BlackCDown

Algernon's is really neat and almost a must-have for modded world-gen, but the ideal situation will be a mix of both the long flat rivers of the Rivers mod and the shorter, faster flowing streams of Watersheds. The rivers in Rivers are long and also fairly calm and this supports riverine transports, but the streams in Watersheds are basically one-way paths with rafts due to the current and waterfalls caused by water traveling downhill.

It is not particularly meaningful in the long run, sure, but those burned by first chance failures will feel it so intensely because it strikes them at a point of scarcity. Especially when you were trying to make tools to solve that scarcity in the first place.

Butchering mod has a neat albeit janky approach to this with smoking. You have 16 hooks on the racks, you can put at most 16 red meat on them and I guess the game treats each of them as a distinct item. You start the campfire and everything smokes at the same rate and is done at the same time. You add or remove one and that one will have its own timer. It has its own implementation problems like hours of progress instantly being reset once the fire goes out (sounds familiar?) but I think this is a good model for allowing batch heating mechanics that also opens the door for mechanics like stack constraints for different heat sources like you said. Which also becomes a potential source for late game progression or visual displays reflecting the number of objects being heated. Right now it feels like that meme where realism is only invoked at the player's expense like in some games. You will get a quasi-realistic scaling of heating with mass but not the realistic batch completion it comes with.

Yeah I stand corrected on quartz, glass production is a pretty significant milestone. I was less inclined to mention shields because I felt that you aren't unlocking a new technology altogether rather refining a previous one, which all metal ages do over the previous anyway. Funny enough I'd consider mining borax early at bronze supposing how bad a time I had looking for it in the past. Regarding progressing gating, my suggestion for water wheels is to actually reverse this trend, to bring some iron technologies down a notch to an earlier age if they can be justified with bronze's material properties.

Mind you, my concern is not at all about experienced players rushing to iron since they would do it regardless of mid-game content, and I certainly do not see a need to arbitrarily hold them back. My concern is that players might not even get enough contentment from unlocking bronze technologies to even feel like lingering in the bronze age, it's just the first step on the quest to iron. When I do linger in the bronze age, it's less so I'm savouring what the bronze age unlocks more so I'm still enjoying the burst of technology from copper age. Which is well put by jerjerje below. Agreed that steel is pretty lacking. However, end-game is not my focus because I'm more a fan of the mid-game and enjoying the process. That's a good point, didn't think about that. That by definition unlocks the greenhouse too and players are sure as hell not skipping that one. I consider the beehive kiln to be significant because it's the first time you can make coloured pottery and fire at scale where previously it was never possible. In that sense I'd accord it the same value as glass in the homesteading aspect. When you put it that way iron does feel a little lacking. When I mentioned metal doors, I was thinking of it more as a new technology you could not previously get, but on second thought outside of the kiln it doesn't really do much for you unless you really like how they look on your house. Charcoal pits are not a super compelling reason and their other functional use is just to unlock the steel age kinda like the refractory bricks from the bronze age.

If you could drop them in single shots but they have finite spawns that need replenishment (hint hint fishing mechanics), I reckon you'd still bother with livestock for the reliability. I'd say more in yet another thread on the meat industry but I believe this conundrum is a result of meat yields and the over-simplicity of hunting mechanics skewing the effort : reward ratio for hunting and husbandry. Back when I tried to be a stone age hunter for my gang I found myself basically living day-to-day because I was spending in-game hours searching for and then duking it out with prey only to get 3 meat from it. I am of the mind that prey should be even tougher. Hell, moose should be bodying bears, not the other way round. But I believe that requires touching up a lot of related systems. Hunting with the Fauna of the Stone Age deer module, Combat Overhaul and Butchering (with modded drop rates) showed me what a more mature hunting system could look like. FotSA prey species are very tough (the original modded moose had thrice its current health before it was added to the game), very flighty and they were literally over the horizon at the first sight of trouble. And after you go through the hours of hunting them (lots of chasing with spears or traps) you still had to lug it back for more hours of meat processing, and then worry about meat storage. Getting the longbow in the metal age felt super rewarding because it drastically upped the kill rate (you could now kill most medium game in 2 shots and chase them in between) and it felt like you have finally reached a significant game milestone. However, even if you felled an entire herd you were still constrained by 1. how many corpses you can bleed at once back home, 2. that you needed to carry home each kill in a backpack slot and 3. the low shelf life of meat. The only reason late game hunting with longbows felt remotely overpowered was because one could just hunt entire herds with no consequence. This could be countered with 1. prey population management and replenishment and 2. improving herd AI so the entire bunch runs if anyone is injured or killed. And even then, I still switched to animal husbandry anyway because overhunting was a waste of time for the constraints I listed above and I favoured having a meat source at home instead of having to decide to dedicate a day to gear up and look for prey. So I do believe that we could buff our damage output, buff prey even more and it would still be a system that favours animal husbandry so long we have the complexities of meat collection and storage.

Currently bronze only serves as a mere stop-gap to the iron age and the most significant addition over copper is an anvil to smith iron on. The end result is that players basically zip to the iron age the moment they smith themselves a bronze pick. It would be nice if there were more technologies that unlocked at bronze to allow players to enjoy the mid-game at a slower pace. I believe that if players feel like they have unlocked a new way of doing things, they will milk the enjoyment longer before moving onto the next milestone. Let's compare how the different ages change gameplay: Pottery changes how you approach food processing, storage and also farming. Copper unlocks the wooden board, 'nuff said. Iron unlocks heavier industries such as kiln and metal doors. Bronze does not really have these paradigm-shifting advancements. You can now build a helve hammer and a crusher but I'd argue you don't really need them the way you'd need a saw to vastly expand woodworking options. The former is just an alternative to making plates and ingots if you do not want to do it yourself, and the latter's main role is for making refractory bricks, and those only become significant in the iron age when you have iron doors. Some technology could even be moved from the iron age too. There is a Discord suggestions thread requesting that water wheels be shifted to the bronze age. From what I gather (correct me if I am wrong) medieval water wheels relied more on carpentry locks than metallurgy, with metal only being needed to shape the wood. Wheel hubs even had little to no metal according to the pictures in this report. I understand that water wheels were arbitrarily gated behind the iron age just as a late-game power alternative to windmills, but if metal must be a requirement, perhaps it could be transferred to the bronze age to capitalize on bronze's structural advantages.

Fantastic post OP, I am a big fan of the contrast between the simplicity exposed to the player (just needing to choose when to quench or temper) vs the complexity of the mechanics behind it (the details you described). Stuff like this allows players to choose the degree of depth with which they engage with the quenching system and that flexibility is the hallmark of a sandbox game like this one.

I would also love to see reeds and cattails spread along the coast of water bodies too. Not just for utility for how much cattails you will use in the early game, but also because it looks awesome to see tall wide stretches of reeds along the open coasts of rivers.

Cheesers should not be the standard that balance is designed around. Players have an active choice in how they engage with mechanics and I believe a sizeable number would not do that if it meant an eyesore water pillar in view of your villa (especially so in a game that sells itself on the homesteading experience). This kind of mentality also leads to the perverse outcome that when you make things more difficult to counter cheese, the course of action left for the other players is to also cheese, which is something you see in discussions related to hunting and combat. The real problem lies in that placed water blocks are just source blocks that stay in place when really they should flow off and be lost if they aren't walled in like in a farming waterhole. Instead, the solution chosen is to punish players who just so happened to not spawn in vicinity of a limited map feature. It is a deliberate decision yes, but not a very sound one imo. Solving this one would open up more room for discussions about rerouting water for power, yadayada and other cool mechanics.

Already in the game. https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Fish

I think the bears' punchiness and sturdiness is fine, but their frequency feels like a difficulty crutch and they could really be a lot more interesting. I saw a suggestion in the 1.20 spawn rate complaint about visible dens and bears sticking near them which would be neat. What I really would like to see is a buff to the prey species though, obviously we don't need all of them to have a bear's aggro but it'd be nice to see a moose body a bear for being too angsty all the time.

I really do hope they add more depth to fish behaviour while they add fishing stuff. Differences in buoyancy (benthic vs pelagic), predatory behavior (especially barracudas) and schooling for some of the smaller buggers would be nice to see. Definitely also hoping for more freshwater love too, since I usually play in-land near freshwater instead of venturing to the coast so for the longest time ever I never knew there were already so many species in the game.