LadyWYT

Welcome to the forums! The first thing I would check is inventory space--if you didn't have the space to hold it, it most likely got dropped to the floor. You might try clearing some inventory space and checking around his home to make sure that it didn't get dropped. If you still can't find it, it's possible that it might be a bug, in which case you should report it over on the Github bug tracker. Do note that if you are using mods, you will want to disable them and try to replicate the bug in vanilla(you can use console commands and admin blade to speedrun chapter 2, no need to complete chapter 1 first). If the bug can't be replicated in vanilla, then it's likely an issue that's being caused by a mod. The item itself doesn't appear to be available in creative, which is probably an oversight and worth a report. The good news is that you can spawn the rickety translocator via creative, so while you may not be able to craft it for that world, you can still access the tech itself(can also wait until you've made all the craftable parts before deleting them and spawning in the translocator).

Absolutely! Yes, making iron armor without the aid of a helve hammer will be a lot of work, however, keep in mind that iron is quite durable, and withstands tier 3 attacks and below. In other words, it's a lot of work up front, but unless you're regularly brawling lots of high tier enemies, you're not going to need to repair it very often. However, if you'd rather wait for a windmill, bronze lamellar is a solid option, since that doesn't require forging. If you have flax to spare, or like to utilize trading, there's also gambeson, which offers the same tier protection as bronze but with better overall stats. I will also note that depending on what you are doing, forgoing armor is also an option. Unless you're delving into caves or dangerous ruins(story content), or fighting through temporal storms, it's usually fairly easy to avoid threats or kill/soften them up at range before dealing with them in melee. You do have to be a lot more attentive to your surroundings if you go this route though, as it's a lot easier to die from mistakes.

Welcome to the forums! Technically, it does, though the recipe you're looking for is terra preta. Terra preta is the highest soil quality possible, and can only be acquired via crafting. There are two different recipes--one that uses high fertility soil in the making and one that does not. Both are pricey, but the one that uses high fertility soil has a better return on the resources invested.

When I play the other block game, this becomes the other block game.

As @ifoz already noted, it was an intended change in order to allow the player more flexibility when completing this part of story. Previously, the player would essentially have to do this section in the spring/summer(unless they were in a warm climate), lest they freeze to death. Likewise, I'm not sure it would have been able to be completed without freezing to death on challenges like Snowball Earth. That being said...I think this farming is an unintended feature of that change. I'm not sure that I would really call it an exploit, given what you're settling next to in order to achieve it...that place is called "Devastation" for a reason. Tier 2 and tier 3 monsters are common there.

I'm not sure about that. Caving itself is dangerous, due to the denizens lurking within, and you do have to go fairly deep for iron. Likewise, there's no guarantee that caves will cut through, or even come close to, iron veins. However, there's also the factor of...just how attentive is the average player? Granted, I don't think the average player really misses that much, but it's not uncommon either to miss spotting clay deposits, or surface copper, etc. Overall though, it's a neat idea, but I think it detracts from the prospecting system. I think that would be a better spot for stuff like pyrite or bog iron, or other small, low quality deposits. That is, a deposit that relatively easy to find and mine, but requires a LOT more ore in order to produce the same yield that standard iron veins will. My friend and I explored this concept on one of our older servers, and it felt fairly balanced. The surface deposits were definitely easy to find, but didn't produce more than maybe a couple of ingots or so. Thus the player has the option of putting in the effort to find a deep deposit and take the risk of mining it, and therefore have their iron needs supplied for a good long while. Or the player can play it safe and rely on low quality surface deposits, but need to find and process a whole lot more of them to get a decent amount of iron to work with.

Given how many issues players have when it comes to chiselwork and functional greenhouses, that's no small feat you've accomplished. Well done!

Or this:

Given there's at least six more chapters to add, I suppose we'll find out!

Correct Kind of. Ores do have a certain depth threshold for spawning(in that it's the highest level you could find that ore at, but it could spawn deeper), but those values vary from ore to ore. To my knowledge, there is no convenient place to look that information up, aside from digging through the game files themselves. It's best to just prospect until you find a good spot to dig, and then dig a shaft down(sampling via node search as you go, if you have it enabled) until you either find what you're after, or cannot dig any further(in which case, time to find a new spot and try again). The further underground you venture, the stronger the monsters get, and the more likely the area is to be unstable. It is possible to find stable/neutral areas deep underground, but very rare. An outpost won't help unless you play with temporal stability turned off. Aside from learning to work quickly and taking periodic breaks on the surface to recover your stability, you can also kill monsters to recover stability, or sacrifice a temporal gear and a bit of health to regain some stability instantly. When there is no longer anything you wish to dig up, of course. Depends on your personal preference. You don't need to light everything up, but the darkness makes it difficult to notice incoming threats. Torches are a good, cheap source of light that will help cut down on monster spawns, but do bear in mind they will only burn for 48 in-game hours unless placed in torch holders. Oil lamps are very cheap and thus easy to use to light things up, but they aren't bright enough to actually stop monster spawns. Lanterns are the best in terms of lighting things up and stopping monster spawns, but given they're somewhat pricey for that kind of work, you'll be wanting to pick them back up when you're done with the mine entirely. Prospecting is tricky; as a general rule, you want to dig at sites that read Decent or higher(ignore the percentage, save for narrowing down the exact dig spot once you've settled on a dig site). However, the density search only gives you an idea of what might have spawned in that area, and not what actually did. While Decent and higher readings are the most likely places to find that ore, it's also worth digging at Poor/Very Poor spots, especially if the ore you're after is rare, or that's the best readings you have to work with. As for when you go after iron...entirely up to you. If the available ore is hematite, it should be relatively easy to find, especially if you have good readings to work with. If the available ore is magnetite though...that's a lot harder to find, even with a good reading. If the hard rock layers are predominantly andesite, it seems to spawn more consistently, but I think magnetite deposits might be smaller than hematite deposits, and thus fairly easy to miss. I'm not for certain on that theory either though--I just know that I've dug at several good readings for magnetite and found nothing to show for the effort. Hematite has never posed an issue. It is important to note that Minecraft-style mining doesn't work very well in Vintage Story, given how different ore distribution is between games. In Vintage Story, different types of ore require different types of host rock, and some ores are very specific when it comes to what kinds of rock they can spawn in. Likewise, Minecraft ore nodes are almost uniform from chunk to chunk, and tend to spawn in clusters/bunches of ore blocks. In Vintage Story, ores vary wildly from chunk to chunk(this is due mainly to the host rock requirements), and spawn in flat circular disks rather than bunches. For Vintage Story mining, you're really better off using the pro-pick to find a good dig spot, and then sinking a vertical shaft or two and using occasional node searches as you go to see what's actually there. Don't worry about potentially falling to your death--when using ladders, your character will not fall unless you physically move off the ladder block.

Not to throw too much shade, but not all mod authors make sure their code actually works either, or plays nicely with other mods. Likewise, it's important to check that the mod version being used is a stable release, and not a dev version. Dev versions are still very much works-in-progress and will likely have issues. There's also the good ol' bug or two that escapes notice in testing, and makes it into stable versions. Helped sniff out several of those while assisting a friend with mod development.

It's also worth noting that they put 1.21 focus to a vote, on whether players wanted new content, bug fixes, or something else, and the overwhelming majority(I think it was something like 2/3 of the vote) went to bugfixes and polish(to Tyron's apparent shock). That's not to say that players don't want new content, but rather that the playerbase as a whole is okay with new content getting delayed if it means that it will release in a more finished state. Which in my opinion, if it's not ready for testing, it really should be delayed. Test versions of a concept don't need to be perfect, but if it's too ridden with bugs then the average player is going to be focused more on the bugs and less on the content. I vaguely recall that being a thing in the earlier days of Minecraft. Oceans were huge...but had absolutely nothing in them, and boats were an absolute joke(you almost couldn't look at one without it falling apart). It was a source of general complaints, at least until the aquatic update.

I also look at it as, the more settings you include in vanilla, the more cluttered and confusing the menus get. It's great to have a high level of customization and all, but there's a reason that running jokes exist about players spending more time in menus just configuring things, than they spend actually playing the game. Not to mention that mods are a great way to test various ideas and see how well different implementations could actually work. Plus mods are a great way to customize one's game to very specific preferences, without changing the game for everyone else in the process.

I second this--would rather have one generic fish fillet, but different species of fish which produce different meat yields depending on the size. A salmon or mahi-mahi should produce a lot more meat than the common pond perch. Spear fishing is one of my favorite things to do in Primitive Survival. Very fun, and would definitely be a great fit for the vanilla game. Also...fish farming. I'm not sure how it would work, but it would be neat if you could stock a large pond and manage the population to have a steady supply of fishy protein. Though really, I'll just settle for having a pretty fish pond or aquarium to look at, since I do love my little fishy friends.

Right, but it's also not possible to cover everything in the vanilla settings either, hence where modding comes into play. Mods are still completely optional, but allow for much greater customization.

I will note that while it's fine for different systems/strategy to shine in multiplayer, the core systems need to be bearable in singleplayer. Using the refined tool handles as an example: if we assume that those can actually be crafted with early game tech and don't require late game stuff, it still bears consideration that the player will be going through a LOT of tools over the course of the game. It might be fun to make fancy handles for a few special tools, but probably not so fun to have to manually refine a tool handle for every single tool that needs to be used(especially ones that break easily). Possibly, but I'm thinking along the lines of, if each drifter is guaranteed to drop one flax fiber...I can make a pile of drifter bodies with ease, so at that point I'm going to be hunting them down at all hours and crafting myself linen sacks/gambeson/windmill within the first in-game month or two. And if the drifters are being dispatched via falx, there's no real need to stop to loot them either.

Bear With It Had just finished Chapter 2 with my hunter friend the other night and was in the process of riding back home. We had covered about half the distance when he had to go AFK for a few minutes. In the process of sitting there waiting patiently(and totally not carefully parking my elk's hindquarters right in front of his face), I noticed a large brown bear lumbering its way over a nearby hill and shuffling its way closer. Hunter was still away, so that left two options: deal with, or leave it and see what happens. Of course I opted for the former--I'm not a complete monster! Donning my armor, I hopped off my elk and charged to meet the furry intruder. In the middle of the resulting brawl, hunter returned to his keyboard, of course, and had to figure out what on earth was happening since he could only hear the carnage taking place and not actually see it. About the time he stumbled away to get a clear view was about the time I killed the bear...or so I thought. Turns out that while I hit it hard enough for it to produce sad bear noises, it was a very good actor and used the moment's confusion to make a break away from me...and straight for the hunter. I could only watch in horrified amazement as the injured bear proceeded to chase my hunter friend around in a circle before...uh...hugging him to death. I managed to dispatch the bear shortly after, and revive my friend of course, but if you thought we were out of the woods you would be sorely mistaken. The rift activity went from calm to apocalyptic about this time, and remained that way for most of the ride home. In spite of that fact, we did manage to make it home in one piece.

...I never knew that was there. That's awesome!

Gotcha. Regarding the early game, I do agree that there's perhaps a bit more that could be added. However, I would also counter the same point with the fact that...the early game isn't really anything more than a stepping stone to teach players the basics of what they need to know for the meatier parts of the game. Stone tools are just enough to allow the player to survive and acquire copper tools, and the copper tools are just enough to get players to bronze. The bronze tier, while not the best, is where the game really starts to open up to the player, since it's durable enough to last a while and tackle things such as the first story chapter. It's also tough enough to mine iron and quartz, which opens up better equipment materials and better access to greenhouses. Late game content, however, is currently barebones. Aside from steel, there are a couple of Jonas tech devices to craft, but that's really it. Once the player has steel, there's not really anything else for them to do once they've completed the main story(the parts that exist, anyway). Given that the mid-late game is where the player will be spending the majority of their playtime, more options are needed in those areas, or otherwise the player is blasting through what's essentially the tutorial tech tiers and having...not much to do after. I wouldn't be against this, but on the other hand, I like leaving a trail of monster carcasses in my wake. Partly because it makes it difficult for live monsters to navigate, but also because it's fun to carve a path of destruction for my friend to find later in multiplayer. Quite a bit of life has been added to the water recently, and fishing has been teased. I've heard rumors that rivers might be in the works, but we'll see. I wouldn't be surprised though if aquatic content gets even more love in the near future. From the practical standpoint...it's a lot easier to account for a few select methods in terms of gameplay balance, than it is to try to implement every option under the sun. That being said, it's possible that such features are planned, but just not a priority to add right now since there are already methods of handling the function in the game(ie, mine halite or trade for it, and focus on fleshing out late game tech or other missing gameplay like herbalism before worrying about boiling seawater for salt). That's essentially what we're getting though--updates to critical parts of the game that are otherwise lacking(like actually adding a way to fish, adding more tech options, etc). As I said previously, the early game is pretty solid already for the amount of time the player is really intended to spend at that tech tier. For more focus on stone age/primitive tech in particular, it's really best to use mods to make that kind of experience the main focus of the game. Otherwise, the game ends up being too "front-heavy" on content(which is already somewhat of a complaint) and feels sorely lacking once one advances past the early game.

Right, but it's not unheard of for the generation of certain ruins or story locations to get screwed up, hence why I suggest reporting it on the bug tracker. Sometimes it's a broken world seed, sometimes it's a bit of code governing a particular structure gone awry; hard to say for certain.

About that...https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/35820 Somebody already tried to implement a similar concept via mod, and the comment section...well, speaks volumes.

Welcome to the forums! To my knowledge, the vanilla game doesn't support this...yet. Maybe some day. I think there's a mod or two that may allow it though.

Out of curiosity, what is your operating system? I vaguely recall a Linux user having similar issues a while back, and it turned out to be a result of some customization they did.

Yeah, that's not how it's supposed to look. If you're not using mods at all, we can rule out mod interference as the issue. The easiest fix is to pop into creative and cut a path through before popping back to survival. However, I would also go report this to the devs on the bug tracker, in case it's a broken world seed or some other issue.

Not that I expect it to be in the game(apart from a mod), but...noodling.