David Taylor

If honey is used for making jam then it seems maple syrup could be a substitute. Does it make bees redundant? The beeswax is obv good for lanterns still. If the current resin/pinetree mechanism was reused to get syrup and the jam recipe modified to include syrup as well as honey and berries it seems like it would be relatively simple. Adding a new collection mechanism would add more dev/artist work. Reusing the resin one might feel too 'samey'. I'd probably still reuse if I were doing it.

I saw a video where the player was using chat history to quickly set waypoints. Once you've set one of each type that seemed like a fairly quick way of doing it. Especially if your chat isn't filled with other stuff, the waypoint commands will be recent. At least that's what it looked like he was doing.

I seem to have settled in a place where it rains 'most of the time' and it is pretty annoying. Luckily not far away is something else where it only rains a lot so might move over there and it's just a bit of a walk to the farms. I was looking at the json files and see landforms.json has a islandchess entry with minRain: 120. No other entry has that key. Is that what's causing the rain? If so, what unit does "120" represent?

To improve chances of this happening the existing mechanic could be reused as is, just with syrup on natural maple trees. After you have some then, yes perhaps some process is required to turn it into honey. I don't know anything about maple syrup or how suitable it is for making jam.

Any weapon with a long shaft would be impractical in a cave... VS caves are pretty roomy but there are tight spots. I also think of the drifters as something like shaggy apes except with no face, so not quite natural. I think the illustrations of the stories has their face filled with teeth but I just see a blankness there.

Copper tools are fairly punishing all around but the scythe really seems to run out too quickly. I have 4 sheep and a lamb in a pen with 2 troughs. A copper scythe does not keep them going for long! It took forever to get a lamb, I just can't keep the feed level up. Unrelated... if you wanted to add code complexity and room for bugs you could stop copper picks sparking. Copper tools are used in situations where sparks could cause an explosion.

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.

PSJ's latest VS video received a lot of favourable comments, although I have no idea how many likes and comments it takes for "the algorithm" to take notice. Between that and TikTok and google search results, the algs have already won and we're living in a Black Mirror episode just trying to please them I'm not surprised by what you say about recent game design. I see the mountains of trash pay to win mobile games that flow across my kids' tablets and know that most game design these days is bereft of any merit and is a cynical "copy the last big hit" addiction forming money grabbing excercise. So I stick to Civ V and Minecraft! VS is the first new game I've bought since probably Civ 6 - the Windows 8 of Civ games. I bought VS mostly because I admire the developer's spirit and the fact it's been designed to be so player friendly in the sense of easy modding, configurable difficulty etc. It's obviously made by a gamer. But I'm enjoying my first world and making the copper saw and shears feels like a big turning point. Now I need lanterns and I'll be set! I think anyone likely to enjoy VS can easily see the difference between it and Minecraft by watching half of a lets play episode, so I don't think the 'it's just a Minecraft clone' is that big a deal. But I'm not the one trying to make a living from it and the devs might feel differently!

I didn't want to start a new topic just for this, but you have so I can post here. I'm really impressed by the amount of effort gone into the design to make it mod friendly. The author must have been scarred by MC modding in a past life Lord knows I looked at it and just shook my head and dreaded my kids asking me to help them install MC mods. Not sure this is quite the game for me, the thought of starting from scratch in a new world isn't very appealing. But I do look forward to exploring my current (and first) world a bit more and making more progression through the copper age. I certainly don't regret buying it. It's worth the price just to have a look around and have even one play through I'd say, unless you're working off pocket money.

Perhaps there's been another marketing push? I saw the psj videos recently and they piqued my interest enough to buy it. I thought psj had given up on it after only two vids but I just looked and he's uploaded another one so that's good. He's good at bringing games alive. And that seems to be vital for this game. I went looking for other lets plays for this game and the thing I've noticed is that unless the author is quite good they're deadly boring. The beginning of the game is such a grind that you really need someone who can inject life into it to make it watchable. I skipped through a video last night that was entirely some guy digging out a trench to try and lure a bore into a stockade. I kept going a few minutes ahead and that's really all it was - just digging a dirt trench. He didn't even really explain why he was doing it... I got what he was doing because I'd done something similar to get a couple of sheep that fell into a trap around my garden into a pen the other day. Mischief of Mice had a good one, it's fun to watch. It could be this game is particularly difficult make into an engaging lets play because progression takes so long. The hours required for progress that then get compressed into an interesting 20 - 40 minutes of video might make it not worth a youtuber's time. Perhaps the audience is tricky too. MC has a large young player base where the hermits can be shouty and get up to their crazy antics (I can't stand HermitCraft and really hope my favourite MC youtubers don't join) whereas kids aren't going to play VS so the tone of the vids has to be different and have a smaller audience to boot. The similarities to MC are obvious and quite striking but that isn't necessarily a problem. MC is what it is and it isn't too difficult to see VS has significant gameplay differences. I think MC is struggling for new content and unless you want to go all out with modding it's getting pretty samey. The nether update for me was "meh", and the bees one was too... you can tell with how the youtubers were all "OMG I found some BEES, this is so awesome, they're so cute, this is AMAZING".... really? MC has turned into more of a puzzle game for want of a better phrase. It's really about tearing through the early stages to get to redstone and then making the auto farms, and then what? Start over again. If you could get wattles or pixelriffs do to a lets play it might have an impact. But the time required per video might make them shy away from it.

My take on the huge rare deposits idea, which would be more realistic, is that it would only suit multiplayer. Then players could set up over a deposit and be the supplier for everyone else. Long range transport of some sort would be nice, or maybe other players would act as caravans/traders to distribute that resource. But I don't think it would work for single player mode. It would be tedious to have to travel far away and bring back as much of the resource as possible so you had it close to hand, with multiple trips because inv space is limited. Having most things in most places is a playability necessity in my mind. Ok if you have to travel for a couple of things, but not everything. It looks like the dev has done an exceptional job of making the engine modable so it doesn't seem a stretch to think someone motivated enough could replace the ore generation part. Having said that I don't know if you can hook into worldgen and replace bits of it.

I was a bit stumped by the bucket holdup too. It seems obvious one of the clay containers should be usable as a bucket. I was looking at the modding info last night and thought a clay bucket might be a good first attempt. Maybe one of the clay containers under a stick for the recipe? I guess the bucket needing planks idea from a gameplay POV is a bit of a forced progression or something. I'm on my first game and the copper saw and shears moment has really allowed things to pick up so were a really big thing and quite exciting to get. Having chests is so good! Post shear and saw, getting a pine plantation going really makes a difference with the wood supply. They seem to drop more saplings than other trees and growing so tall seem to be a better bet for wood than maple or birch. Wattle and daub planks might be an early building material so you don't have to live in a dirt hut. I took over a ruin so had a few walls already but the dirt filling in the gaps and the roof looks pretty bad! I didn't realise I could punch the cobblestone though so I could have rearranged things a bit and I have ruins scattered all around me so there was plenty of building blocks, I just didn't know it. The door I'm not sure about... putting a haybale or something over the opening at night feels about right for the very start, annoying as it is. And you have the option of ladders straight away for the up and over entrance and the game even auto climbs them. I admit I'm not looking forward to the start of another world. And I'm playing on easy mode! I guess I just don't want quite such an "uncompromising survival" experience. But I wanted a change from Minecraft and now I finally have the copper tools I'm enjoying it more. I too see a few users here who feel the need to tell others that the game is meant to be long and boring and it should be even more long and boring. Like real life doesn't have enough long and boring things you need to do! Are there bigger copper seams to be found other than the small surface ones? I'm hoping I don't have to constantly travel looking for 10 or so copper bearing blocks at a time. That's going to get old quickly. Although it is appreciated that they are scattered around to make the jump from panning for the pickaxe to making the anvil. I'm not a fan of the smithing mechanic either. I watched a couple of youtubers making mistakes so knew what to avoid, but it's boring. And I have trouble seeing which voxels should be left and which must be got rid of. Not enough contrast or something on the outlines. Again I was thinking recipes for this that used as much fuel as you'd need in the forge (1 charcoal it sounds like) and a stick and an ingot. Then arranged in some manner to indicate which tool you want to make. Or maybe the process is deliberately long and boring to make the night go faster