TFT

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.

Bears are simple enough to avoid if you spot them first. If not, such as with all cases encountering ninja bears, you run and do what others said and try your best to lose it. You wont always get away as most of your bear attacks begin with taking a surprise hit from one, and sometimes despite your best efforts it sticks to you like glue and it finishes you off. But, unless you're good at it fighting them off or have very good reflexes you're going to die from one and that's a certainty. Of course, assuming you didn't pick hunter or clockmaker, those dont have much trouble escaping bears and wolves if there's a way out. That said you shouldn't be afraid of them either. They beeline towards you and are far more manageable to fight or lose in water, and since they are a fantastic source of huge hides along with being a threat to any area they're in, you'll want to hunt them and get used to hunting them. Getting used to fighting them means ninja bears are less of a pita when they jump you. All else fails there are mods to give them footstep sounds or put them on your minimap so they aren't as likely to jumpscare you if you're focused doing something else. Every bear is a new pelt for tanning. Kill them all.

I think these two can work together. Let's say you have a sixth "satisfaction" bar in your nutritional stats that takes the average of your other food groups plus "luxury" things like alcohol and spices, or just counts for variety in general with spices and alcohol having more impact. Some minor gameplay effect to incentivize diversifying your diet but isn't critical or punishing if you ignore it, just something to nudge you to make anything but red meat pie and hearty red meat and cabbage stew for once. And something other than a health increase like the rest. Maybe your temporal stability drains slower or gives you a flat rate increase to stability so you can live in unstable areas permanently? Maybe you lose less satiety when doing intensive activities like sprinting and forging? Maybe gaining a positive trait like accuracy, loot rate, or walk speed or something unique to that class when the meter is high enough? Maybe all of the above at different milestones or rates? Spicing your meals could add that satiety bonus that stacks with meals and make the hunger freeze last longer. Spices could also have an effect of preserving foods a little longer as was the case historically. We already have salt, but could always add some more 'spice' to non-temperate biomes like black pepper, ginger, mustard, or cumin as another incentive to venture south. Of course you could get some from traders in small quantity. Some like turmeric and garlic could be used as an alternative in poultice recipes since they are natural antibiotics. Grow them like any other crop or could grow them in planters. On a complete tangent, but the more I think about it the "satisfaction" idea can be taken a bit further than just food. Valheim has some things like that with the "rested" bonus from having different furnishings and comfort items. So maybe proximity to rare or expensive decorative items could increase that satisfaction meter too by a bit. Such that working on or spending time in a trophy room with your gems and butterflies or whathaveyou provides a minor but tangible gameplay benefit compounding with a varied diet. It's not necessary, but could nudge players to collecting items for the bonus only to trip and fall into enjoying and putting a lot of effort into decoration and chiseling.

This is what holds me back from fruit trees, though not for the lack of trying. They're very hard to get started and move, so you want to know exactly where your home is going to be and where you want to plant them. Like other long term projects you want to plant them very early so you can get the best chances of having good trees for next spring as you'll invariably need to replant the failed ones, but there's a catch to that. You wont know how winter in your area will affect them until you take the time and make readings during the winter. Makes me wish we could ask traders about these things, like average rainfall and what the lowest and highest temperatures are like in their area. Realistically most players will be settled and can afford to start doing fruit trees after the first year, but then you'll be waiting to get fruit for next year, which depending on the player is when burnout starts to set in as you probably put in 80 some hours into that save so far. Your source of fruit is best from wild trees you find. They do have this weird juxtaposition with normal trees in that popping up a forest of oaks is far more fruitful than a fruit orchard. It's similar to cheesemaking in that it requires such a long time investment before you have a chance at any payoff for something with a niche use. Which by the point you are filling out your dairy nutrition you likely already have the other four filled and have good armor, so the extra HP from dairy is bordering on diminishing returns. Sure there's the challenge and prestige factor of having a lush orchard and a cellar full of cheese, but overall it's a vastly overlooked mechanic. Glad that it's there in either case for anyone with the patience for it.

Simplicity isn't a bad thing, but it needs to feel good to play. The issue with making combat more "complex" is that it's not a system that you can just make like any other of the game's complex systems. When combat begins, it takes your full undivided attention until you deal with the problem either by fighting, running away, or dying. Dying in itself is incredibly punishing: your HP gets slashed making dying even easier and you've likely lost a ton of gear. It feels much worse when you've died to a cheap shot like stealth bears, getting pelted by drifters throwing stones willy nilly, a shiver janking into you at full speed, or a bowtorn shot out the dark. "Punishing" cannot be said for other systems. If you mess up smithing you're at worst wasting an ingot, if your crops died from cold you still get the seeds back, or if your food spoils you've lost some easily regainable resources and you can still do stuff with the rot. Non-combat systems, while complex, have "reward" too. You feel rewarded for finally getting your first metal tools, and getting a saw and chisel opens up the world of building for you. Making leather is also an incredible stepping stone as you can finally have breathing room in your inventory and lets you make the best armors. Combat's reward is… a few flax fibers for a dozen drifters and maaybe a temporal gear once in a blue moon. Overhauling combat is not as simple as adding fancy moves and extra weapons either, there's a lot of extra variables involved like terrain, movement, visibility, and enemy quantity and variety. The player is only half of the equation and the enemies we face aren't up to snuff for anything grander. I get that combat feels like you're just statchecking each other, but adding "complexity" onto jank is just going to create more unfun jank. As it is now, this just isn't the game for a bigger focus on a combat system. It's focus is on being a survival block game and the dungeons/story locations we do have make up such a small percentile of what we do in the game there's not a lot you're adding with expanded combat mechanics. As opposed to something like Hytale (release never ever) or Valheim where combat and exploration takes a larger focus and there is value in creating complexity. The place to start is making what we have not feel so clunky, then you can look towards expanding combat related content. Personally, I'd like a system that works well for both PvP and PvE with a high skill ceiling, but first I'd rather have something that isn't a chore at the best of times and frustrating at the worst.

Combat could use some improvements to make it feel good as it feels jank as hell, but a whole overhaul is not necessary for the reasons Thorfinn mentioned. Doing something like the combat overhaul mod is definitely the wrong way to go about it as it's overkill and tries to do too much. Leave the overly ambitious and experimental stuff to mods. For what could be done to polish combat, I would do away with hitscan. Hitscan works better for Minecraft as the time between clicking and doing damage was near instant, whereas here we have a much longer delay for attack windup, a lot can happen in that half second which leads to my next point. Shivers added another mob to the pile that is both too fast and in your face to feel good fighting. Call it a skill issue if you want, but I simply don't have the reflexes to land all my attacks with all their jumping and pushing into the player. Missing a shiver that's facehugging you a few times because your crosshair landed between its legs or over its head at the last instant sucks, same goes for locusts, and a similar story for attacking mobs in bushes, leaves, and grass. Like you can see your weapon passing through an enemy, and shivers are large enough to see that in third person, but if your crosshair wasn't on them you do no damage. If your weapon had a similar contact damage like thrown spears and arrows do it would alleviate the feeling of swinging at air. This is a much larger problem when you factor hostile mobs. Wolves are at least good at it, most of the time, since when they aggro on you get barking and growling giving you a split second to start running, but bears will sneak up on you and you only find out you're being mauled after they swipe off 3/4 of your health and by that point you're just dead.

To be fair, horses were really bad for travel. Forests are near impassable and steep inclines everywhere are a nightmare. MC also has minecarts, but that's resource intensive and you can only go places you've built up a track to. And then you have the nether which already exists as a great "fast travel" option made faster with the boat/ice trick and it doubles as a place worthwhile to explore. The elytra side steps the issue of cost and bad overworld terrain by being relatively easy to obtain and you can fly over bad terrain, fireworks then make it an infinitely superior option since it's easy to farm materials for a bunch of them; at that point you're basically at the "creative mode" part of survival. The glider we have takes more investment and time to get to, takes a backpack slot, and doesn't go very far. A novelty reward from the archives at best. Personally, what I would do is make the glider more "glidey" to not lose speed so quickly, and place it's schematics at the second location with the damn bird, both to be somewhat thematic and to pace its value to later in the game. Elks suffer from the issues MC horses do which makes air travel very desirable, but there's ways to make gliders better without upstaging their land based counterpart. Mounts can be buffed via better worldgen, they would be a lot more valuable if I didn't have to navigate a perlin noise map with them. Even compared to MC horses, elks have their utility going for them that make current travel worth it. I don't think you're destroying other options by making the glider good to use. They compete with elks, boats, and translocators as travel options and each has their own strengths and weaknesses. Elks—provided worldgen doesn't screw you—are the most versatile land travel option and good for hauling stuff. Boats are very expensive and require sizable oceans (and rivers if you have the mod), but they can haul a base's worth of goods and people along with the elk. Translocators are pricey and up to RNG, but if it works out in your favor you have the fastest long range transport, their usefulness only growing as you add more to the network. Gliders as they currently stand have a poor niche: they're story gated and reduce your inventory, they require either mountains or very tall towers to get distance out of them, and they still lose out to the elk in speed. If they had a longer flight time they could fit in between elks and translocators for being speedy and free in their movement at the cost of needing towers and sacrificing inventory. So long as you aren't giving a firework equivalent (at least not without great material investment and upkeep) you're not going to supplant other options.

I don't think it'll have much trouble gibbing you anyway since it'll be silent like other animals.

Complex glassworking is held back by our lack of high temperature refining options. Ideally you'd use a crucible since you could mix ingredients inside, so for your stained glass you could put in your quartz along with a powdered metal; but, the only thing that gets hot enough is a bloomery that only accepts one ingredient and is resource intensive. To this end you'd need something like a furnace with bellows, and give it coke to cap out at 1500 C, a few degrees more if you want it hot enough to remelt and cast your leftover steel bits. The new update brought powdered iron oxide who's only use is for bombs, so you can use that and similar crushed and powdered ores to color your glass. Putting rare crystals in a bloomery as your early-mid game source, and you'd use oxides for late game glassmaking. Other avenues would be gem cutting and jewelry making, just encrust anything and everything with quartz jewels. But you're still running into the problem of what to use all your quartz on. Clay is useful as a major building material and is used in a lot of recipes, but you're not making buildings out of glass like you are for clay except for the odd greenhouse. Except, there is a non glass building block that is/was made of quartz. The ancient blocks which are only found in rare ruins or in the stock of traders. In prior versions the pillar of that set was called a quartz pillar. If those or something like those could be crafted then you have a large architectural outlet for all the quartz you find. Which this mod lets you do: https://mods.vintagestory.at/quartzblocks

Weaknesses such as: too big to fit through doors and a pushover at short range. Both taken advantage of by… Boiler rooms! (and other assorted Drifter traps) The same things many players were using before to farm storms. Which is to say the answer is to ignore the new enemies and blow through storms like normal in a bunker or arena designed to make the new mobs glorified drifters. Storms should not be like they used to where all you needed were flint spears, and you're right in that the new mobs counter that way of fighting storms, but if chainmail or lamellar can't cut it for even light storms then I think it went too far in the opposite direction. For vanilla default settings, there's simply too many as Marotte went into detail on. And in specific I think it's the Bowtorn that need the most tweaking. It's also just been barely a month since stable 1.20, I imagine there's a lot of room for fine tuning and rebalancing.

This is how I feel about it. Previously, storms were doable running laps around my base in bronze and iron equipment and doing my best to not get cornered. Cheesing was an option, now it's almost a requirement. It's like you either need to make some special bunker farm setup to reap any rewards, design your base for storms, or have iron plate armor and above to not die every other minute. I don't think it would be so bad if Bowtorn damage didn't start at 5 per shot. Their little wind up sound cue is cute and all, but it's drowned out by general storm ambiance which leads to you getting hit without warning. Armor helps, but you're too slow to chase them effectively since while you're chasing one, several more shoot you in the back while Shivers nip at your heels. It begs the question on what the intended way to face storms is? Storms are no go if you don't have armor since a basic Bowtorn will quarter your HP every few seconds, and you're hit so often by them that any armor you do have only delays the inevitable. Armor is an expensive investment and losing half its durability (for bronze anyway) each storm for a handful of flax fibers and a chance for a temporal gear seems like a terrible exchange. At the moment the balance feels out of wack, because either you refuse to engage with the mechanic and wait it out, you die trying to engage with the mechanic, or you cheese the mechanic. You're obviously meant to engage with it since sleeping through it is not enabled by default, Caves and story areas feel much safer and are far more lucrative in comparison. It feels like Shivers and Bowtorn should be treated as rarer deadly mobs rather than a normal mob interchangeable with a Drifter. Shivers are bigger, scarier, and tankier Drifters, and Bowtorn are glass cannons. As you said, it's not so bad when they're in small numbers such that you can prioritize them, but if they are just as common as Drifters then it becomes a treadmill exercise since you can never fully get rid of them all.

1.20.3. I wasn't aware there was a new version out, thanks.

At least you can tweak it if you feel it's too small or short. Default setting in the World generation tab says "Default distance is an estimated 2.5 hours estimated of full travel an Elk to all the locations." So next time you make a world you would want to bump it up to 200% or 300%. It is, but it also means by the time you get to having an elk you've spent a good chunk of the game traversing that terrain by foot, and that's not a fun time. If there's one benefit from carving a path through forests is that you can set up charcoal pits along the way to dig up on your way back. Gets rid of all that wood and gets you an important resource.

I'm also having similar troubles which makes testing a pain in the butt. I'm trying to test how resistant each kiln tier is, how much of an effect fuel types have on firing, and whether opening or closing hatches mid process affects anything, but between kilns just not breaking (a normal fire clay kiln with 92 hours running with no broken blocks, can't tell if bug or luck) and things instantly firing from raw to fired ceramic with no discernible reason, my 20 kiln testing area produces nothing but mixed results. I don't know whether the bug is because I made them in creative, made them with the worldedit copy paste tools, or maybe there's a seemingly unrelated mod is causing trouble in some way. It seems to work properly when you see a "Fired for X hours" tooltip on the ceramic, which you can only check by looking directly at it in the kiln. I'm also not sure whether the "Firing: for XX hours" is just a measure of the kiln's lifetime or if there is an actual 'finish' state like a cementation furnace where block damage takes effect. Is a "cycle" as mentioned in the handbook defined by the fuel burning out or the pottery becoming fired? So far I have a few observations that may or may not be based on bugged behavior. 1) Never use fuels other than what is most plentiful or convenient since the clay finishes firing long before the fuel burns through. 2) It takes 9 hours (according to aforementioned tooltip) to fire the whole batch. It doesn't matter if it's bricks stacked to the ceiling or a few storage vessels. 3) Fired ceramics start cooling down when they're done, regardless if there is fuel burning underneath or not, bug or feature I couldn't tell you. 4) Ceramics begin their "Fired for X" timer once they hit around 950 degrees. 5) All fuel types heat the interior to 1200 degrees. 6) The color of the fired bricks is determined at the moment it finishes firing. e.g. If every hatch was closed for 8.99 hours of the process and you opened two in the last minute, your red clay bricks would be red instead of the expected tan. Be careful of trolls turning all your blue clay bricks into clinkers I guess. I agree.

According to a very recent interview with Tyron… (timestamped at 13:15) …he estimates it's around 20% and mentions that they can also call it finished once all the story chapters are in the game and not have it be marked as early access anymore.