LadyWYT

Not really. If you look at real warhammers and maces, they aren't the monstrosities often depicted in movies and videogames. It's one thing to have the supreme spooklord of evil swinging a mace the size of a Volkswagen, but it's another thing entirely for your average Joe. I'm not saying that a sledgehammer-type weapon wouldn't do a lot of damage, but it takes a lot more effort to swing, and does not swing very fast. Not only will it wear out the user a lot faster, but said user is also at a higher risk of death since their opponents have plenty of time to counter the attack. A real mace or warhammer, on the other hand, isn't going to be that heavy--probably somewhere around 2-5 lbs(roughly 1-2 kg). It's not so much the weight itself that is dangerous, as much as it is the force the weapon is swung with, and the design of the weapon itself. They have spikes or flanges that are designed specifically to dig into armor, and the lighter weight means the weapon can be swung around efficiently at higher speeds. Heck, even the "really big" weapons like greatswords don't weigh very much--they're usually around 5 lbs(2kg) as well. As for armor, thicker plates are more protective, yes, but the user still needs to be able to function while wearing said armor. The heavier the armor is, the faster the user tires, and the less agile they are due to the weight. Incidentally, this is also why full armor started being phased out towards the late Middle Ages; the introduction and improvements to firearms meant that armor was getting thicker to stop bullets. Eventually, it was too thick for full armor to be practical for warfare, thus the cuirass took its place. A cuirass could easily be made much thicker to withstand gunfire and protect some of the most vital areas of the body, while also being light enough for a soldier to feasibly wear into battle. Yeah pretty much--it's a matter of finding that sweet spot in regards to the physics. The speed is also a critical factor in reaction time, as I mentioned above--slower speeds means the opponent has more time to react.

You'll probably be interested in this mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/meteoricsteel Otherwise, I have to partially agree with @hstone32--the current tiers of stuff are fine, and if something new does get added it should really be for reasons more than "just because". Personally, I do expect another tech tier to be added beyond what steel offers, but this would be the realm of Jonas tech, and likely not a tech tier required for story chapters other than perhaps the very last ones.

It's not just that, iron is also lighter than bronze, with the exception of aluminum bronze(which to my knowledge, is a modern alloy and not something that was known in medieval times). When it comes to making weapons, tools, and armor, heavier does not mean better. Armor needs to be light enough for the user to function in for long periods of time, without getting worn out. Lightweight tools and weapons allow the wielder to use them more effectively for longer periods of time. https://www.coyotesteel.com/assets/img/PDFs/weightspercubicfoot.pdf Yeah, just a quick browse of the internet suggests that medieval smiths had access to tech that allowed proper iron smelting--late 14th century, roundabouts, which tracks with the setting of Vintage Story. I wouldn't be too surprised if options for iron and steel casting were added later, but I'd wager the reason that the current design(in terms of how to refine the ore) is the way it is, is that the iron blooms were both easier to implement at the time while also being different from the earlier metalworking gameplay loops. https://metalcastinginstitute.com/iron-history/

Ahem...the specific timeframe is somewhere between 1200 and 1400, due to the existence of both the Hanseatic League and the Byzantine Empire. If you go earlier than that, the Hanseatic League doesn't exist, and you can't go later than 1400(1453, to be precise) or the Byzantine Empire no longer exists. Since both are referenced in the Old World history, the events of the Old World took place somewhere in that timeframe. As for the current year in the game? The only thing that's really known for sure is that some sort of catastrophic event took place to end the Old World, and a few hundred years have passed since, at least. Very little of humanity is left, and the ones that are left have had their hands full just scratching out their own survival. In other words, that's pretty much the in-lore reason that technology is locked to the late Middle Ages. The Old World had an early leap in tech thanks to the efforts of a certain character, however, that progress has pretty much been lost to the ages and only specific individuals still have any clue how to create it. I don't think it's a matter of "couldn't", but more a matter of that the focus of the game is on medieval tech, with some steampunk thrown in. The stone age is just a brief phase that the player is in at the very start of the game, and not the tech level intended to be the main focus. I'd also note that "pre-Columbian" tends to refer to the Americas, but the game's setting is predominantly central Europe, with references to some of the other nearby areas relevant to that region at the time(near East, far East, North Africa and the Middle East).

Honestly, with as irate as some players get over "sleep at night" as a solution to deal with monsters, good luck convincing them to take a nap as a solution to intense heat.

Not really, since the traders will still sell elk. It's only important for the Homo Sapiens gamemode, where purchasing isn't an option at all. On normal gamemodes, the only advantage to capturing and taming wild elk calves is that you won't have to pay the trader for one(though you will have to go through a LOT more work). I think when it comes to creature spawns, it's kind of both. Generally, I play temperate starts, and it's not unusual to only see moose in the wintertime, or at high altitudes; same goes for brown bears. I've even seen the odd polar bear roaming around on mountaintop glaciers outside of the arctic. So I think the creature spawns are tied mostly to the year-round temperatures, as that determines the overall climate of that particular area. In the cases that current temperature might be influencing creature spawns, I think the creature spawns are still limited to what you could realistically expect to find for that climate zone, hence why you might find a moose or two in temperate regions in winter, but won't find polar bears. As for elk and where to find them...generally it's best to look in cooler climate regions. The arctic is too cold, and temperate is generally too warm, so the cool climate zone is overall the best place to look. For the default temperate start, you'll want to be looking in highland areas, since these areas are cold enough to count as taiga due to the elevation. Grasslands are the easiest places to spot them. If you're seeing spawns like mountain goats, ibex, and larch/pine trees, you're likely at a high enough elevation where you could expect to find elk. To my knowledge, it's not possible, outside of certain modded creatures, or vanilla creatures that require specific elements present(like forest floor) in order to spawn. I think the best you could hope for here is finding some elk first, and then killing them all if no babies spawned, in the hopes that a baby elk will spawn in later(you could try breeding the adults, but I'm not sure that this is possible currently). Honestly though, the easiest way to get a tamed elk currently is to just buy one. Raising a baby elk and then saddlebreaking it will save you the gears, but it also requires a significant investment in time and resources, even moreso if the spawn RNG isn't kind.

Except iron is already incredibly abundant in VS--all the player has to do is find one and they're set for the rest of the game, essentially. The only ore deposit that might be bigger than iron ore deposits, is quartz deposits. Iron ore can be a bit tricky to find sometimes depending on what kind the player is searching for, and also because I think iron deposits have more distance between themselves than other ores due to their sheer size and importance. In any case, if you nerf iron to bronze tier, then all that's really accomplished is pushing players to stick to bronze since there's less effort required to obtain/work it and no upgrade for durability/damage output by upgrading to iron. It also hurts story content pacing; tier 2 is required for chapter 1, meaning that bronze is sufficient in most cases, but players in singleplayer or playing at lower skill levels may need to opt for iron instead in order to have a more manageable time. Tier 3 is the minimum required for completing chapter 2, which means that players will need to have obtained iron or better on default settings, unless they're very skilled. If iron is the same as bronze though, then story content essentially becomes locked behind steel unless the player is highly skilled or otherwise has friends to play with. Mind you, I don't think locking some story content behind steel is a bad thing, but that should be reserved for later chapters, and not the entire story itself.

Well...there's a beloved part of my childhood that I had forgotten about.

As modded multiplayer instances? Yeah, I could see it, and would honestly be surprised if vampire and werewolf mods weren't created someday(I know someone over in the mod development section was asking about creating a werewolf one recently). As an addition to the actual game itself? Heavens no! The main focus of the game's setting is realistic survival at the late Middle Ages tech level, with some eldritch horror elements in the background to add some mysterious spook factor.

Truth. Incidentally, I went and poked around on the mod database earlier to see what options there even were for prospecting. Prospect Together is by far and away the most popular, with a 200k+ downloads and easily in the top handful of mods(that's putting it mildly). And as already noted, all that mod does is allow players to share their prospecting data with each other in multiplayer, in addition to adding a heatmap grid to the vanilla system(which already has a heatmap, but the mod's grid might be easier to understand for some players). Better Prospecting? It's not even close, sitting at roughly 30k downloads. I had to scroll pretty far just to find it, and none of the mods I scrolled past to get to it were related to prospecting at all, save for Prospect Together, ProspestorInfo(which was rendered obsolete by 1.19), and Block Overlay(which is basically an Xray mod/mod to locate specific blocks/entities, and not so much for prospecting itself). Block Overlay easily has about twice the downloads that Better Prospecting does, which leads me to wonder if players who just want to find ore easier aren't just using this one so they can go straight to the ore instead of needing to hunt for it, which Better Prospecting still requires the player to do. Judging by the comments on Block Overlay's page, it seems this might be the case for some players, but many are also using that mod just for testing various things in the game. As for Better Prospecting's comment section, it seems that the mod still didn't make ore finding easy enough for some users, as some were complaining about the increased durability cost for the added propick search modes. In any case, I think it's safe to say that based on mod data, the prospecting system as a whole is fine, and tracks well with the overall difficulty implemented in the overall game design, but adding an option for players to share prospecting data in multiplayer is a good idea since there's quite a lot of support for that feature. Changing the entire system to be easier is much better left to the modded realm, so that the smaller subset of the playerbase that really wants to play that way can, without changing the entire game for everyone else. As a side note, I also have to wonder how many of the complaints stem from players who jumped into the hardest difficulties(Wilderness Survival and Homo Sapiens), without understanding what they were actually signing up for? Those gamemodes disable the map, which means prospecting data won't be recorded at all, so they'll either need a very good memory, or need to manually record the data themselves at the prospecting sites via signs. Likewise, those gamemodes disable the propick's node search, so they have no way to actually figure out what ore is there, aside from digging and hoping they stumble across it. Outside of those difficulties, multiplayer itself disables node search by default, so if the players in question only play multiplayer servers that kept that default, they're going to have a harder time finding ore even if the overall difficulty is set to something other than Wilderness Survival/Homo Sapiens.

It was one of the changes introduced in 1.20, I think, and to my knowledge it works for cookpots as well.

There's an option in the mod config to turn that bit off. Makes it much more bearable, if less realistic regarding carrying buckets of liquid around. Food is currently fine. Pies are my go-to and I cut them before venturing in. Crocks were recently changed to allow players to fill bowls from the inventory(you may be able to cut pies in the crafting grid too, not sure), rather than needing to place the crock, for that reason specifically I do believe.

It's probably simple enough to put some kind of colorblind option into the Accessibility settings. However, I think a bright teal would show up a very light color, while a dark red would show up as a darker color, so I'd expect there to be some definite contrast anyway in the event of colorblindness.

Oof, that's rough. Have you checked the log files to see if any memory leaks were being reported? To the best of my knowledge, there's still potentially a minor leak or two, but all the major ones should have been fixed. Of course, I'm not saying it wasn't a memory leak, just that it's possible there could be another cause, especially when using mods. It's possible one of the mods has a major issue, or the mods that you're trying to play with are too much for your hardware to keep up with. Mods that add a LOT of stuff, such as Better Ruins, tend to be pretty demanding on hardware. If you're sure it's a memory leak though, one thing you can do to help pinpoint the cause is go into the Interface tab of Settings, and enable Developer Mode. That will make a new Dev tab appear--go to this tab and enable VAO Dispose Debug, then load your world and play around to try to trigger the leaks. More details should be recorded in the logs when the leaks occur. If you're going to test over multiple sessions, you'll want to check that setting before loading the world each time, as it does seem to get switched off for new sessions. In any case, it's definitely a problem to report to the VS devs if it's a problem in the base game, or mod devs if it's a mod problem. Pretty much why I'm skeptical of adding thirst or climbing mechanics. Story locations weren't built with those in mind, and would need major reworks to account for such things.

You're probably going to have to pan for your first pick, hammer, and propick, since surface copper deposits occur extremely rarely in Homo Sapiens. You can still try looking around for them though--you'll know when you've found one by the copper bits lying on the surface. You won't want to pick up those bits until you have something to dig up the deposit with though, or unless you have someway to mark the deposit. Homo Sapiens mode does not enable the map(though you can turn the map back on via command), so the usual "mark the map" just isn't an option.

Don't worry, as soon as you get a populated skep back to your base, you will find the wild hive nearby that you previously missed.

Instead of glass, you can also chisel the block you place as a barrier. It'll help funnel more material into the hopper, while being unintrusive.

For Homo Sapiens? Not really. Perhaps work on acquiring copper and bronze? The worst you really have to worry about is surviving the winter and bears, though I would make sure you fence in your crops. I'm not sure if rabbits and other wildlife will still try to eat them, but better to be safe than sorry.

It's vanilla. Rifts generate particles, yes, but the particles are most noticeable when the rift is in the process of closing. It's difficult to spot since the rifts close pretty fast; one second they're wide open and the next they've zooped shut.

It's due to the baking temperature being around 700C. Any item that can be heated to such temperatures will start to glow like that. Though typically, most food items cap around 300-400 C, so they never have a chance to glow. I'd say in the case of bread here, it's probably an oversight, if not potential mod interference.

Honestly, I'm not sure that it's building in neutral places, as much as it is perhaps just a lapse in attention. Maybe they're new players, maybe they typically play with stability off and decided to turn it on, maybe they're a veteran player that just wasn't paying attention for whatever. Hard to say for sure. I kinda look at it like food; it's easy enough to avoid starving to death in the game, yet it doesn't seem to be an incredibly uncommon occurrence for players to starve. Suffering the consequences doesn't mean the mechanic is bad, or working improperly, but does mean the player probably needs to put a little more diligence into certain areas of gameplay. Tweaking my earlier comment--maybe instead of changing the entire color, just have the gear keep spinning regardless of how full/empty the meter is, so that the player can tell the stability of an area even while the meter is completely full/empty. While the meter is recharging, highlight it in a glowing teal outline to help illustrate that something positive is happening, and outline it in red to indicate when it's draining.

Yeah, as @Thorfinn said, the Devastation is an extreme case, as it's permanently changed the land itself and essentially one giant rift. General surface/subsurface stability is incredibly mild in comparison, and like Thorfinn also noted, seems to mostly only affect seraphs. Presumably, seraphs are the most affected since their foothold in the present is tenuous. I also feel that temporal stability is meant to be something that can easily catch players off guard if they aren't careful, regardless of whether the player is new or a veteran. This is a better change, if there's going to be one. Or perhaps the player needs to be taught about temporal stability in the tutorial? The gear spin is fairly obvious, and when it ticks lower that suggests something bad, but it's not otherwise obvious exactly what that gauge is trying to inform the player of unless they read the temporal stability section of the handbook.

This is also why there's an option to disable the instability mechanic. Otherwise, the purpose is to help illustrate just how much of a disaster certain past events were, as well as provide an extra challenge to the player when picking a spot to settle down.

I don't disagree that it's maybe a little too easy to get a handle on foodstores, however, I don't agree with punishing the player for excessive stockpiling. Having extra is never really a bad idea, and in the case of cooperative multiplayer, large stockpiles are mandatory. Cats would be an obvious solution to rodents, but I also think a mechanic like this mod could be added: https://mods.vintagestory.at/rottingstorage Essentially, the player would need to check their foodstores semi-regularly and either use/dispose of foodstuffs that are getting too old, or else risk losing a big chunk of their foodstores. Gives a lot more value to preserving food via crocks, pickling, or salting.

That's the actual lore as well. Although it's not the seraph voices that humans find strange--it's the accents.