ifoz

I really like the idea of the Hansa banner being the item that calls traders to your base in a theoretical system with wandering traders, it feels very fitting. Elvas has said in his dev streams that they do have ideas about wandering traders one day, but also that it'd be such a large system to implement that it likely isn't coming any time soon. Traders carrying goods between each other, or having a courier who would cart things around between traders and who you could meet on the road. Honestly, I feel like this would be a decent chance to give Tailor a buff. Let them get somewhat better prices, due to being a merchant themselves with experience selling clothing and dealing with customers, as well as their more civilised manners/way of speaking.

Came back here to add in a little bit of additional feedback: Dungeons should probably have some internal limit to the amount of room pieces they can reuse in one room. Maybe two or three times maximum for one room. I just found a room made of the same corner piece for all four corners, resulting in this strange ruined lantern pit.

Actually, thinking about it a bit more, it could be fun if the Malefactor had a class-exclusive lockpicking kit (or class-exclusive but also sold by treasure hunters) to sometimes let them bypass needing to search for keys, or making the theoretical lockpicking system easier in some way.

As much as that could be the case from an in-world perspective, places like in the laundry and on the clutter shelves of bedrooms there is still a lot of (unobtainable) clothing, so it still seems strange to me that there can be so much implied to be around but absolutely none for the player to take. I'm pretty sure they nerfed the rot amount in a recent rc, the latest dungeon I found didn't have nearly as much as they used to. They do actually have two guaranteed terra perta if you dig down inside the waste shaft, but I have never bothered to grab it myself, because from a roleplay perspective I doubt my Seraph would really want to go digging around in ancient sewage to grab some soil. It'd be nice if different future dungeon types had different levels of danger. Some more casual and low-stakes mainly focused on giving the player some decorative clutter and adding to the general atmosphere/environmental storytelling, and some that would be more dangerous with monsters/traps/etc.

As much as I enjoy the dungeons as a proof of concept, I can't help but feel the same. As they currently are, it's just a special somewhat larger ruin that is roughly the same in appearance and loot distribution each time you find one. The central blast furnace room of the dungeons still seems to be a work in progress though, and I would bet that it will make it into the game by stable. I sometimes also feel like they have less loot than regular ruins, depending on your RNG. Given their rarity I'd expect a little more, considering it is completely possible to find nothing of value in a dungeon. (Looting five chests in a large bedroom as an example and having them all be empty feels a little odd, if you were almost guaranteed at least one clothing item and some ruined cloth clutter I think that would make sense. From my experience it feels like a lot of loot randomisers in dungeons are set to only appear around 10-20% of the time). When I find a new dungeon, I don't usually think "oh this is great, I'll explore this and get some loot!" I usually think "I wonder if it'll be empty again this time". The clutter makes the rooms feel very full, but in terms of actual loot there usually isn't much. I think this comes back around to how I think it would be nice if clutter would drop scraps of resources. There's so much cloth hanging from drying racks in those laundry rooms, yet I can't get even a single flax fibre out of it if all the chests are empty. There's ruined shoes on the shelves, but I can't salvage any leather. Having some clutter be able to occasionally drop scraps of basic resources would go a decent way to making dungeons feel more rewarding in my eyes, given the sheer amount of ruined clutter in them that can't be used for anything. It's a strange feeling to step into a structure so cluttered, but then only be able to beeline for the few chests and hope they contain things. If they don't, everything else in those rooms might as well not be there. (Clutter can be nice for decor, but there is a lot of it that is too ruined to really use as decoration in a normal base, and dungeons contain a lot of ruined clutter). I think Elvas did mention that the lock-and-key system might make it into the 1.22._ patches, where the vault's iron door would be locked and you would need to search around for a key. That could add a bit of potential puzzle-solving and open the door for better loot rewards, but without guaranteed enemy spawns it also might just feel like a scavenger hunt for no particular reason. All that aside, they are still really cool. I think the dungeon system is a great proof of concept, and there's an absolute ton of potential for having special ruins that are unique each time you find them.

Shattering does still happen as far as I am aware, but not if the item is placed on the ground and cooled off with a watering can. This allows you to endlessly stack quenching buffs. I've seen a friend of mine get a falx up to 20+ damage with this method, past 200% shatter chance.

I've had a theory for a while now about Jonas being either attached to a machine, or having his consciousness linked to one, sort of like you mentioned. Spoilered for mentions of ch2 content, but this is why I think this could be something that is revealed at a later point in the story:

I haven't messed around with tempering and quenching that much, but does anyone know if pickaxes no longer being able to have mining speed increased is intended or not? In earlier 1.22 pre's you used to be able to quench a pickaxe to boost the mining speed (though this was bugged back then and actually slowed it down). In rc-7 though, quenching a pickaxe only improves the hit damage, making it largely useless. You are therefore funnelled into only going for durability rather than power, as from what I can tell power is mostly inconsequential. It removes that element of player choice that the power/durability balance has on other tools.

I think it's a thing probably all builders (really, all artists in general) experience at one point or another. Builds also always look terrible when you start out - I have had many builds where I blocked out the floorplan and walls, thought they looked terrible, only to slowly work to improve them and end up with something I was proud of. Probably my favourite build I've made so far (this was in creative mode) is the tavern in my village - and I did not like the way the blockout/basic layout looked at all. I spent a couple days wracking my brain about it and eventually managed to find a way to cram details and a proper interior into that blockout, and everything kind of just went from there. I think a decent way to make nice builds in survival is starting small - making a large base often means you need to grind more for resources, construction takes longer, and it is easier to get demotivated, burnt-out, or begin to dislike the project. I'm also posting some images here so you might be able to see what I mean. I don't want to show off a build of mine to say "look at how this looks, you should build like this, problem solved!" but instead to say that even a build whose end result I am very happy with went through a stage where I was doubting the entire thing. Image below of blocking out the back side of the tavern, which I thought looked terrible. Image below of the finished back exterior, which I am now really pleased with. Even now I still think there are improvements to make, like making the shingled roof beams more staggered than straight. The point is though, with enough effort, even builds that start out bad can end up as something you are proud of. It really just takes practice and trial and error, and usually the builds you work the hardest on are the ones you end up the happiest with just because of the effort put in.

Looking into it a little further, looks like the command to bring it up might be ".dev aedit", though I don't know if you need to turn developer mode on in settings or be looking at an NPC for this to work. I haven't found any documentation either, it seems like nobody has really discussed or used this feature since it was added. I'm working on a village mod myself, and this is probably going to be something I'll have to figure out once I get around to actually implementing NPCs. Let me know if you end up finding out anything about it!

If we're talking about the vanilla NPCs, there's an 'activity editor' that you can use (I forget how to pull it up, but it exists) to pre-program NPC schedules. The way it looks to work is pretty much like "at (time) wake up, pathfind to (coordinates), play (this animation), at (time) pathfind to (coordinates)" etc. as far as I can tell. Do be warned though, there isn't a way to give NPCs custom dialogue and trades without making your own mod for it. All the NPCs spawned in creative will be without a specific trade and only with the default dialogue. The way actual NPC trades work in vanilla is that it's hardcoded for that specific NPC. All of this is assuming you're talking about the vanilla NPCs, not the VSvillage mod NPCs or the vanilla traders (since vanilla traders don't have this kind of pathfinding yet).

Personally, I disagree. VS has been in development for over 10 years now (they celebrated their 10th anniversary earlier this year), and given the steadily increasing player count, I can't really see it going anywhere any time soon. Sure the general modern audience is after something more fast-paced, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a more niche audience after something slower. As an example, UnReal World released in 1992, and is still being updated to this day. That's a far more niche and somewhat more hardcore survival game than VS is with an even steeper learning curve, and I think that just goes to show that usually when your game hits a niche audience, they don't just pack up and leave when the next interesting thing comes along like a more general audience might.

I think a decent way to alleviate some queue frustration would also be introducing a feature where for about a minute after a player disconnects, they could rejoin and they would regain their position in the server or in queue. TOPS (and just internet connections in general) isn't/aren't the most stable, and it is a frequent occurrence to wait in queue for hours only to get disconnected in the single digits, or to finally get in, play for five minutes, and then get disconnected and sent straight back to 130 in the queue.

I think the comment about megabuilds is an important point - many popular Minecraft builders probably won't want to do much with VS due to the fact megabuilds aren't as viable. Megabuilds sell very well in thumbnails, whereas you can't really show off the average VS base in a single still image. VS generally encourages you to have multiple rooms/areas, and then use chiselling, wrench offsetting, support beams etc to really make those areas packed full of detail and function. Sure you might be able to make a thumbnail of the base exterior, but a likely equal amount of work will have been put into the different parts of the interior. As much as I love building in VS (I think this game has a genuinely amazing building system with so much creative potential), the block palette is also a little lacking. I get that the game is going for more grounded, realistic textures, and I like that a lot. But the real life middle ages were full of colour! I'd love if we were able to paint/dye plaster to create a brighter blockset than wattle and daub, as well as stain wood to finally get planks with a nice deep brown tone. (RedRam did mention linseed oil being used to treat lumber in the future, so fingers crossed!) Having blocks of dyed cloth and leather would also be very nice, even if not the most immersive. That way you could chisel custom furniture and carpets using textiles rather than rock, daub or sand like people currently do. Saraty did mention custom carpets when weaving is eventually introduced which is very exciting, but I still think chiselling could benefit from cloth blocks.

I think a marker for where boats are would also be nice, maybe tie it to having an anchor equipped in the boat's front slot. This is already something you can do, the anchor just serves no current purpose. I also think a marker for a ruined house would be nice, as the current "ruins" marker with the pillars is a bit skinny and hard to see sometimes on the map. The trader wagon marker could also use an update in 1.22, since traders no longer live in wagons. I did hear they are working on doing that, though.