annoying to attempt. I'd love to see something along the lines of a craftable well as a water source with irrigation pipes.

Haha. I read this exchange about mulch and felt like I needed to go look up my gardening lore. I enjoy gardening, but I can't really say that I'm good at it in the real world. But I did think one of its purposes was to keep the ground from drying out as fast.