LadyWYT

I'm not sure but what part of the learning curve of VS is just learning to let go of things sometimes. Depending on settings, it's very possible for the player to end up dying and being unable to recover their stuff. Too high of rift activity might mean sleeping or working indoors at night, instead of running around outside. The temporal stability mechanic means that underground bases aren't that feasible in general, and that sometimes there will be a beautiful area that's unsuitable for a permanent residence due to being too unstable. Get complacent about food stores and suddenly everything's rotted and you're scrambling to find something edible. And the list goes on. That's not to say that any of those situations aren't frustrating, or that there's not room for improvement. But I do think a big portion of Vintage Story is knowing you will get punched, and learning to roll with those punches when they happen.

If you can't find what you're looking for, you could always try hosting your own. Yes, it's a bit more effort than just joining someone else's server, but it does give you complete control over what rules are in place.

Possibly, but they can still getcha if you aren't paying attention, especially if you're unarmored at the time. Not that players need to start wearing armor 24/7, but it does mean more vigilance will be required on days with high rift activity. Plus it's more incentive to build rift wards, rather than rely on lanterns.

For what it's worth, the ones that spawn in the daylight don't seem to hang around terribly long. They'll wander around for a bit before disappearing, unless they happen to notice you. In which case, they'll get aggressive until you either kill them or run outside of their aggro range.

If you're building a town, why not turn the unstable areas into storage? No need to hang around storage, just drop off materials or grab what you need and go elsewhere. Or build a jail or asylum as set pieces, because hey, decoration is cool, and those are two places no one wants to be anyway.

Are you running with VSync turned on? That can make a decent impact to performance in 1.21. Turning off VSync tends to boost the framerate. I have a Ryzen 5 1600 and Sapphire 580 for CPU and GPU respectively, and 16 GB of RAM, and had some performance issues when updating to 1.21, when VSync is enabled. Forested areas are more likely to impact performance regardless, given all the foliage that needs rendering. However, there were a few changes to rendering in 1.21, I believe, that were supposed to improve performance, though it also seems like AMD hardware and Macs are struggling with some of those changes.

I second the tropical map idea, though maybe nix the island part unless you just really love sailing. There is more water content so I would definitely increase the amount of water you have covering the map in order to have more ocean, but otherwise there's not yet enough water content to justify a proper islands map, in my opinion. I would say add dinosaurs as well, but it doesn't look like those mods are updated for 1.21 yet.

I want to say that shearing sheep or goats for wool is intended, but I can't recall having seen any particular official statement on it other than cloth weaving being on the roadmap. In any case, without a way to actually process the wool into something useful, there's not much benefit to a shearing mechanic.

As @Echo Weaver noted, the mechanic is already telegraphed clearly in the game by the big teal gear on one's hotbar. There's also an entire handbook page on temporal stability as well. However, it is a feature unique to Vintage Story, so it's also something that will probably catch new players off-guard quite easily. As for why the mechanic exists...it's mostly just an extra challenge for the player to deal with, and it can be turned on and off in the world creation settings or via console command after world creation(make sure to reload the world for the change to take effect). The lore reason for the mechanic's existence, without spoiling too much, is that someone in the past essentially scienced a little too hard and tampered with things they shouldn't have tampered with in order to save humanity from being wiped out. The result was some sort of cataclysmic event that allowed humanity to survive extinction, but broke the world in the process and caused all the chaos the player encounters in the present day.

Just highlight the piece that you want to quote--it should bring up a green box that says "Quote Selection".

This is mainly due to Vintage Story being a slow-paced game in general. It is possible to make very fast progression, but that requires a lot of effort and knowledge on the player's part. Which, I think is fine; the game is better when taken slowly, but it's nice to have the option to "speedrun" certain things if one has the skill and desire. The drawback to the slower overall pace though is that it can definitely be a turn-off for players who'd rather just complete a game in a weekend's worth of play(not saying that's the case here though). As for progression speeding up after copper...I think there's a two-fold reason for that, the foremost being player skill. A more experienced player will be able to build off of copper tools quickly, since they know the basic steps of progression that come next. A brand new player though will probably be stuck at copper for a while, since they're still figuring out how various things in the game work. The other main reason copper speeds up progression, is that copper unlocks the rest of the game's general toolset(chisel, saw, quern, etc); from there it's just a matter of finding better metals. Tagging on to what @Echo Weaver already said--keep in mind the game is still very much unfinished. There is a main story to complete, yes, and while there is quite a lot of content for what is implemented so far, it's still only two chapters out of a planned eight. As far as end game content in general, currently end game tech is still mostly undeveloped--we have a handful of Jonas tech devices, but that's about it. I think the next major update though is supposed to be fleshing out the end game tech, so that issue should be remedied within an update or two. The idea of increasing tool durability across the board, in exchange for making surface copper more rare, feels like a fair trade off. However, I think the current balance is fine as it is, and probably better suited to the average player given how many complaints there have been about early tools being too hard to acquire. So an early metal tool that is fairly easy to acquire(plenty of surface copper) but that breaks relatively easily compared to other metal tools is probably more satisfying since it gets the tool in the player's hands faster, while still pushing the player to seek out better materials instead of sticking to copper. And yeah, I think you're spot on with that statement about panning. It's pretty boring, and not really a good idea to force the player into that path, but it's there as a safe, convenient way to get a few early game minerals. The player needs them not just because they last longer, but also because some content requires better equipment to handle it. For example, chromite ore requires steel to mine and process, and is a required mineral for crafting sturdy leather for the best backpacks in the game. Likewise, the first story chapter requires a minimum gear level of tier 2; while the player can complete it with less, that requires much more skill. Chapter 2 requires iron gear as a minimum. There's a lot of things that happen in the game that aren't accurate to real life. The reason those decisions exist is for balancing reasons. "Realistic" doesn't always mean "fun", and part of the general challenge of the game is that the player will need to replace equipment every so often, and thus need to devote the time and energy to acquiring the necessary resources and crafting the items. Better quality materials are harder to get, but also mean less effort long-term for the player since the tools last much longer. That's progress though; if the new equipment isn't actively better than the old, there's no reason to work towards new equipment as there's no progress actually being made. However, I wouldn't call low-tier materials entirely obsolete. In the late game, copper is still very useful, but the player is using it for lanterns, lightning rods, and machine parts rather than using it for tools. Many players still use flint axes to chop firewood(I do this myself), or a flint knife or shovel as a cheap tool to collect a few things instead of retrieving a better tool for the job.

This isn't true--you can milk a gen 0 ewe, it's just very difficult. I think the failure rate is something like 95% or higher. In any case, I've done it, so I know that it's possible, but it does take a lot of patience and isn't really worth the effort most of the time. You're much better off waiting until gen 1. In any case, welcome to the forums! You don't need to keep feeding your ewes in order for them to produce milk. You can only milk them once per day(24 in-game hours between milking times), so it's more just a matter of being patient. The once-per-day limit is also why it's not a bad idea to keep older ewes around until you have enough higher generations to replace them, though do make sure the older ewes are at least gen 1, for reasons stated above.

I think the intended solution is for the player to use rift wards to defend their base from rifts. It takes a fair amount of work to acquire one, and it'll cost the occasional temporal gear to keep it powered, but for that level of security it's a fair trade. Given the recent changes to rifts that allow them to spawn the occasional monster in daylight, I'd say that's also going to be the reason the player needs to invest in rift wards over relying on cheap lanterns everywhere.

I've made cheese a few times, but usually by the time I'm acquiring dairy in any reasonable amount in a world I'm dropping the old world in favor of starting over fresh for an update or new modlist. For just building the initial dairy nutrition, I think drinking milk is the best way to build up the points. From there, it's just a matter of eating the occasional slice of cheese or so to maintain it. Cheese is definitely something that could be a more appealing trade item though. Currently, only the agriculture trader offers it for sale, and even then only on occasion(and it's expensive). Make cheese available at a cheaper price though, and available at survival good and commodities traders, and now the player has a feasible source of early dairy nutrition until they can acquire proper dairy livestock themselves. Or in the event the player doesn't want livestock at all, they have a viable way of obtaining and maintaining dairy nutrition.

You can, it's just a more uncommon drop compared to regular quartz. You might have to pick up several pieces in order to get a couple pieces of clear quartz.

Should be possible, though a pure trade strategy will hinge on access to survival goods and commodities traders, as those seem to offer raw materials specifically.

How else does one acquire clean dirt

If I'm reading correctly, I think the main issue here is that if passive healing rate is turned down, then it can create the strategy of...just hurt yourself a bit to slow down hunger depletion, and thus make your food stores go further than they really should.

Interesting. This feature does make rift activity have a lot more impact and actually feel dangerous. I almost died in the forest while out hunting the other day, thanks to a couple of sneaky daywalkers.

This is a pretty huge fix--we've been playing with his modded hotfix on our server and man...it's a game changer. You don't realize how much the bug affected gameplay, until your food stores start running low because you have to actually eat properly! In any case, this fix and all the others are much appreciated.

This was me when I first started playing, frustration included. However, the tedium is the trade-off for having a method that safe, which is quite fair in my opinion. Eventually, I got better at the game to be more confident about venturing out for surface deposits. Yes and no. Panning is a decent way to get them, along with other goodies, but if there is a deposit of quartz near the surface it's also just as easy to pick up the surface bits and get some clear quartz that way.

As are pigs--there is a reason I said most predators aren't really desirable foodstuffs. Bear is tasty but may need to be pressure-cooked for tenderness. Gator is tasty but chewier than most people would probably enjoy. Haven't had snake, so couldn't say on that bit.

Like others here have noted, the general way of acquiring enough copper for the first anvil and tools is by mining surface deposits with the pickaxe and crushing the ore with a hammer. Panning for all the ore is an alternative that's very safe, but also very slow and tedious, so it tends not to be the usual strategy. As for the anvil mold breaking, that is intended behavior, however... Breaking a mold that contains metal that has not yet hardened will produce a mess, and not a finished product. I think in that case though, the metal is supposed to drop as chunks, that you can break down into bits with the chisel and then re-smelt. If no metal dropped though, it sounds like you found a bug, in which case best to report over on the github bug tracker. ...Tyron(the lead developer and creator of Vintage Story) is designing the game he himself wants to play. It originally began as a mod for Minecraft, but due to disappointment in the direction Minecraft was heading, and the limitations of Minecraft's engine for mods, he ended up just building his own game to ensure his vision could be fulfilled completely. Given the success of Vintage Story, there are obviously a lot of players out there who also enjoy his design, but that also doesn't mean that everyone who tries the game out is going to enjoy it(that can be said of any game). If you're not enjoying the game or prefer Minecraft instead, that's perfectly fine too--everyone's allowed to have preferences. The refund policy is quite generous, as I understand it, so you should be able to get your money back, though it may take a few days for the support team to process your request.

Tough choice, as I both utilize all of these to some extent(how heavily depends on circumstances) and I also enjoy them all as well. I will also note that you forgot hunting on there, technically, but I suppose that fits under foraging. In any case, on to the explanations! Under-used: Trading. It's not that I don't trade, because I do--it's typically where I get my salt. It's just that generally, traders aren't selling anything I particularly want, outside of salt or the odd decorative item or two. As for rusty gears, sure, sometimes I just sell stuff to the traders to earn them, but usually I'm putting my efforts to work elsewhere, and just saving the ones I find as treasure from ruins and monsters(there's plenty). Favorite: Combat is probably what I would pick overall, which is a bit of a paradox since combat is also something I generally avoid. However, I think that's also part of why I enjoy it--there's actually a reason to be picky about when and why I engage. Otherwise, the boss fights are very satisfying, and it's very satisfying to make all that shiny end game gear and then finally bring the pain to the monsters, instead of the other way around. The fact that you can make the monsters fight each other, or try to flee from your onslaught, is just the icing on the cake. Likewise, the monsters are balanced so that I can't just go unga-bunga with the bare minimum of equipment and expect to come out on top, like I can with the other block game. That's a quick way to get shredded, and the same general logic applies even with good equipment. Get complacent, and you will probably die.

First off, welcome to the forums! I've heard that boss health is supposed to scale in comparison to nearby player count, but I'm not 100% sure that it does. Overall, I would say that story locations in general are a little easier with a friend or two, simply because you can watch each other's backs or revive each other in the event someone falls(thanks new healing mechanics!). Very minor spoilers in that so far there is one boss fight per chapter, but not every story location contains a boss battle. Each story chapter has at least one "challenge" portion that will prove quite difficult on average, though how difficult it actually is depends heavily on individual player skill. I highly recommend taking temporal gears with you to reset your spawn, in the event that you meet with misfortune. Again, it depends on player skill. On average, the main puzzle locations take a couple of in-game days to complete, minimum. If you've never done those locations before though, I would prepare to spend more time there overall, as some puzzles can be quite challenging. The answer to this one really depends on whether you prefer to complete content solo, or with friends. Completing it solo, you can take as much time as you'd like at each location, and won't need to worry about sharing loot. If you decide to complete it with friends though, hilarious hijinks can ensue, and overall your reactions can play off each other.