AngryRob

I like the dark night, even though it's hard as nails to go out in it. Night in this game is legitimately scary, especially watching the wind move the reeds.

This is a weird problem. on one hand, there are a lot of mechanics that are built around exploring and prospecting. you HAVE to find resources, and the hunt for resources is very important. At the same time, if you do not find the resources you need, you are completely screwed and can not enjoy the game. It's that balance between realism and gameplay. So what can be done to fix it? There are a few solutions. Maybe improve drops during temporal storms? this forces combat and no longer makes those storms a stupid meme, but an actual, important mechanic that makes you look forward to the cthuthulu harassment day. Another one is trade, improving trade where what you can not find you can buy off of traders. So far traders are the only way i can get salt. They need an improvement, because honestly only a few of them are worth trading with. The third option, and the one i think should be really pushed, is more alternative recipes. That way if you are not able to get the resources you need, you can do some sort of alternative. I am conflicted with the ore scarcity. On one hand it disrupts my plans completely, because i am dependent on exploration. But on the other hand working around and overcoming that disruption is also very fun. Maybe the issue is not the scarcity, but with prospecting? Maybe have multiple means of prospecting that when used by themselves are inaccurate, but when used together, are more accurate? Or more geographic features that could indicate ore deposits?

Maybe fur clothing should be added to the game? We have hypothermia, so having to spend the summer making winter clothes would be great. Combine that with a dangerous frigid biome and we have recipes for shennigans! Imagine ice ruins with harsh, lethal cold but also with amazing treasure like seeds and, meteors, or the bag of never ending garlic bread! But yeah, wearing leather is great. it's good, but it is also expendable, so if i die on an exploration, i am not crying.

I have to disagree with the player progression being bad. I will use valheim as an example. I love that game, but i have raged quit two weeks ago, because i was stupid and got killed on a distant shore. My boat is there, my stuff are still there, and if i had friends i maybe could ask them to join my game and help me? Now with player progression, i really am not over in valheim now am I? i could start all over in a new world, and still keep my skills. Losing all my equipment is not a game breaking problem, i still have my skills. Also player progression means combat is NOT boring. Why fight? Why bother the drifters? just nerdpole and wait out the storms. With player progression those storms go from being a nuisance and unfun, to being an important opportunity to administer beatings and get good. Locking recipes behind skill perks is not fun, but having a demonstrateable combat skill improvement, mining improvement, and maybe even an ability to lick rocks to prospect would be great.

I would like to see that, as well as rubber trees.

Not if you craft multiples, or even a higher tier portable one. Also, maybe mob behavior should change? after all animals freak out when tornados hit, so seeing panicked mobs before a storm, as well as increased drifter aggression and wondering.

I would like to see a thaumcraft style research system. Thaumcraft could have been it's own game it added so much to minecraft. Anyway, what i mean is that after you research temporal gears you can make a temporal weather vain that will start spinning when a storm is coming. Maybe if a storm is bad enough the weather vain will need to be repaired or cleaned?

Yeah, the trick to finding bees is to explore the woods during the day and to look for the brown dots. "bees" are brown dots that fly around their hives. you can miss them if you are not paying attention. You have to be careful because you can knock out a hive and not realize it. so you will want to go from tree to tree, look for brown dots flying around, and carefully break the branches off. I am also wondering if just leaving a skep around in the forest will help? just plant some flowers around it and check back from time to time?

Currently i am finding placing some blocks to be frustrating. You have to be looking at the spot just right to get the stairs or slabs to face the direction you want. I would like to see a better block rotation system, similar to 7 days to die where you hold down the r button and select the block face that you would want.

I have started panning late game again, for brass. Make the lanterns out of brass instead of copper. This makes you copper last longer, and zinc is not used for too many things, and is found via panning. This means that you can turn stacks of sand and gravel, into lanterns. If you get a helvehammer, then you can safely mass produce them as well.

What would be neat is if some plants added nutrients, while others took them. At the same time, there is an element of RNG so that if you don't get the right seeds, you may be screwed. So maybe a good work around is poop? have animals poop, pick it up with a shovel, and have a system where it is turned into fertilizer? That would make getting animals more beneficial. As it stands you should get them asap just for steady leather and meat, as well as cheese in the future. So having a poop system where you have to clean the cages to restore nutrients to the farms would add value and realism. It would also help in finding animals, as they would leave a poop trail out in the wild.

So are temporal storms going to be a thing we have to weather, or will the be some sort of shelter we can build?

the real pain, is when you are in a "heavily explored area" and fall down a pit you have missed a million times.

apparently changing the feed worked. Pigs take flax grain, sheep take grass.

I will change the feed then.

I have a sheep, a ram, and a pig in a pin. the pig is gaining saturation, but the ewe and the ram are not. Is this a bug, or do they need something other than flax grain?

Another thought, is that instead of villages being places on the map, they can be places we build? When we trade with a trader we can buy an npc bed and then in a few days a settler will show up, and if the bed is in a well lit place they will move in and can be given work. Maybe even have skills that they level up like in hearthstone and they can do stuff around the village?

you know what breaks t3 rocks besides bronze? ore mining bombs. So it's not completely hopeless, there is a way to get bronze if you can't find tin.

During a temporal storm, i have witnessed them spawning at half height slabs, and at full height slabs. So slabs are debunked as a means to prevent drifter spawns. I am going through and chiseling each block in my panic room now to see if that prevents spawning during the next storm.

Does difficulty really drive away the casual player? We have been told this for years, but the commodore 64 was an entire console of difficult games. Arcades were all about difficult games. Dark souls and that sekiru game are popular among the causal player. Part of me wonders if that was industry propaganda to suppress new ideas so that they can milk their has been ips forever. Is grind in a game bad if the grind is fun? I am of the opinion that even though vintage story is far more hard core than minecraft, that the casual audience would dive into this game because the difficulty makes the rewards that much sweeter. Maybe that is why some pvp communities get so toxic? Maybe that is the only reward those players get from that type of game? I have also noticed that people became jerks after the whole console achievements stuff hit.

Is it pvp that makes those communities toxic? Dark souls had pvp, but that community is pretty awesome. This is not really a combat game, its more of a "do not starve to death game", and i think once the survival aspects are ramped up people will not be wanting pvp as much. I have noticed that the games where the environment is very dangerous have nice communities. Rust has a controversial community, yet 7 days to die which is very similar has a nicer one. Based on my observations, the competitive games draw in people who think everything has to be a navy seal exercise, while the nasty real world survival games draw in a more intellectual crowed that is cooler.

A directional block/attack would not be hard conceptually with the animals. You know the wolf attack, because they pounce, so you would block in that direction. Same with sheep. They are animals after all, so they should be easier to read. Now drifters already have multiple attack variants, and those already do give indicators. The animals give good loot already, meat and hides. Drifters? I get the feeling that the loot they have is placeholders at the moment, kinda like the feathers that zombies used to drop....

Easy readability to allow for reaction based actionsTo be able to react to an action, the player has to be able to read which action he has to react to. The first person perspective and limited animation system can make this hard from just animations alone, requiring very expressive and clear animations and sound effects. So if this was implemented, then a system of directional based blocking like in mount and blade could be thrown in. It would improve combat. Let me throw in my 2 cents here, and 32 years of gaming experience. I try to avoid combat in vintage story, because it is neither fun nor rewarding. The first example that comes to my mind is soul reaver for the Playstation. Once you recharged the soul reaver, you no longer wanted to fight the vampires. Killing vampires and eating their souls was the core loop of the game, and it was rendered tedious by another core loop the very sword the game was based on. Fast forward decades later to dragon block c mod for minecraft. That took the bad minecraft mechanic, and added bare minimum flashy effects and a crappy rpg system. This simple change made minecraft a bad combat experience, to a very fun combat experience. I found myself downloading other mods to add more mobs to beat up because i wanted to be extremely op because dragon ball. The point i want to make:combat is currently unrewarding. The drops on the drifters are meh. temporal gear? meh i get those from panning for copper. Rusty gear? meh. Flax fiber? hell yeah i need tons of those. Now if they had a block of haliite things would be different, i would be hunting drifters into extinction because this game gets it, salt is more valuable than gold. The economy in the game is spot on in that regard. you can become a king in a server if you discover a halite deposite and mine it for yourself. There needs to be some sort of reward to the combat, either a fun new grind, a better drop, or an xp gain.

I was thinking the player would be sucked into a special dimension that would be similar to the area, but with a village and people. when you walk out of the boundaries you get teleported back to the spot you used the gear. It could very well be difficult to impossible to implement, then again, i have seen modders do insane things that even developers thought would be impossible, and from what i understand, Tyron used to be a modder...

I would not mind seeing underground settlements, or using a temporal gear over a village ruin to go back in time to trade with them.