Porkbrick

Let’s go with the temporal satiation idea. I don’t think you have to incentivize the builder. Like nutrition, there’s really no downside to not sleeping, but for the explorer or miner there would be an incentive in the form of better or higher temporal resistance.

If pressing left shift to wake up early was easier or more accurate I’d have no problem with the variable sleep.

I think treating sleep and temporal stability like eating and hunger are treated could be interesting, easy, and rewarding. Sleeping gives you temporal “satiety”. Better beds offer better or longer lasting satiation. this way, totally ignoring sleep just results in base stability same as it is now, but getting regular sleep or recent sleeping allows you to spend more time in unstable areas or recover your gear faster.

My impetus for starting this discussion was mainly to get at the question of why does vintage story have a sleep mechanic at all? The way I see it there are three main broad justifications for having a sleep system. 1. “realism”. You need sleep in real life. Not getting enough sleep is detrimental. If you want a “realistic “ survival experience, sleep and lack of it adds to that style of play. Personally I’m not a fan of hard core realism in this case ( you can carry a million ton of stone on your back ffs). 2. Sleep as a game mechanic. This is more or less what it is currently. Its only use right now is as a pseudo time skipping device. Too many drifters to work outside? Waiting for that pit kiln to finish? Sleep through the night and you save a little waiting time. Like I’ve said before, I think it’s fine if that’s all sleep ever is, but I think it could improve a little if that’s the case. Besides time travel there are a lot of other mechanics that could involve or revolve around sleep. Food satiety and sleep, working speed and sleep, hunger levels and sleep… etc. ton of things to play with, maybe too contentious or disruptive to implement. 3. Lore relevance for sleep. I think this one could be most interesting. Do seraphs need sleep to stay temporally stable? Are the rust creatures attracted to those who are not temporally strong? If you go too long without sleep could you bring on a storm, or hold one off by getting sleep? I think there is a lot of room for something really interesting without making it punitive or Immersion breaking. Do I think the way sleep is handled currently really needs to change? No. It’s fine as is. Like I said my only nitpick is that I wish it was easier to time how long you sleep when you do. But I do think there are a lot of fun and interesting things that could be done with the mechanic. Tying it into lore and temporal stability seems really interesting to me. As for the multiplayer aspect. It seems to me that what we have now is really not very usable when you get more than a handful of players involved. Everyone has to cooperate and lie down at the same time. That is no good if sleep is a survival element and lack of is punishing. Also doesn’t really make sense as a time skip device. For any of the options there would need to be some way of adapting it to or disabling it entirely in multiplayer. And anything involving consequences should of course be optional, like temporal stability, water block moving, cave ins, and soil stability.

I wonder if maybe a first step could be to treat nut trees like extra large fruit trees. One of the things high on my vintage story wishlist is big oak, chestnuts, hickory, and walnuts that drop nuts in the fall. Real life large nut tees like these were incredibly important to Neolithic and hunter gatherer societies. The fall nut harvest would be a real boon to survival over winter. I don’t think they would need to “grow “ like apples, etc. but the branch structure and leaf drops as well as the fruit maturity system could be adapted. Obviously the trunk would be full sized and breaking the branches wouldn’t necessarily drop cuttings. Maybe mid sized branches could drop firewood as well as sticks. if deciduous trees did drop leaves in fall that opens up the possibility of having those leaves be a material with practical uses.

Yeah, I’m not invested either way. I’m fine if sleep remains a time skip mechanic. My only real gripe with the way it is now is not being able to easily wake up when I want to. Either the bed doesn’t let you sleep long enough to reach morning, or you miss time it and wake up with most of the morning gone. all the other stuff is fun to think about, but definitely not crucial. I’ll definitely check out xskills. thinking about it, I actually have no idea how sleep works right now in a multiplayer game. I’ve only played solo and lan games with my son. We just both sleep at the same time.

Is there any reason other than coding complexity or processing for deciduous tree species not losing their leaves in game? Fruit trees do it, but maybe a whole forest is just too much and would slow down the game?

Sleep already is in the game. It just seems not really very functional beyond skipping time. I don’t want it to be punishing at all, rather there should be rewards for getting enough. Negative outcomes for lack of sleep could be included in all sorts of interesting ways, but they should be optional at world creation, like cave-ins and mob hostility. That way, if you don’t want to sleep you’re free to play that way, but there is some positive incentive to doing it. Kind of like nutrition. I don’t think I’ve ever really paid attention to nutrition in the game, I know it’s there, and I know how it works, but ignoring it doesn’t really affect my gameplay. I like that it’s there if I want to put in the effort for the reward, but I’m not really punished if I don’t pay attention to it ( and it kind of naturally works in a more positive direction just by playing normally). I think regular sleep could offer similar, more or less positive rewards, and for those who want a more challenging mechanic there is a lot of space to come up with creative and maybe lore relevant negatives for lack of sleep.

“the only idea I don't like the waking up at dawn no matter “ maybe not no matter what, but at least a more accurate or consistent way to wake up at a certain time. I’m not a huge fan of trying to time left shift only miss time it and sleep through half of a short winter day. Or similarly, go to bed at dusk only to wake up at midnight and sit in the dark for the rest of the night. Right now sleep as a time travel mechanic leaves something to be desired. “although walk speed made add a lot of difficulty in gameplay (say if you find yourself "suddenly tired" and the controls don't feel right just as you about to take on a shotile mob for instance).” agreed. Any effect on something like walk speed or fighting ability definitely should now lead do a steep ramp up of difficulty. Especially in early game where survival is hard enough. Making good sleep boost your speed rather than the other way around could work. Or if lack of sleep did slow you down maybe something like an adrenaline boost could be involved. You get a temporary speed boost the first time you take damage in a day or something. That way, even if you’re “exhausted “ you could still run away effectively. but like I said, I prefer to limit the negative effects if possible.

Currently, sleep seems to not serve much of a purpose in vs beyond skipping a high rift night,dark in general, or to pass time waiting for some process to finish. I think it would be interesting if there was some sort of bonus for getting adequate sleep like there is for having a balanced diet. One idea is that maybe if you recently slept, food eaten would give a boosted satiety. Another idea would be that for a given number of hours sleep you could boost your walking speed and/or working speed (digging, mining, chopping). I’m not really a fan of having a tiredness or fatigue bar as such, but it would be nice to have sleep serve slightly more impactful purpose. As far as negative consequences for lack of sleep, I think they shouldn’t be too nagging or super disruptive (it needs to definitely not discourage big building projects or long mining trips). A couple thoughts: the other block game spawns a unique enemy if you fail to sleep for more than three days. Maybe the longer you go without sleep after a point, the higher the chance of high rift activity or the higher the tier of enemies that tend to naturally spawn. Maybe you go too long without sleep and you either start do drain your temporal stability fast or trigger a storm. Could also reward frequent sleep with increased time between temp storms. Or reward sleep with with better temporal durability ( ie your gear won’t wind down as fast in an unstable area if you are well rested). Also, I would like it if beds would default wake you at dawn no matter what tier they are. The higher the tier the better to rest you get for any given hour of sleep (more comfortable!).

I was thinking that with water only created from meta block “springs” you could assign a flow rate to those blocks. If the all had a standard flow rate the you would spawn more springs the larger the water body. Or you could vary the flow rate of blocks based on how big the body they nee to feed. In either case, if you dig an outflow into a body it wouldn’t empty unless to outflow exceeds the input. So a single spring block could keep up with a single block size trench, but if you widened it out to two it would start to drain. The larger the outflow the faster it drains.

Maybe this is too much, but just trying to distill this down Water spawns only from “spring” meta blocks. They are unbreakable and immovable. As long as the bottom or a side is unobstructed they will continuously spawn water. The do not spawn water from the upper face. They cannot be destroyed by placing a block in them. Spawners will not spawn water above their own level. At spawn, all bodies of water generate with one or more spawn block somewhere in them, at least one of which will spawn at the surface water level and always next to a solid block (no spawners in the middle of the water column). Rivers/streams would spawn with one or more springs as their source. Water behavior. An exposed spring block will propagate flowing water outwards in any open direction until it reaches the flow distance limit, flows over an edge or hits a solid block face or still water block. If it flows over an edge it will reset flow distance and continue, like vanilla does now. If it hits a solid block face it will become a full still water block. This transformation will propagate back towards the source of the flow. If the propagation reaches the spring block it will stop. If there is no path for the water to flow out of a body of water, the entire body of water should be still water blocks. As long as there is at least one open space somewhere at or below the spring level there should be a path of moving water from the spring to the outlet opening. If the still water propagation leads back to a flowing water block above its level, and there are not other flowing water blocks in the body of water, then flowing water will start to propagate at the next block level up. This propagation back and forth will continue until the water flows over an edge. If at any point a still water block is not connected in an uninterrupted line to a spring, it will dissipate (the rate at which it dissipates can be based on a simple timer or tied to other factors like rainfall, substrate, temperature, etc.). Water propagation and basin filling continues all the way to sea level. At sea level some mechanism stops horizontal flowing from propagation above saltwater blocks. That way water can flow into the ocean, but it will never raise the surface level, or cause any odd water mounds or flowing water on top of sea water. Yes this probably leads to computing nightmares, but I don’t care. Just trying figure out the mechanics first. Interactions: gravel sand and mud don’t count as solid blocks in this system as far as water goes. These blocks will waterlog and flowing water will pass through them. Optionally they could waterlog but water could only flow through a limited number of contiguous blocks(maybe only one or two). That would prevent whole deserts from becoming waterlogged. Waterlogged mud, sand and gravel would allow for the possible creation of aquifers and swamps with minimal spring blocks. Waterlogging could also make for some fun with peat. A live peat moss block would be neat. It can propagate waterlogged infinitely from one to the other but would not allow flowing water to pass through. That could make for a peat bog to be a thing. Water flow distance over block could vary based on material. Sand and gravel have the shortest flow distance, followed by mud and soil. Rock and wood have the longest flow distance by a lot. This allows for stone aqueducts and craft-able wood troughs and flumes. Craft-able ceramic and metal water pipes. Axe and logs to make wood water troughs. Pumps (wind, water). Dowsing sticks for finding underground water sources? Things that need to be worked out: Obviously it would be not good to have a bunch of water propagating and path finding from scratch on world gen or as chunks load. Somehow it would need to be fully calculated out during world gen. Either all the spring blocks would need to be contained (so only lakes and ponds like vanilla generation is now) so there is no flowing water, or streams and rivers would need to be pre calculated and pre-filled before hand. That way you don’t spawn into a map where half the valleys are filling up with water and eating up your frame rates. How would large areas fill? If the water behaved like I described above, I think that if caused water to start flowing into a basin it would fill the basin as long as there wasn’t a flat stretch of ground exceeding the surface flow distance. If say water is set to only flow 8 blocks horizontally then any basin with a flat area wider than that would stop filling at that point. Otherwise would continue to fill until it overflowed somewhere. Any body of water with an inflow and an outflow would have a channel of moving water leading between them. Saturated blocks could be used to stop flowing water and prevent basins from filling and overflowing? I’m not sure about this one. I think it would be good if there was a way to stop a basin from overflowing, but maybe placing gravel anywhere along the edge is too simple? Digging a canal the irrigate farmland should end up flooding the entire valley. again: I have no clue how any of this would be programmed, or if it’s even possible In a way that doesn’t eat too much processing. Just fun. To think about. Cheers!

There are two main motives for me with this idea. One is a little more “realism” with how water works real world. And the other is just thinking of ways to model water behavior so that it interacts well with mechanical systems. On the first one, being able to spawn infinite water once you’ve got a bucket is a little too easy and doesn’t really fit with the other aspects of the game that try to stay closer to reality (but obviously only to a point). Having to dig a canal is kind of the point as far as that goes. I don’t know if propagating source blocks is the best way to go about it, but the other realism breaking mechanic that bothers me is having random flowing water surrounded by full water blocks. It should somehow fill back up when you remove blocks. Maybe some other way would work. Maybe water source blocks and “full” water blocks could be separate objects. Lakes, ponds, rivers, etc could all have “springs” feeding them, so digging a canal would fill with water by as soon as it gets cut off from the source it would go dry. the second motive, interaction with mechanical systems, just aims to make water power balanced in some way. It would strike me as a little too easy if you could just build a mill wherever and bucket down some water to make it work. I would rather the player have to consider the location based on the location of the water sources. with boats coming with 1.20 I don’t look forward to manually filling canals if I want to connect lakes etc. I think having the option to toggle bucket source block on and of would definitely need to be an option. I don’t want to force anyone to dig irrigation ditches who doesn’t want to!

Interesting. It would be really neat if that was true about the traders and instability.

Is there a mod or plans to implement in game a buildable translocator finding device? Looking around with no clip in creative there seems to be quite a few translocators down in caverns with no connection to the surface and really no way to stumble into them.

Another thought on the erosion idea: untilled soil next to moving water could turn into muddy gravel. Could then have muddy gravel turn into gravel or sand. Soil next to still water would stop at muddy gravel. Moving water could also affect soil stability. Banks 2 or more blocks tall next to flowing water would destabilize.

Just throwing down an idea I’ve been thinking about. Water source blocks shouldn’t be moveable. What if lakes, ponds, and springs were all water sources, you can take water from them, but placing water wouldn’t result in a permanent source. Extent the distance water flows horizontally so that digging irrigation canals and aqueducts would be a practical way of getting water to where you need it. Could even adjust to flow distance based on the block below. Sand and gravel would flow the least distance while stone and wood would go really far. Possibly having water source blocks propagate similar to mine craft. If you enlarged a pond, it would propagate to fill up to, but not necessarily above the surface level. Only 3 wide could propagate. Maybe too easily abused, but could offer a way to make large scale aqueducts and canals. It would be fun to be able to craft flumes, pipes, and pumps. Windmill pumps! something like a rawhide/pelt waterskin might be nice for early game water movement. No idea if it’s practical or not, but could be cool. if rivers are ever implemented, I would be really interesting to explore an erosion mechanic. Erosion could be tied to flowing water, and maybe even rain. Your dirt hut would eventually wash away in the rain if you didn’t put a roof on it! cheers

i did look at oneroof. i really like the eve overhang, and its awesome that it has the roof block that has a "universal" base material (base takes on whatever material its set on). unfortunately the shallow roof angle are only able to be made with 2 blocks side by side. i couldn't figure out how to fix the shape in place, so, adding another block changes the block next to it.

i would love, love to have a roofing slab with a 22.5 degree slope that can be placed just like normal slabs. that is all. it would make me so so happy. while were at it, how about an eve/overhang roof block? doesn't need to be insulating, just a nice way to make roof overhangs and eves without the square block bottoms showing.