Echo Weaver

OK, I'm sure the daily reaction limit on the forum is to avoid harassment, but dang it is a SMALL NUMBER. I guess I come from an online culture where reactions get thrown around everywhere. I tend to use them every time I think someone makes an interesting point, shares information I didn't know, or tells a sad or happy anecdote. I also like reacting a lot -- I helps people feel seen; it's easy to feel invisible in online spaces. If we have to have a daily reaction limit, I totally think it could be 2x or 3x what it is now while still being difficult to use for harassment. And while we're at it, I could totally use a horrified reaction along with the sad reaction. When someone posts about lighting a fire pit and burning down their house, sad doesn't seem quite right....

Dang it. I know I like to react to things a lot, but the reaction limit is really bugging me.

I love trading. That was basically my style in that other game -- find a village, install myself as its protector, then trade. It was a great way to put mini-goals into my game, and it brought the illusion of being social. The thing about VS trading is that the traders are very spread out, and I don't know what they're trading until I get there. Only maybe 3 traders are available conveniently to my base in my primary game, with another 2 at about 24-hour round-trip. The treasure hunter trader is about 2.5 days travel from my base. I'm not going to do that on a regular bases. I think of building paths out to far-flung areas as a fairly late-game thing, but I still don't think it's going to make the round-trip to the treasure hunter appealing to do on a regular bases. I keep intending to install some mods (is it Day Trader that allows you to call up a trader to find out what they're trading before you leave?) to see if I can smooth out this process, but I got distracted by other stuff.

Yeah, so I want to go meta because that's my obsession. I have a series of rants about the game that I bring up whenever I get an opportunity (eg: way more ruins items should be usable, and glue is dumb when the stuff you're retrieving isn't useful anyway). I also have some conundrums where I don't have a strong solution to propose (eg: vanilla respawn mechanics mostly put the kibosh on a nomadic lifestyle -- unless you're some crazy dude who plays on permadeath, hypothetically -- but they also feel appropriate to the game, and I'm not wild about jumping to bedspawn). I don't think I bring these things up in a way that causes most folks (at least the regulars) to raise their hackles. So what makes a friendly discussion rather than an argument? Since the combat stuff comes up all the time, I'd love to have more brainstorming over what we'd like to see in combat, but it always seems to be contentious. Phrases like, "X is broken; let's fix it." -- Guaranteed to be contentious. My hackles also immediately go up when someone takes a swipe at being pointed to a mod when they state their complaint. OTOH, "This bugs the crap outta me; I think the game should do X instead," doesn't generate that kind of reaction. So maybe it's simple -- folks who keep their take on the game personal and leave room for other people to share a different take.

IIRC, this is how normal treasure maps work -- actually, not exactly, but the location is tied to where you are when you read the map. I bought one but haven't used it yet because I bought the resonance archive map at the same time. I want to be encouraged to travel too, and I understand Chapter 2 will do that. But I feel like what anchors players to hanging around near spawn is the difficulty of changing spawn. I'd like to take on a more nomadic game, but it all comes down to where I go if I die. I don't know if it's possible to change your spawn to, say, the deck of your sailing ship. That seems like it would be a nice way to handle the problem. I also imagine an elk-pulled caravan with enough space for a very simple base where one could set respawn. I'm resistant to using a bedspawn mod because that seems too simple and also feels like that other block game. I like that spawn point is set with temporal gears, though I do set the respawns to infinite in game settings because I want to actually be able to set my spawn point for reals.

I remember that drama, but I hadn't been playing long enough to have much context. And I still haven't made the journey to Chapter 2, so I don't have an opinion. I'm determined to make the full journey at least the first time. I like the idea of being a nomad for a while, the only concern being respawn. But this is a case where fan reaction led them to make changes to the game. In everyone's defense, Anego doesn't make changes in response to everyone's flamewars, so they must've been convinced by the complaints. Adding a config setting for something you could already change in a text config file sounds like an hour or so of work, not something that would have backburnered a feature for the next release.

OK, yeah, this sounds about right, but it doesn't seem terribly profound to me. I mean, a lot of that stuff was really was cheesing. Drifters still happily fall into pits, maybe not quite as happily as previously. I didn't learn there was a special issue with trapdoors until after I put together my strategy, so I haven't used them much. But honestly in places where I've used trapdoors to be sure that I don't fall into my own pit traps, drifters seem to treat them the same as an open pit, and they still fall in. Shivers, afaict, don't though, even with a pit wide enough for them. When I tried to use pit kilns as a way to burn up drifters, it worked fine, but it also burned most of the loot. That was in 1.19, I think. So if there was a way to do this effectively, it got nerfed a while back.

Everything you suggested makes my little heart go pitter pat.

I want this for SO MUCH CLUTTER. I did revive the abandoned Scraps mod, which has some repair recipes. I have more clutter repair in my head that I'll get to at some point. I find it silly that we have the glue mechanic (which I turn off in settings) to be able to take home things that don't work, especially when so many things would be obviously repairable.

I think a summary of my opinion is just: Combat needs an overhaul, but this is a survival horror game, not a combat adventure, and an overhaul to the fighting system needs to stay in that theme. I think body-region hits make sense. Attack combos do not. But I basically trust Anego's dedication to their vision, and they'll be able to thread that needle. I think this seems to be a common misconception. I'm quite sure Thorfinn is not telling you that your opinion isn't real because I've probably been in a dozen conversations with him that go in this circle. This is a moddable game. Installing a mod does not make someone a second-class citizen. I don't think anyone on this thread is primarily a vanilla player. I have mods I don't play without. Thorfinn has mods he doesn't play without. The issue here is folks coming in and dictating that the game should revolve around their play style and being offended when other folks come back and say they don't want that idea. If you want a combat system closer to Combat Overhaul, the right thing to do is to install Combat Overhaul. Now, maybe Anego will be convinced that they should take the combat system that way, but as I mentioned above, I think they're pretty committed to the survival horror angle. A change of that magnitude is would be more than a year away regardless, and Combat Overhaul exists now. What Thorfinn (and me because it's often me) is saying here is: "I don't agree that this feature should be part of vanilla, but there are mods that could give you the style you like." Make the game what you want it to be. That's what we're all doing. I honestly think we all pretty much agree that combat needs an update. The question is really how much the update should look like the current system. I'm certainly not going to turn down a system that works better than the existing one. I just also want my combat avoidant strategies to be supported too. And, philosophically, I don't really agree with the assertion in this thread (at least how I'm reading it) that Anego is funneling players toward a certain type of head-to-head combat. I don't play like that most of the time, and my play style currently feels well-supported.

I like that I'm doing a lot more with pottery, but I'm sure I'll be very happy to move on to copper in the spring.

Do they drop regular maple seeds or crimson maple seeds? I have one near me, and I'm not going to try to get seeds out of it if they're just ordinary maple.

Hmm. Yeah, if it's vanilla, I don't know what can be done about it. I'd honestly engage with other players on the server to find out what THEY do.

In both my long-term games, an area adjoining my spawn was a peridotite area. I've seen a lot of folks complain about not being able to find any hard rock but granite, but mine seems to be peridotite. That's not terribly useful to you, but I do think that areas with peridotite as their primary rock aren't THAT uncommon. I wouldn't be hanging out in very deep peridotite layers looking for olivine.

Eep. You're giving me idea for my stone age game!

I keep wanting to join multiplayer servers and then talking myself out of it for just this reason. I joined one that was well set-up for my availability, i.e. it only opened for half a day on Saturdays for everyone to play. If a server is advancing 24/7, I'm just not going to be able to keep up. (I had to leave the Saturday server because soil instability was crashing my client.)

I really don't see the value in insulting people who like the current system. I like it because it's a decent simplified simulation of real prospecting, which I'm pretty sure is the goal of the design. I'm not trying to play my game faster. Prospecting gives me another incentive to explore. I don't think any of us are disagreeing that RNG is involved. The question is whether this is a bad thing. What's bothering you about the conversation here? You feel that your gameplay preferences are not being taken seriously? Are you insulted because everyone in the thread didn't jump in and tell you you're right? That's never going to happen. We have a huge diversity of play styles on the forum, and there is essentially no suggestion that isn't going to get pushback. Come to discuss, not to proselytize. It's not intended as an insult to point you to a mod. Your concerns aren't unique, as evidenced by the other folks expressing the same dislike on this thread. The whole point to a moddable game is that we can make adjustments to suit what we enjoy. As an example, I never play without Player Corpse. I easily slide into over-caution, and if I run the risk of losing difficult-to-obtain items when I die, I will just never carry around those items. Moreover, my caution generally means I don't die trivially, so it's likely to be someplace dangerous to return to, increasing the chance of dying on my way back to my body and otherwise timing out before I can get my stuff. My only other vanilla option is to retain all inventory on death, which I find trivializes death. Player Corpse allows me to drop my stuff but set it to never time out, which is the balance I want -- it gives me a death penalty that I want and avoids risk paralysis. What I don't do is tell everyone who prefers the risk of losing items on death (or, y'know, Thorfinn, who is in a class of his own) that they're wrong. I just play the way I want to play. If you want to talk about being offended, I find it very offensive when folks come in with a perspective on the game and then actively deny that anyone else's perspective is valid.

There's No Offline Food Spoil, which protects what's in your inventory. It needs to be installed on the server, so the server owner would have to be interested in it. In install this on my game that I play in local multiplayer. I agree that offline food spoilage is a big hassle in multiplayer. I can see that it's trying to avoid an exploit, but it seems like there ought to be a better way to handle this. For stuff that is stored in the world, I'm not sure if there's a good solution. A commenter on the above mod suggested messing with food spoilage rates by claim in multiplayer, but I don't know how practical that is.

Yeah, I really love this mod. Sometimes the little ones are the best.

I generally use bows for range because of the stacking issue. It bugs me to no end that they are not craftable beyond bronze in vanilla due to the range damage. I just want a weapon with the extra melee strike distance.

OK, actually a live-catching butterfly mod existed at one time: https://mods.vintagestory.at/butterfly One could probably learn from that. I'd think that fish would be similar. To my surprise, it's just a content mod -- adapting this old version and adding fish might not be a lot of work. ETA: The warning about lag from too many entities too close together should probably be taken seriously. I'm not sure how many fish one could have in an aquarium or butterflies in a butterfly garden without causing lag. ETA2: The ornamental fish mod has a mechanism for live capture and transport: https://mods.vintagestory.at/ornamentalfish. I believe it only applies to the fish added by the mod, but this is also a content mod, so adding the functionality to vanilla fish might be straightforward. As written, the relocated fish despawn at light level 8, which seems rather bright to me. I'm not totally sure why one would need a despawn light level at all, but there might be a reason. This is a really cool idea. I don't want to give the impression I'm running off to make it, though. I have a lot of stuff going on. But with the examples, you might be able to make it yourself @Hexaclover.

+1 I want to build aquariums in survival. I thought I saw something about folks making aquariums in VS, but perhaps those were in creative. I'd also be much more likely to collect butterflies if I could build a butterfly garden. I dig collecting lovely wildlife, but only being able to display dead versions just bums me out.

I could imagine digging air holes down from above, though.

LOL. Someone brought this up on another thread as an example of Anego overdoing the challenge. I think rats going after stored food makes sense. I don't know about diseases. I guess the team is looking to add status effects in 1.22, so diseases could make sense.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that is why rock-throwing was added, but as others have frequently pointed out, they don't do a ton of damage. I also don't think that using approaches to monsters that avoid head-to-head combat is cheesing, and it shouldn't be easy. Nothing Anego has done so far seems like it has been focused on neutralizing alternative ways to engage monsters -- just removing really easy ways to farm them.