LadyWYT

I mean...I don't know about anyone else, but eating the same thing all the time gets a little stale, so I'll change what I'm cooking from time to time--it doesn't really need any buffs attached to it. Likewise, I don't think it's really a bad thing if players decide they want to maximize efficiency and only eat redmeat-turnip stew and berry pies, or if they decide they just really love blueberry pie and want that to be the backbone of their diet. The problem with RNG is that if the player isn't getting consistent buff strengths, then they're going to end up getting frustrated when one meal provides a really good buff and then cooking the same meal sometime later gives a weaker version of the buff. And of course, if specific ingredients are required for specific buffs, then you end up with frustrated players when they can't get the buffs they want because they don't have access to the ingredients they need. With all due respect, I don't see how this really improves on the current system or doesn't force players into very specific diets. It sounds similar to Valheim's food system, where eating different foods provides different levels of health and stamina--you eat whatever is appropriate for the job you intend to be doing. The drawback to Valheim's food system though is that you get forced into eating the same things all the time, because some foods are drastically better than others so if you don't eat them, you're effectively hamstringing yourself. There's no point to eating roast boar, venison stew, or queen's jam anymore when you have serpent stew, wolf kabobs, and onion soup, since the latter provide significantly more benefit. In the context of Vintage Story, you get shoehorned into always eating specific meals for specific tasks, so if you wanted to eat a redmeat pie before going fishing that's just too bad if some other meal offers a more appropriate buff; you could still eat the pie of course, but you're just not going to be able to do the task as effectively as you would by eating the proper meal. Other issues that arise are the fact that you can't just eat whenever you want--you need to be hungry first, which also means that you can't just switch buffs on a whim. Likewise, there's also the question of what happens when the player can only eat part of a meal, but not the full thing.

Welcome to the forums! Not really, and the "tier level" of the material doesn't necessarily determine where you can find it, though it should be noted that different materials have different depth ranges at which they can spawn. I've seen plenty of copper and tin deposits buried deep in the earth(sometimes near bedrock), as well as a few iron deposits that were around y=90. Do keep in mind though that surface deposits for copper and tin aren't the same thing as the deep ore deposits; surface deposits tend to be rather small but more accessible, while deep ore deposits take more effort to locate and extract but provide much more ore for the effort.

Luckily, there just so happens to be a mod for that: https://mods.vintagestory.at/notemporalstability

It's an interesting idea, but I don't really see a point. Players should be able to pick the class they want to play upfront, without needing to jump through extra hoops just to get to the class they want to play, at least in the context of Vintage Story. Tutorials for each class aren't really needed since while each classes does have advantages and disadvantages, none of the traits are strong enough that the player will need to drastically alter their playstyle to accommodate.

I mean, it is kind of unfinished, after a fashion, in the procedural dungeons only shipped with one general type, and a few of the berry bushes(like the kumquat) seem to have been pushed back. Which is understandable--the devs packed a LOT into 1.22, complete with a lot of restructuring, and at some point one has to say enough's enough and just get what's there polished and shipped so players can play with the new toys and get used to the changes. At that point you can take a break as needed before working on the next update. I'd be surprised if we didn't get more survival challenges in addition to the combat; I'm guessing that the status effect system might be added alongside the combat changes, which should put more pressure on the player across various areas of the game and not just in the combat scenarios. Survival isn't so easy if you can catch a cold because you decided to work in the rain, or broke your leg because you decided to jump off the roof instead of using the ladder, especially if such afflictions actually take a bit of time and effort to fully heal. In fairness, I think the alpha designs are done in grayscale on purpose, in order to focus more on the contrast and design without getting distracted by the colors. Light and shadow can make or break a design, and drawing the image in grayscale first can help you get the balance correct before adding color. Keeping teal for the temporal elements also helps isolate them from the rest of the design, so it's easier to tell at a glance which parts of the design are supposed to really pop versus which don't need to draw as much attention. Jumping right to colors is also possible, but doing so can make it a little harder to spot certain issues with a design.

I wouldn't rule out bugs or mod interference, if you're playing with mods, but the first thing I would check is the storm strength. Light storms are relatively mild and don't have much visual distortion, and are also the most likely ones you'll see towards the start of the game. If the world is still fairly new, it's more likely that the storms just haven't gotten strong enough to produce the really funky effects yet.

A hot air balloon or zeppelin wouldn't be a bad option. It'd be expensive, slow, and careful management of fuel/ballast, but as a late game option it could be pretty fun to build and maintain some sort of airship, especially if you're playing with friends. In terms of flight risks, I'm not sure it'd be necessary to get this complicated. Fuel regulation is pretty much a given, and icing is dangerous(especially if it chokes the engine or disables instruments). Flying into clouds is risky because not only can you not see approaching hazards, but certain cloud types can contain strong updrafts and downdrafts, as well as hail and other unpleasant things. Oxygen is a risk, but I think that's something that doesn't need to be worried about here since that's going to be difficult to translate into a game mechanic(VS already compresses altitude effects by quite a lot), and the kind of aircraft that VS would have, if added, would probably be based on the earliest examples of flying machines and not likely to be flying all that high. If lightning strikes a hot air balloon, I'm pretty sure things will go BOOM, so gliding to safety isn't really something to worry about. If the balloon is just too damaged to continue flying or catches fire, then the player may have enough time to bail out and use the glider to land safely.

When life gives you no doors, simply punch a hole in reality and carry on like nothing happened?

As much as I would love to see more story in 1.23, I don't mind if it's pushed back to 1.24. That gives the devs time to focus on adding status effects(which I think was supposed to be in 1.22 and didn't quite make the cut) and improve the combat--both of which the community has been requesting for quite some time and which will likely also be a bit time-consuming to implement properly. Writing and polishing new lore and tying it in seamlessly with the old is no simple feat either, and should really be the focus of its own update, with more minor changes accompanying it. Plus it's probably easier to balance new combat systems first, and then add new creatures and tweak them as needed once players have had time to adjust to the new systems, than it is to try to do both at once.

Maybe if you were sitting on the elk, but I would be a little surprised if it worked. Base return teleporters, to my knowledge, are meant to be single-use items that teleport the user back to their spawn point. I would highly recommend testing this in creative first before trying this in your survival world. Translocators should be fine though, if a little awkward due to space. For me personally, I don't really trust translocators enough to try digging them out and bringing my elk through them, as it seems like it would be a very easy way to have an accident.

That would be pretty interesting, but also fairly difficult to write, especially since the story so far is meant to be fairly linear and have the player character going on what's essentially a hero's journey. That being said, I wouldn't mind seeing some conflicting information, or requiring the player to make choices between NPCs/factions, and having those choices influence the eventual outcome of the story. It could be that while all endings technically save the world, who died in the process and the general state of things afterward might determine whether it's a classic happy ending, something quite bleak, or something in-between. Of course, I don't want to see everything turned into a case of "everything is morally grey and there's no good guys here". There's nothing terribly wrong with that trope, but it's an easy trope to mess up, and a trope that's greatly overused these days.

I hope not. Doing so would basically turn the glider into Minecraft's elytra, and while the elytra is fun to use, it's one of the major balance problems that Minecraft has since it offers exceptional utility for very little drawback. There's currently no way to customize the glider outside of mods, though I would say that the crafting process, while fairly simple, is appropriate for the amount of utility that the glider provides. It's useful for potentially avoiding lethal falls or otherwise making mountain descents easier, but in return for having that utility the player gives up some inventory slots. Likewise, while it's useful for avoiding falling to one's death, it doesn't fly far enough to be very useful as a travel tool.

I play with the map in Vintage Story since I enjoy that convenience, but I suspect that if I turned the map off I would definitely be doing a few more of these things. Then again, I like to do some of these even with the map enabled, since it's fun to do and I don't always want to be looking at the map. When it comes to bridges and roads, these not only make the world look nice, but it's very useful infrastructure for cutting down on travel time if there are locations I'm going to be visiting regularly(like nearby traders). I would say though, that when there aren't clear quest markers, I do tend to pay attention to environmental details and NPC dialogue more closely, rather than just glossing over it as "set dressing". That's one thing I've been enjoying about Vintage Story's story arcs--all the information you need to complete the challenges is there, but you need to do some poking around and pay attention to various clues in order to figure things out.

I wouldn't mind seeing goats as pack animals, but they shouldn't be mounts. Unless we're talking musk ox, as those are probably big enough. Goats and sheep aren't big enough to carry most adult humans, let alone seraphs that are slightly larger. It's partly why you only see children riding the sheep at rodeos for "mutton-busting", and the adults stick to riding horses and bulls.

I think the main reason that the story is "optional", is that there's a subset of the playerbase that just wants a realistic survival experience and nothing more. In which case, it's not really possible to tie the story directly to the survival experience(that it, make it a progression requirement), since doing so would make it extremely difficult to give players the option to just turn the lore off entirely and play exclusively survival. It was before my time, but as I understand it that's how Homo Sapiens even came to exist as a game mode option. That's not to say the story feels tacked on either. It's very much tied to the world, and if the player wants to fully understand what's happening, they'll need to play the story to find out. But they're the ones that get to decide what pace it unfolds, at least at the present time. It's similar to an Elder Scrolls game in some ways--there's a main story there, the game gives you some plot hooks to pursue it. However, the player can also decide to go off and chase sidequests or do a bunch of crafting and never touch the main story, and still have a lot of fun in the game. If there's anything to "conquer" in Vintage Story, it's probably the following: