runnybabbit

Is there supposed to be muddy gravel generating under sea water beaches again? I travelled to the worldgen border to explore and noticed the nice wavy ocean sand got suddenly cut off for muddy gravel in fresh generation. At first I assumed it was a fresh water lake that spawned next to the ocean but then I noticed a nasty chunk border between the wavy sand and muddy gravel.

Great idea! I'll see if I still got the pelt.

lines would be useful for the standard brown-and-tan map to denote tectonic/rock boundaries as currently it's quite difficult to track which rock type is surfaced on the standard map.

Much sadder than that. I wiffed every single swing, but since it was only a fox I refused to back down. I often rely on a shield to give myself some breathing room but the fox also kept running through my legs to deal death by ankle nibbles from behind... At first I thought it was some new clever AI behavior but I haven't seen it since so maybe it was just pathfinding jank. Anyway, I ran back to my death point with a spare blackguard shortsword we had lying around and downed Fantastic Mr Fox with the first blow.

Today I died to a fox... as a blackguard. With full health, nutrition, and iron gear. Just waiting until the inevitable day I throw hands with a racoon and get thrashed.

The last couple of updates seem to have some nice perfromance improvements. I had lots of stuttering on my shoddy laptop so until recently I've been playing VS exclusively on a much more powerful desktop. However I live completely on solar here and recently the bad weather has put power at a premium, so I switched back to the laptop only to be... pleasantly surprised. It still starts to stutter after a little over an hour of gameplay but it's been much smoother overall. Another 'performance' thing I've noticed is the item pickup seems much more consistent, though that could arguably be more of a 'polish' thing. Anyway, I feel like items used to often sit for a second or two before being picked up but now it's much more responsive. Has anyone else had a noticable increase in performance the last couple of updates?

To expand on this a bit, historical fire arrows were a lot more... "smolder-y" than modern movie pyrotechnics present. As MKMoose suggested they were mostly situational, and required lots of prep time so not the sort of thing a single hunter or archer would have much use for. They could be devastating weapons in seige and formation warfare however. Tod Cutler had an excellent video exploring historical fire arrow recipes if you're interested https://youtu.be/EAAYhIJIOjg?si=qFYdVkrxKWN9JZXf

I've been using brown dots to denote boats for some time now. Issue becomes when you forget to remove the marker and all your coastlines get cluttered with brown dots but you can't remember which one actually had the boat. For sure that's a skill issue though.

I've often thought much of the character screen information could be made more vauge and specific info placed into jonas tech. Perhaps a single climate/rainfall/temp reader... potentially with expected seasonal highs and lows if that would work in the engine. Pre-modern peoples would not take for granted acess to quick and accurate temperature readings down to a fraction of a degree, which are a technological marvel.

I feel this ought to at least have one of those little red text popups at the bottom "your ingot is too cold to work".

Oops yep guess I skimmed that the first time. I wonder how much the rust world intrusion (which, is afaik the lore reason for the terrain generation being so weird thus far), would change cave generation too.. Like could we have recognizable 'real world caves' but then 'spooky and geologically improbable' be it's own branch with specific and recognisable formation?

Don't forget lava tubes such as The Kazumura Cave in Hawaii

Would also love to see all sorts of expanded meat preservation mechanics. Maybe a smoking thing that works a bit like blue cheese curing but in reverse?

Most can be deducted from the names themselves... "Oh boy, I wonder if these Orange-Fluted Organ Liquidator Mushrooms are safe to consume"

IRL having even a small-scale poultry setup for meat production really does net you with a TON of feathers. Granted, not all of them are very useful, since arrows require specific feathers found on the wings. I like the idea of a duvet increasing warmth when sleeping as well as sleep time. I've woken many a winter morning completely freezing despite leaving the fire stoked

It might also feel coherent (trying to find a better term than "realism") to tie distance to restock times and/or prices? Since feasibly things like glass, bricks, and plaster might still have some demand on the frontier... just at a higher premium.

Having treasure hunters as 'most remote point of contact' seems to fit. Maybe for a few gears they'll sell you the location of the nearest "trade route" i.e. cluster. Meaning a savvy newly-spawned seraph could scrounge up a bit of currency in the first few days, and then have a good direction to scout out for settling... Or, you know, ignore the offer and just go walkabout.

I like the idea of an attire-based NPC reputation system. ofc, historically clothing was very directly tied to status and reputation. You could even tie it to cultures! Maybe certain cultural clothing begets reputation with groups, which in turn allows for the occasional opportunity to acquire even more clothing associated with that culture, thus boosting your status with them. Could be a fun way to progress... I was intrigued by a recent interaction I had with some story location NPCs that resulted in obtaining some cool culturally-distinct attire. Might end up being a way to passively buff tailor too, I imagine someone good with thread would be very valuable to most peoples in a wilderness situation just as a baseline, plus the option to craft better clothes, boosting rep. I've been thinking for a while that VS could benefit from some sort of ''cluster' generation system, which could support this really well. idk how it feasibly fits within current limitations of the engine but... what if instead of random equally distributed generated structures and NPCs the game generates 'clusters' of structure/NPC 'nodes' that are all interrelated. So like you could have like 6 or so trader structures that are all within a certain distance, and three or four traders between them with some static and some travelling between empty ones. They can tell you the approximate locations of the other stations in their 1km or so 'cluster' if you were looking for different traders. This basic clustering system of 'like with like' could be expanded to something like bandits, non NPC-related structures like ruins, and so on. Aside from this meaning we would have actual inter-relatedness of human structures, the advantage here is that you could allow for variable density in NPCs. It would depend on how these things were implemented but for example perhaps some areas are just wilderness, filled with a higher prevalence of/more lucrative ruins and maybe the odd passing nomad group or trader outpost. Other areas, have larger trader networks and maybe the odd small hunter outpost with 2-3 NPCs, as if they lie upon an important trade line or are closer to civilization, effectively marking soft 'territories'. Very very rarely you may have a larger 'settlement' with one or two outliers and more traders/bandits in the area or something... if it could at all be balanced with the game. A main payoffs here would be allowing for the feeling of 'wilderness survival', (since perhaps many large areas are just that), while also allowing for the experience of encountering the presence of fringe civilization, since if you travel in one distance for long enough, you're bound to come into contract with an NPC cluster of some kind. I feel this would fit with how a lot of the progression/resource acquisition already works, where extensively travelling for lime/borax/halite/refractory materials and even many ores is the norm, but once you find them you usually have abundant access to them.

A crop that increased fertility at the cost of lower yields than other crops would be very interesting. Legumes are nitrogen fixers, they activley increase the amount of avaliable N in soil for other plants to use.

perhaps the option to fertilize tree seeds/saplings to increase the chances of more growth height?

Surcoats would be amazing too!

I bring along some friends who are bad at building and think everything with a basic level of attention to design is amazing. Then I relentlessly flex on them to fill the gaping whole my persistent imposter syndrome has gouged out in me. Nah in all seriousness though, I rarely attempt big projects all at once, and instead focus on small 'modular' bits.

Maybe a sort of Stout/Guinness for extra nutrients?

On the subject of 'maybe you can balance something by having it unbalanced but kinda rare'... Can I please have a stick forest that's just sticks? Please Devs?

Valheim ties comfort very directly to progression but not sure that would work as well in VS. I would also expect the implementation to be a bit more limited to a handful of things and minor effects. Since VS has so many furniture options already, (near-infinite with chiseling) I don't think it's likely we'd see buffs from things like tables and chairs, but maybe more like some hanging herbs, an open fire and a rug could give a small buff to healing rate and some minor disease and cold resistance. I think you're right that a blanket 'comfort' status effect may not fit as well as specific conditions. In that vein maybe the buffs mentioned before could be specific to certain elements, so disease resistance t the herbs, cold resistance to the rug etc. (Completely random side note here, but exposure of one's skin to the infrared waves in firelight actually has beneficial effects for healing both physically and psychologically. For the physical side, apart from the warmth value and neurological signals that calm a stressed body, -allowing for activation of immune system in cell repair, - 3000nm light itself does all sorts of amazing things due to it's effects on fluid dyamics and absorption capacity in a hydrophillic capillary, measured by a thing called zeta potential. Anyway, light therapy of some sort has been used for ages in all sorts of applications to treat things with varying but usually at least moderate effectiveness.) Yes but imagine if you put it because it looks nice *and* gives you a small boost. Wouldn't it be nice?