Echo Weaver

So, I gotta ask -- what's the state of temporal storms now? Did they get nerfed back down to something reasonable?

Me too.

I explained where I got that impression, and I'm willing to be corrected. I can't find your quote from #2 in anything I posted, nor can I find it in any other comment. Could you point me to it? It seems to be the source of our misunderstanding. I did say several times that it wasn't my intent, though, so I think we can consider that matter clarified.

If there's no lore, what do you want with books?

The big head-smacker that I discovered too late in the season is that low quality farmland is just not going to get you a harvest that will get you through the winter. You should run around enough to find medium quality if you can. I don't know what medium quality spawn conditions are, maybe that's recorded someplace, but I had a heck of a time finding any in my long-running game. Where I finally found it was pretty logical, which is a lush grassland area surrounding a pond. So probably it has smarter spawn conditions than I gave it credit for. Run a lot if you hear wolf howls. Unless you're @Thorfinn, early game wolves are going to slaughter you before you see them coming. Bears are bastards, will also slaughter you, and they can be hard to hear coming. Some death in early game is just to be expected. I personally would advise Standard with a monster grace period over Exploration if you're going for the "uncompromising survival" experience that it advertises. But you do you.

This reaction limit thing is really cramping my style. This comment is:

Ok, I gotta know what Bonesbonesandbones.zip is. A quick search of the mod library didn't turn up anything that looked likely, but I find that search frustratingly inaccurate. You have Legacy of the Phanerozoic AND Fauna of the Stone Age? Dang, that's a lot of historic beasts. ETA: That does remind me that I probably have more like 100 mods in my fantasy modpack. It does have FotSA, and I just marked that on my list as one mod. Also Salty's immersion mods are one line on this list.

Ah, now I understand. I'm apparently way to loose with my reactions, so this comment is a "thank you" reactioin.

I'm not a big MMO fan in general, but I do play one, and for that one I play seriously and have a lot of community engagement. (Heh. My video game style tends to be depth over breadth.) In Lord of the Rings Online, the devs have said that experimented with branching quests, and the only thing that triggered in their player base was a bunch of anxiety over which paths to take. Indeed, the primary example I know of this was a choice with consequences two expansions later, and honestly I wasn't wild about it. Maybe I would have been if that was something they did a lot, but . It seems like in a traditional linear RPG game, MMO or not, you're really using combat mechanics or whatnot to unlock unchangable increments of a fixed story. I don't mind that at all, provided the story is good. I don't think that's a good route for Vintage Story, though. Alternately, I love games with hugely branching paths, but they tend to be shorter games, I presume because you're actually implementing a bunch of parallel versions of the game. It seems like there's a third kind where choices don't exactly lead you to a different narrative each time but they, say, build or reduce your relationship with a given NPC, and your relationship with that NPC affects your ongoing options. A more broad version of the same thing would be for your actions to affect your general reputation, and that affects your ongoing options. I believe TOBG implemented a basic reputation system with villagers such that if you are observed attacking one the entire village will stop trading with you. Or something like that -- I play games to feel like a hero, so I seldom have any idea what the meaner paths do. I've actually never played either, though I've seen plenty of Skyrim from other sources. What is Divinity like? Whoa. I had no idea that any major MMO accepted user-created content like that. That's awesome.

OK, I am FINALLY looking to upgrade my long-running 1.19 game to 1.20. I'd like some advice. Firstly, what happens to world settings when you upgrade? I know for one thing that I don't want to play with glue. What's the process of changing settings when upgrading an existing save? (OK, maybe I should verify my understanding of glue -- I think it allows you to take functional items out of ruins, but it doesn't allow you to turn destroyed clutter into functional items. Is that correct?) Recently, I've done a lot of playing with my teenage daughter. Is it safe to let us upgrade separately and for her to log in with her current inventory to the upgraded game? I've been considering asking her to log and move all of her inventory and gear into storage before I do the deed. What about mods with configs? Should I delete my 1.19 configs, generate the new ones with a fresh 1.20 world, and edit them if I need to? If my kid logs in after upgrading her game, will those changes be applied properly to her game or should she track them down and delete them?

That helps a lot for the context of what you're saying. I need to repeat this. Minecraft does not have any kind of story mode. Telltale made a licensed game called "Minecraft Story Mode." Saying that this is part of Minecraft is like saying Jurassic Park: The Game is part of Jurassic Park. It's just a license. Minecraft Story Mode is not built on the Minecraft engine. Telltale makes a certain kind of game, and this is a Telltale game with the Minecraft art style. I drew that conclusion because of the remark below. I cannot imagine where you would have concluded from any post on this thread, much less mine, that anyone thought Adventure Mode shouldn't have quests.

Craftable one-shot spells! That seems like the right theme. Maybe find the recipes in dungeon chests, buy from wizard vendors in a tower, or get drops from magical creatures. You seem to have some idea what Hytale was intended to be. I watched the trailer, which looked awesome, but that's mostly art style. Could you give a quick summary of what major features Hytale promised?

I think there's two kinds of modded games (or maybe more? haha) -- there's the "vanilla tweaked" experience and "turn this game into a totally different game" experience. In theory, I want the vanilla experience the first time I play a moddable game. But so far my vanilla experience now has over a dozen mods in it. Most of them are tweaks or minor mechanics that I just expected the game to have, and when I discovered the thing I was trying didn't work, I find a mod that makes it work. I'm a big fan of removing the crafting grid, so I have a bunch of minor immersion mods that replace craft grid recipes with in-game actions. These don't seem like they have any effect on overall difficulty. I also have some mods to allow dying of things that can't be dyed in vanilla or give constructed items variants to match their material (OK, I wanted to decorate a kitchen in polished andesite and birch, so sue me). Then there are a few bigger QoL mods. I have Carry On because managing storage inventory when moving bases just gets stupid. I also think that Carry On is very well balanced -- you take a huge movement hit when carrying and can't use your hands. I hope the team takes it as inspiration for a vanilla mechanic someday. Also a few mods to facilitate playing on LAN with my daughter, ala Prospect Together and waypoint sharing. When I executed a big base move, I also planned to breed my livestock and capture the babies in basket traps to move. Then after about 4 months, it was clear those pregnancies were not going to advance while I was at the other base, so I threw up my hands and installed Animal Cages. This was in 1.19, and lo-and-behond 1.20 has a rope leads mechanic, which is what I was actually hoping to find in a mod. So no no more Animal Cages. (But also, if bees and a bunch of other time-dependent things can advance while I'm out of the chunk or at least update when I enter the chunk, why the heck can't animal pregnancies??) In addition, all the talk of a fantasy mode got me thinking about what mods might make a fantasy-style VS game. My prototype modpack for that is about 60 mods. Which does beg the question what you 300-mod folks are doing!

Tuning is SO HARD. I've dabbled in modding That Other Block Game, and I've just now started to take a look at code modding VS, but I'm a serious modder in another non-block game. I have a big mod that has bee dangling out unfinished for a year because my alpha testing release demonstrated that skill gains are absurdly unbalanced, and I can't face all the testing required to get the values right. I really feel that pain. Moreover, I'm not sure it's even possible to tune something well without a bunch of players testing it. That is, of course, what the release candidates are for, but the type of folks who like to play in them is still not a random sample of people who play the stable releases.

I think you're reading #1 differently than I do. That reads to me like software engineers who are working hard to make things the best they can be. It is not a rejection of the approach to the story they have taken. I read that they don't like some of the details, probably because players ended up doing things differently than they expected, so they are adjusting details. Re #2, I absolutely expect there to be quests. I can't imagine an RPG without quests, and in fact most of the brainstorming on this thread is about what form quests would take. The phrasing of your #2 indicates that you think quests of any kind would be a bad thing? I think what most of us agree would be a bad thing is a rigid required story progression that takes you to the end of the game, where you "beat" it. There are plenty of examples of RPG games that don't take that approach. Whatever they do needs to be compatible with procedural world generation. I'd love to hear ideas you'd like to see in Adventure Mode. Just to be clear, Minecraft Story Mode, despite its name, is a totally different game by Telltale that licensed the Minecraft name and art style.

Haha. I guess the name does seem important here! I certainly got the impression that the team was proud of the VS story so far. I'm sure they've learned a lot and have things they'd change. I also assume that whatever is done for Adventure Mode would not be the same. I'm not being deliberately dense. It sounds like you think some things are obvious from those statements, and I'm not cluing in. Sure EQ2 is a foundational RPG game. It doesn't seem like a great match for a procedurally-generated voxel world. Honestly, if I were going to point to an influential RPG with a rigid mandatory quest progression for comparison, it would be Diablo 2. The environments there are generated, but the quests are fixed. That adds a lot of replay value, but it's all with the same goals and the same feel. I played the heck out of Diablo back in the day, but I think Vintage Story could do better.

Yeah, I've just gotten well enough established on my base to start making TP in earnest, but now I don't know if I care. I have a mix of medium and high fertility soil and am producing more food than I can eat. Flax plus the overabundance of K crops is annoying, but that's really a crop rotation problem rather than a soil problem. I have enough variety of crops now that I'm only growing a couple of K crops and otherwise focusing on N and P to try to round out my rotation. ETA: Really, I probably won't be needing to mass-produce flax much longer, will I? I'm currently using gambeson armor, so I need the flax to repair it. Starting to build a set of iron chain armor, and that will take iron and leather to repair. At least those aren't crops.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one!

I had no idea that there were different reactions by player class with the story NPCs. I love that. I agree that the ability to choose different paths through the story would add a lot of replay value.

I've been digging up recipe mods to create more bone-handled tools. I disagree with @Thorfinn that all bones could be used to bonemeal P crops. (I think that's what you said? ) I have a pretty decent farm, but I think my only P crops are onions and parsnips at this point. I have two stacks of bones hanging around. Bone blades seem reasonable too. My reasoning on bone-handles is that if we're going to use a generic stick, and a generic bone has more durability than a generic stick, then we ought to be able to use them interchangeably for tool creation and get a durability boost. Sticks that one would gain from breaking branchy leaves wouldn't be long enough for a spear either. You'd need to cut an actual thicker branch, I think, and we don't have a mechanic for that. So all bones and all sticks are of arbitrary length, and I don't have a problem with that level of detail. I guess the durability boost is a percentage though, right? It does seem like one isn't going to get that kind of improvement for higher metals. Seems like the durability boost ought to reduce such that a steel knife with a bone handle is almost the same as one with a wooden handle.

My big concern for a game mode heavy on a central story is that it would reduce replay value unless it is extremely flexible. I'm not familiar with Hytale, though. I assume they approached issues like this in their design. My first guess is that the story approach to Adventure Mode would be heavily influenced by whatever Hytale was attempting.

It bugs me to no end that functional-looking objects like beds are not functional. When I brought one home and tried to use it I was shocked. I don't see what the logic was there. I have found lore in ruins, so it can happen. The one I found most recently was a scroll in a crate. The most important things I find in ruins are torch holders and ancient firewood. It does seem like there should be more interesting stuff.

Yes, that sounds accurate, and it's explicitly what this thread is for.

Plenty of RPG games have quests but not a single central story. I can also think of a lot of open-world games where there is a central story, but it's totally optional. (I haven't personally played Oblivion, but a friend of mine had a fantastic time abandoning the story and opening up a shop in some town.) Also, a lot of games, including VS, tell a lot of story in player-discoverable documents. I think the line between story and lore gets fuzzy, similar to what @LadyWYT said. There are plenty of ways to do it. I think an RPG can be fine without a single central story, but it's hard for me to imagine one without quests. If there's a central story, it shouldn't be one that involves completing/beating the game because this sort of survival game is intended to be open-ended, and I don't think it would be good to change that.

This makes me think about what counts as story-driven. Haha. VS default already has a story. You don't have to engage with it, but it's there, and it provides a motivation for me to explore. I would hope that a fantasy RPG mode would have a quest system of some kind and/or a way to structure a sequential adventure. It would also be really cool to have discoverable lore comparable with current VS. However, I don't want to see any fixed map. I like the way VS currently adds lore locations to its procedurally-generated map. Or, I do in theory, since I haven't actually gotten there yet.