Kiko

Update 1.23 is the official pollution update. Fish were only added in to be a water quality indicator.

I've also been playing for over two years. I think my problem isn't necessarily that I have to do calculations and rather that my calculations consistently end up with weird remainders. If I want to even things out I could just find a common denominator and aim for that number of inputs for my output, but then I end up massively overproducing some items. The gameplay result is that most remainder items end up getting thrown onto my roof to despawn because it would take more recipe iterations than I care about to justify the accumulation.

I've always been particular about volumetric inventory systems like in deus ex where you rotate items to fit them into your inventory. Still, I doubt any restructuring of the inventory mechanic would make me any less frustrated while I'm trying to craft. You'd still have the issues of x amount of leather requires x liters of liquid in a barrel that holds 50 liters, or x units of metal crushes into .3 of its crushed variety. It's the ratios that get me fired up, the actual system for putting things in my backpack is just tangential to it. I'm just grateful that none of these recipes have decided to use 7 x 1 of something, or else I might actually have a panic attack.

I honestly wouldn't be so opposed to that. I assume that the concept of stack size would be based on the theoretical ratio of how much weight to volume a person can carry. I as a human can lift a mattress by weight, but by volume and distribution it's a real pain to do. The main issue that you come across is that 1 sqM of granite weighs about 2700kg. Asking players to quarry stone and roll it to their desired location chunk by chunk like an ancient egyptian. While that may sound neat, from a gameplay perspective it's pretty disrespectful of a player's time to expect them to spend 40 hours quarrying stone and gathering log rollers to build a 3 meter high wall. This game has to straddle the very fine line between being in depth enough to be fun and interesting and becoming so much of a chore that it has to compete with vacuuming and doing the dishes for leisure.

The crafting is killing me, nothing ever lines up. I need a 1 x 4 ratio for slaked lime, but quicklime is created at a ratio of 1/2, so i need 80 lime to create 40 quicklime, but lime stacks at 64. Mortar stacks to 64 but it comes out of the barrel above its stack limit. If I want to make leather I need 50 lime (out of stack of 64) to create a full barrel of lime water, but you actually only need 2L of liquid per leather produced. A full stack of metal bits is 128, but that stack creates 6.4 ingots. The extra 8 pieces will only be fully used after creating 30 ingots (which stack to 16). Metal stacks are a multiple of four, but their actual unit value is base 5. Metal bits crush into 0.3 of crushed metal powder. A stack in base 4 with a unit value in base 5 pulverizes into 0.3 units of crushed material. If I were to make stone blasting bombs I would be able to make 4.8 bombs per stack of 128 iron bits. Items stack in base 4. Metal units are in base 5. The barrel works in 1L increments except for when it doesn't. The meal system works in 4x6 with foods that stack to 64. I know that this is supposed to be an uncompromising survival experience but it's not really any more difficult, just annoying every time I want to produce something. Like Oh no! I've got two extra daub left over since daub produces in batches of 8 and each wattle requires 3! I can't overcome the burden! Anyway that's my rant. I'm frustrated and it feels bad to craft stuff.

All that you need to do to make storms fun would be to spawn enemies in a radius around the player rather than wherever. It's fun to stand on a wall or something and fight waves. It's not fun to have an enemy spawn on top of you. As of now the meta for dtorms is to build a pit and a space enemies can't spawn in, then poke drifters that fall in.

I hope we see some fishing lure action in the future. It would be really cool to have a mid-late game bait source that doesn't expire, and different lure types could be used to target different kinds of fish, maybe working best in different regions.

I buy most of my black bronze tools

I figured that was the case when i saw them selling creative mode items lol

I think that melee is the meta right now, since baiting his melee attack avoids the rock throw and ground pound. If timed correctly all damage could be avoided. Still, I don't like the idea of using a metronome to fight a boss in a game like this. If the bosses become too technical it's going to end up like runescape where everyone is using third party mods to mark tiles and add helper timers and such to get really efficient, and that kind of kills the whole point of the dungeon IMO. I'd prefer to see the combat become more fluid rather than rigidly timed.

The story content really has me burnt out. It was especially frustrating to get to the village expecting to be able to purchase supplies only to find out that the inn only sells goats and ore, and that despite every other villager telling me I can rent a room there the inn keeper says to come back in a week. I know I can just sleep wherever i want, but still, it's kind of stupid. I had to spend a day hunting in the woods nearby before going to Tobias. By the time I got there I didn't want to continue because there's a bossfight that I need to prep for, which means i need to go aaaaaalll the way back home to resupply, then aaaaalll the way back to the boss fight. This game really needs some kind of airship or something because spending 10 hours playing walking simulator is not fun. In the early game it's not a big deal because I can always map out valuable resources, but getting to story locations feels like I'm playing the first elder scrolls with no fast travel. Honestly the worst part is thinking "holy shit i have to walk back." I think it would be more engaging if the store items in the village were more consistent. If I could cash out loot and items I got elsewhere then I could avoid having to go back to my base to by trading in the village for additional supplies. Right now the trading system is very limited in terms of what you can sell. Maybe something like the runescape general store would be a good idea. A guy who buys things at low prices but he'll buy practically anything of value. It's still trash. It'll increase the time it takes for you to heal and the boss is guaranteed to cancel your heal by doing a ground pound in that time. Extremely annoying mechanic overall

That would be cool, it would certainly help with being able to dodge the attack horizontaly but i think it would also add a lot aesthetically. Maybe if the crush attack had a different cooldown it would also break up the attack pattern rather than having it be 2 seconds for each attack

Alcohol bandages are just cheaper honey sulfur poultices. Both have the same healing and application time. The bonus between them is they stack twice as high and the aqua vitae is more easily sourced than sulfur, but as far as boss fights go they wouldn't help.

I avoided soaked bandages because I was worried about them drying mid combat and leaving me without a healing source. I agree that the change was likely implemented with the boss in mind, however the quick attacks just mean it's impossible to use healing items. You also can't disingage and heal a la darksouls. Maybe a solution would be to increase the time between attacks as well as the damage. It would make dodging easier while also significantly more important. It would also mean that you could heal in less cycles and potentially avoid having to jump during a heal if you timed things correctly. I noticed that the groundpound was actually a directional attack rathther than a straight AOE as I could dodge the attack sometimes by sprinting around the boss, but since there aren't any visual indicators for this I can't reliably use this method. A particle effect or other indicator of the affected tiles would make using that method consistent.

The new mechanic requires the player not to jump or fall for too long to maintain a heal. The archive boss does attacks which moves the player over the y axis enough to cancel the heal. The counter is to jump, which cancels the heal. The boss attacks every 2 seconds, and a poultice takes 3 seconds to apply without armor on. I went in with a chain helm and gambeson, making my healing time roughly 7 seconds. That means I need to successfully dodge or tank 3 attacks from the boss without jumping, which means I either need to bait the boss 3 times into whiffing melee attacks or get lucky with his choice of ranged attack. I could take off my armor and dodge or tank a single attack, but realistically if I was knowledgeable enough about the boss to not use armor I wouldn't need to heal. My point is that vertical movement should not be the deciding factor in whether or not your healing cancels, especially when the first boss of the game is almost entirely designed around moving you vertically. While the new system might be compelling in a situation where you're trying to maintain a level path while running away from a wolf, it doesn't fare well when you're being thrown into what is essentially a pinball machine. The new mechanic does make the boss significantly more difficult, but not in a way that requires skillful management of the game's systems. The strategy I ended up using in lieu of my original plan was to sprint jump in and out of the bosses face while attacking. I do this for literally every other enemy in the game except for shivers, which I just run down. I don't feel like I'm really engaging with the boss when the game's design rewards me for using the same tired technique, and things like hiding from ranged attacks behind the columns placed around the room are punished.

I have chests for specific operations I'm working on. everything I need for steelmaking goes in the steel ops chest, everything I need for that building goes in the chest near the building, etc.

If you really wanted to change the overall feel of the game I think that you could do a lot by changing the palette used on the enemies to include more color, especially between enemy versions. I did a lazy recolor of some black and white versions of the drifters but I feel like even that adds a lot of variety. Palette swaps are really good bang for your buck in that regard. I also feel like you could really go crazy with the shiver given that it has elements that open up for attacks. A surface variant could be shades of green and then open up to a bright red mouth when chasing, maybe subsurface variants include shades of purple. Unfortunately I couldn't find an image of a shiver with it's mouth open online.

It would be nice to play in a world that isn't so depressing. It's exciting initially and the first few times you encounter the enemies is creepy, but after a couple hundred hours it's just sad and desolate. Especially so since there isn't a real enemy spawning mechanic besides depth and lighting. It would be cool to go into a new area and find a new type of enemy that isn't just some sad abomination from the past. Vintage story is fun but it's really gritty, and after a hundred hours that grit gets stuck in my teeth. It would be nice to find a forest full of goblins or a cave of troglodytes, maybe some kind of insect monsters in the jungle. Just something a little less grey and brown than the usual suspects. As it stand I generally just ignore combat entirely because it's boring and doesn't benefit me.