Allen

So uh, crazy thing. I was starting to run low, so I started digging a mineshaft near the very high copper reading near my base and... I found hematite. Well, to be exact, my prospecting pick's node search mode turned up a reading for hematite. I haven't actually found the vein yet, and considering the hematite reading for the area was really low, I don't expect there to be much ores anyways, but uh... that should help a lot when looking for that ultra-high iron chunk. But also, because it occurred to me while I was digging. Once I get a reading, do I just... dig down until I hit something? Because that's what I did, but as I'm currently expanding the mineshaft, I realize I very easily could have just missed various ore veins I found if I'd dug in a slightly different position. Like 3~4 blocks to the the side or up and I would have missed the giant copper vein I've currently stopped on. If I hadn't tried out my prospecting pick at the exact moment, or I dug like a few blocks to the other side, I would have missed the hematite reading. I mean, it does look like the ores I get will more than cover for all costs of me digging this stupid deep hole, but like, I can't be that lucky all the time, can I?

Well I did find a very high copper reading nearby, so worst comes to worst I guess I can tap into that for more tools. More prospecting it is then!

Finally trying to step into the iron age, poking around with the prospecting pick to find some iron. So apparently the poor/decent/etc next to the ore the prospecting pick shows is the chance for ore to be there, and not like, the actual ore. So the question is, does say 'decent' actually give a decent chance of finding ore, or should I just skip all but very/ultra high readings? Second, is digging around in quartz veins I find for possible gold/silver worth it or no?

Fucking bees. I spent days without finding a single one, and now that I've found one and am in the long process of waiting for a skep to fill, I immediately find like 4 other beehives.

Mostly a half a day to a day's walk/sprint away from spawn. Figured I'd use it to find nearby copper/etc to enter the metal age proper while I'm at it, so I was searching nearby forests one at a time. I did check the temperature/rain every now and then to make sure I'm not looking in the wrong place entirely, but otherwise, it was go to the forest, walk around all over until I'm fairly certain I've searched everywhere, move the the next forest, rinse and repeat. Though, now that I've found enough metal for an anvil, I'm considering moving further south by maybe a day or two to search, after some base renovations for proper storage and such. I might try the mod if I get too frustrated. Haven't been using any mods so far but I've only heard good things so. edit: I think I found my problem. Made a creative world and spawned in a beehive so I know what it sounds like. It took like 8 blocks for the sound to lower to a point where I could barely hear it and would probably just write it off as background noise if I heard it in my survival world amidst all the other sounds like water/footsteps/etc. Guess I'm getting that mod to find my bees.

Found a forest with like 50% maple trees so wandering there with music set to 0, weather sounds to 10%, and ambient and master volumes at 100%. Just walking all around the woods to check out every corner I can. No bees so far. But hey, I did find 2 ingots worth of copper nuggets, so can't complain I suppose. But at this point, I might end up getting my first candle from all this bony soil I'm picking up before I find a single bee.

Is there some latitude they spawn more frequently or something? Do I need to head more south so it becomes warmer? Because I've been searching for days and haven't found a single hive. Doesn't help that forests are extremely annoying to explore both due to heavily limited visibility and being home to wolves and bears.

These are my personal thoughts, but considering what temporal storms do(reduce stability, spawn drifters), and how the game is being made with the lovecraftian mythos in mind, a temporal storm seems to be something like a sudden sharp decrease in temporal stability. 'Temporal' means 'relating to time or worldly things'. As a temporal storm doesn't seem to effect time, we can assume 'temporal' in temporal storm/temporal stability means 'worldly'. So when a temporal storm happens or when you're in low stability areas in general, the very world is becoming unstable. This fits the lovecraftian themes the game is said to be going for, and explains why drifters during temporal storms flicker. They're dimensionally unstable. Considering the broken translocators in ruins use temporal gear, I think it's plausible that the current state of the world in vintage story is that some advanced civilization messed with some lovecraft horror dimension and got wiped out. Temporal storms happen because whatever said civilization did made the world unstable, causing crap to leak over from the horror dimension place causing instabilities. Drifters would then be things from said horror dimension, or maybe things that 'drift' between dimensions, that are finding their way into the world thanks to it being unstable. So temporal storms and drifters would be an alien 'intruder' to an otherwise natural world. Or not. I don't know what the devs are thinking or what they're plans are any more than anyone else. Anyways, my point is, not everything has to be 'natural thing that happens here and the world grew up/was shaped around/with it' for something to be a part of a story or lore. Lots of stories have some outside influence or other dimensional corruption that, depending on how far it's progressed, don't feel like they belong because that's the entire point. Of course we don't know what the devs are planning since the game, and especially the lore/fantasy stuff, are really early in development and the things are pretty bare bones, but I don't think calling it an afterthought because it's not fully fleshed out yet is a fair assessment. That said, I don't like temporal storms very much because the screen wavy effect gives me motion sickness really easy. You also can't really protect yourself against the effects which kinda sucks.

It should seal as long as you have the necessary amount of limewater. I never use exact amounts for my leatherworking and haven't had any problems.

Have to agree. I prefer literally anything else to the combat update because you know new stuff, but the unrefined combat frustrates me way more than say, the lack of fish or fruit trees.

Agreed. Actually trying to gather enough seashells to do any reasonable lime stuff is super annoying as the amount of type and color combinations means you're probably going to have one seashell per slot when you're trying to gather them, so you can only gather very few at a time, and since each shell gives a pitiful amount of lime it takes way too many trips to get enough lime to do.. well, anything worthwhile really. Personally, I think it'll be very nice of all seashells drop a genetric seashell item that gives a random shell when you place it(you can choose the color/type when placing it like knapping recipies or something), so you can keep all the shells in one slot.

Hmm, better save the chicken farming for 1.15 and go for the sheep then.

I was trying to heard a nearby group of chickens into my farm, but ran into some wolves on the way and well, long story short, I no longer have chickens near my base. Do farm animals respawn over time, or do I have to track down a chicken from further away and lead that into my base? Because if so, I might just get rid of the chicken coops I'm working on altogether and just raise some sheep instead. Chickens are way too annoying to chase around to try and farm for me to try getting them from that far away.

Having played with some mods/games with cave-ins, cave-in's in games generally aren't a threat unless a player is being really careless. It makes you use up more resources during caving to make the supports, but that's generally it, since well used supports will negate the dangers of a cave-in. It's also generally not a danger for exploring generated caves, so without some sort of threat, it's easy for someone to just walk down a cave, mark all the ores, them come back with some supports for easy mining. Underground fire/smoke can be resolved by not placing too many dangerous light sources, not a problem since you're no longer trying to stop spawns, just light the place enough to see. Also, unless there's going to be some complex thing to make it only work in caves or only have them set supports on fire, you'll probably need a 'safe' light source for using in buildings as well, which could be used to negate the fire/smoke dangers. Basically, the problem I see with environmental threats is that once you know what they are, they can generally be easily bypassed, especially in games like this when things are generated randomly and the player can easily shape the world around them.

It doesn't need monsters and mysterious magic weather sure, but I don't think that necessarily means we shouldn't have them. For one, having fantasy monsters means the game devs have much more freedom in where they place a threat and how dangerous it is. Like caves, for example. Not a lot of animals live in caves, and the few who do are usually small and only live close to the entrance. If we only used real life creatures in the game, deep caves would be essentially risk free to explore.

I personally wish the propic could just work if you right clicked a block or something. Having to make random holes in the ground is annoying and to top it off, the propic isn't really that fast at digging, making it all the more annoying. I think the point is being able to prospect exactly where you want easily, making it much easier to make a sample grid. Which I guess is kind of an exploit, but I dunno, is having people dig down for like 2~3 blocks of dirt when they want to prospect really that important?

This would be really nice, especially when you're hunting for seashells because you don't have an easy source of lime near your base. Alternatively, I think something similar to skyrim's weight system would be cool too. Not something exactly like it, but something like giving items a value like say, 'bulk' and having your inventory limited not by slots, but by the total 'bulk' you can carry. Either way, it'd be really nice to have a way to not get your inventory cluttered by a bunch of tiny items, especially when a good number of them are 'this thing, but minorly different'.

The horizontal only version works great, but I personally found 'vertical only' to be a lot less great as when I try to use that mode, I keep on placing the slab at right angles to the direction I want to place for some reason.

A quick google search says straw can be used for animal feed, though they're not as good as things like hay, and generally require a supplement of better feed to make up for the nutrients it lacks. Either way, I think alternate ways to obtain animal feed wouldn't be bad, though I can't really say for certain since I haven't quite gotten around to raising animals myself.

Speaking of food preservation, if you get a chest/vessel and want food to last even longer, just bury the vessel/chest of food in the ground. The hole will count as a 'cellar' once you cover it and slows down food rotting even more.

Surface ores always have an ore deposit below it. Mark all the surface copper nugget locations on the map, and when you gather enough nuggets for a pick and hammer, mine out all the ores under the nuggets. I have enough copper for nearly 2~3 full set of tools and I didn't even mine out a tenth of all the surface copper I found around my spawn. The game probably should explain a lot of things better. The in game guide is rather lacking in a lot of aspects. Though, rotating crops is generally enough considering 3 nutrient types and crops generally taking 3~4 days to grow. If you grew a P crop, dropping P nutrient levels, grow some K and N crops and you'll give P around 7~8ish days to recover, which I found was usually enough to keep everything more or less topped off. Using better soil for farmland also helps. Or use fertilizers. Bones are fairly common, and even just refilling one nutrient type means you can give the other types more time to recover. Also, crops draining the nutrients in the ground is.... kinda how it works in real life. There's a reason farmers use a lot of fertilizer. Probably because it's not as big of a priority. And while I do agree that some alternate fruit would be nice, not sure if we really need more crops atm. I mean, say we add potatoes and corn. What would it really add gameplay wise? Animals do need to be fed, not to keep them alive, yeah, but to have them be productive in any way. Yes, no water, but you don't drink either, so eh. Definitely agree we need some method of moving animals around easier. The current 'method' is basically 'we haven't implemented a system to move animals, so uh, try to make do with whatever animal mechanics we have'. Considering how animals are only going to get more important(like goats for cheese), a easier way to bring them to your farm is really going to be necessary to avoid frustration Horsetail+cattail makes a horsetail reed poultice, which iirc heals you for 2hp. The game has both wooden paths and dirt paths to make roads/walkways, and they boost walk speed. Wooden paths require aged wood, the dirt ones are just dirt and rocks. Can't say I'm a fan of how they look though, would personally prefer it if all blocks had different walk speeds(with 'artificial' blocks generally having better walk speed than 'natural' blocks) so you can make paths out of blocks you like. Firstly, that's... basically how ores work in this game as well. All ores can be found underground(Ok, some ores don't appear in certain stone types, but it's not that hard to walk out and find a stone type that does have the ores you're looking for), they're found at different levels and have different rarities, and certain ores require certain tier of pick to obtain. Also, the propick is a very complicated thing to use, but it isn't sucky, and can help you locate ores fairly well if you know how to use it. Getting to those ores is another matter, but the propick will make finding ores much easier if you make use of it.

The game tells me I've played it for about 24 hours now and I just experienced my first temporal storm, so I thought now would be a good time as any to write up my experience with the game so far. Overall, I enjoyed the game quite a lot. Everything looks really nice, the hands-on crafting was fun, and there's a lot of stuff to get into. The chiseling system is also really cool, though I haven't nearly enough artistic talent to make full use of it. The crop nutrition is super easy to understand, which was nice. I initially thought ores were really hard to find, but once I started playing for a while, I kinda realized that A: copper is freaking everywhere, and B: Copper is perfectly good for 94% of things you'll do. Some (granted rather minor)annoyances I had were: 1. Inability to carry large loads over large distances. Maybe I had a really unlucky spawn, but I had neither fire clay, chalk/limestone, or much ores other than copper and quartz near my spawn, so I ended up having to do a lot of walking around for stuff. It gets better as you get better bags, but long distance exploration/resource gathering is still pretty annoying since there are multiple things you can find that you'd want to carry, so you often have to leave stuff behind if you're off exploring any respectable distance. 2. Gathering seashells is really annoying. There's like 6 different types with 4~5 color variations, none of them stack, and each seashell gives iirc 2 lime each. Inventory space is limited, and you need loads of seashells to do anything more than very small scale lime stuff. Lots of trips, lots of back and forth, pretty annoying all things considered. 3. You can't have non-cellar type blocks next to cellar walls as the game would interpret that as your cellar not having a 100% stone wall and make your cellar crappier. Which wasn't very nice because I had to choose between having a nice looking cellar with wooden 'shelves'(made some half-slab 'shelves' to put my second row of storage vessels. Had item spoil rate increase from around 0.28ish to 0.32, which isn't much, yes, but still rather annoying) or having a uglier cellar that stored food better. 4.The temporal storm makes your screen go all weird which made me feel slightly sick, and I'm hoping there's an option to disable the vision thing that I missed. And because I don't think I showed enough appreciation for it: This game looks really good. I especially love how the night sky looks. I could stare at it for (in-game)hours.

Another thing about mob/nature block destruction, at least from my experience with minecraft or similar, is that it often leaves lots of ugly landscape scars that can be unpleasant to see and hard to get rid of, since generally, nature does not recover from damage done to it.

Sounds like a bug. I have 0 problems making meals out of mushrooms or cranberries.

When I say 'casual' I mean people who don't have the drive or time to really sink their time into difficult games to really learn them. I think the biggest issue of the 'difficulty can turn away casual gamers' is defining what exactly a 'casual gamer' is. And there is a group of people who will get turned away at difficult games and high learning curves, what we refer to them as doesn't change the fact that they exist. You say dark souls and sekiro are popular among the casual player. Maybe it is. I enjoy both games a lot and I consider myself a pretty casual gamer. However, if you check steam achievements, you'll note nearly 20% of people who got dark souls on steam never made it past Iudex Gundyr, and almost 40% didn't make it past Vordt. It's the same for Sekiro. around 40% of people who got the game on steam didn't make it past the first boss. Difficulty makes for sweeter rewards, but that only gets people into the game if they can, you know, achieve those rewards. Grind by itself might not be bad, but even if the grind is fun, if someone just hates grinding, they're not gonna play the game. Similarly, high difficulty by itself might not be bad, but raising the skill floor will inadvertently keep out players who isn't willing to or simply can't invest the time/effort/etc needed to reach that skill floor. And if you make it look too difficult, people might not even try it out in the first place. There are plenty of stories of people who didn't buy dark souls because 'I'm a casual gamer and I heard it's really hard'. . Going back to PvP and toxicity, I think it's really just unlike most PvE/non competitive were if you loose, you don't have much to blame other than the game or yourself, in PvP, if you loose, you have lots of people to blame, and all those people, along with you, are part of the game's community. Kinda happens sometimes with cooperative PvE too. It's like telling two(or more) people to fight each other for multiple rounds with only a very distracted referee who's watching several hundred other games and (usually) loose rules to keep them in check, and hoping everyone comes out of it all nice and sportsmanship like.