BlackCDown

Aye, true and fair enough. Plus we were all on the same page about where we stand on this morally either way.

.The original post that the thread title and the post were adapted from is a very vitriolic one targeting minorities FYI

It need not be trivial to bypass, ACs work without needing to be stealthily installed after all. ACs and cheats are two sides of the same coin in function, and just like cheats ACs can use obfuscation to make it harder for cheat devs to figure out how they work, and evidently Maltiez has been taking some lessons from PatchGuard whether he intended to or not. Not all ACs are made equal, but anyone who has lurked cheat forums will often see people having difficulty with coming up with bypasses no matter the game. What matters is accountability - you can keep the keys to your safe but you should at least make sure the owner of the house knows you are putting one there. You do not get to enjoy the benefits associated with stealth, but you can still add to the cost of development.

More trustworthy is not the same as trustworthy, it's just that the bar is that low now. Even No Man's Sky gets applauded for fixing the game post-launch when the game should not have been delivered in a state requiring that to begin with.

Malware is a specialized form of software engineering designed to subvert or disrupt the regular functioning of your system without your consent. Of course, info stealers and ransomware are very flashy and all the craze but they are only a subset of what malware is designed for. By subverting the regular functioning of the game for unknowing players it already opened itself to that interpretation. The impact argument is like saying it's okay to leave a mosquito flying around your home because it's at least not giving you Lyme disease like some other bloodsucker. No, you kill it because it still gives you and your family an itch. Likewise, this should not be tolerated on principle alone, not just because "eh, it's just lost hours in a game". It's even more incriminating that he could not have just made a robust AC mod for server admins to install, he chose the method that would allow him to deal punishment however he wanted with no need for accountability, almost like he was just chasing personal satisfaction from vigilantism instead of an altruistic desire to improve the community. And more than that it reflects poorly on Anego to try and whitewash this issue the way they did and apologise only for being made to.

In icesharkk's defense, the last allegation can at least be considered obfuscation since it's a design decision to befuddle analysts during dynamic analysis (i.e. debugging). In this case, it's not making the code less readable by misleading readers or looking like gibberish, but misleading those debugging from accurately attributing a crash. Windows famously uses something like this as well to make sure that BSoDs from corrupted data structures cannot be properly attributed to the watchdog that detected them. But unlike the subject, Windows is (despite their best efforts) professional and know that false positives are unacceptable for their intended audience.

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.