BalmoraPete

I understand people got fixated with the long rambling low quality part of my first post for this topic, my fault. i did say "the rest of this post is unnecessary to read". the intended point was that traders are sold thematically as an entity that travels the world yet cant ever move because of the mechanical restraints from the game. them being able to fly would fix that. nobody cared to engage with that point. ultimately i don't care if trading or killing drifters is a faster or slower source of gears, that was never my real interest. yet with the new enemies, bell headed shivers spawn reliably and drop 5-7 gears, with a farm that sorts out non shivers blah blah blah. try and tell me that you can get johnas parts faster than this. my original point was that the player shouldn't be incentivized to farm drifters because it leads to mob farms and engaging in one of the games weakest aspects of the game that is combat. this is all silly to argue about i will refrain from further posting. Bazinga

I agree, I seem to have exaggerated. they can sometimes be helpful to skip laborious repetitive tasks. assuming they stock the item you can just buy a bow, or skip the hassle of making lots of storage vessels. but its inconsistent, you cant roll up and just buy 500 lime to save yourself the time mining the stuff even thou mining the 500 lime is the same amount of labor as making the storage vessels or bow. I've seen lots of new players streaming the game, one upon seeing a trader they questioned, "why are they just out here". the traders are a thematic misstep, an incomplete idea. the dev could just commit to what the traders are, if the traders are meant to sit around and function this way stop with the carts, put them in houses. they can be hermits or criminals banished from society that trade you crafts or goods they have gathered. that would also explain why they cant buy and sell in large volumes and why that cant just give you a ride to the nearest town along with so many other issues. why not skip the age progression entirely, buy a tinbronze pickaxe, turn it in and go right for the resonance archives and bed cycle the Ender Dragon.

so i hear people saying "the intended way to get gears is this way". i don't care. people don't generally care how the developer intended for there game to be played. did the minecraft devs intend for players to use create resource farms, to enslave villagers. did valve intend for players to launch themselves with prop physics and rocket jump thru levels at incredible speed? when i made this thread i was quite sure an optimized mob farm would be the fastest reliable source of gears but was always unsure because you could get lucky and find the perfect string of traders that if you ran between them with trades it could be faster. now with the new update the edition of the new shivers ends the questions. i see zero way traders are faster than a mob farm that filters out non shivers. have you seen how many gears the new high level shivers drop? I'm not saying people should build mob farms, play the game in whatever way you find the most fun. lots of the time games become less fun when you understand the most optimal way to play them. even thou it would be the most optimal i wont be cooking pies deep underground next to a mob farm because its just tacky and tasteless and reminds me of minecraft. I think i failed to communicate how underwhelming and useless the traders are. the player has access to vast amounts of resources yet traders will have like 20 gears and will only buy and sell tiny amounts. the player wants to move thousands of gears worth of goods yet traders only deal in tiny amounts that are of no use. they are unreliable venting machines with limited stock. want to build something with wallpaper and other trader only building parts? you buy the stock, than sleep and afk for them to restock that correct item, over and over. just give us dwarf fortress traders that come to us, have reasonable stock and world building reputation systems. the dev can do better than these current "traders" we have, underwhelming hobo cart dwelling venting machines.

The player shouldn't be able to just copy paste stuff, as useful as it is. its like the water bucket, its nice that it just dumps out infinite water but should it? vintage story makes you get hands on knapping and forging tools bit by bit, it wouldn't fit within the game to just copy paste something. I could see the possibility for an npc that you give a chiseled block to and give him the raw material and say remake this, or remake this mirrored and come back in a bit after paying for the services. as useful as copy paste is for chiseled blocks its antithetical to the games design aesthetic for how the player interacts with the world.

How would it actually work in game. what feature are you actually asking for. I've also wanted to simply pick up chickens. the player should be able to pick up a small bird. just like the player should be able to pick up lots of things yet we are still stuck punching them than absorbing them into our inventory. you are asking for an entire new system where you pick something up and it locks you out of swapping to anything else until whats in your hands has been placed down. I've seen a mod that seems to do this for containers and some objects. I don't know if its possible to make this system work but i would very much welcome it. animal husbandry would benefit much from some attention paid to how animal are manipulated. the issue is that whatever they implement needs to compete with the trusty rock. the rock can trigger at range the top speed of the animal and the players positioning is all you need to dictate the trajectory of the animals movement. how can the slow animal lead compare to the animal running at top speed from point A to B.

Yes restocking is a part of it but its more than that. I might misunderstand the lore for the traders but unless they are hunting for animal pelts or searching for artifacts to sell they shouldn't be spending so much time sitting around the wilderness. a closer to ideal mechanic for traders would be if they were more sparsely distributed around the world and only available for a few days before they move on. currently theirs way too many traders all over the map and they just sit around as an eyesore blighting the land with their presence. supposed dangerous world where you need to survive but its covered with guys in wagons that don't have food, don't care about the cold and monsters. you can just barge in and store your stuff in their containers and use there bed and they don't care. don't we need at least some attempt at roleplay from the trader npcs, some kind of attempt to make them seem like a living part of the world and not just noisy vending machines? The wagons are never going to move. i understand the ship that's under development is a complex vehicle but the wagon is much more complicated object not to mention it would be piloted by an npc. It would also need animations for animals to pull it and so much more i could mention. a flying trader wouldn't have to navigate a complicated 3d block world, you wouldn't have to worry about the player or natural environment creating navigation difficulties that would block it. whats a more interesting player interaction? 1) Open map and see shape of trader, run to location and find its not the type of vending machine you want or lacks specific item, mark type of trader on map and run to next one until you get the item you want listed for sale. traders only buy and sell tiny amounts of specific items only with gears. lots of running around. 2) Spot trader in sky, check map, its moving in the direction of a landing location you've found so its most likely landing, vehicle is styled and color coded so you already know what type of trader it is. traders buy large amounts of goods related to their trader type but only buy and sell so much, can barter for goods. reputation system, if given good trades they will return on a set schedule that they tell you adding to an interesting extra game element.

Traders just sit in one place all year round and that's never going to change as they are. give them a vehicle with vertical take off like a hot air balloon, don't give it an interior that the player can enter because that would make things complicated. than just give them a building next to the landing area for them to enter to replace the wagon. I've made my statement above, the rest of this post is unnecessary to read but i might as well express the rest of what i see wrong with traders and what i see as a solution. traders sell items for gears. the only reliable way to obtain them is killing higher level drifters. so the temporal storm happens, you want the gears but you are playing vintage story because you don't like minecraft and refuse to build a mob farm. so you kill the drifters in a fair fight in an open area and get the gears but you need more for an item. the game logic is pushing you, why don't you just dig down to where high level drifters spawn and make an area to fight and kill them. how advanced do you make this fight arena? how is this not just a mob farm? why is the game built this way? combat is not great and doesn't need to be, its not the focus of the game. monsters should not drop anything. the game should not push you into fighting monsters for loot. I don't know what the dev for vintage story has planed but the way i see it he has two choices. first is the animal crossing social game route where none of the mechanics matter and the goal is simply to make an aesthetic house. second option is add some colony sim development elements that tie all the mechanics together into a complete game. if npc are added for the player, a way of deploying them would be needed, a transport arriving to deposit them from above sounds like the only way. if some kind of npc colony sim elements are introduced along with more advanced trading i can see a way where multiple dead end game mechanics could fix each other along with the gear economy. Rift ward a currently useless construct could designate a settlement zone protecting it from monsters and rift activity. first an area designated for landing delivers NPC, from here it could function like dwarf fortress, the original inspiration for minecraft before development lost sight of any creative vision. currently farming is disappointing, you have one harvest and you have so much food you never have to plant things again. survival is currently a tiny early game element that quickly turns into the same as minecraft where all you do is munch on something in your inventory one in a while. if you could take on npc workers for some risk reward at a drain on food stores you could keep the survival element of managing supply as a lasting mechanic in the game. If all of the above is ignored and vintage story is just a game where you build a house and adventure i still feel like the wilderness still shouldn't have random guys in wagons claiming to be traders just siting around going nowhere without animals to pull the wagons to even pretend like they ever moved.

that would create possibly the first entity that can interact with blocks in a way that only the player can. does it dig into your snow shelter to get you? does it destroy your intricately chiseled snow art all because it thought it was stuck? does it get loads of development time for a new animation just to unstuck itself? do we not care when bear drowns like he often does because water is confusing for him? mobs could use some kind of anti stuck but i fear the use of it for them to cheat there way thru blocks into my base, if you have a bear in a pit and dump sand on them they will be stuck in sand. you can remove the walls and they wont be able to get out. if you walk over the sand they can hit u while stuck its amusing.

keep away these wicked pans. all seraph understand the serene recipe pairs of even fair amounts cooked in a pot the way god intended. trouble not the minds of honorable seraphs, ask for nothing else. think not of meals prepared without the trusted pot. indecent meals prepared with profane objects would poison any true seraphs soul. speak no more of this Blasphemous Roasted Pan. whats next? depraved souls demanding more than the humble bowl with which one eats. blessed with hands to shovel the gift of food unto our grateful faces. slurp upon your meal cooked with the grace of the reverent pot and be at peace.

i love it, i want to join in moldy cringe soup. the age old forum argument slop "well in real life it works like this", "if this was real life". Malnaur says , "Run where? IRL, if you were the animal", bro if you were an animal in real life, if this was real life and you were an animal, if i was animals and this was real life. lol HAHAHA. ok now i'm going to wade into the mud with you guys and share in the brainrot. a dear has real good hearing, from the sound of the bowstring to the arrow in the air the animal is already reacting to it before the arrow hits. the dear than runs off with the arrow in it. wow real life if only youtube or something existed for me to look this up so i could win internet arguments. also the fact also people did not know animals in this game just stand around when shot from long range and confidently said stuff like Michael Gates "IME animals *do* react when you hit them with ranged weapons. Thrown rocks are a great way to pull wolves or bears over to you, it's a lot safer than walking right up to the things. ". embarrassing, shameful. this is more of a bug report than anything obviously things should react to damage from long ranges. hilarious that a completely reasonable request to fix a bug with the AI summons so many confused zombie posters vomiting nonsense all over the replies.

"Thorfinn says they have no problem doing pretty much anything at night, which does not seem possible with drifters swarming most nights (not to mention the whole "can't see anything" part)" drifters spawn within a 25 block radius of a rift. you are not outrunning the drifters you out ruining the game attempting to spawn a rift on you. i don't know for sure but it seems like the game will only ever spawn so many rifts. so you can return to places during the same night and rifts will be gone if you needed a bit more time on that task. as you move around at night the game will struggle to keep up with you at anything below high rift activity dumping rifts on you as you go. simply finish your task and move on, dig clay until the rifts pop up and than go dig peat, than propick to find mineral veins. if i never stop moving i don't even see a single drifter, by the time it spawns a rift on me I'm long gone. even during daytime stringing tasks together with speed is the default way to play anyways. you can also buy time if you visualize the 25 block spawn radius of a rift and put a quick hole between you and where they would have to funnel as they egress the rift area. if you play correctly night shouldn't bother you. "You certainly can't explore at night because you can't see anything" i know its cheating to have the map enabled but its all you need, as long as you are running in the dark generating map data you can find traders clay peat any many other things from simply looking at the map. i still agree with malnaur that it is as you said its clunky to rest till morning, al i want to do is tell if the view from some hillside is pleasing enough view to build on. lastly as much as it appeals to my crusty min maxing gamer side to dodge wolves and bears and rifts in the dark none of it means anything and i now find myself resting to morning more because i just don't care.

ill way in on this because i feel i understand both sides. when i first started playing this game i thought i had to be maximizing survival and i did not understand why anyone would ever build a bed because it saps your food level away while bringing you closer to winter so over 100 hours and i never built one. my base was completely dirt, why would anyone build out of anything but dirt, do they not care about time management? my base consisted of a honey honeycomb of large connected round rooms each built to the correct size maximizing the light value out of each light source before the light drop of would allow drifters to spawn. why ever build differently light is round rooms must be round to maximize value. pit kilns, charcoal production, clay sculpting, fields to harvest, bony soil to sift, an endless number of things to get done within the rooms of the base. building food storage underground with a door to role play? why are people doing this? cellar rooms must be built with an airlock made of hay, build it above ground for faster access. do people not care about food storage? why are they using doors they don't block as much light as a full block, why are people doing? i could go on endlessly but ill stop. i no longer play like this because i discovered vintage story is an easy game once you understand how it works, survival is easy and only people who are bad worry about food and winter. instead of in game time management worry about real life time management. the dark pit of min maxing survival leaves you farming purely to create rot to make better dirt to make more food items to make more rot. miserable, your soul itself rots away surrounded by endless resources and treasure in a sad min maxed tomb of dirt and rot. unless you are bad the first 40 nuggets should be collected in the first in game day night cycle. only two reed baskets carry 120 damage worth of spear heads when a drifter has only 12-48hp, combat is easy. the hardest thing in this game is the time spent looking for the best place to live and building an aesthetic house. an example is a place in the south that combines warm temps at low altitude and colder temps at high altitude allowing you to grow the maximum number of of the games available plants. the place would also have an aesthetic mountain to do this with in a region with temporal stability reasonable rainfall preferably a good local trader, and lastly its preferable to have a high amount of a valuable mineral resource locally. finding this eden is the real challenge in this game, combined with the artistic ability to create a chiseled wonder of a house. the bed is an item for noobs and people who have actually mastered the game. i would like maximum daytime while i search for a location and build a nice house i agree with malnaur.

the Roadmap already includes "Improved combat" as a target for improvement. this minecraft mod seems to lock you into third person while in "combat mode" and has trashy Naruto anime attacks thank god the dev for vintage story seams cultured enough to never implement something so trashy in the game. I'm sure the dev has a better idea than any of us as to what references would be of value for a combat overall project. games of note would probably be ones that have a simple satisfying system that reads well in a first person so people are not forced into third person for combat. zero reason why the inspiration would have to be drawn from any block based game. "this is a perfect opportunity for Vintage Story to really improve on one of the weaker aspects of the game" the Minecraft mod creates an opportunity? what? "High-level drifters already have blades in their arms" lol? "There is so much potential for new and exciting creatures. 'Made in Abyss' is a great place to look for inspiration." for a forum that could be a place for intelligent discussion or constructive debate between strangers invested in this game you have just attempted to give an anime recommendation. "The intersection of the gear dimension with our own is really cool, but it would be much scarier (and super exciting) if you could actually go to another dimension" i have to agree with this one thing, although I have no idea know how it could be done tastefully and not come off as some kind of Minecraft neather Imitation. i played this game multiplayer with someone and they walked up to a rift and asked "does this bring me to another world if i stand in it? what happens?" and they were disappointed when i had to tell them that all it does is make your screen distorted until it spawns monsters on you.