TFT

To pull my comment on STALKER again this is basically that. After surviving the cosmic dangerous weather event you can run outside and go searching for anomalies since they are most plentiful right after an emission. It's just hard to find a "what" that's meaningful to the context of VS without just inventing some magic doodlydoo contrivance whether that's an item or an activity unique to storms. I dunno, could enchant rusty gears to temporal gears by killing monsters around it. I like the idea of speeding up time based processes, like a bottle of time from some MC mod, and sacrifice stability to do so. Maybe a nether equivalent dimension you can only hop into during a storm for whatever resources/lore. Whatever it is, it shouldn't be free or easy since this is an unnatural disaster event. You're either killing monsters, risking your life, and otherwise spending something not easy to get back fast like health and stability which the storm will drain one way or another. Just literally something to do or gain besides kill monsters for chump change or hide in a hole for your five to ten minute timeout. I dont mind difficulty or tedium if it actually produces something for my efforts, after all, we're playing a video game. I dont see the downside to expanding the temporal/eldritch horror stuff to be its own set of gameplay to make storms meaningful.

Combat Overhaul is a bloated poorly executed mod thrown into modlists because its popular, much like how Create is shoehorned into most MC modpacks regardless of if it fits. And for a while it was only used because it was a required full package dependency for firearms/crossbows/bullseye. It sure is an overhaul, but apart from changing hit detection it adds nothing to combat. Only thing I can think it's good for is if you really really like pvp. On that same vein, vanilla combat is serviceable, just needs better hit detection. Yes, because nothing says great mechanic than telling the player "well you just cant build here because you just cant okay!". I think it's overall a pretty cool system, but I would just like the bullshit cut which boils down to surface stability and temporal storms spawning things next to you. I often see this too. Some underbaked or placeholder stuff becomes some bespoke thing for the players who gaslit themselves into believing it's some sacred cow.

It needs an overhaul at some point. It wasn't so bad when all we had were drifters and the worst you could call it was an undercooked work in progress. They were dangerous but you had enough space and could kite them around with practice. Then your reward was temporal gears from the double headed drifters you could only get from storms. Now we have a very deadly ranged mob and a very fast mob to make that near impossible. Nothing wrong with changing up the "meta" since it was too easy as Zane and others said, but it's too far in the other direction where the chance of getting a temporal gear is not worth it when you pay for it in an equivalent amount of respawns and broken armor such that the actual reward for surviving your timeout is not losing either of those things. Of course you can build an arena of fenceposts and dirt blocks so you're only dealing with drifters (assuming your storm spawns them), but now you're just back to where we were a few versions ago. I really like the idea of temporal storms and lore justifies its addition, but I am not so delusional as to gaslight myself to think it's perfect and without flaw, or that it's feature complete and nothing can be changed in this early access game. It's silly to be able to run around outside without a care in the world like before, but being confined to a closet for 10 minutes isn't exactly riveting gameplay and mass logoffs in multiplayer servers is a common occurrence. A mod like Weather The Storm at least lets you use the functions of your house and do more than pan without a tier 4 drifter spawning up your ass. TL;DR straw man argument.

I think this is pretty easy to verify if nothing else. Using the block overlay mod I searched around for lead ore bits (first image), then set it to show lead ore blocks (second image), then took a propick reading of the center of the zone. For this example the reading I was given was "decent 4.59%". Even poor and very poor readings produced surface bits and deposits directly below and deeper around the area. Try it yourself. Seems pretty conclusive to me. Where there's a lead reading, there's surface ore bits. Where there isn't a lead reading, there's no surface bits. The same cannot be said for copper and tin where an area absolutely littered with surface bits and only shallow deposits produced no propick reading for them, but an area with deeper ore did and any surface bits are coincidental. This conclusion shouldn't be a surprise as copper and tin are the only unique outliers and are specifically coded to be so, as has been stated ITT. So if you really want to find lead, take a propick reading and if you have something above minuscule then it can be worth taking a look around for bits and the easy deposits below. Of course lighter sedimentary rock strata and flat plains or badlands will make it much easier to spot. If anything is decent you could treat it as you would any other ore and start mining shafts and use the short range node search.

They have it on the pages for the metal bits which is imo not as intuitive as just having the alloying percentages on the ingots, but it does cycle through the things you can use to alloy with, like omok pieces. The ingots are what people are typically searching for so having the percentages there as we used to have would be good. Having it on both would be better.

I like option 1. I think having spawns prevented in your immediate surroundings full stop should be sufficient for early game and not punish a new player for thinking their cellar is safe. The spawn radius can be tied to temporal stability too such that your "safe space" becomes smaller and shrinks to nill around half or a quarter stability. Not too much of an issue for light and maybe medium storms, but by heavy storms you will need to either sacrifice gears or kill monsters to recover stability because of how quickly it drains in those. By that point too you should be better equipped and prepared to participate in storms instead of hiding away. It feels like a much more elegant solution that gives a sense of progression and overcoming of danger. For later in the game I think there should be an expansion to the rift ward's functions to make storms weatherable. Like preventing spawns and reducing stability drain in its active area. It would act as a late game convenience so you can do more things around your base besides box yourself and alt tab if you dont want to go fighting. Agree and disagree. For late game I can get behind this, but the main issue is that it's just not a fun mechanic in the early to mid game. Once the novelty wears off you have a forced timeout where you do something else but play the game. If your only counterplay to RNG spawning a nightmare drifter next to you and sending you back to spawn is a 1x2 coffin to AFK in, then it's a crap mechanic. Even from a lore standpoint it begs the question why anyone is left alive after a few storms. I can imagine a high level drifter materializing into the family bunker will turn it into a blender real fast; but, if the temporal storm tapestry is anything to go by then I guess everyone uses the 1x2 AFK coffin. Either way, I think it's very telling that much of the discourse surrounding temporal storms are about ways to avoid interacting with it entirely. Cant imagine playing a hardcore game with it as it is. It is not a hot take to say it's an undercooked mechanic in need of a rework. It's really cool in theory and I love the idea and feel of it. Adding to vintage story like emissions/blowouts do to STALKER, but in practice it's a novelty that turns into an annoyance. Your reward is you didn't die and burn one or more respawns getting spawn killed.

Stands reason to me that it would save a lot of time. You could run around looking in a place where there is no galena and move on after 20 minutes of finding jack squat, or take a couple seconds on a reading telling you there's no galena and move on. But you do you on how you spend your time, I aint your mom.

@MKMoose If I understand your points right. All surface deposits are "surface" deposits, but not all "surface" deposits are surface deposits. Surface copper and tin are distinct because those two metals are the most important for early game progression, so they are not represented by a propick and have worldgen settings to adjust their frequency hence the separate objects in code. "Surface" deposits of everything else like coal, lead, or whatever generate normally and be correlated with propick search data. Whether they happen to be close enough to the surface to produce bits to pick up is dependent on how the terrain generates. Since lead is a sedimentary rock ore it'll be closer to the surface more often than not and you'll find bits on the ground above those deposits.

Manual checks is the only way I've been doing it. Pain in the butt since the game's mod manager is cumbersome when you have a ton of mods and you cant easily mass download a new modlist. You're gonna have to check the mod pages for your mods every so often to keep on top of things. Though there's mod managers on the mod portal now which is nice. I've yet to take a look at those, it's something worth looking into and these two looks like they'll do the job. https://mods.vintagestory.at/simplevsmanager https://mods.vintagestory.at/rustiquewindows

The player can also just never encounter it in the first place. Despite working many blooms, by hand without a helve hammer, I never had this bug come up. I've only seen it discussed in forums.

Something to consider is that by this point VS and MC are apples and oranges with different goals. VS has a focus on survival, realism to a degree, and has a setting whereas Minecraft is a voxel sandbox with survival elements. You're right in that VS is short of something like a techpack in progression and it still will be even down the road with everything the devs wanted in it. They aren't trying to compete with minecraft. However, I think it's also unfair to compare VS to modded MC since you also dont want mods to solve the problem here. You know where the devs want to take the game. Anything outside that vision has to be modded, and the fact is that VS doesn't have the sheer popularity of MC nor is modding culture like it was to explode with new biomes, dimensions, magic systems, and a dozen advanced tech packs like we saw in MC. I doubt we're going to see something like Enigmatica 2 any time soon. And MC suffers outdated mods to an insane degree, the game moved on and many tech mods sat behind in 1.12.2 or wherever else, TFC et al. may end up the same. It's a nightmare to mod and get what you want. One final thing to consider with modding is the detail resolution of this game is going to hold a lot of modders back from big ambitious projects because so much more is expected of them; a bunch of 1x1x1 machine blocks with programmer art is going to feel really lazy in VS while it was the standard in MC due to that game's programmer art and textures composing 98% of its graphics. If the game simply isn't for you then that's fine, I personally never buy things I don't enjoy. I think the game has a lot of potential both from devs and modders and I think it would be cool to see modders make the out there stuff from MC mods like high tech and space stuff, but you get what you pay for and it's foolish to buy a promise or potential. 20 dollars gets you what exists right now and access to mods on the mod portal. I think it's more than worth it, but my tastes aren't yours, so whether you stick out of refund is up to you.

Yes. Only find out there's things like bellows for forges and a dungeon generation system in the works when I randomly check the reddit. Sure, they are probably far off from being in a release, but it would still be nice to see what's being worked on to look forward to.

Sure, IRL ore quality is variable and we're running on iron age tech, and complexities stemming from that would be cool for a mod to tackle, but this is esoteric at best and nonsense at worst. The IRL argument is just odd when the only in-game solution is a helve hammer fabricating missing metal out of thin air into perfectly formed bars. When working as intended no one questions the logic as vintage story does a good job at maintaining its own verisimilitude and keep you immersed, so for this to be the one standout when the rest is gamefied and deterministic is strange. If left in and made a "feature" it would've been a patch note already, so the only sensible explanation is that it's not fixed is because it's not game breaking and it's too rare to be a priority, as redram said. I myself haven't encountered the bug and neither has anyone I've played with. Maybe complain loud enough like OP to get your answer one way or the other. To be hypocritical for a moment, why do you want a rare bug to be a bespoke feature so much? If it was, what steps would you propose to polish and bring the rest of the game in line since it's clearly out of place? Again, it's a bit of an insignificant thing to make a big deal of. Sorry (not sorry) but it's a bug and the mental gymnastics to justify it as anything but is silly. As Thorfinn demonstrated, making a json edit is a quick fix and the simplest solution other than ignoring it, dont know why you'd need to go the extra mile to contrive a game mechanic out of this.

Honestly this whole thing is just making a mountain out of a mole hill on something that can be very clearly called a bug and an old one at that. It's not severe enough that anyone should be getting all upset or needlessly passive aggressive about. Making sure that blooms have with enough voxels to finish by hand seems like a solution no one would take issue with. At the end of the day it's a very minor bug that's an inconvenience at worst with easy workarounds, so I don't anticipate it being very high priority to fix. This is what I do too. Until my hammer setup is fast enough to not care, it's quicker to help the hammer by banging off the slag and then process another by hand on a separate anvil while it finishes up.

Banging out the nth bloom, plates, or god forbid chains by hand is the reason you want a helve hammer. Not because you randomly cant process a bloom by hand that a helve hammer can. Like real life, you're going to find way more iron than copper or tin. It is no wonder why iron was used for everything once the means to refine it became widespread. Even if you can refine several hundred ingots of iron out of a vein, I find it very hard to believe there's an intentional mechanic to "spoil" random blooms of iron.