Echo Weaver

I my job involves a lot of mentoring of undergraduates, and that's something I try to impress on them. When you chase down that bug for a week, and it's something absurdly stupid, don't feel incompetent. IT'S ALWAYS LIKE THAT.

That looks fantastic. I never have any suggestions. I'm just impressed.

"That Other Block Game". It's just a Minecraft in-joke.

I suppose it could be terrible luck, but that's REALLY bad luck.

Wow, that sounds nuts. Sheep should frequently spawn with both male and female and maybe a baby. And they're all male, not like a pair generated and wandered away from each other. Are you playing with any mods? Could something be messing with animal spawns?

Cool. If you're making it hard to get into the copper age, I could recommend a couple from my stone age game: Log Troughs, so that you can feed animals without making a saw Crude Building Elements, to give you more pre-copper building options. There's a ceramic bucket in here, which opens up water and other liquids (pottery for water-carrying is a soapbox of mine). There's also a couple more tiers of crude door -- one that doesn't break off its hinges all the time and another that can be insulated against the cold. Primitive Stick Window to make a trapdoor. Storage Urn, a mod of mine that adds a ceramic crate. Clayworks has ceramic barrel, bucket, and crate, but I don't use it because of the bloat from all the additional colors -- the colors are really the point of that mod. If you're having trouble with performance, Clayworks might not be the right thing. I'm testing out a ceramic barrel to go with the ceramic bucket, but I haven't released it. Oh, and since you're playing with VS Village, you might want VS Quest. That's the mod that allows you to interact with the villagers from VS Village. Otherwise, all you can do is watch them go about their day and maybe steal their produce/livestock, which is kind of underwhelming. I hadn't seen Floating Landmasses. I'll put that in my fantasy modpack that I haven't played with yet. I love the irrigation ditches and pit traps in Primitive Survival. The fishing is interesting too, though it's not as immersive because it magically generates fish. The Critter Pack is also awesome.

I'm curious what mods you put in the new game.

Fauna of the Stone Age are updated, and I'm blown away by them.

Oh, that's interesting. Maybe the daytime generating ones aren't such a big deal, then.

I don't agree either. I'm playing in an area swiss-cheesed with temporal instability, and it's making for a very interesting and different playthrough. I had to scout out a base location that was stable, but my farm is slightly unstable, and I need to pay a lot of attention to the state of my gear when I'm out and about. The downs where I spawned also has a large number of ruins. It gives the place a really eerie feel. I do see that surface instability it's not everyone's cup of tea, though. For more building-focused players, it's pretty frustrating. You're far from the only folks to complain on the forum about it.

Maybe I should retitle this "Echo's Stone Age Travelogue." Yup, they're European Aurochs. I caught the cow! I feel like a rock star. I created a fenced enclosure on three sides and put a trough of grass beside a 2x3x3 pit trap from Primitive Survival. (I wasn't sure whether she'd be able to jump 2 blocks, so I made it 3 deep.) I wasn't sure if she'd be drawn in, but she showed up after about 24 hours. I sneaked out and got about half the 4th side of the fence placed before she noticed me, at which point she freaked out, tried to run away, rebounded off the far fence, and fell into the pit trap. I'm not sure I actually needed the pit trap, but it was great to have as backup. So. After I said the bull might be gone, I thought I saw him about, but now I think it might have always been the cow. I ran about my grassy downs area and haven't found him. Coincidentally, two deer were also checking out the grass trough when I captured the cow and were also fenced. I thought they were ordinary deer that would be good meat, but they turn out to be baby Giant Deer from FotSA. Sadly, both male. While searching for the auroch bull, I found their parents walking around together. I'm going to set up another similar trap to see if the bull will materialize or I can get the adult giant deer, at least the female. Adult domesticated giant deer can be ridden like elks, says the FotSA page, though 10 generations is a long haul. I don't know if a partially domesticated giant deer might be rideable. Giant deer can be milked AND can eventually be ridden. It would be much more logical to abandon the quest for aurochs and focus on the deer, but it's hard to give up on the aurochs. I mean, aurochs, c'mon. I'm trying to figure out if I could let myself cheat a bull into existence if the original bull can't be located. Maybe if I am able to pull a repeat performance with the giant deer, I will let myself go into creative to zap one of the male deer and replace it with a male auroch. And then I would have way too many domesticatable animals that will be insane to work with for a couple of generations and will likely kill me repeatedly. I haven't actually seen vanilla deer yet, but the auroch cow panics like nothing I've seen in vanilla, and my experience with the bull in the wild is that he aggros like a bear and does more damage. It will be hard to get close enough to feed them, and I can't imagine milking is an option in gen 0 at all, maybe not even gen 1. I thought I saw that there was a console command for locating a specific entity. Is that a thing? Maybe I can determine whether the bull is out there at least or if it either fell down a sinkhole cave and died or wandered far enough away to despawn. Oh, and now there is some kind of wild dog running about that has chased me multiple times and got a nearly-lethal bite out of me once. Great times. (Maybe I should post pictures. This is a ton of fun.)

It also seems like you could handle this with the user preferences the same way as avatar selection. Just provide a button to load the last config you used.

Just saw this pop up on ModDB. Maybe it will do what you're looking for: https://mods.vintagestory.at/meteoricsteel

This seems like it could be a good mod for folks to look at: https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/31920 It restricts shivers to underground, requires 0 light level for spawn (which I think would be mostly underground and perhaps at night in a shadowed area), and reduces the frequency of bowtorns and shivers. I need to poke through the current lore entity json to see if I can get what I want. I don't want lower spawn light or lower frequency. I just want all the rotbeasts on the surface to retreat in daylight. That seems like it might be more complex than it sounds because the game currently seems to have two behavior variants for surface drifters at least -- one that retreats at dawn and one that spawns in daylight and hangs around. (I walked by one standing on top of the spire of a ruin at midday recently, which was pretty entertaining). I don't know how this difference in behavior is defined. I know that rift-spawned rotbeasts are defined in their entity json and rotbeats for temporal storms and devastation are defined someplace else. But I don't know where the daylight-tolerant variety of rift-spawned rotbeast behavior is defined. For bowtorns, I'm currently playing with an adjustment of Zippy's Bashful Bowtorns, which I updated to 1.21 and changed such that normal bowtorn spawns are Zippy's light-fearing alternative in addition to the temporal storm ones. I don't want anything in story locations messed with -- those are their own thing with their own challenges.

Re better quarrying, what about Salty's Stone Harvesting? I have it installed, but I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. It seems much more immersive but possibly a pain to use.

Yeah, yeah, it seems like we're talking about "least used" or "least useful."

It's technically possible to milk a gen 0 ewe, but it's mostly an exercise in frustration. You really get access to milk with a gen 1 ewe. It's a pain in the butt -- 1 out of 3 success rate, but it's doable.

Weaving? Do we have a weaving system?

There's a mod that does this rather nicely: https://mods.vintagestory.at/wool There's a periodic forum debate about the practicality of wool in the VS world. Bighorn sheep are not wool producers. I assume they were chosen because of that? I don't know. My argument is that sheep were domesticated to produce wool, so the player ought to be able to shear later-generation sheep for more and more wool. I suspect that something like that will eventually be added, but . Until then, the wool mod is nice.

Bismuth bronze is an alternative to tin bronze! As for lesser-tier metals, I make my lanterns out of bismuth. It's the prettiest metal in the game (and basically irl too), but it's too soft by itself to be useful for tools.

In my primary game, where I'm just smelting my first batch of steel, I always carry around a stack of obsidian. Even iron tools still break fairly regularly, and I want a way to finish my work without carrying spares. Knapping never ceases to be useful as a backup imho. A lot of sandbox games are like that. I enjoy having the story as a long-term goal -- even if I'm not actively trying to pursue it, it gives a sense of purpose to my progression. But I still need my own goals.

Pretty sure it's not small, though I'm just starting it now.

Do you know about the story quests? You begin the story by finding a Treasure Hunter Trader, who will ask for a tin bronze pickaxe. Deliver them the pickaxe, and you get a map to the first story location. Complete that area and return to the trader, and you'll have the opportunity to buy a tamed elk to ride and can journey to the next story location, which is a long way off. I'm also playing a game currently where I just am not allowed to use copper until after the first winter. I needed to install some mods to do it, though, because some things that I think should be early game are gated behind boards, which require a metal saw. In particular, animal troughs and henboxes require boards, which pushes animal husbandry into the copper age. That seems nuts to me, so I modded in a crude trough recipe.

It's supposed to work for small troughs, but there's a bug report in the comments reporting a crash using them. TenthArchitect's pretty on top of things, though, so I wouldn't expect it to be too long before there's a fix. ETA: That crash report seems to just be for thatch, though. Why do you say Diverse Diets is only for large troughs?

So one thing I'm taking away from this poll is that the results are REALLY distributed. Almost everything was selected as a favorite feature by at least one person, and more than half of the options also has a least-used vote. Nobody's favorite is panning. No surprise! It's not the most fun, but I'm glad it's there as a fallback for resource frustration. Trading is getting a revap sometime soon. Alcohol brewing feels like it's not done. (I love the idea of wine and spirits having some additional effect beyond nutrition.) But overall, the survival mechanics are broadly appealing. This survey was JUST survival mechanics, though, I assume intentionally? I love finding and exploring ruins. Sometimes I build out the more detailed above-ground ones into the buildings they might have been. The subterranean rooms have a story to tell. And I keep on panning bony soil and collecting bones because I want more lore books.