LadyWYT

Like the Steam Workshop, or even Vintage Story's own mod database? That's usually the easiest way to handle user-generated content, I think. Very mild spoilers here, but the original Subnautica had community content in the game itself, in the form of time capsules. If you beat the game, you got to create a capsule with your own custom message, a screenshot/picture, and whatever items you chose to put in it(within a certain limit). Before it could be added to the time capsule loot tables though, it'd be put to a community vote. Granted, I think they've stopped adding capsules, but it was a cool idea. Welcome to the forums! It's an interesting idea, but I think an Adventure Mode is better suited for a fantasy setting, and not the one we currently have. Vintage Story has a great setting, but it takes place in the real world, around the late Middle Ages(sometime between 1200 and 1400, to be more precise). Of course, due to certain cataclysmic events, the world as we know it has been scrambled and there are now eldritch abominations running rampant everywhere...but anyway... A new fantasy setting is going to give a lot more creative freedom than just setting the new mode in VS's past. That's not to say that VS's past couldn't be a more fantastical version of ours, with wizards and dragons and whatnot, but that's not really the vibe that VS goes for. Aside from the backdrop of eldritch horror and steampunk motifs, most things in the game are heavily rooted in realism.

The quern was definitely available in 1.19 and 1.18. I think the issue is he was after pies specifically, which require a table to make. But since he skipped the anvil, no saw for planks.

I'm pretty sure I've done this a few times, just because I wanted a few pieces of dough and was too lazy to bother with a bucket.

Just an idea I threw out there Doesn't actually exist in the game without mods.

Or I mean...just make iron/steel tier spears into pikes instead. They can't be thrown, so they're no longer competing with bows for the ranged slot. They offer much better melee range than the falx or similar melee weapons, however, you could balance that by giving them a minimum effective range too. That way, if an enemy manages to get too close, the spear is no longer effective; swords and other short-range melee weapons are still useful as a sidearm, or in tight spaces like caves where a pike's minimum range is going to be a setback.

If it's branching off Vintage Story though, it shouldn't be an issue, least I wouldn't think it would be. Vintage Story already supports opening your worlds to your friends, without the need for a dedicated server or needing to be on a LAN. I don't know how things work on the backend in that regard, but it seems like the concept could be applied to a Hytale-style game.

Or just add a pack saddle for rideable creatures. That way they can be ridden by the player, or used to transport even more stuff, giving players both a choice of how to use the creature in question, as well as a reason to have more than one rideable creature. Currently there isn't really a reason to have more than one elk. The main hurdle I see though is how to manage claimed animals. Pack animals seem like they should be similar to claimed mounts, in that they should respond to the bone flute. However, the player can only claim one mount at a time, so the rules would definitely need some tweaking.

You can kind of quarry in tunnels, but keep in mind that you have to break all blocks touching the stone block in question in order to get the full stone block. If you dig out a strip of stone(2 tall, 1 wide), you can make a checkerboard pattern for the most efficient quarry pattern(I think). I say that because to get rid of the necessary blocks in the ceiling/floor, you only have to dig one block out to get to three of the supporting blocks at a time. Also, welcome to the forums! In regards to just collecting loose stones, what I generally do is just hoard whatever I dig up on my mining and quarry trips. That generally provides plenty of building materials. If I need a specific color though...that usually means a dedicated mining trip to an area with that stone type. If there's a desert of that type with lots of boulders, that's even better, but that may or may not be an option. If mining for the stone, then I'll usually quarry some blocks too, just to have some available should I ever want them.

Oh it is? Could have sworn that was a mod thing. You learn something new every day!

It is splitting hairs a bit...mostly it was just what I found with a quick Google. From a gameplay logic standpoint, crafting a limited use oven from lower quality clay seems like a fair compromise, at least on paper. Ah, yeah, didn't think of that. Makes a lot of sense!

In all fairness, pies were gated behind the anvil anyway prior to the quern change. Unless I'm forgetting something, pies require a table in their crafting--ordinary blocks won't do. Tables require boards, which requires a saw, which needs to be smithed on the anvil. Given that they're a food source on par with cookpot meals, but stackable, I'm not sure that I would make them easier to obtain. Having a food type that strong is a good reason to invest the resources into acquiring them. Maybe, although at a glance, it looks like fire clay is required due to the oven needing to withstand high heat without cracking. Though the weirdest part about the oven to me isn't the fire clay requirement...it's the lack of firing. Every other piece of pottery you need to fire in order to have it be usable, yet the oven is usable as soon as you're done molding it.

Pretty much. Plus a mortar and pestle can serve other purposes too. It could be used for an herbalism gameplay loop--perhaps it's even the only tool that can grind plants into a fine-enough powder to use in potions and salves. A mortar and pestle also makes a great decoration, or a useful gadget in the event your friend has occupied the quern with other tasks. Of course, I could also see removing the oven requirement for bread too, after a fashion. Expanded Foods(I believe it was this mod, anyway) implemented such a concept--you can bake bread in a firepit, but the result will always be the charred variety. A change like that, in addition to adding a mortar and pestle, gives the player another early food option without needing to worry about fire clay at all, while still giving them a good incentive to invest the resources into an oven later.

I didn't do the best job explaining it in my initial post, but it's not so much about gating pie-making, as it is a change to smooth out the progression for getting to iron from the stone age. Prior to 1.20, red clay didn't exist at all, and fire clay and blue clay spawned in large deposits like red clay does now(there was also no converting one clay type to another). Once you found a fire clay deposit(which was fairly easy to do), you were pretty much set for the rest of the game. 1.20 changed how clay works--red clay was introduced as a different common clay type, and the natural spawn rules of fire clay were made a lot more strict. The general way to acquire fire clay en masse is to cook flint in a firepit to calcinate it, then grind the result into powder and mix it with blue/red clay. I assume the quern recipe was changed as well in order to help smooth out the early game a bit with the change to clay, since the previous recipe only required an ingot's worth of copper minimum(100 units for a pick, if you consider the quern and nothing else). With the change, the copper cost is increased to 1200(100 for pick, 100 for hammer, 100 for chisel, and 900 for anvil...man I am bad at math sometimes), which feels like a more fair price for what you unlock from it, and helps the early game feel a bit more meaningful. It's not a change I would revert, personally, but I do think this is perhaps a great situation to add something like a mortar and pestle(I like the way the Ancient Tools mod handles this concept. The mortar and pestle can't grind much at a time and can't be automated, so it's more tedious than a quern. However, the benefit is that it's very easy to craft--a stick and a few hard rocks, no fancy tools or materials required. Adding an item like this would give the player the choice to either spend more resources up front in exchange for more efficiency(the quern), or spend a bit of extra time to achieve the same result in return for not needing to sink as many resources into the grinding tool.

Welcome to the forums! The good news is that someone else already had similar feelings and made a mod to do just that. https://mods.vintagestory.at/oldquern Personally, I wouldn't revert the quern change, as it was a good one in terms of early game balance. Before the change, the cost to get to better foods like pies and better materials like bronze and iron was a whopping...two ingots of copper, essentially. You didn't actually need to craft an anvil until you had the materials for bronze. With the change though, it costs the player at least eleven ingots of copper to gain access to things like pies and barrels. A player can still skip the copper anvil and go straight for bronze, of course, but they do so at the cost of unlocking certain useful things much later as well. Not quite. Grinding calcined flint into powder and combining that with clay is the easiest way to get fire clay, but not the only way. Fire clay spawns naturally under black coal and anthracite deposits, as well as in bauxite biomes. It can also be found in certain cracked vessels, or purchased from some traders.

Chiming back in here, but I'd really like to see a speech skill actually mean something, in addition to having just more diplomatic options in general. It doesn't have to be anything as in-depth as having specific languages like elvish or dwarvish(although this would be a really cool feature!); just if the enemies are going to be begging for mercy after a good thrashing, I want to be able to actually choose whether or not to grant their request. It's one major criticism I have about Skyrim--some of the enemies will "yield" or otherwise beg for mercy, but you don't actually have the option to oblige since they'll just turn around and kill you. Yes, bandits and the like aren't exactly trustworthy, and it's reasonable that some could lie as a dirty trick, but it's also reasonable to assume that if it's clear they're in over their heads that they might be willing to run away instead. As for a speech skill, it's nice to have the option to talk your way through some challenges, instead of resorting to killing. That's not to say that the orc chieftain that's been raiding the local villages is going to be easy to reason with, but a character that's a very good talker might be able to work out some sort of treaty beneficial for both parties. Or perhaps they can convince the other orcs to revolt, or even just smoothtalk the chieftain in order to gain his trust and then poison his drink. Having such options also increases the replay value of the game, since there are more ways to accomplish the same end goals without playing just another combat build.

Out of curiosity, have you tried giving them more things to fight instead, since they seem to prefer combat? Fauna of the Stone Age has a great selection of dangerous beasts, and a different mod author has been adding dinosaurs to the game. Others have added different kinds of monsters too to help flesh out the current roster more. Otherwise, you might try mods like the following: Better Loot: https://mods.vintagestory.at/betterloot Drifters Have Loot: https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/14762 Battle Towers: https://mods.vintagestory.at/battletowers There are others, but those are just some suggestions to increase the drops and loot variety. Something like Battle Towers gives them structures to actively seek out, both for the monsters themselves as well as the treasures the monsters may be guarding.

I have a mod for Skyrim that adds notice boards. Same principle as the radiant quests you can get from guilds/innkeepers/stewards, but with more variety and not tied to any specific faction. Quests could be anything from dealing with local bandits, hunting vampires, or retrieving stolen items, to hunting specific game animals, foraging alchemy reagents, filling soul gems, or even delivering letters/items to other NPCs. The rewards you get for completing the quests depends on who issued the quest in the first place--delivering goods yields a lump of coin, as does killing bandits, but delivering supplies to an innkeeper will yield food and and drink in addition to a bit of coin. A system like that would probably work wonderfully for an Adventure Mode, as it's a nice way to flesh out the world without relying too heavily on NPC questgivers. Perhaps some settlements might even require the player to do some basic jobs for the town to establish their reputation, before the NPCs will trust them with more serious work.

Welcome to the forums! I'm not sure how big your house is, but it's possible you built on the edge of an unstable area and part of your house happens to be in that instability. Usually the transition between stable and unstable chunks is somewhat lenient, but sometimes it can be a bit abrupt. In any case, I would investigate your base to see if the whole area is affected, or just parts.

What @ifoz said--traders are outdated, and slated for a rework. Otherwise, I would chalk a lot of the strangeness up to gameplay convenience. Logically, there are several things that don't really make sense, and not just traders, however, we suspend our disbelief and just roll with it. But to try to tackle the question from an in-universe standpoint... It's simple--they need wheels in order to travel efficiently. When the player finds a trader wagon though, the trader has set up camp and is thus no longer moving. Why are traders always in camp when a player finds them? Simple. Traders are very aware of their surroundings, and their wagons are built specifically to set up shop extremely quickly. Customers are difficult to come by, so when a trader spots a potential customer they immediately ready their wares. While traders get excited about potential customers, they aren't dumb either. They can handle themselves well enough in combat, but they keep their livestock hidden to avoid tempting strangers to steal the animals. They carry lots of trade goods in their wagons, but only display what they think a potential customer will be interested in. If they fail to entice the customer to buy anything, they'll try different items, usually after several attempts at selling the original stock(but not always). Those wagons are sturdier than you'd think. Perhaps sometimes they don't survive, but the likelihood of the player witnessing such a spectacle is almost zero, since players will almost certainly avoid such severe weather if possible. If it's just a temporary camp, it's not a big deal. Plus seraphs are likely a lot more sensitive to temporal stability than humans are. If you're going to be venturing out into dangerous wilderness, you're going to be very skilled and prepared, or else you won't live very long. They can forage and hunt when there are no potential customers around, and of course, they aren't going to be selling their own stock of survival supplies unless they happen to have extra. After all, the bulk of their business is going to be in settlements, which are few and far between. They have to make sure they live to see those settlements in order to make money. You could blame this one on seraphs being a more appealing target, for whatever reason. Otherwise, this is definitely one that you essentially have to chalk up to "gameplay reasons". Trade guilds. Plus there are likely certain items that always sell well, in a wide variety of places. Traders will be inclined to stock those rather than take risks, hence why stock lists look so similar. Sometimes they can caravan, but it's probably easier to avoid unwanted attention by traveling alone. That, and less competition for business and resources. Oh they certainly do, but what makes you think they're going to share with a complete stranger? Especially ones that look as goofy as seraphs? It's not wise to give away trade secrets, and it's not wise to direct potential threats to your hubs of business.

As a mod, sure. As an addition to the vanilla game? No. Realism does not always equal fun. Yeah...all this is doing is punishing the player for playing the game correctly, as well as force players to cast their metal at very specific times. No more running off to do other things while waiting on molds to finish firing, no more creating molds well in advance of what you need...unless of course you want to be hurt while trying to cast. Currently, metalcasting is fine for what it needs to do. If the player steps on piping hot metal, they'll get damaged a bit. If the player is impatient and trying to use water to cool a mold faster(or otherwise leaves it exposed to rain), then the mold has a good chance of breaking. Both of those outcomes have a very clear cause and effect, so players that make those mistakes can quickly learn from it. The metal explosion you've proposed isn't so obvious, and will likely confuse players in addition to frustrating them with extra time constraints. I mean...videogames do not work like real life, nor should they be expected to. There are plenty of things players do in videogames(not just Vintage Story!) that are very dangerous to do in real life, but that's a big part of what makes videogames fun in the first place. You get to do things you maybe couldn't do otherwise. I will also note that if a videogame mechanic like metal casting or blacksmithing, or something similar, inspires players to pursue a new wholesome hobby IRL, that's great! Logically, they're also going to take the time to research the subject appropriately and acquire necessary materials/tools before they attempt it, but if they don't? That's not the fault of the videogame.

Just to add something to this list--I've also noticed that bowtorn aren't very intelligent when it comes to figuring out where and when to shoot. They're good at detecting players, yes, but when it comes to actually figuring out whether or not they have a clear shot at their target, they're pretty dumb. As long as the bowtorn can "see" you, it'll just fire away. Likewise, once they make the screeching noise as they load their shot, they will fire before they do anything else, though to be fair that behavior seems to apply to drifters as well.

Really depends on the server/player group. As a general rule, I would say that most serious RP tends to have events set for specific times, much like a TTRPG, while most casual RP tends to just happen whenever, with whoever happens to be around. As for exactly what happens in RP instances, that hinges heavily on the premise agreed upon for the server/group. Not everyone sticks to the vanilla lore--some add their own details, or just scrap vanilla and write up their own setting. Likewise, how the RP unfolds also depends on the expectations for IC and OOC communication; RP relying on voice proximity chat will have a different feel to it than RP relying on text channels. In my personal experience playing with friends, we don't RP at all in-game. We have a play-by-post RP thread running on Discord for the in-character shenanigans, as that's an easier way to pack more detail into the story, that you just can't do in-game.

Was discussing this the other day with a friend and we both agreed that it was a bit weird to just stick three copper rods into the crafting grid and have them magically fuse into a lightning rod. To be fair, the crafting grid requires some suspension of disbelief, however, other grid recipes lean towards realism, like the quern and machine parts. So why not here as well? It gives another use to the soldering iron, and the player will already have leftover solder bars from making a still, so it's not a change that really drains resources.

I learned most of them by listening to them on Lo-Phi's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lo-phi-music I'm not sure that every track is uploaded to his channel, but he's got most of them available there. You can also get to the album from the Vintage Story website: https://lophi.bandcamp.com/album/vintage-story-ost The track titles are listed there as well.

I'll admit I've not paid super close attention to these suggestions, but at a glance they seem very solid and I can see it being an enjoyable way to handle more realistic water mechanics, should the devs go that route. One of my favorite parts of your suggestion--instead of just adding something brand new, you're working with things that already exist in the game as a suitable equivalent.