Echo Weaver

Dur, is that a 1.20 thing? I don't remember that level of hand-holding when I started playing on 1.19. I haven't started a new game in quite a while, though, so I likely don't know what I'm talking about. I learned about H-for-handbook from the forum. Speaking of confusing mechanics, my daughter and I both read through the survival guide instructions and managed to assemble and connect a helve hammer about a dozen incorrect ways, and we're still confused on how to interact with it (though, admittedly, we finally got the dang thing working just before signing off yesterday, so we haven't done much yet.

This is a great line of thought, and I have to agree, though some of my perspective depends on what you mean by physical violence (oh no I'm digging into word definitions ). I guess I've played enough hack'n'slash of various types -- it's fine, but there are a lot better, more responsive, more creative real-time fantasy combat games out there. I describe myself as a "coward" to have a high concept of my gaming approach, but the more detailed description is that I much more enjoy thinking my way through how to mitigate a threat than meeting it head-on with punches and spears. I've been playing with my teenage daughter on LAN with my long-running save this past week since school let out, and we've been working on creating an effective kill zone at my base for temporal storms. The first attempt was a hysterical death loop where we got trapped inside our base with a nightmare drifter who camped our respawn point until the storm mercifully ended. The second attempt involved fewer deaths but not a lot of dead drifters. The last one was pretty good, and I got a double-header to boot, though the jerk didn't hand over any jonas parts. All of this was probably far worse than just running around with spears, but it was FUN. OTOH, I don't really view wolves and bears as combat opponents. They're environmental risks. But really one of the highlights of my gameplay so far was the my first winter where I nearly starved. This seems like a good indication that I am the right mindset for this game. And also maybe I need a therapist. Well, to be fair, you don't need to stare at a wall. Just make a hay-bale bed and sleep like a normal immersive human would do. And if you don't want to do that, there's usually a bunch of cooking and whatnot to do inside during the night. ETA: I know that optional/nonexistant sleeping is pretty standard for most games, but I kind of think I'd prefer a fatigue metric just to contribute to immersion. I don't know that anyone has modded that. I'll have to think on it. ETA2: Oh, healing is supposed to be boosted while you sleep??

OK, this makes sense to me. When I read about the Hytale plans, it sounded more high fantasy than gritty survival with a side of Lovecraftian horror. It sounds like Tyron is looking at ways to build something closer to Hytale's concept on top of Vintage Story, and that makes a lot of sense. As folks have pointed out, it's already an incredibly configurable game. Though Hytale is pretty far away from VS on default settings, one could get a lot closer to the right landscape feel with liberal adjustment of settings, then the high fantasy and RPG elements could be built on top. I would totally play that.

I enjoy open-ended games, but I think a lot of what grabs me about VS is immersion. I can suspend disbelief and really live in the world. All the agricultural and crafting simulations contribute to that. I'll move along in the plot, but my instinct is to always tend to my comfort and security first. I can certainly imagine cranking up the difficulty in a future playthrough as @Thorfinn does, though I doubt I'll ever play on permadeath. I get too invested in what I've built, and my natural risk aversion would turn into paralysis. I think what I have in mind for a future run is a start in a much colder biome. Also, another to deck out the game with the stone age mods.

Re lettuce -- we already have cabbage, and that seems close enough for a leafy green. Cacao, coffee/tea, nightshades.... and either a flax alternative that is not K or more crops that are not K or some combination. Crop rotation gets frustrating when the need for flax overwhelms everything else I grow.

I find it kind of bizarre and fascinating to try to drill down to what people mean when they say, "grind." I mean, I know what a grind FEELS like, so I'm hardly questioning that it exists. But it seems to be really different for everyone. It's basically doing the same repetitive actions past the point of it being fun, right? And it's challenging when it's still fun? I have so much to do to get my farm running smoothly and deal with temporal storms that I keep forgetting to actually search for a treasure trader to advance the story. There's so much to explore and lore documents to find and also thatch for the roof of my barn and cheese aging and armor to forge. I just finally found bees and am starting my apiary with the exciting prospect of switching out all my lighting for lanterns. None of it seems grindy at all to me -- just extremely detailed and immersive, which is what I want. I could advance faster, but I don't really want to because there's so much to do. So... what would be less grindy while being a similar experience? And what, specifically, makes the grind for those complaining about it?

I love this idea. It further contributes to immersion while throwing the noob instructions in your face so you can't miss them -- though I realize that there are probably lore reasons justifying the way we start now. There are definitely places where the guide isn't detailed enough, and I have needed to look things up on the wiki. I wasted my first growing season trying to farm on low quality soil, assuming I could eek along while looking for better soil. Not so -- my harvest ran out about one month into winter, and I spent the rest of the time digging cattail roots out of the ice and running home before I froze to death. Also spending stupid amounts of time failing over and over again to milk my wild ewe for the dairy. Honestly, I loved getting my butt kicked like that and really feeling the pressure of starvation. But it also felt kind of like a gotcha that I didn't know that farming on low quality soil was pointless and that I should spend my first days searching for better farmland before settling down. I found the mechanics of putting the sails on the windmill confusing enough to go find a YouTube video (kind of a last resort for me), and figuring out the power train has been more so.

Haha. My reason might be the opposite. I really like my current game, and I've been leery about what the big changes will do to my play strategy as well as the possibility of terrain generation changes that doesn't mesh well in an existing world. (That was certainly a problem with That Other Game.) I haven't really started the story (still searching for the Treasure Trader), so I'm not ready for the chapter 2 content. I think I saw that the release candidate might have some help for finding that pesky trader, which might be motivation. I also have been reading threads about drifter spawn going way down during high rift activity and difficulty getting way worse during temporal storms. I'm pretty happy with the spawns the way they are in 1.19. Mostly, I've been intending to install a 1.20 game in parallel to my 1.19 game and copy over my save to see how it handles in the new version, and I've been having too much fun playing to bother.

How have temporal storms changed since 1.19? (Yeah, I still haven't upgraded.) To be fair, in 1.19, I experimented with a more aggressive approach in a medium temporal storm and ended up in a death loop with a nightmare drifter that got into my base.

Dur. I wonder if this is a failure of imagination on the part of the devs? Then again, VS wildlife aren't exactly the same as their real analogues, and of course they're far more vicious.

VS has a pretty dedicated player base at this point. I think it's natural to compare to Minecraft because they're both voxel games, and Minecraft was the pioneering voxel game. As someone else said, Minecraft is the grandpappy of this genre. That doesn't make other games in this space just pieces of Minecraft. Maybe we need to get over the inferiority complex that assume a mention of Minecraft makes Vintage Story look derivative. VS's infancy was as a Minecraft mod that basically remade Minecraft into a different game. So now it's a completely different game that no longer layers on top of Minecraft.

Other than just being cute, I think there's actually some value in not naming that other block game. Since it comes up a lot, it could cause VS to show up on searches for that other guy. Then again, now I'm not sure it's a good thing. I mean, with all the content on this forum that compares Vintage Story to Minecraft, a bunch of Google searches directing people here is free publicity for VS. I have nothing against Minecraft. I've had a lot of fun playing it, and while VS's Minecraft roots are pretty clear, the tone of this game is completely different from the tone of that one. If I want a rollickin' adventure, I'll play Minecraft. But it turns out that I was progressively modding Minecraft to make it more survival and agriculture oriented. When I discovered VS, I realized that this was what I was trying to mod Minecraft to be. I'm sure I'll go back to playing it at some point, though.

Necro'ing this thread. I still haven't upgraded, but I probably will soon. As @Thorfinn suggested, with a copy of my world. Indeed. I think I want to set up a 1.20/21 game and keep my 1.19 setup. I'll need to review the instructions for multiple parallel VS configs. I already have two -- my 1.19 modded and one with no local mods that I use for multiplayer games. I'm curious if the mob spawns were ever adjusted. I rather like that there are an army of drifters out on high and apocalyptic nights. OTOH, the easier route to starting the story mentioned in the 1.21 prerelease definitely caught my eye. I still haven't found a treasure trader in this game.

I'm back after a few months off, and I'm faced with whether I want to upgrade my existing game to 1.20. The two things that changed relevant to my gameplay are, I think, the new mobs and the ability to move water source blocks. I appreciate why water source blocks have been changed, but the hassle seems less important to me than the realism. I'd like to be able to put my farm wherever I want it rather than finding a body of water. Is that something that can be changed in config. I'd also be interested in a mod that makes it possible, even if it takes extra work. Then there are the mobs. They sounded pretty nasty when the update was in beta. What do folks think now? How would you describe them from the perspective of someone who likes setting traps and other deviousness instead of head-on combat?

I think this must be mods or settings. I was definitely getting insta-killed by wolves at the beginning of the game. I didn't start getting resilient until gambeson armor.

Well, I often get my three blocks in an L-shape, counting 3-4 blocks away from my first block on the Z-axis and the X-axis. However, I also play with ProspectTogether, and I've actually never used density search without it. It stores density results and allows you to display them on the map in various ways to help you locate what you're looking for.

I go for deep oboe.

Generating planks at 0,0 seems odd when your initial spawn is randomized around a fairly broad range.

Oh, sorry, I didn't mean a literal fisherman class. I've only barely played with classes at all. I just meant character lifestyle. I get the impression that expanding fishing options is in the plans. Fishing rod mechanics like that other game could just be half-assed in, but things like fishing nets from boats is more interesting, and it seems more in character for the game.

This is cool to know. They barely spawn in 1.19, and it bugs me that fisherman is not a viable specialization.

Yeah. And I really, really want to be able to configure a different mod list per single player save too. With the toggle on and off, it seems like it would be pretty simple to include a custom active mod list as part of the save's config. Anything without a custom list can default to the set that is turned on in the Mod Manager. I know there are ways to finagle this on your own, but it really should be supported in the client.

I do something similar, but just with a 1x1 hole in the floor.

I'd say overwhelmed. It's not really a game meant to be learned just by doing. Instead of a tutorial level, it has the starting guide in the handbook. You can get pretty far with just that to explain some of the base survival mechanics.

I didn't know aqua vitae I made the comment. I read about it on the wiki since then. The new part here is the part about the bandages drying out. It doesn't seem very useful to have bandages that you can't just carry around until you need them. And I thought I read that wine provides the nutrition of fruit but not the satiation? Bees are the one big survival resource I haven't found yet. I've been preserving berries in pies, which when stored in a cellar gives me a good 3 months at warm-weather spoilage and close to 6 months at cold-weather rate. So I'd guess the average is a bit more than 4. I made enough pies that I'm having trouble eating them fast enough, but I'm staying fed and keeping my fruit bar up just fine

Haha. I don't know if it was for the same recipe, but I went hunting for (and did find) meteoric iron because I thought I needed a meteoric iron chisel for some midgame thing. When I got it, I realized that I'd just had a bad mouse-pause on the recipe, and any chisel would work. That's a new player fail, but hey, I'm still pretty new.