LadyWYT

Oof. I really like melee, so this is the tough sell for classes like Malefactor and Hunter. Clockmaker at least has the bonus against mechanicals, and I don't like bells...though admittedly I'm not really sure how effective that bonus is. I'm probably just an oddball in the category, but I've never really had issues with it. Maybe it's because I have hoarding issues instead. Either way I've often wondered if the penalty to foraging and hunger should've been a little higher, in return for a bit more of a health/damage boost.

Unfortunately, this strategy is probably going to be broken in the next update, given the new enemies. Is that in the current 1.19, or in 1.20? When playing around in the 1.20 test patch I actually found the melee to be improved--the hits actually pushed the enemies back slightly, so it was possible to keep drifters and other things at a more comfortable distance without needing to backpedal as constantly. Now that being said, I still expect ranged to be strong in open areas, and for dealing with threats in general. It's a lot safer to deal with the threat before it reaches you, than it is to get up close and personal...but of course, dealing with it at range isn't always an option either.

I think this is one of the things that makes Vintage Story so appealing. It gives you all the information you need to progress in the game, but it doesn't explicitly tell you how to go about achieving that in your gameplay. That part you'll have to figure out for yourself, based on the resources you have at your disposal, and how you achieve the same sets of goals will vary based on how you decided to generate the particular world that you're playing on. That's also what makes the progression so satisfying; it was your effort that got you that nifty new tool/weapon, and not the game just handing it to you just because. Pretty much one of the points I was trying to make, albeit in perhaps the most inefficient fashion possible. This sums it up much better.

A bit of a tough task given that I tend to gravitate toward living in colder climates than the default temperate starting zone. Not quite turned myself into a fully arctic creature, but I'm getting there. I knew it!

I think it hinges on what season it is. I've not gotten an elk yet, but I'm wondering if it will be possible to pick up shed antlers, or if the antlers just disappear and being the process of regrowing.

Agreed. On the one hand, it seems like it would be simple enough to add a few simple scrap pieces for broken metal tools/weapons, that could be chiseled into nuggets and melted back down into ingots for use in other projects. That's how mods generally tackle it, I believe. Having played with some of those mods though...while it was nice to have, it also meant there wasn't much incentive to go look for new ore deposits, as having more ore wasn't as valuable as it once was. So for balance, I think the item breaking and returning nothing is fine. Also agreed, though I would argue that you could probably drop the durability cost to sharpen a weapon/tool, and still be fine. A sharp weapon would do more damage, and a sharp tool will work faster than a blunt one. Not keeping your weapons sharp means that you'll need more hits to kill an enemy, which means more durability lost from the weapon(each hit costs one durability point). Not keeping tools sharp means they won't work as efficiently, so you'll have to spend a bit more time on the task to get it done. To get around the tool speed and animation issue for this particular scenario, maybe set limits to which tools can be sharpened. IE, stone tools can't be sharpened at all, and metal tools when sharpened operate at the speed of the next tier only as long as they remain sharp(X number of durability points). To be fair though...lack of efficiency/damage and durability are good incentives to upgrade your stuff to higher quality materials, like steel. A grindstone and sharpening system would be a nice little bonus gameplay loop. You know, I've not been a fan of the "let's manually turn sticks into proper handles instead of slapping them into the crafting grid" idea, but if there were higher quality handles for higher-tier items(bronze+) then that might prove interesting instead of annoying.

Hmmm, this is very true. I'm guessing the hands might deliberately be kept free, so that you can continue picking up items if you wish, instead of having to constantly empty your hands. Agree with stackable bowls--it's easy to do this when cleaning the dinner table after a meal with family or guests. I disagree with the crocks though--those are bigger than bowls, even if the game models don't really show it, and should not stack. That being said...I've not had issues picking up crocks when I already had one in my hands, provided that I had other hotbar slots free. It would be nice, and might happen some time in the future. I'm not sure how hard it would be to write code to account for that.

https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Bot_System This is probably what you're looking for, if I had to guess.

First off, welcome to the forums! As Thorfinn said, you can always tune things like water/land distribution, terrain roughness, forest coverage, and more under the world settings. For more diverse biomes in a fashion similar to what Minecraft has, you'll want to go to "Climate Distribution" and chance that from "Realistic" to "Patchwork". That should make it so that biomes are randomly distributed and potentially save you the legwork of needing to travel tens of thousands of blocks before the climate changes. As far as I'm aware though(never played Patchwork so can only guess), the seasonal changes will still apply in temperate/colder biomes, so it might be a little jarring to see or cut back on the survival challenges. The main lore content is found via talking to a Treasure Hunter trader. He'll give you a task, and reward you with a map to the first major story location. It's quite a trek, but some of the goodies you can find there are other bits of lore about various things. As for other lore content...the more minor pieces are kinda scattered around in various places. Some of it you can find by talking to the traders about various things. Some of the traders sell things that provide insight(Artisan traders and tapestries); some items have flavor text that provides insight into what once was, or what might have happened. Panning bony soil is a good way to acquire lore books and other valuables. As for caves, it's not unusual for them to be empty. Sometimes you'll get lucky and find some exposed ore, or some long-forgotten ruins that may or may not hold anything of interest. Surface ruins sometimes have basements that have extra supplies, sometimes a lore fragment or two. In regards to world settings though, there's not really much you can modify here to make finding the lore easier, aside from perhaps smoothing out terrain to make traveling easier, and removing a lot of the survival challenges so you're not as likely to die while out and about. You could go the modded route with Better Ruins in order to have more interesting things to explore while still being "lore friendly", but it's not quite the same thing as the vanilla game. I will note though that the next update is right around the corner, and will be featuring a mount and a proper boat in order to make traveling around easier, as well as the second story chapter.

It does. It's great if you're wanting a huge variety to play with in your world, but not so great if you'd prefer to keep things simple.

Somewhat depends on how far out from spawn one travels, assuming that spawn is nothing but low fertility soil. Generally there's going to be at least some medium fertility soil close to spawn though; it's a little unusual for there to be none for miles. Now if there's a lot of forest around--I believe forest floor always drops as low fertility soil when broken. I will note that low fertility soil isn't entirely useless for farming...it'll just mean that you shouldn't wait too long to plant your crops, and you'll probably only get one harvest out of the field for that year. By the time you've scraped by your first year on that, you should have plenty of compost to turn into terra preta, if you've not found higher quality soil elsewhere. I don't know about using it to craft terra preta...I think high fertility soil should perhaps be a more efficient way of accomplishing that. And given what you pan out of the bony soil...I think there's more bones and deteriorated clothing bits in there than dirt.

Proper glassware and full range of craftable stained glass colors? Yes please! The main advantage of a glass bottle over a clay one, of course, being that you can tell at a glance what kind of liquid a glass bottle contains. Ironically, glass was fairly expensive in the Middle Ages(which is the general setting of Vintage Story), yet it's perhaps one of the easiest materials to obtain in the game.

Okay next time I'm gonna have to remember to build a charcoal pit in the woods, just so I don't have to make several trips between the woods and my house. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that Thorfinn is a dwarf.

Have you tried breaking it, instead of right-clicking to pick up? Assuming you're playing on 1.19, and not the 1.20 pre -edition(which is still unstable), there are a couple of pottery items that can't be picked up with the standard right-click, for whatever reason. Breaking it with your hands though will still drop the item, which you can then pick up and place elsewhere. It's a bit of a goofy thing to check, but also make sure that you have an inventory slot free in order to pick up the item. I've forgotten about this a time or two and gotten confused as to why there was so much stuff lying around on the ground where I was working.

I'm guessing he probably take a trip into the woods to cut a bunch of wood, then brings all the logs back to his base to turn into firewood for the charcoal pit. Although depending on how big the base is and where it's located, getting to a stable area might be as simple as stepping outside the house or visiting the farms. That's actually pretty funny! I wonder if the drifters were spawning underground, or in a hole where they couldn't reach you. I think when you get that low on stability they're supposed to start spawning practically on top of you. Generally my first clue that stability is getting a little low for comfort is when the music fades out and the spooky metallic ambience of the Rust begins to play nonstop. I think it happens around the 60% mark, so there's still a good bit of time before the nasty stuff starts spawning, but I tend to use that as my indicator that it's time to wrap up whatever I'm doing and get to a safer spot. For me, I tend to forget to check the stability of an area before I turn it into my base. So far, I've somehow been fortunate enough to pick stable spots to settle in.

Welcome to the forums! I would give it a bit longer on the support ticket; I'm not sure where all the staff are located, but I do believe there are several that live in the US, and we had a major holiday here a few days ago. So some might still be traveling back from visiting their families. If it's been a few days and there's still no response, the only other thing I can really think of is to try emailing again.

That's Vintage Story for ya! I wouldn't say it's a common occurrence, but it's always a thrill when the game decides it's been too lenient and throws a wrench into your carefully laid plans. I once came back from a big mining trip; it was deep underground, so my stability was pretty low(around 40%). Wouldn't you know, a temporal storm hit as soon as I got back home, before I had time to recover. Thankfully I had an extra temporal gear to sacrifice for some extra stability, or I probably wouldn't have survived the storm.

I would assume that if you've slept recently, it will take that into account when you try to sleep through the storm and prevent you from sleeping. However, if I recall correctly, you should get a warning eight hours in advance of a storm, which should be plenty of time to allow your character to get sleepy again before the storm hits...provided you didn't get the message immediately after going to sleep, that is. In any case, it doesn't hurt to try, even if you have slept recently. The worst that's going to happen is it won't let you sleep, because you're not tired enough. At that point, if you don't want to deal with the storm, all you have to do is lock your character into a secure location where mobs can't get you, and wait it out. Good time to AFK and grab a drink, take a potty break, etc, if you have nothing to do in-game while waiting.

Possibly, or perhaps an oversight in the code and it doesn't check for combustible grass in a vertical radius. Hence why I suspect outdated information on the wiki. There's actually a mod for that game that adds more complex contraptions, that has a sort of built-in mini tutorial similar to a Lego manual that shows you how to put different pieces together and how they function. However, I don't think something like that would really fit the tone of Vintage Story; it seems to be more geared towards teaching the player the very basics and letting them figure out the rest for themselves, albeit with a wealth of knowledge at their fingertips in the form of the handbook. Now that I think about it...it's somewhat a throwback to the oldschool days(for me that's Age of Empires 2, Spyro, and Crash Bandicoot era) where the game manuals or strategy guide books would probably be the first place you'd look if you got stuck on a particular game. Not that the internet didn't exist, but it wasn't the wealth of game knowledge that it is today. I think that's also the strong point of things like wikis and YouTube videos; they can provide more detailed information about certain parts of a game, that you might not be able to easily access otherwise. Now of course, they can also be completely bogus, so you do need to be careful which sources you're using.

Agreed. I'm guessing it was probably asleep somewhere nearby and didn't notice you until you were pretty close to it. Or rather, you didn't spot it until it was right on top of you.

Hello, and welcome to the forums! Lighting up caves that you intend to make a few trips into can cut down on the mob spawns quite a bit. Torches are cheap and have a decent light radius, though they will burn out after a couple of days unless you place them in a torch holder(which are fairly expensive). Oil lamps are a decent alternative to torches if you have the fat and clay to spare, as they don't need relighting. They are a bit dimmer than torches though, so you may need a few extra to properly light everything. The best lighting though, provided you have the resources for them, are lanterns. They have the biggest light radius(you can line them for a bit extra but it's not necessary), and never run out of fuel, but they will take lots of beeswax, metal plates, and clear quartz to craft. Another important thing to consider is the current rift activity when you go caving. If the rift activity is high, underground spawns will be higher. If the rift activity is low/calm, there will be fewer spawns to deal with. Also keep in mind that rift activity can change quite drastically, so if you are caving you'll want to keep an eye on it and consider heading back to the surface should it get too high(assuming that you haven't lit up the cave system). Last but not least, upgrading your equipment(if you're using lower tier weapons/armor) will help you deal more efficiently with the monsters that do spawn, and don't forget that you can always seal off smaller passages until you're ready to explore them, in order to stop any enemies from coming through. They can be dodged, but it does take quite a bit of practice to do so. The easier way to dodge drifter attacks(in my opinion) is to get up close to trigger their melee attacks, and step back out of range right before they swing. This also takes practice though, and works much better against one or two drifters than it does larger groups. The more effective way to counter the rocks is to use a shield. However, shields are a bit difficult to use when caving, as they're typically carried in the off-hand slot so you can use your weapons. Given that a light source is also typically carried in the off-hand slot when caving...you'll either need to light up the cave as you explore, or settle for plunking down the light source before drawing your weapons, as you'll need to be able to see in order to fight.

I wasn't sure, so I erred on the side of caution and assumed it wasn't a vanilla addition. At the top of the forums, under the Media tab. https://www.vintagestory.at/stories/storyexcerpt-themorning.html/ https://www.vintagestory.at/stories/storyexcerpt-ghosts.html/

Very true, although for reasons you might keep class-exclusive enabled in singleplayer: extra challenge, or just for roleplaying purposes. I generally tend to turn off class-exclusive recipes, so I can have access to whatever items I think make sense for the character that I'm playing.

I mean...if it were me, and a spot I really liked, I'd probably just build there anyway. Of course, I'd also probably make sure that my main base is in a more stable area, and keep that one spot as a cosmetic build. If it was the main base though...then I'm either going to make sure I take a walk every now and then to a stable area, or have a good stash of temporal gears to recharge myself when I get too unstable.