LadyWYT

I've a hunch the next pre might include the berry bush rework and the dungeons, or at least one of the two. The bug tracker has been suspiciously quiet, with a few bugs marked as swatted for next pre, but fewer than I would have thought if the devs were just bug swatting. I do agree though, I'd rather wait a few extra weeks for everything to be just right, than to have things get rushed and make a poor first impression due to being a little undercooked.

To be fair though, some real life caves do be like that sometimes. The Marvel Cave(I think that was the name?) in Silver Dollar City has a huge drop from the opening to the cavern floor, and while it's interesting to see looking at the stairs leading down into the cave can make one quite dizzy. That being said, I wouldn't mind seeing the number of caves decrease a bit in exchange for the caves getting a little bigger and more interesting when they do occur. Or at least having some swaths of territory where caves are far less frequent. As it stands now, the caves aren't terrible, but there's several of them that are quite small and don't really go anywhere or contain anything useful. It's not bad to encounter a few from time to time, but since they occur quite frequently it makes it quite easy for the player to turn to ignoring them instead of wanting to explore them.

Welcome to the forums! If it makes you feel better, I incinerated myself in a few of first worlds thanks to building pit kilns in my base...next to the hay bed...and reed chests. This is why it's a good idea to set up a lightning rod somewhere near the chicken pen, unless one really enjoys friend chicken, that is. Edit: I meant to say FRIED chicken. Leaving chickens to get roasted by lightning is not typically a friendly gesture.

It might not be the best fix, but it's definitely better than having to fork over several gears for a new elk. Plus that is one benefit of being able to switch between game modes, no?

Oh good, now I can tell my friend he can stop fiddling with his teleporting bears idea.

What I like to do when I toy around with arctic playthroughs, is add the Wildcraft mods, as well as something like Expanded Foods or other food mod that allows things like pemmican or otherwise gives more use to bushmeat. Ancient Tools adds a healing salve that can be crafted from fat and resin, I think, as well as adding recipes for turning tree bark into flour. Wildcraft is the biggest gamechanger though, since the Fruits & Nuts module adds more berries and nuts to forage, while the Trees & Shrubs module adds more diverse flora along with the option to craft baskets and things from canes/thin branches rather than reeds. That being said, the arctic is one region that needs more fleshing out. I do think it should remain very tough to survive there, as well as tough to acquire certain supplies like linen or honey, but that's also part of what makes surviving in such an environment appealing.

This is why I'm leaning a little more towards watermills in 1.22. They might be an expensive investment, and not as fast as windmills, but there's enough power there to keep a helve hammer going at a good steady pace. A windmill is still nice to have, however, it's really disappointing when the wind up and dies right in the middle of a big smithing project(like armor).

I've done this several times. I look at it like a Bob Ross painting--it's my world, so I get to be the one deciding what happens in it, whether that's via the vanilla settings, the tools of creative/spectator mode, or just adding mods to spice things up.

I swear there was somebody who managed to build an automated sorting system in VS with them, but can't recall who it was. In my case, I don't get that deep into the mechanical side, so I forget the Archimedes screw is a thing, for the most part.

This isn't true. Iron and steel spears get bonuses from quenching, but cannot be sharpened like swords can. However, the quenching is a little bugged at the moment on the prerelease, so I don't think the quenching bonuses are applying properly to anything right now.

To be fair, Minecraft is still a good game, it just has different priorities than Vintage Story. Interestingly enough, Vintage Story actually began as a mod for Minecraft, before Tyron realized that a simple mod just wasn't going to be able to handle the scope of what he wanted to do. I think every VS veteran has been there at one time or another. But that's also part of what's fun about interacting with the community. You might not ever be able to truly get that "new player" experience again, but after you've earned your stripes then you have the experience to help out the players who came after you.

It turns out the creature behavior was bugged, so rabbits and other animals weren't trying to eat crops like they were supposed to. The bug should be fixed in 1.22, but I haven't actually tested the bunny pit trap to see if it works or not.

As one of the players who got eaten by said bear before it died...yes, can confirm that it is a thing in the game.

Borax. It happened to me in 1.20. I started a new world to play the story from start to finish and see how the pacing was, and got incredibly lucky with a surface tin deposit near my spawn. So I had bronze in the time it usually takes me to get to copper. Iron also proved easy enough to get, but I wanted steel before starting the story as I wasn't sure what I was getting into. And then the trouble started. I think I did eventually find borax thousands of blocks to the northwest, but then I was still missing bauxite, so eventually I just gave up and started chapter two, hoping to find what I was after along the way(which I did).

I'm also curious as to whether this is a situation that happens more often when mods are involved, or whether it happens fairly frequently in vanilla as well. I've seen the issue come up a few times on the forums, but can't say that I've ever experienced it myself, or really seen a definitive answer to solving it when it does happen.

Sure, but it still brings up the issue of players wondering why certain cosmetic options are available in one game mode but not the other. It also makes things complicated for players who decide to enable/disable lore content mid-playthrough, for whatever reason. If they started in Homo Sapiens and decided they wanted to play the story content without starting a new world, they probably won't appreciate having their character turn blue all of a sudden. Likewise, those that want to play with lore enabled but don't like the seraph options aren't going to be pleased when they aren't able to select more natural tones. The options could, of course, just be enabled for everyone regardless of game mode, however, that doesn't track with the lore set forth for the game, which isn't ideal since it decreases the quality of the story. There'd absolutely have to be a few rewrites, since the strange physical characteristics of seraphs are directly mentioned on more than one occasion.

Welcome to the forums! 1.18, which is right when the first story content dropped. Aside from everything feeling more overwhelming and scary due to a lack of game knowledge and experience, the game's progression was similar to what it is now. More difficult than Minecraft or other similar titles, to be sure, but very satisfying to play and not actually that hard once one learns the "rules" that Vintage Story plays by. Most of the game is just testing how good the player is at problem-solving, planning for the future, and thinking on their feet or outside the box. As for the lore, 1.18 laid the foundations for pretty much everything we have now, but the pieces that came with chapter 2 in 1.20 confirmed a few things that had otherwise been theory before, though there were a few things that were definitely not hinted at before(that I am aware of, anyway). Gut feeling, mostly. The survival mechanics looked interesting and the world in general looked fun to explore. The hard sell for me was the player model and horror aspect. I'm not a horror fan, but the game didn't seem to have blood or gore, and keep the creepy stuff mostly as background dressing to flavor the setting, thus I don't really consider it a horror game. The player model wasn't as polished back then as it is now(though it really hasn't changed too much), and while it looked unsettling at first it's the kind of thing that just...grows on you, as well as makes a lot of sense once you figure out why the player character is colored so oddly. In any case, after watching some basic gameplay footage(Rhadamant mostly, for those wondering), I ended up trying the game for myself and loved it! As for what keeps me invested, the story and lore plays a big role. There's a lot to uncover and piece together, and it's well-written as well as blended into the world in a way that feels natural. I've had several many hours of entertainment alone just from uncovering scraps of lore or writing up different characters and thinking about how they would fit in to a world like this. The core gameplay itself is also challenging enough to keep me entertained and acquiring new tools and resources actually feels like an accomplishment rather than something that was just handed to me. Not that I have anything against easy games either, but sometimes I just want to feel like I actually had to work a little bit to beat the game. Honestly I thought it was a janky Minecraft clone the first time I ever caught wind of it, and thus I promptly ignored it for a year or two before I stumbled across it again. To be fair, when I found it the second time, it still looked like a weird Minecraft clone, but actually researching what it was revealed it was anything but that. I can't say that I really saw its potential when I first bought it either; that more came after I had played it for a little while and realized I was having more fun than I'd had for a long time in a videogame.

I think it makes more sense to just leave it to the modded realm. Homo Sapiens isn't the game mode that Vintage Story is developed around, and just there as a nice option for those who want pure realistic survival only. In the lore, the player characters are not human, hence why they have odd colored skin, eyes, and hair. If human tones existed in Homo Sapiens only, it might be fine for that mode but cause friction for the rest of the game when players wonder why they can't have those options in standard play. There's also the factor of...Homo Sapiens mode is just the standard gameplay with the lore content disabled. Given that the player can easily disable the lore content themselves in the options at world creation, or via console command after, that introduces the new problem of how to handle those color options when the player tampers with such settings. Not really an option without rewriting the entire game story, as well as the setting. It's better suited for a different game, with a setting to support such, or otherwise handled by mods so players can add whatever they want.

To restate what others have already said, the only real way to find other rock types is to just...pick a direction and start walking. If you have access to translocators, those can make the process much easier since they can teleport players thousands of blocks away in an instant. The trick, however, is finding and repairing one. I will note though that when it comes to bauxite, it's usually the top layer, but can sometimes spawn under other layers of sediment rock. Thus it's a good idea to keep an eye on exposed cliff faces or peek into caves every now and then to see what kind of rock strata is available, assuming that the top layers are sediment layers, anyway. Actually, for a Minecraft-style world, the climate distribution can be changed from "realistic" to "patchwork" at world creation. While it won't change the rock layers and the biomes will still be determined by rainfall and whatnot, it will mean that hot biomes can be next to cold biomes, meaning that the player won't need to travel to the equator in order to experience the tropics(or the north pole to experience the arctic).

Probably for the same reason that mushrooms and pumpkins are also classified as vegetables in the game, and why tomatoes are considered vegetables in conventional real life terms rather than a fruit like an apple or pear. It might also be to give another vegetable option to the warmer climates, since turnips and things aren't going to grow as well.

Nah, the thing you have to be watching for now is where the "catch" is. That is, the drifter ambush underground, or the bear in the bushes on the way home, etc. Sometimes there's not, but there's usually a sneaky little detail or two to overcome to actually get the prize back to your base.

I don't think seaweed/aquatic plants can be harvested at all without mods. Coral...I'm not sure, but it seems like it would probably need saltwater in order to survive.

The problem with that is that classes actually have specific lore tied to them. It's not just a choice of buffs/debuffs. If it were just a choice of equipment and traits then every character would have the same experience, rather than special class-related interactions. That being said, I recall one of the ideas floated for a status effect system being that the player could potentially earn new traits over time, both good and bad. So it may be possible to earn additional good traits or lose bad traits in a future game version.

Welcome to the forums! There's kind of a chronological order they get arranged in, however, some of it is also left up to the player to figure out. By that I mean that lore books seem to always be added to the journal in a specific order, but the order in which they appear isn't necessarily by which was written first. Generally, the journal seems to try to keep multiple entries from the same author grouped together, and it's a similar case for subjects as well. Tapestries and carvings are entered in the order in which they are found, however, they also have numbers to indicate to the player which one is "first".

This is true, however, it gets a little goofy when it comes to dealing with computer water and digital vegetables.