The Lerf

I think this is the best understanding of the hunger penalty. It isn't supposed to be 'having an item in both hands is physically taxing', but 'the physically taxing work being done requires two items in hand'. The most common activities for having two items in hand, as previously mentioned, are Smithing, Mining, and Combat. It's a kind of roundabout way of making these activities 'cost' more, but I don't mind it. What doesn't feel like it works though, is when other strenuous physical activity doesn't get the debuff. Chopping trees, swimming, mining in the daylight... I think this is what pushes the perception of "Item is in my left hand, my metabolism is now overclocked" like OP says. I think this will all be solved with the status effect system, and a way to show exhaustion. An invisible 'stamina' meter just like satiety, that gets depleted by swinging hammers, breaking blocks, wearing armor; basically taking the place of what the hunger bar is doing currently. Hunger I imagine would just be a 'time since last meal' meter. Once the stamina amount decreases enough to reach a threshold, that's when 'Strenuous Activity' would occur, increasing the hunger rate and whatever else to represent it. When fully depleted, an 'exhaustion' debuff can apply, lowering mining speed, attack strength, movement speed, etc etc. "Oh, but isn't this just the same as hunger but with extra steps?????" Yeah, but with a layer of separation that doesn't tie the offhand or wearing armor so directly to hunger. Which is the important part that OP is referencing.

To be honest, there are a lot of problems with combat, but most of them I feel aren't actually related to the combat system. I think some of the problems with combat stem from the armor system, and how encountering an enemy with attacks above your armor tier effectively disregard your armor, or completely shred it. Even while wearing plate armor, you're still pretty fragile, so the most effective tactic available becomes the classic "Don't get hit." Speed and maneuverability over the ability to tank hits. The addition of bowtorns and shivers has reinforced that meta. Combat, at least for me, has devolved into holding the sprint key to repeatedly hit an enemy and then back out of their kind of buggy attack range. Having armor on is only good for tanking a couple hits before you have to disengage, remove armor, and heal. Other problems are caused by enemy ergonomics. Attack animations are poor at telegraphing an enemy's range, and have very little 'windup time' to react to. Enemy AI is little more than 'seek player position and melee'. The only one that doesn't explicitly do that is the Bowtorn, which in my opinion is way too strong at higher tiers, and way too accurate at lower tiers. Player ergonomics are another factor. Shields are only useful in daylight. Most interactions with enemies are at night, or underground, where the offhand gets more use out of holding a light source than a shield. Shields have a lot of RNG attached to their ability to absorb damage, for some reason. The player has one attack that hits one enemy at a time and has no 'get off me' tools for when they accumulate into hordes. Taking off armor to heal effectively is a hassle, just to put it back on again to reenter combat. I think the current 'click enemy to damage' system is fine but very, very simple. I think it could be improved by adding a right-click function that's different per weapon, similar to how the spear gets thrown. The falx could have a wide swipe meant more for pushing enemies away than for damage, or a stronger 'charge up' swing. Perhaps armor's function could be reworked to be more about invalidating damage, instead of reducing it. Suppose a rework where wearing a set of armor has the flat damage reduction (currently implemented) massively increased for enemies of the same or lower tier. A tier one drifter would do 0 damage to a tier 2 or higher armor. However, hits would still lower the durability of armor, and that flat damage reduction would decrease with durability loss. A broken armor would still have a flat damage reduction, but would be significantly less than if it were at 50% durability or higher. Higher tier armors would perform better with this ratio of damage reduction vs durability. This kind of reads like a list of complaints, and isn't my best post ever. I've delved deep into potential enemy reworks in past topics, and when I'm more rested and thoughtful I might link those or do the same on player combat.

Appreciate a dev confirming this, I'm looking forward to the future of the mechanical side of the game.

Isn't this just the current inventory system of 4 'bundles', just with extra steps?

Something I have realized now with 1.22 and some of the item changes has made me want to increase the visibility for this suggestion. Rabbits, foxes, and raccoons all now have their individual hides and pelts as different items. Which is great, but having to use 3 limited inventory spaces to carry small pelts that previously only used 1 space is making wonder about the future of the inventory system. Individualizing more items is something I would like to see for immersion, but it could end up affecting inventories significantly, especially when they are limited. Also I'm not sure if I emphasized it enough in the OP, but the concept of these specialized bags would work identically to how the currently implemented Mining Bag does. Providing a large inventory boost only for specific categories of items.

A crafting recipe for gold/silver/electrum plates involving a chisel and the plate that produces four 'reflective lining' to be used for lanterns would definitely be welcomed. I do agree that two ingots for one lantern just for +2 light level is a bit pricey.

Hopefully I'm interpreting this correctly, but do you mean something like this? I believe this is the most space efficient way to make a split while keeping the powertrain going the same direction. Current limitations are the spur gears being endcaps, and the mandatory 'axle attached to a block' condition for placing gears.

Perhaps 'not engage with half the game' is the wrong choice of words. But let me see if I can explain what I mean. Vintage Story is not designed for nomadic life, and I don't know if herding mechanics is enough to allow it to actually be used to any effective measure beyond roleplay. People don't build a base/home because the game tells you to, but because it's the easiest, most effective way of surviving due to the ability to concentrate your resources and have structures for defense and production. To be nomadic, you have to give up your resources and defense and production until you return to that place. We don't have effective mobile storage in the game, so any seasonal move becomes a small restart essentially. The game has terrain with tons of vertical death pit caves, a very high amount of predators per place, enemies that spawn at night, and semi-weekly apocalypse events. Moving a herd is inherently more risky than real life, by a large degree. Animals don't need food, don't care about weather, and don't care about space. They can be gathered in a small pen and be forgotten about and be fine. They aren't nearly as valuable to the player as they would be in real life contexts. Yes, you can do the work to have multiple bases, but why would you bring animals on trips outside of roleplay? The time spent making a base far enough away for it to matter includes travel time, which I imagine would be at a walking pace for the herd to follow. Based on how animals work, it would be easier to just have animals at each base without moving them. I say this because I already do something kind of similar in my single-player VS games. I use a dirt hut through the stone age, on metalworking I upgrade it with planks, furniture, equipment, etc, and at iron I make a new base somewhere else more attractive/resource heavy from the ground up. That becomes the new base of operations, and part of my roleplay is I then make the dirt hut look ruined and abandoned. The transient stage of moving is the most annoying part, because there's only so much you can take at one time. So, you minimize your trips as much as possible, because the time spent walking is time wasted, and holding W isn't engaging at all. For herding to become an intentionally designed system in VS, animals need more resources put into them, and to get more resources out of them. Grazing and pastures is the plan, but I think it's easier to apply to a player-built pen by calculating the size of an animal pen, and then determining how many animals it can support based on that size. Animals should need to be fed, either by the player or by grazing, or either die/no longer produce resources. The resources in question should probably be compost, wool, more meat, or even be able to be sold to traders. But the point is they need to provide more value by being alive. By making animals more valuable as resource producers, but making them fragile, it creates an incentive to either A: invest in a structure to protect them but have to manually feed them, or B: invest in the equipment needed to move them away during inhospitable winter months to keep their automatic grazing. Unfortunately I feel like the cost/benefit ratio still skews heavily away from nomadic herding because of all the environmental hazards, but one could say there's a reason why historic nomadics settled down too.

I like the idea, but I don't know if it's worth the full effort of implementation just for players who don't want to engage with half the game. Parts of it are great; I welcome any improvements to animal behavior, and the concept of a 'Follow Me' ability for domesticated animals, but I think there's more standing in the way of nomadic living in VS than just herds. Especially for something that is kind of just roleplay.

We're really getting the worst of both worlds with the current system. I think I like what they're going for here more, but there's no way a stack of 16 flint should take 16 times as long to get up to temperature. The stacks that are being put into the fire aren't solid unitary masses, everything should heat at once at a much more reasonable rate. I know it's been done as a balancing effort, but it's a bit too ridiculous. I think OP has the best option here: The balancing lever stops being the stack size, and becomes the campfire. Perhaps this can then open up for larger firepits that need more prep for more efficiently cooking large batches of things?

My counterpoint is that bears aren't a boss. They're a semi-rare mob that can be encountered on day 1 and leave someone with very few options besides 'die'. Yes, you can put bears on your DNI list and never enter a forest without iron plate armor, but before that, most encounters, even accidental ones, will most likely end in death. I think the big point I'm making here is that the best counterplay to bears is to never encounter one or be stacked with armor and weapons, with little in between other than luck. The player can be taught that the world is dangerous without sending them into a death loop, or starting them from zero again. I also think it's a little strange that the game makes the natural animals into significantly larger threats than the apocalyptic horror corpses. Corrupt Sawblade Locusts can 1-shot a default player with no armor, same damage as a Polar bear, barely more than a brown bear. But the difference is, Sawblade locusts only spawn deep underground, can be easily outran, have a cooldown for their attack, have less health... do you see where I'm going with this? That just seems wrong to me, that the enemy that spawns in the tougher end-game locations are still less of a threat than average ursine neighbor.

The biggest thing that bothers me is that bears take center stage as "toughest enemy" for such a long time, and really overshadow the rust monsters, which makes them feel really weak and kind of inconsequential. I'm getting worse jump scares from bears than the Lovecraftian horrors. They're the fastest, most damaging, and highest health enemy on the surface, until the first heavy temporal storm. It wouldn't be so much an issue if the aggression was tuned down, or if they were super visible, or if they could be mitigated in some way. Now, bears are dangerous IRL. Not surprising. They should still be dangerous in game, and this is clearly reflected in their stats. But just for comparison's sake, the default starting health for a commoner class PC is 15. All bears do tier 2 damage. A Black bear does 10 damage, 2-shotting an early game player. A Brown bear does 12 damage, 2-shotting an early game player. A Polar bear does 16 damage, 1-shotting an early game player. (These are the bears I've most commonly seen, I've never actually come across pandas or sun bears, but their stats are slightly weaker. A Panda still 2-shots, and a sun bear will need 4 hits before it kills a player.) A surface drifter does 2.5 damage at Tier 0, killing a player after 6 hits. They can be outran by just walking, and they have to stand still in order to attack. A brown bear runs slightly faster than a commoner, and can attack at while at full speed. The only way to outrun them is by taking advantage of their terrain climbing quirks. Holy ****, writing it down makes it seem wild. Now I'm not saying that a drifter should outperform a bear, but I don't think a common bear should be stronger than the first official boss of the game. The Eidolon's strongest attack is 8 damage at tier 2. (Or maybe it's 2 damage at tier 3? The damage calcs are confusing.) Now it doesn't help that bears spawn on day 1. Devs can say otherwise, but the fact of the matter is that they absolutely do. They can potentially spawn multiple, depending on the environment. Hell, one of my 1.22.2 games has started with 6 bears in my surroundings, and it's not even heavily forested. They can perform a double attack, giving two consecutive instances of damage. I think bears are overtuned, compared to actual enemies. Wearing improvised armor lets you take a single extra hit, which won't matter since you're now slower. There is very little you can do in the early game if you unexpectedly get chased by a bear. Which might be realistic? But is it fun? What can we do to improve this? Initially, I think lowering the damage tier down from 2 to 1, and decreasing the value of damage is the easy fix. The player should have a fighting chance to get away, especially in the early game, and it allows the improvised armor set be worth something, even if it's just a little. Increasing the bear's visibility is another easy fix, we can up the frequency of growls and roars when the player gets within 20 blocks or so, before the bear is able to aggro the player. The most recent update has added footstep sounds for the bear, but unfortunately they are only audible when within your field of view, so they are functionally useless if a bear is behind you. This should be fixed. Personally I'd like to see a limit on the amount of bears per square kilometer or something similar too. A more complicated option that I think would be the best, is making animal run speed directly related to the amount of health it has. A bear, or wolf, or ram may aggro you, but if you can get a couple hits in, you could outrun it. (This benefits hunting too, which has recently seen a lot of community attempts at reworks). Predators really, really do not want to sustain injuries as mentioned earlier in the thread, but the lore of VS has established wildly increased animal aggression. I think this change would suggest the appearance of both realities, allowing animals to still be aggressive but with injuries actually mattering. Regardless of all this, the code on bears needs to be tightened up. Changelogs of past updates have stated that bears shouldn't spawn for the first 4 days of a world, but the amount of bear pelts and wounds I've gotten in my first hours of a 1.22.2 world state differently. The double instances of damage I witness may be because of a lack of synchronization of attack rate and animation length. Bears can reach through fences to kill livestock. Aggro feels inconsistent with distance. We should also remember that this is a video game, and not a 1:1 simulation of reality.

It's actually not 3 angled, it's still 2, just visually there's a third connecting them. Yeah, and other than splitting axles, its kind of the only thing it can do. It's an additional option which I like, but it's use case is pretty niche. I can't think of many times when I would prefer a 1:1 split, rather than just connecting things in series.

I haven't seen much discussion on the new Spur Gears introduced in 1.22, so I'll begin. The rather unique thing that we've gained via use of the Spur Gears is the ability to split power trains without the need of a Large Wooden Gear, and it keeps the torque/speed ratio 1:1. (Spur Gear split and reversal) Unfortunately, the design of the gear prevents us from continuing the power train in the same direction. Using a spur gear forces the power train to double back on itself. This can be reversed again by using another Spur Gear, at the cost of additional 2x3x1 space and materials. Obviously this seems a little strange, when the axle could just come off the end of first paired gear, but the current implementation prevents that due to the gear basically serving as an 'end cap' for any axle. (No fun allowed) Perhaps this is planned, perhaps not, but allowing the Spur Gear to function in the middle of an axle would allow much more flexibility in mechanical design, even if just allowing things to be more compact/cheaper. Now, some interesting things I've found... (4-way Spur Split) The Spur Gear can split off of every side of itself. By shifting the mechanisms below the floor, you can get a rather compact way of powering multiple things in parallel. In fact, this can be continued over, and over again... (Potential chaos) ...To create a very confusing but functional mechanical mess. This all works in-game, even if it looks like it shouldn't.

Perhaps the problem instead is that we receive too many feathers when harvesting chickens. There reaches a point in the game where I just stop grabbing them, and let the body despawn. What if instead of a singular 'feather' item (that we can find up to 16 of per chicken), it became a 'bundle of feathers'-esque item, where less of them get harvested from the chicken but it still carries the implication of receiving many. Think how when harvesting cattails, you don't receive (1) Cattail, you receive (1) Cattails, and the icon is a small bundle of them. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be many practical/functional uses of feathers historically, besides as fletching and bedding. Their main usage was decorative and ceremonial, so perhaps Tailor classes could get some more special feather-based clothing items to craft, but it's a bit of a struggle to think of something they could be regularly used for. The aforementioned down duvet idea is nice, and could be a late game item that goes for a high price at the luxury trader, which leans feathers towards a more 'money-maker' type trade item and is the closest analogue to feathers being a typically fashion-style thing IRL.