Echo Weaver

The guy who introduced me to the game put stone pieces on the floor. Those can be walked over and have negligible effect on visuals. I've adapted my 4x3x2 dirt hovel from early game with some blocks to narrow the space, baskets on the wall, and stones on the floor. It has worked like a charm SO FAR, but since spawn location is random, it's hard to say if it's 100%.

These options seem appealing and thematic for alcohol: 1. Shrug off a bit of damage 2. Warming effect 3. Mitigates some loss of temporal stability Deep mining would be safer, though more challenging, while drunk. A stiff drink could keep you from freezing to death for long enough to get someplace warm. The damage one seems a bit more difficult to visualize, since intoxication should make combat more difficult, but I could see a useful mechanic in there. More like a way to survive while escaping than to carry on the fight.

Yeah, I turned off the glue mechanic in world config. I think the idea is to make the aged clutter harder to obtain -- that's the kind of extra challenge that might be interesting if I got bored with the current challenge. I haven't played nearly enough for that. As it is, just FINDING the clutter is plenty exciting. I would be super delighted to see a mod that allowed glue to fix actually broken things. And maybe glue solvent to take wallpaper off walls.

And the thing I learned from this thread is that I could have repaired my clothes for my first winter, and of course I'm learning that in April. Sigh.

I've seen variants of that mechanic used in other games, and I really like it. It's fun to make alcohol, but I'm definitely a player who needs to have a reason to do it.

I don't know about a command to affect the average temperature in your region, but there's a command to set the spawn point.

I admit that I'm less receptive to a mechanic that makes things easier. The brutal hard-coreness of survival is a major part of the fun.

Hmm. Did you have a rough door on your hut? I don't believe those insulate against the cold.

It's not like Minecraft, where you just dig and see what you find. Ore isn't that kind of common. When you find surface bits (copper, coal, obsidian, anything else?) then there is a deposit directly. below. For everything else, you really need a prospector pick.

I love that idea.

I don't think a hyperthermia mechanic needs to be super difficult, just as hypothermia isn't super difficult. What makes survival interesting and challenging isn't so much that any individual mechanic is incredibly difficult, but that the sum total of all of them is a challenge. I am just finishing out a pretty rough first-year winter, and I have to say that going around in the snow, digging up roots because my grain ran out and then having to scamper home because I'm freezing to death and about to starve is the most immersive survival experience I've ever played. I'm sure in future games I will manage my first season better, but I really appreciate the barely-surviving experience of not really knowing what I'm doing. When I get more experience, I won't be able to go back to this kind of tension.

Propick says that place is a fantastic mining area too, so double-win. I think I will keep the high fertility soil visible particles mod in, but now I can ditch Block Overlay. It's just hanging out there tempting me to take all the exploration fun out of the game.

For those of you who have been reading me whining and complaining about being unable to find any soil other than low fertility for the last few weeks -- it really was the seed! I wandered around the areas I'd already searched with Block Overlay installed, and none of those locations turned up any soil. But I just found some (using the mod) exploring a new area. It's largely under a pond, so I don't know if I'd've seen it without the mod. But I'll take it.

It's hard to tell. I often get nothing from drifters I have definitely killed myself. And, of course, it's usually a combination of the strikes from me and their strikes on each other.

I killed my first double-headed drifter after the last temporal storm. Wow, they really do have impressive loot.

How deep does the shaft go? Is there a reason why you built the trap up on the surface instead of digging down?

This sounds interesting. I'd be willing to try it, and I'm happy to speed things up with a spear. I'm not completely incapable of hitting things. I'm just not someone who has the reflexes to kite a foe backwards while throwing spears or whatnot. I prefer my fights to be as unfair in my favor as possible.

Oh, thanks for letting me know. I just moved from my dirt hovel to my nicer base (which I already realize I made too small. Argh). It's easy to arrange the hovel to have no 2-block-tall spaces except where I stand. I weathered the last storm in my base and apparently lucked out. I figured it might be a good idea to keep the hovel, and I guess that's where I'll weather future storms. Unless.... @Thorfinn you've talked about a drifter trap scheme where you light a pit kiln in the middle of a 3x3x2 pit and then dispatch drifters during the storm as they catch fire and burn up. Is there a coward-friendly way to engineer this such that someone with poor real-time combat coordination won't get slaughtered? It sounds much more fun than waiting inside for the storm to subside, and potentially more profitable too.

Oh, they do? I haven't made paths in this go-round of the game, so my memory is fuzzy. Kind of unfortunate they're not colored with the stone used to make them. Ah, well.

I agree with those who aren't wild about a thirst bar. Heat exhaustion has the same basic cause as hypothermia, though -- raising the core temperature higher than the body's tolerances. Summer in most climates isn't going to get that hot. or at least not for very many days. Drinking water and swimming could reduce a too-high core temperature. Wearing warm clothes could contribute to the increase of body temp in hot weather. Wearing craftable light clothing could contribute to lowering core temp. That could also make it worthwhile to carry around a clay water jug similar to the watering can, but which the user drinks out of. Or, as @Asreal said, fruit juices, which would presumably add saturation and cooling. I personally find this idea fun in the same way that cold weather is fun. It means that running to the tropics doesn't get out of some temperature-based mechanics. Heat exhaustion would primarily be an issue in places with hot enough climates that they have a negligible winter.

Fair enough. I do want to add some paths, but I intend to use the same stone for all the paths, so that leaves out all but one type of stone. ETA: I actually hate trashing the landscape, so I do put dirt, sand, and gravel back to make something that looks natural after I dig it up.

Everything has a use for something, but I don't have a need for everything. Is there a use for miscellaneous stones other than turning them into cobblestone and building with them? I've done all the stone building I need for a good while.

In that other block game, I usually created a 1x2 pit and put a trapdoor on it. Then I could open the trapdoor and throw stuff into it that I didn't want to turn back up in my inventory. When I found some lava, I put lava at the bottom or filled a cauldron up with the stuff so that anything I threw on it would incinerate. Despawn mechanics are different in VS, and I'm reluctant to take up game resources with a bunch of stuff tossed into the bottom of a pit. Lava is rare. I assume it's associated with geologic activity, but I haven't actually found any in-game. What do folks do to dispose of trash?

Doesn't lighting up your base affect drifter spawns during temporal storms? I read something in one of the 1.20-pre release notes that seemed to indicate that was a feature that was being refined.

I refurbished a surface ruin for my base, but it's difficult to retain much of the original character of the building because of chiseled blocks that don't conform to the grid. For example, I had a nice, in tact doorway that I was not able to place a door in because the whole thing was a half-block off the grid sideways using half-width chiseled blocks.