David Taylor

Copper is good enough to make a boiler, although steel is better. But that brings in concepts like brazing & welding to put everything together.

Yozo, the nice thing about VS (and the devs) is that they recognise not everyone likes the grind. They've given us a huge amount of customisability in world creation, and the ability to use loads of mods to make the game play how we want. For example, the start of my current game had passive mobs (only animals would attack if I hit them, drifters and locusts never). So I could take it easy and just learn the systems. There must be commands you can run to set your spawn. This might not work on a server, but for single player you can customise to a high degree.

I made a bunch of iron chains and an iron knifeblade due to a misclick after putting the ingot down and was throwing them into a water block to cool them down. I noticed there weren't as many chains as I remembered making about halfway through and then everything disappeared. Did they rust away?

I checked using a door between the two rooms in my house and even when the door is open the /debug rooms hi shows green so I guess interior doors can be open or closed - very good! The wiki says 14 x 14 x 14 so I guess that allows for 2 stories of about 4 blocks high with an open staircase between them and a ceiling on the top floor if there is a pitched roof.

I've started building a house and wanted to make something a tiny bit better than my usual dirt box hovel, so I have a cobble L shaped house. I've looked at the wiki and it says a room is an enclosed space 14x14x14 and I've just tested this in my house using the /debug room hi command. This means if I want to have rooms in my house (from the point of view of temperature control) I need to put doors between most rooms, which will make moving around a nuisance. What does everyone else do?

It makes sense that if a tool is completely made from metal, then you should be able to get some scrap back from it. Perhaps tools could degrade into an item similar to the metal scraps, but made of the metal from the tool, and that could be melted in the crucible along with ore nuggets. Each scrap could be some amount of the metal and you get varying numbers of scraps depending on the tool/weapon/armour type.

Many drifters arrive during temporal storms, and they're flickering so they seem to be coming from a different time where there are lots of them. Or maybe they're coming from many different times which is why there's so many. I was just watching McJty's recent temporal storm and the rocks make electronic bleeps when they hit the temporal storm drifters rather than the usual pink noise. They don't seem to be trying to help the player, given they attack you and killing you doesn't bring you back to anywhere except your spawn point. I have noticed the drifters seem to get on their knees and look like they're crying sometimes. I think it's sad the way they collapse to their knees when you kill them too.

Yes, the 2x2 mode in clayforming is hard to use. Perhaps an outline showing which 2x2 area will be filled in would help.

I'm seeing this too. I keep finding my sheep in the pits surrounding the fenced enclosure. It happened once with the chickens too. It seemed to start happening in winter, and I assumed the snow on the ground was making it so they could climb over the fences so I've made the fences 2 blocks high for both. For the sheep I've left a 1 wide gap where it is only 1 high so I can fill the trough, and each corner is only 1 block high because it has an oil lamp on it at the moment. Sheep need a 2 wide space to get through as far as I can see. It will be interesting to see if they keep getting through the fence, or if the problem goes away when the now melts.

The beauty of VS is how moddable it is. I'm sure someone could make a mod that provided recipes to make tool heads so you could do it MC style if you wanted. We don't all want the same game, but VS is interesting enough that a lot of us want a really similar one and we've been given a lot of tools to help make it I'm a vanilla MC player... optifine is the only mod I use. I like sticking to the rules for the most part. But I don't have the time or desire to play VS quite the way it wants to be played. I switched off all the temporal stuff, and I wish all the tools lasted about 4 times longer than they do (esp the scythe). I use the carry mod (used it once or twice so far), the give back dirt from farmland mod (not actually used it yet but will when I re-locate), ProspectorInfo - I don't think that changes the way the game is played, and I've installed better crates but not used it yet and am not sure about it, it does seem to be overpowered for storing the endless stacks of sticks and stones you accumulate. I *am* basically playing a really cool MC clone/extension. I'm honestly considering getting rid of Drifters! They're just getting in the way of my fun when caving. There's no point talking about realism when there is an automap, minimap, compass, coords, etc. If you don't want to be attacked by a wolf while knapping then tower up and do it 3 blocks up. Then kill the wolf from there Having said all that I agree VS needs to keep its identity in the default state.

I tried creating another world with the same seed as my exploration world so I could have it in creative mode to make it easier for me to prospect. When I entered the new world it looked nothing like the one I have in exploration mode. Then I copied the save file and gave it a new name from within VS and that did what I wanted.

I'm with your son on that one. I don't enjoy the knapping, smithing, or clay working parts. They're not terribly 'realistic' as such and are just busywork. The knapping is probably the least annoying among them in that at least it doesn't let you make a mistake - you just have to hold the button down and move the mouse around. But they're such a part of the VS identity I can't see them going anywhere so your suggestion is a good one.

Regarding prospecting, I think it sort of works ATM but isn't much fun. I watched the video and read the threads and a systematic survey makes sense. I started around my homestead for a few hundred blocks in each direction and got a lot of nothing much. No tin, of course, one high copper, everything else very poor. It wasn't enough fun I wanted to keep going in all directions. I had taken the propick by mistake when I was looking for resin and figured while I was out and about I may as well give it a few goes. I found poor tin, better than anything around home, so kept looking and got it to very high. It isn't too hard to see you're getting lower or higher. I was going 50 metres in each direction. But at that point I thought about the next step with the other propick mode and couldn't be bothered. I copied my world, switched to creative in the copy and went looking at the very high location. I hit a layer of quartz about 10 metres down. I went through it and found the tin about 20 under it. It wasn't anything like as large as iron or coal veins I've found but good enough. As you only need 10% tin for bronze you don't need that much. I wouldn't be able to get through the quartz with my copper pick and it was extensive enough it didn't seem I could reasonably mine my way around it - I gave up in 3 directions even in creative. Luckily the last direction I tried had it ending fairly close to my reading location so I noted the edge of the quartz layer, and where I'd seen the copper, and then took it from there back in the survival world. I looked up tin mining the other day and after following a few pages I think I may have found the wiki page the dev used to decide ore probabilities - the numbers looked exactly the same A lot of bronze age tin mining seemed to be at or close to the surface, so having to dig through quartz seems unfair.

Yes, he is really good at bringing essentially empty games like Minecraft alive with the extra "lore" he adds. That's the trouble I have with MC - once I have the auto farms I get bored in the world because I don't play multiplayer. I'd like to play with my kids on a local server but they get bored with it quite quickly. I guess I have to take responsibility for that! Even pixelriffs, who I think is one of the most pleasant and watchable minecrafters, doesn't do what PSJ does. The epic Minecraft Survival Guide has been bigger and bigger builds and obscure mechanics for about half it's lifespan. The mechanics are interesting but I'm not a fan of "build" videos. I'm a grumpy old gamer now so I'm pretty annoyed with these kids ruining my hobby

Yes, I feel sorry for the dev(s) in this regard. I guess they just have to make the game they want and hope other people like it. At least VS seems to provide enormous scope for customisation. I'm sure a mod could replace the smithing with crafting, or add crafting as an option to smithing, without a huge amount of trouble. Something like adding a recipe that produces the same item as the smithing process? I fell down a hole in my first caving expedition near home and found a limestone deposit with copper in it. Not far down that part of the cave was also saltpetre - lucky find! A lot of drifters too, that was not so great.