Diff

One footgun note there, if you're copying within the same computer it's probably safe to copy the whole file, but the file contains other things besides the session key, like the folder to read mods from or the list of mods that are currently disabled. It can cause small headaches if you copy the whole file across totally different computers, but you can also just manually pull the session key out and share it across your various instances.

How long are you waiting on it? That step takes the longest for me but it eventually loads in after a minute or two.

Getting increasingly small with the nits being picked here, but technically you can start a single player game offline. As long as you've already signed in and I think as long as you're not connected to the Internet on game boot, it's happy to skip checking in with the authentication server. If you wanna get philosophical about it, you can think of VS as locked to a store with a single game for sale. All these things you say apply to VS, just with a library size of 1. But practically, I think we can trust Anego to not fly off the handle, and practically, Valve does not have the history of random unjustified algorithmic bans that Google, Amazon, YouTube and other large tech companies have. I've personally seen two flavors of No Steam, No Buy. First is the Linux crowd. Steam's the only one nowadays that shows them any love (Epic's completely cold to the point of making formerly Linux-friendly games Epic-exclusive, Humble has stiffed them with the Trove, and GOG still hasn't brought Galaxy over, the others are absolutely non-existent), and Valve has poured a lot of that money into basically developing Linux gaming from ashes. It's a bit of loyalty/voting with their wallet for more Linux support. The other is driven by frustration at Epic at buying up exclusivity, threatening to bring the modern dark ages of video streaming (the balkanization of Netflix) to the games industry.

And only today I learned these exist after 2 years of vintaging stories

It can be a small problem, I just hit winter in my single player world and I usually have to duck to get out of my house if it snowed overnight.

And here I've been manually writing patch files like a d*ng fool. And I see ModMaker has an option to convert the vanilla assets to actual JSON? Handy stuff, I've just been ignoring my IDE yelling about all the unquoted property names. Although apparently the ModMaker-generated modinfo.json has 2 different properties that apparently are invalid/not allowed to be uploaded. Not sure what that's about. Anyway, here's Wonderwall. https://mods.vintagestory.at/snowballtraders

You could edit the files/make a mod to make traders snowball-compatible. Or, I've never published a mod before, but I'd be willing to take a crack at it. Only gotcha is that it wouldn't be able to generate traders in your existing snowball world.

Nailed it. This one I'm not sure. Did some digging in the files on my machine, but I'm not not immediately seeing clues for this. If it's still broken, that's something that a small broken example would be handy in debugging.

My dude it's never okay to get steamed to the point where you're harassing people over videogames (of all things) online. That's so stereotypical. If you can't keep it cool, you don't get to be disrespectful, you just walk away from the situation.

Ah that might be a bad picture on the wiki then, because chittering four legged spider sounds exactly like a shiver. Can't answer why he's there, but somehow you're definitely not in a homo sapiens world.

Looks like that was it, thanks! "Wisp" was the term I needed to get good search results. I knew it added some extra Lovecraftian stuff but wasn't aware of this odd little cosmetic guy.

The traders shouldn't be there, but there are still hostile creatures even without supernatural monsters. Several kinds of wild animals will still be after you, primarily wolves and bears. But also mooses, goats, boars if they've got piglets.

Spotted these two on a midnight walk, but I haven't seen them in any of my playthroughs before. Is this new with 1.20 or did one of my mods sneak some sentient snowflakes in while I wasn't looking? sentient snowflakes.mp4

Ah, I think that's the misunderstanding. There's two flavors of colon with totally different meanings. Domains always have a : separating them from the rest of the path, but inside the quotes with the rest of the path. For this line in your face files: "seraph": "entity/humanoid/seraph-naked" "seraph": isn't the domain, it's the key/name/ID used to refer to this texture later, as "#seraph". Change that, and you'd need to change #theothers. A texture referring to a specific domain might look like this: "seraph": "game:entity/humanoid/seraph-naked" Here, "game" is the domain. And like I mentioned earlier, if there's no domain, it defaults to the mod's own domain. So for the original files from the built-in "game" mod, they default to the "game" domain, and since they're looking for a texture, VS will look for a PNG inside the textures folder inside the domain: "assets/<domain>/textures/<the path you see in the JSON>.png". For the original game files, that ultimately adds up to "assets/game/textures/entity/humanoid/seraph-naked.png" which I do see existing: To reference the same file in your mod, you'd need to use "seraph": "game:entity/humanoid/seraph-naked". If you use the existing paths verbatim, they'd default to the "insertyourmodhere" domain and look inside "assets/insertyourmodhere/textures/entity/humanoid/seraph-naked.png" instead.

Just on the storms, at least based on the wiki, and a third qualifier, it looks like they only extend in duration and cap at 4.8 in-game hours. And that's a really fun concept for a game world!

I don't completely understand your question, so apologies if this is completely off base, but I think it's what @xXx_Ape_xXx is referencing with mod domains. Without a prefix, paths will use the same assets folder as the mod they come from, so they're referencing assets/game/textures/entity/humanoid/seraph-naked.png. The existing faces come from the game mod and look for textures also from the game mod. If you want to tap into the same texture, you can either copy those files into assets/yourmod/... or change it to game:entity/humanoid/seraph-naked to reference the original from the game mod. The "seraph": means that inside this json, it'll be referenced as "#seraph", and the path after that is the path to the texture, inside the textures folder of whatever mod you're referencing. By default, your own mod.

Ohhh you know I guarantee that's it. I copied my clientsettings from my Steam Deck so I wouldn't have to keep logging back in when I found out that was possible. I bet you it's looking in /home/deck/.config from SteamOS, not /Users/jaromino/.config from macOS. I guess the Open Mods Folder button doesn't follow clientsettings.json?

Ditto on what Echo Weaver said. Was totally unaware unaware that paths were moving for 1.21. Unfortunately I'm still on 1.20, so the location I have *should* be correct. But that link you have does mention a secondary location, the mods folder in the installation folder. On macOS that would be inside the vintagestory.app bundle itself, which is very odd. I thought that would break 37 different things with signatures and whatever else but it actually seems to work. Doesn't explain why the first folder is broken, but hey, it works!

Could you provide a small broken example modzip to toy around with?

I used to be able to, so I'm not sure what happened, but today I restarted developing one of my old mods, compressed it (with the contents at the root of the zip, not the containing folder), put it in ~/.config/VintageStoryData/Mods, just like Linux and... doesn't show up in the list. After double and triple checking, I couldn't find anything wrong, so I went to go steal a working mod and harvest it for parts but it turns out that nothing I put in the ~/.config/VintageStoryData/Mods folder loads at all. This is the correct folder, when I click the "Open Mods Folder" inside VintageStory, this is what opens. It's just not actually loading anything from there. And ~/.c/VSD/ is being used, there are recently modified files in here, and if I create a new world, it pops up in /Saves. It just doesn't like /Mods. Any idea what I might be doing wrong here?

Found some references to something that looks right, a meta block (music)? https://mods.vintagestory.at/yourownmusic https://github.com/anegostudios/VintageStory-Issues/issues/4379

Oh definitely. That and occasionally brainstorming. One time I needed to draw dirt in an Art Nouveau style, nothing I was splatting down looked any good at all, and there were no references to be found. Feeding that prompt into an AI... actually only gave me brown soup, but I did fish some ideas out of it that got me unstuck. I've been labeled as a luddite who will be left behind in the supposedly inevitable AI revolution, but AI has utility. It just also has big limitations and severe legal and ethical concerns that techbros love shoveling under the rug so they can move fast before they break everything. The hype train is vastly outrunning the actual tech and smashing obliviously through the all problems with it because that's easier than acknowledging them.

A thick skin is the first thing a professional creative develops. It's understandable to be demoralized when you spend time on something you think is nifty and get differing opinions. (Proper) critique of a work is meant to improve it, give you alternative perspectives and paths for improvement, and isn't any reflection of the person behind the work. As mentioned earlier upthread, this is just fundamentally something that AI is going to fall short of the level of handcrafted textures. It'll make textures. But you're going to get odd AI artifacts, you're going to get breaks in tiling, you're going to get inconsistent design choices that all mostly match the description but don't match each other (particularly on the cobble, some of the highlights and shadows are exaggerated, but by different amounts, or in different ways). You're also going to run into gaps and strong attractors in the training data, especially with some of the more niche minerals out there. I can see the AI took, I'm assuming, "peridotite" rock and just drew solid peridot gem. These are the pitfalls with the approach, and unfortunately with AI implementing feedback can be challenging. As someone with 500+ textures of my own for VintageStory sitting in a box in my digital garage, texture packs are just a fr*ck ton of work. When you're dealing with numbers that large, there's no way around it.

I'm not seeing a direct BDcraft similarity, although the vibes are there. Maybe it's something like style transfer? I don't think it looks like fine tuning an existing model. They do seem to be based on existing textures though. While the tiling is not good, it would be way worse if they weren't fed an existing tileable texture as a starting point to then disrupt. Could also explain the odd "extension" artifacts where the AI tried to (sorta) draw past the bounds of the original texture, causing little "echo" hiccups especially noticeable along the vertical seam in the copper ore. AI Seams.mp4

Went to see if I could find an answer in the ancient texts, and turns out in assets/survival/worldgen/structures.json, it was written that traders shall not spawn if it's colder than -14C outside. Similarly, arctic supplies don't spawn if it's any warmer than -14C, so that seems to be some sort of snowball tipping point for worldgen.