LadyWYT

TIL! Guess I'll keep sitting then while I'm reading my books!

By default there are 5 nutrition bars: fruit, vegetables, grain, protein, and dairy. Protein is fairly easy to fill, along with fruits, so I'd say the default is closer to 2/5(40%) filled in the early game. With your proposed addition of hydration, it would be closer to 3/6(50%). Each full bar of nutrition gives an extra 2.5 hitpoints, so the end result is a potential extra 2.5 hitpoints in exchange for another stat to keep track of. It's an interesting idea, in any case, but I think hydration is probably best left in modded territory right now. I've been playing with one of the thirst/hydration mods of late and while it brings a different challenge to the game, it also gets a little tedious when I'm needing to drop what I'm doing for a drink every so often. This is how my thoughts are generally leaning as well. I don't think this implementation would be as tedious as either of the mods currently available that do similar, but I'm not sure that an extra 2.5 HP is worth the extra stat tracking. I already do a half-baked job of keeping all nutrition bars full as it is. It's not really unusual for me to let one or two drop pretty low due to wanting either a particular food, or using what I already have and not caring about whether it's filling nutrition or not.

If not an iron stove, then at least an iron cauldron as an upgrade from the cookpot. It could hold twice as many servings, while still cooking at the same speed as the standard cookpot(ie, 8 servings will cook in the time it takes to cook 4 in a regular pot). It would be very handy for preserving winter food, as you can now cook three full crocks at a time, in addition to feeding several players at once in multiplayer settings. Or instead of cooking faster, make the stove more fuel-efficient, similar to how the distiller allows a single piece of firewood to burn for two in-game hours. And perhaps instead of meals being more saturating, food left in the pot could be much more resistant to spoiling, provided that the stove remains hot. Hunter's stew, in other words.

I think it depends on what kind of building you're trying to do. Minecraft is better(currently) if you want to jump right in and start building while keeping some rudimentary survival elements. Minecraft is also more lenient with some of the decorating(you can put cakes in a windowsill and they won't rot), and has(in my opinion) more versatility regarding build styles. You can build realistic medieval, modern, steampunk, fantasy, etc. with relative ease. Vintage Story's chisel system lends itself to much more detail than Minecraft, but I feel like the block options make it a little harder to build outside of medieval, steampunk, or low-fantasy themes. It can also be harder to decorate, depending on what you like decorating with, as you can't just leave food sitting out(it'll rot) or have giant fields of crops planted for show(depending on the climate, they might die to heat or cold).

I meant to comment on this earlier and I forgot. But yes, I agree that sitting should reduce your hunger rate! There's been many a time that I've been sitting in the safety of my shelter, flipping through the handbook while waiting for night/temporal storm to pass, and wondering why sitting doesn't reduce the rate of stamina loss. Now granted, I typically don't have issues staying fed in the game, even playing my beloved Blackguard, but when I'm say...traveling and want my rations to last longer, having a sit-down by the campfire while waiting for dawn would be a great way to do it.

Oh, so more like an old choose-your-own-adventure book! 'Twas a bit before my time here. I've not played any of the Myst games, but from what I've heard of the series they're basically "try everything and keep guessing until you figure out the pattern". Kinda reminds me of trying to 100% the original Crash Bandicoot 2 game. There were secret levels that you could only get to via doing some fairly random stuff in other levels, and a couple of the colored gems you had to get by completing a certain objective in certain levels. Sheep Raider(Sheep, Dog 'N Wolf for the Europeans out there) also had a couple of secret levels to find and play, although the game gave you a way to unlock the secret of how to find them, instead of making you find it yourself. Back to the general discussion topic though--I think that if too many new players are still having issues figuring out the earliest tech tiers of the game, the tutorial should probably be expanded a little more. In that case, I think it would perhaps warrant a special "scenario world", where the player is given a little more obvious direction on what to be doing and what to be looking for. It could be a full world that allows the player to keep playing even after completing the tutorial segments, or it could be a small scenario world that only teaches the basic concepts while leaving the actual practice of them to the actual game worlds. In any case, making it a separate thing from the standard game modes would give brand new players a more detailed walkthrough of the core systems, if they so wished, while allowing more veteran players to easily ignore it.

As @Thorfinn and @Maelstrom have already indicated, it's not so much that drifters need to spawn at distance for your idea to be feasible--it's more about how you build your base. Drifters(currently) cannot climb save for ladders and slopes that aren't too steep, so it's rather simple to build walls to keep them out. Then it's just a matter of lighting the spots you want to defend the most, and possibly chiseling some holes into the structure to allow you to attack the drifters without much threat of harm to yourself. You'll still probably get the odd rift or two within the fortifications, but you could either chalk that up to bad luck/sappers, or figure out how to acquire and power rift wards in order to keep the rifts from spawning in certain areas. Now one thing I think that could be added to the game, to help spice up fortifying areas--stuff like stakes, caltrops, Greek fire, etc. Though I also expect that to be a bit more practical in a PvP multiplayer setting, rather than in a singleplayer game. Drifter AI is...not the best, and while they'd need a bit more brains to avoid being easily farmed, they also don't strike me as entities that are meant to be particularly intelligent.

Which is exactly what folks are discussing in this thread--the general idea that was presented, and the various benefits or challenges it could present in implementation. I agree with the first part--the Handbook UI could use some improvements, such as the ability to bookmark a page, or remaining on the page you were last reading after you close it. I can somewhat agree on the last part, in that locking the Jonas tech devices until the player has completed certain in-world objectives(Archives, certain NPCs, etc) makes some sense. It's a late-game feature that's somewhat out of the normal scope of progression and not really required for survival. I'm still going to disagree with the latter part primarily because of how interwoven the gameplay loops are, and that it would be more cumbersome to try to lock crafting recipes and related knowledge behind specific player actions(similar to what Valheim and Subnautica already do). One potential example I can think of, on how it would be an issue: say that picking up a copper nugget unlocks the copper recipes. You need crucibles and molds before you can actually do any sort of metalworking, but those fall under pottery, which is going to be unlocked by a different action, such as picking up clay. Now assuming the player manages to unlock the pottery stuff before copper, and gets everything set up to smelt their first pieces of ore into something usable...they're still going to need charcoal in order to smelt it, assuming they didn't get lucky and find some coal in a ruin. Now the charcoal pit information could probably just unlock with the chopping of the first tree, but it's still going to be up to the player to figure out how to put all of that information together, which if I had to guess is probably going to take several hours of trial and error. I'm also guessing that the average new player is already going to be familiar with the basics of Minecraft, and thus will likely be trying to prioritize getting a pickaxe first. It's not going to take them long to figure out that Vintage Story works very differently, and they're going to get frustrated more easily if there's no clear direction on what they should be doing to achieve that particular goal. Interesting observation. I've never played Dark Souls, as it's just not my cup of tea. I'll not say what I did to my Skyrim files though, heh heh. I should maybe clarify what I mean when I say that Vintage Story doesn't hold your hand though. Vintage Story does hold your hand a little, in that there's a short tutorial to teach you just enough to be able to survive, before pointing you to the handbook to help figure out the rest. However, you're also not required to use the handbook either; you can in fact never crack it open and still reach the late-game content, but it's going to be a lot slower and a LOT more frustrating than if you had spent some time reading. In short, Vintage Story will hold your hand, to an extent, but only to the extent that you want it held. It gives you access to all the information you need, and lets you decide how to best use it based on the circumstances that you find yourself in(which can vary quite heavily depending on how you set up your world). And if you forget how to get to a later tech tier, it's simple enough to look up at any time(and also lets you plan ahead more easily when it comes to your goals). Where's this from? It sounds like one of those old point-and-click adventure games, which often had you doing something rather arbitrary in order to progress.

The saturation value already tells you that it's an edible item, so the text telling you such is unnecessary. It also stands to reason that fat is something you're going to have to harvest from an animal, given that it's not a plant product. This is already a thing for the native ore bits on the ground--hovering over one tells you it's a good idea to dig underneath that spot. It does, although to me this method seems more convoluted and hand-holdy than the handbook that we have already. I also suspect that the reason a lot of the gameplay loops don't feel intuitive(at first) is that we've lost touch with a lot of those concepts in the modern world. Dishes come from the store, food also comes from the store and is stored in the fridge/freezer. Tools and building supplies you buy from a different store. Lighting, you just flip a switch and there's light. Likewise, I think a lot of videogames nowadays tend to spell everything out for the player, making the puzzles super-easy and/or just giving the player the solutions outright. Whereas several older games would present a hard puzzle with a few hints, but it was up to the player to figure out how to progress(often by using what they've learned to that point). This is my general sentiment, and the seatbelt analogy is golden. A lot of the concepts in the game are already basic, common sense logic(such as needing a torch or other light source at night), but a lot of modern videogame titles have trained players to go through a set of predefined motions like a theme park ride. I think it's something that, if needed, should be worked either into the tutorial, or a separate gamemode intended to act as a more in-depth tutorial. Personally, I think the handbook that we currently is sufficient, and the tutorial also makes sure to inform the player that everything they could want to know regarding survival is found in there. It's a lot of reading, to be sure, but you can pause the game while reading and there's so much overlap between gameplay systems that it's the most efficient method of delivering the information. This is true. However, one issue I see with flavor text is that it's easy to clutter the screen with the text box, in addition to needing to have the mouse cursor hovering over the item in order to read it. Using the earlier-mentioned example of fat: "Useful as a sealant". Short, to the point, and won't clutter the screen with a massive text block. Telling the player via text that it can be eaten or used as fuel is entirely unnecessary, since the item has values for saturation and burn times.

In my case, I watched pieces of Let's Plays and a couple of other videos to get a sense of whether the game would be something I would enjoy before actually buying it(I've been burned on a few titles). That, plus shelling out a few hundred hours in Minecraft meant I had a decent idea of what to do in the beginning. When hiding for the night though, I typically unpaused the handbook and just spent the time reading and figuring out what I wanted to work on. I'll actually disagree somewhat here--part of the charm of Vintage Story is that it doesn't hold your hand very much and expects the player to think things through themselves. Oh, it's nighttime and you can't see? Well of course you need a torch, did you expect to see in the dark silly? That being said, if enough new players are having enough difficulty with it, then it's probably something that should be added to the tutorial in order to reduce frustration. At that point it's an "ignore at your own risk" factor. Alternatively, you could slip that in as advice via dialogue from the traders. Since the player always spawns in near a trader(although admittedly, the trader wagons aren't always immediately visible), they're almost certain to investigate and start asking questions.

I'll jump back in here to say that I'm guessing the initial intention(given the Skyrim comparison) is that there would be an NPC or two to teach the player how to do something like tanning or metalworking. And while that would be a cool, immersive way to learn some of the game systems, it would fundamentally alter the entire storyline of the game. The general idea seems to be that the player is dumped into the world out in the middle of nowhere, with no civilization for miles around. Talking to the trader nearby may further confirm that what civilization there is will be very difficult to find. Once the villages/settlements/strongholds are actually added into the game(perhaps with the 1.20 update?) I expect reaching one to take some effort to reach, perhaps after an in-game year or two for the average player, assuming default settings. Now that being said...a "new game+" mode, where the player has the option of starting in a settlement, could be interesting and make for a nice reward for beating the game's main story in the standard method of play. Also imagine being a veteran player and not being able to leave the Stone Age because the scrap of paper that opens up metalworking won't spawn in any of the ruins you find! I think that kind of RNG could potentially work for late-game items that are intended to be super-rare, legendary status type things, but hard-gating standard progression behind what is essentially lootbox RNG is generally a bad idea.

That's probably something you could bake into the end of the tutorial. That way new players are made aware of it(assuming they do the tutorial, anyway), and seasoned players won't be getting annoyed with it every time they start a new world.

Well I mean...he got removed from Minecraft, so it stands to reason he found a new home somewhere else. I wouldn't worry too much though, unless you start finding extinguished torches that you didn't place. Keep an eye on your gears too--I hear he likes to redecorate.

I'm guessing that there will probably be some more immersive ways to learn some of the gameplay loops in the future, but I agree with @Thorfinn. Vintage Story has a steep learning curve and requires the player to learn a hefty amount of knowledge in order to truly master the game. The handbook is the best method for making all the information you'll need available in a convenient, unobtrusive format. Haven't played in a while and forgot a recipe? It's easy to look up. Starting a new world? You don't need to have an NPC hold your hand and go through a tutorial; you can just jump right into the actual gameplay. The thing about Skyrim(and similar games) is that the list of craftable items is much more limited, and crafting itself is much less effort than what Vintage Story demands. For Skyrim in particular, the crafting system as a whole has been simplified from its predecessors in order to be more accessible to more casual players. When there are fewer things to manage, it's a little easier to work in a short immersive tutorial quest to familiarize the player with the systems. This! This has been a frustration of mine for both Subnautica and Valheim! I try to manage my inventory in this types of games so I try not to pick up things that I don't think I'll need. In Subnautica, this resulted in me getting stuck for several hours of gameplay when I was trying to craft benzene, I think it was. Basically, I could see the recipe so I knew it existed, but I didn't know what I needed to craft it because the ingredients were listed as unknown. I ended up getting frustrated and just looking it up, only to find out that the blood kelp pods were what was missing in order to unlock and craft the recipe properly. Same story with Valheim, although a bit less frustration involved. I spent several hours running around with the crude bow after defeating Eikthyr, due to not realizing that there was a better bow option available. I had to cut down a pine tree in the Black Forest area before I figured it out, as there was nothing to really suggest that those trees would give a different type of wood. In regards to NPC quests needing to be completed to unlock recipes for progression, in the name of immersion...I'm reminded of what in WoW when the quest NPCs would get killed by enemy players or disappear after someone else completed the quest. It could take a while for them to respawn, which meant you had to either sit there and wait, or go find something else to do. Now in Vintage Story I suppose you could mitigate the problem a bit by not allowing anything to attack the NPCs, but that shatters immersion in a whole different way. Aside from the immersion aspect though...there's nothing like unskippable tutorials to kill a game's replayability.

What I have mine set to, although I run Fullscreen and not Windowed(was just for screencap). I'm not sure what hardware you're running, but I would assume since our settings our similar that it's similar to mine: Ryzan 5, Radeon 590, and 16 GB of RAM. Possibly. As I recall, Better Ruins adds a lot of items to the game(or at least, the blueprints that let you craft uncraftable items?). It also generates some larger, more detailed structures than vanilla, and some of them are proper dungeons leading underground that you will need to clear out if you want the loot/space. I don't think they're quite at the scale of the Resonance Archive, but one of the reasons that the Archive tends to drop frames is due to all of the chiseled detailing, I believe. So it's very possible that the Better Ruins could be the cause of the lag. The next time you notice a framerate drop/stutter, it may be worth popping into spectator mode and taking a quick look around to see if there's any massive structures that might be the cause.

Without going too deep into spoiler territory--I'm not sure that the player characters are native to the world. The player characters are seraphs rather than humans, which is the reason for the oddly colored skin, eye colors, and height difference between the player and the traders. As for why the drifters have them and the player character does not...I would chalk it up to drifters essentially worshiping the technology, or perhaps wresting it from the hands of some poor soul that came before you. The player character, on the other hand, has reappeared in the current world after an unspecified amount of time, having escaped whatever calamity befell the Old World. Assuming it was a narrow escape, it stands to reason that the player character has nothing but the clothes on their backs to work with at the start. However, I could also see this changing in a future update, perhaps as an option to start with a temporal gear(or some other one-use item) to set your spawn.

Can you snap a shot of your graphics settings? That might help narrow down the cause, though I'm wondering if it has more to do with how much of the world has been explored. My current game doesn't have those mods, but has a handful of others and has similar issues. I don't think any of the mods are really performance-heavy, and the graphics settings aren't terribly extravagant(hardware is decent). I have explored quite a lot of the world though, and activated at least five translocators, so I'm wondering if that's perhaps keeping more chunks active/loaded than there are at the beginning of a game. However, I'll also note that the dropped frames aren't always an issue--sometimes when I reboot the client, reload the world, or even just play for a while the game will sort itself out. I will also note that in my case, it could still be a lurking issue with my mouse, although I've not noticed it causing the issues I was having before.

I forgot about that. Whoops! This is basically what I did on the first several worlds I had. The game was still challenging, but it was more fun because it was a little more forgiving of the mistakes I made while learning.

Welcome to the forums! Out of curiosity, have you tried the Homo Sapiens game mode? It removes the temporality mechanic, traders, and the rest of the lore stuff in favor of a pure survival experience. You could probably pair it with the Outlaws mod(and others) to have a more "realistic" survival experience without the supernatural elements. Personally, I've found the temporal mechanics an interesting take on the survival/adventure genres, as it's not quite science fiction, but it's not resorting to the "magic" excuse that a lot of games tend to. And while the drifters and automatons are creepy, the game doesn't feel like it really delves into horror territory. A lot is left up to your imagination, and the pieces of lore that do exist have to be found and pieced together by the player themselves. As for the drifters...they do annoy me, but they've become oddly endearing as well. I light my base fairly well, so they don't tend to spawn indoors, and the way the rift activity works means that they don't always spawn at night either. Much less hassle to get things done when it's dark out. I'd also say don't be shy about using console commands when needed or modding the game to fit your personal taste. The game was built with that in mind.

I answered in the other thread, but I'll post the same answer here in case others who read this need it: To change your spawn point in Vintage Story, you will need to acquire a temporal gear. These are rare items that can drop from drifters(the more powerful the drifter, the more chance one has of dropping) or from panning, be found in ruins, or be purchased from certain traders(I believe it's the treasure hunters that can sell them). By default, a spawn point that is set via temporal gear will only last through 20 respawns, so if you've died several times since last setting your spawn you'll want to refresh it with a new gear. Or you can change that particular value in the world configuration options. The other option is finding a mod that changes the respawn mechanic to tie your spawn point to whichever bed you last slept in(or whichever changes the mod makes), rather than using a temporal gear.

You need a temporal gear, which is a rare item that drops from drifters, from panning, occasional dungeon loot, or as a sale item from certain traders(treasure hunter, I think). By default the reset spawn point will only last through 20 respawns, but you can always change this in the world configuration options. The other option is finding a mod that changes the respawn mechanics to be tied to whichever bed you slept in last, instead of needing to use a temporal gear.

This might be what you're looking for: https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/7942 Now in regards to the Resonance Archive, I don't really have an answer there other than a rule for players to ignore it, or using the Homo Sapiens game mode and building all ruins from scratch.

If you're going with a smaller world size and were able to generate something close to what you were looking for, I'd try fleshing the rest of it out manually via creative mode. That way you can delete the traders and anything else on the island that you don't want, while adding extra resources that you'll want to find later. You can also build extra set pieces into the world that way as well, such as an abandoned mine, hot springs, active lava zone, etc. Depending on how long you intend to run the server, you may want to enter creative mode once in a while anyway to replenish unrenewable resources(such as ores in a mine) as a form of maintenance. There might be some barrier blocks or something you could access via creative mode, if you haven't already set the world boundary itself to 5k x 5k. Otherwise, you'll probably need to use an honor system and trust that everyone will stay put in the designated area.

This is true. However, all of the plate helmets in-game(that I'm aware of) are depicted with visors, which is what I was referring to in my initial post. That being said, having some helmet styles that aren't locked to specific materials would be awesome!

For as long as people stay interested in the game. Just look at Minecraft(as @ifoz mentioned) and Skyrim; both of those games are well over a decade old and still going strong. There are also games that are even older than those two, that still have a dedicated playerbase. If the core gameplay is good, people will keep playing, and mods just add to the experience. https://www.vintagestory.at/roadmap.html/ https://www.vintagestory.at/faq.html/ As others here have mentioned, and as the links above confirm, Vintage Story is still quite early in its development. I seem to recall reading somewhere that only 10% or so of the game is finished. As for the game engine itself, it's custom-built by the developers, and not something pre-existing like Bethesda's Creation engine. The general impression I have is that the devs are building the engine as the game progresses, ensuring that the most important pieces are there first(like lighting and the modding API) and then refining later. The next update(1.20) should result in some major updates to the engine, as mounts are being added as well as more ambient mobs(crickets, frogs, and the like--their generation is different than the entities we already have, like butterflies).