ifoz

Decided to restore most of the RA as a little side project, here's some screenshots! (Spoilers ahead, though ingame most of this stuff is piles of rubble ) Noclip view of the guardroom and commons. Noclip view of the staircase, engineering, the translocator room, the boss room and the library. Inside nobles' quarters.

Some areas are just temporally unstable, and just being in those areas will decrease your stability, leading to the effects of a temporal storm. There is nothing you can do (without altering world settings to disable stability, or getting a mod) other than just leaving that area and going somewhere that is temporally stable. (Gear on your hotbar turning clockwise means stable, counter-clockwise means unstable). I won't try and defend surface stability since it's a kind of esoteric mechanic that you sort of just have to know about to understand what is going on, but yeah. There are mods out there that specifically only disable surface instability but keep it underground, I am pretty sure.

It might be a problem on paper if only going by the metric of popularity, but the idea of "don't make a game that aims to please everyone" is usually regarded as a fundamental principle of game design. The better alternative is picking a target audience (even if that audience is just yourself!) and making something focused that audience can enjoy. Trying to please everyone often ends up diluting the vision and focus of a game in the long run. I don't want to be one of those people who just hate on Minecraft, but I will say that I personally think Minecraft's "design for everyone" philosophy is part of why quite a few people think the game's quality and focus has gone down over the years. Anyway all that to sort of just say that being niche isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as the devs are making enough cash to keep working on projects they enjoy.

Oh also, you can make scrap bombs using golden nails. They should add a special bomb model for if you do that, as a silly trophy item. Holy hand grenade!

As much as I wish they worked like this, you can't toss bombs. You have to place them, then light them, then wait. It means bombs are completely unusable in story locations since you cannot place/break any blocks there. Bombs aren't also particularly great in terms of damage, even if you do manage to hit an enemy with a scrap bomb it likely won't kill it with the first blast. The one "good" use of bombs for combat I have seen is wiping out a pen of chickens, but that doesn't seem like the kind of thing the devs would want the players using scrap bombs for.

Elvas showed off some early dungeon work on one of his recent streams, they basically seem like larger, rarer ruins that have interconnected rooms/areas and are going to be home to various tough enemies. The parts he showcased were various rooms of a big underground shelter. There was a dining hall-like area, some bedrooms, etc. From what I have seen and heard it looks like a way to keep lategame ruin diving interesting while gating it behind some trickier fights so the player won't find themselves at the mantle in a ruin rewarding some dry grass and sticks. Part of the problem with the current way ruins work is that none of them are designed around the lategame in particular, so unless you are after ruined clutter or some nice fashion, their rewards are usually a bit lacklustre. Dry grass, sticks, rot, firewood being found at mantle-level ruins since those same ruins could theoretically spawn just below the surface. I'm really excited for the procedural dungeons personally, since they seem like they're going to give a more replayable ruin diving experience tailored to the mid-late game specifically. I am also just happy the modular dungeons aren't simply copy/paste square rooms joined by corridors, the ones shown seemed quite unique and decently modular while retaining visual style. The dining hall was separated into quarters that could be interchanged and looked like they would still work seamlessly to create a large cave-like room.

From what I've heard Elvas say in his trader-building dev streams, it seems they might be doing away with the current trader grid spawning pattern in favour of a more interesting system. There's some who are planned to only spawn in forests, some in deserts, some who have homes built into ruins and only spawn in ruined village clusters, and some with stilt houses who would spawn above shallow water. Hopefully once their spawning pattern becomes less predictable, you don't find so many at once, and they in turn seem rarer.

I'm actually surprised so many people voted that they utilised trading the least, I normally trade quite a bit in the average playthrough! Playing Malefactor allows you to sell cracked vessels for some really good early cash, which you can then use to buy your way to bronze through commodities traders. The least useful trader for me personally is probably either building or furniture since their stocklists aren't all that special, though now that sleek doors can insulate I have actually started buying them. I guess the honour goes to building materials then, since I don't usually use wallpaper (not having it drop when you break the block it is placed on annoys me considering the price, even if it is realistic lol). I think they're alright for selling lanterns to, but I always use all of my lanterns to light up parts of my base and there's always a better way to make gears (cracked vessels) as a Malefactor player. [EDIT]: I am sure I have said it before here or somewhere else, but I really hope the team consider having furniture traders actually sell the new trader furniture in 1.22. Come on Tyron, just give us a 2-wide table that we don't have to chisel ourselves. Kek. There's a couple 2-wide tables you can't obtain since they're supposed to be exclusive to a story location, and I think that design choice wouldn't sting so bad if players also had an alternative 2-wide table they actually could obtain.

Not that I know of sorry, you'd have to search around.

I think most of the "pristine" clutter should be moved out of the clutter category and into being actual real items. There are fully pristine versions of braziers, lecterns, glass tanks and metal tanks that can all be obtained in survival. There are some other pristine things, though those are only found within story locations and so are unobtainable. I'd love if metal tanks could function sort of like barrels, just for the fun of it. You'd put in liquid, get to see it inside the tank (would be cool with the glass tanks), and then get to dispense it into buckets/jugs/bowls. You could have a wine dispensing station at a tavern, or a tank of aqua vitae you pour some from when you need healing. Would also be fun for alchemist lab builds, having tanks of various liquids or dyes. Lecterns would be an easier implementation I'd imagine, just being able to place a book on the lectern and read it by right clicking. Braziers could possibly function something like torch holders, though maybe providing some warmth. Not as fast as a firepit so they remain balanced, but a passive warmth gain useful for houses. That or having it so fire pits can and will start fires like pit kilns do, and braziers being the non-fire spreading version of them.

On that topic, I think it'd be fun if you could craft a ruined lantern (the intact ones, not the fully broken ones) with a candle to get a rusty-looking functional lantern. That'd be fun for builders, and also seems pretty balanced since it still requires the candle and these things are decently uncommon.

I have seen at least two separate clips where people burnt down their houses trying to light a pristine brazier (non-functional clutter item that definitely should be made functional)

@Teo Teutza The vanilla buried treasure maps always mark with a blue X, so unless you've manually changed them yourself these might be from a modded buried treasure.

It's (as far as we know) just a case of "video game requires you to fight boss to progress' Interestingly if you poke around the game files, you can see that for ch1, the boss was originally planned to drop a special machine part that would be required to open the only door out of the boss arena, creating an in-universe reason for the fight. This was scrapped at some point though, since as it currently stands ch1 is also "kill boss to magically open door".

Traders teleport back to their 'home' point if they get far away for long enough, so making a trader area wouldn't be possible without another mod that disables this behaviour. I think you can unclaim the land with commands, or just use creative.

That would be incredibly cool, seeing Brief Discussions with the Traveller performed in-world.

I'd recommend finding a treasure hunter trader and doing the current story locations as Echo Weaver mentioned, they're generally recommended for bronze age (ch1) and iron/steel age (ch2). That would give you a larger goal to work toward.

Combat updates are one of the community's most requested features for the exact reasons listed. It doesn't really get better, lategame combat is identical apart from enemies having more health and doing more damage. The two boss fights the game currently has are okay, though I have not experienced the 2nd fight in a good few months and it has been improved since then. Generally with caves my best advice is to just be fast on your feet. Get in, check any ruins/ore you find, get out. The less time spent down there, the less time there is for enemies to spawn.

They had better make cool click-clack noises as they go up/down if they use gears

It's a bug/oversight yeah, already on the github bug tracker.

Getting a pair of shears and growing a big pine plantation greatly helps. Still, sticks are a bit of a grind even latergame. I can see the argument for boards as tool handles (and personally hope we do see better handlemaking in the future), but I don't know if boards for wattle realistically makes sense. Irl wattle is made of flexible sticks, so they can be woven around the posts without breaking.

I don't have any concept art, but they're basically meant to be someone who has been twisted at the waist and then bent backwards. So the head is upside-down, and the spikes on the back are the ribs flayed outwards.

On the topic of hats, it'd be nice if hats didn't squash all your hair flat. But yes, big supporter of woolen stuff. Wool exists in the creative inventory already! (I know there is a "woolen" clothing set ingame you buy from traders, but that's just a shirt/pants/boots).

Yeah, it's called putting cloth in the crafting grid. I hope once we get better/actual weaving, tailor might stop feeling like a living crafting station.

I think it could be fun to see a survey of ingame tasks people enjoy the most, and what they would most like to see expanded. Building, exploring, doing all the story locations, blacksmithing, mechanical power, ruin hunting, farming/homesteading. Personally I hope weaving is expanded soon as it is the system I feel has the most potential but is also the most lacklustre in current implementation. Luckily, it's on the roadmap!