Echo Weaver

This surprised me, despite the fact that I'd already looked up these mods for this conversation. I just never really looked at the number of digits in the downloads . I will say that ordering by most downloaded seems to have issues. When I ordered by most AND least downloaded, Prospecting++ was first both times. Pondering more, I think the issue is that the search was clearly updated some months ago to put a higher emphasis on word-matching in the title of the mod. I noticed immediately when my search results started making actual sense, but it isn't immediately obvious to me the best way to balance out that requirement with the requirement to order by something like download count. It looks like there are three mods that are closely related and inspired each other -- Absolute Prospecting, Better Prospecting, and BetterER Prospecting. The latter is for 1.21, and the other two haven't been upgraded but seem to work on 1.21. If you are generous, you could total the downloads for all three and get 63k. There are also a couple of mods that give full prospecting readings on 1 sample rather than 3. I can definitely see the appeal of that. That's an interesting question. When I looked through the options for my first game, it was not obvious to me that Homo Sapiens would be more difficult than Survival. It just looked like it wouldn't have the horror and lore features. Not having map for prospecting sounds rough.

You ninja'd me . Primitive Survival doesn't have fishing lines that you hold and wait to respond, but otherwise it's the same classic fishing mechanic you see in the other game. I used it when I first started messing with Primitive Survival, but now I find it so anti-immersive I don't use that feature. The pit traps are da bomb though. (Yeah, this is a distraction, but the primary topic is going so well?)

This is really well-said. Yeah, they've had fishing on the roadmap for all the time I've been playing. The question hasn't been whether we'll have fishing but what it will look like and what its priority will be. Since hanging out on the forum and playing a lot more myself, my opinion on this subject has changed a lot. I originally really wanted the same fishing mechanic you see in most games, where you cast out a fishing line and the game generates something to hook onto it. I see now that this is just not thematic for VS, and I'm sure that's why it hasn't been released yet. If someone shows up and asks for fishing, we'll point 'em to a mod -- we already know fishing has the devs' attention, but there's no telling when it will show up. This is also the point of pies, right? (Also, I want to know how Thorfinn managed to get credit for using unmodded prospecting when none of the rest of us did. )

I like that house design.

Well you can follow a mod. I don't know if that would fill the functionality you're looking for. Some form of mod profiles has been a big feature request for a long time. We've been told it's on the roadmap, though we shouldn't expect it to turn up tomorrow.

You really should be. I put up with it because, as you say, I like the fog outside.

There is an autosave feature. That should not have happened. I've had issues where the game crashed, and I lose a few minutes of gameplay, but this sounds like something else.

Right, and of course I'm doing the opposite of that. I've built most of my permanent base, I probably have enough planted to get me through the winter, and I have breeding stock for livestock from mods: ducks from The Critter Pack, and aurochs and giant deer from FotSA. I have enough copper nuggets to advance to the copper age just from panning, and enough surface copper flagged on my map to at least produce a pickaxe. So I'll be fine in the spring when I'm ready to move to the copper age.

Wow, I've been obsessing over my stone age world, and I see that it's only 26 hours in? Wow, You can do a lot in 26 hours .

I thought TOPS was vanilla? So you're talking about client-only mods here?

I've had this happen too. I find it annoying. I don't know if it's intended or not. Certainly fog has caused big problems with lighting in deep caves. My current theory is that fog just needs a lot more adjusting.

OK, yes I'll admit this does have me a bit concerned. I'd like more information about what they plan to do here. I'd really rather have enhancement of caving on the roadmap than procedural dungeons specifically. At least the meaning I put into that term does not fit the VS theme. So far, they've been pretty good about keeping to a very specific worldbuilding vision. I don't see how classic procedural dungeons fit with that vision. I'm assuming at this point that there's more to learn. I can imagine a procedural dungeon being a more elaborate ruin with more lore and whatnot to find. I don't know. I guess, while I agree that if combat is going to be more of a focus, the system should be improved, I'm far more interested in pushing back against a shift to combat focus. Probably true. If it has nothing to offer my style of play and there's no companion feature added that does, I admit I'll resent it. Maybe where we got off on the wrong foot is the jump to combat mechanics rather than discussing VS's focus, whether it's changing, and whether that's something we want to happen. I think VS as a dungeon crawler presents plenty more problems than the combat mechanics.

Huh. I'd consider that a significant issue, especially since I leave the door to my base open because I've been known to come tearing in with a bear or some other beastie on my tail and my hit points almost gone. I've never had this happen, and I wouldn't expect it to happen so often -- at the very least, not on low and calm rift activity. Your base is lit up? Just how deep is it? If you dug into the side of cliff, then you wouldn't be deep either.

+1 on the jonas device for surface stability.

Heh. I was wondering why stability keeps being mistaken for sanity, but I guess I can see that hearing drifter sounds could feel like you're hallucinating. And that's the usual expectation for a horror game.

I agree -- I don't think I've seen a mod to do this. The team does seem to tweak monster spawn criteria every release to try to get enough monsters to spawn outside bases while not spawning inside them. I'm curious what problems you're experiencing that lead you to request this.

In today's episode of Extreme Animal Husbandry, Echo tries to find a mate for the three(!) giant deer calves (fawns?) in her pen. There used to be several giant deer roaming about, all female. As the leaves start turning for fall, I can only find one, but she's been sticking around. In fact, no matter where I chase her to, I was always finding her back in approximately the same spot. I'd find her, then I'd chase her back to my base, which I could actually do with impressive precision... just not quite precise enough to send her into the pit trap I had waiting in hopes that she or something else interesting would fall in. I'd give up and head to bed, then I'd go back looking for her a couple of days later, and she'd be back in that same spot across the valley . I was at this every few days all August, and it wasn't working. I decided to try the bola mod. If I read it correctly, I could immobilize her for a short time, and I think I would be able to tie her with a rope to extend that immobilzation to 80 seconds during which time I could fence her in. So I did the usual chase and got her into my neighborhood. Then, when she calmed down and started grazing, I'd sneak up and throw a bola at her. My aim is terrible. Of course, I'd never used this thing before, so I didn't exactly expect better. I don't have a sense of how far I can throw it or how high I need to aim. That's why I had a lot of them. I did hit her once, but then I got tangled in my inventory and didn't rope her, and she got up and ran away. Argh. OTOH, she ran toward my base, which wouldn't be a bad thing. I watched her approach the trough of grass I had laid out beside the pit trap. Keep in mind, I've had this setup all summer, and she's been by before but not fallen in. I caught those three giant dear babies using these traps, but the aurochs needed extra encouragement to fall in. I watched this doe walk right up at to edge of the trap and sit down to nap once. It feels like their routing is taking the trap into account, but I can't be sure. This time I was ready. I sneaked around behind, hugging the mountain to stay as far away from her as possible. Then I ran at her, and she fell in! So I put all that work into figuring out bolas, and she fell into a trap instead. Next lesson: I knew these creatures have a 3(!) block jump, but somehow it didn't occur to me that the catwalk I had added above the pen to interact with the aurochs without being gutted is 3 blocks up. She did not get away, thank God, but she did jump up and walk along it before I chased her off and knocked it down. So, breeding pairs of both species, which was my goal. The auroch cow is pregnant. I hope her calf will be "partially-tame" as named in the FotSA files, and that this means it won't freak out when I get into line-of-sight. I'm going to revisit the bola when it's time to cull the older generation because I'm going to need all the help I can get to kill one. When it comes time to butcher one of these things, I guess I'll get a good start on compost because I don't think I can possibly eat all the meat before it goes bad, even in winter.

The traps in Primitive Survival are incredibly well-done. Highly recommended. I've been using them a lot.

I think trader caravans would be exactly the right thing honestly. I believe Better Traders does that, but I keep forgetting to try it out. But those are two different things -- I think they're too spread out to be an effective game mechanic. Lore-wise, there might well be too many of them.

I don't know that it's broken. Getting most of that stuff by mining is no more difficult than trading for it. Having the trading village option just gives you a different path to take.

The more I think about it, the more I would encourage an explicit, "Disagre" or even "I was offended by this" reaction -- one that doesn't grant reputation points and gives us a place to put the reactions that we're just not going to be able to stop making. On the surface, it seems like adding negative responses makes the forums more contentious, but most of that contentiousness is going to happen anyway, and not having an outlet just generates more frustration. I'm sure somebody has studied this .

Oooooh. This is EXACTLY what we need. I feel totally chuffed to have reached Historian, but the truth is that I don't see that much value in poster reputation. I think this is another argument against it. The human impulse is to react to something that generates a reaction, meaning pleasantly inoffensive posts are not going to advance your reputation but trolling is going to make everyone want to click SOMETHING, which is usually wolfbait because nothing else fits. Even I've started using wolfbait to mean, "That post is gonna get you flamed/make the wolves descend upon you," rather than the its original meaning. If it were removed, we'd come up with something else. It's why I see laughing reactions being removed on several forums, which bugs the crap out of me because I want to be able to react to things that are actually funny. Either you switch off to just "like," or you have to face the fact that some reaction is going to get used for, "That post offended me." ETA: Actually, I wonder if you'd actually be making the forums more civil by just owning up and adding "Disagree." People will generally flock to it for offensive posts because it's the best fit, but it's less inflammatory than sarcastically using a reaction intended for a different purpose. It doesn't fix the reputation problem because disagree is also perfectly useful for civil disagreement.

I think you're dead right there. As far as fan satisfaction goes, there's no way to win. While I'm proposing headshots, and I'd support them being added to the game, I'm unlikely to ever put the effort into getting good at them. My kid would, though, and I think she'd have fun with the challenge.

Yeah. I think a bunch of us are in alignment here -- this is not an action RPG, and I don't want it to play like one. Combat should be kind of clunky imho -- many survival horror titles choose awkward or clunky combat mechanics precisely because you're supposed to feel vulnerable. OTOH, I think the obvious way to introduce one-shots is ranged head shots. Those are generally difficult but make sense, particularly for drifters because they're humaniod. Other rotbeasts can have head-equivalent vulnerabilities. This would require body-region hitboxes, and refining the current hitboxes would be the priority. But for those who want that kind of combat, I think it makes sense without changing the mood of of the game or being too easy.

Yeah, versatile games like this have such a wide variety of expectations that the devs essentially can never win. The point made (by you? Thorfinn?) about how the most popular mods are actually homesteading ones was eye-opening to me too. Combat generates so many more frustrated forum posts. But I think probably there are two things going on -- 1) folks playing for homesteading are likely to be less loud, and 2) casual players are likely to be homesteading players, and those are underrepresented on the forum itself. Forums are absolutely not representative of your general player base. So, there were tons of gripes about how rotbeasts were almost entirely drifters, and that was boring. They added bowtorns and shivers, and the other half of the fanbase had a fit. I do find it interesting that specifically bowtorn-removal mods have gone out of fashion. I had to fix an abandoned one to make my teen happy. (Maybe I should post that.) Mods around rotbeasts tend to nerf all of them, block all of them from spawning on the surface, etc. Bowtorns still generate way more forum complaints than the others put together, but mods available don't reflect that. I admit that I felt the annoyance a bit myself -- those of us who are into slow-burn prepare-and-mitigate strategies have to put work into new strategies. But I got over it, and I think the new rotbeasts are an improvement. Heh. I've been using autoloot reforged for ages. I didn't even know the falx had changed except for the forums I totally agree here. I don't need or want dozens of the same thing. OTOH, as mentioned in other threads, we really need a polearm or some sort of weapon with extended mele range without bringing unbalancing range attack options along with it.