LadyWYT

I'd actually argue the opposite--the player should have mastered enough basic gameplay concepts by the time they reach this location, that they can figure out how to complete it. A few deaths are to be expected if the player has never done the location before, however, stiff penalties for mistakes and rewarding careful planning ahead/thinking on one's feet are integral to most every aspect of VS gameplay. The tin-bronze pickaxe requirement for starting the quest ensures the player can meet the minimum safe equipment level to complete the Resonance Archive. Likewise, the high tier common enemies placed in certain parts of the location serve to test the player's capabilities long before they reach the boss room itself. If the player is getting chewed up too much by those enemies, they'll probably take a hint and get better equipment, or more healing supplies, before they venture much further. On the flip side, if the player is handling those enemies with relative ease, then they'll probably be able to handle the boss just fine with their current equipment. I would also say that the boss fight itself is what gives the player an idea of what to expect out of boss fights going forward. That is, bosses are going to be very tough enemies, that have options unavailable to common enemies, and said bosses are located in areas that will be difficult to escape from should the fight turn against the player. They aren't something to take lightly at all.

I mean...not to be snarky, but that's how Homo Sapiens mode works. Lore content turned off means just a pure survival experience, and whatever story you want to make up to go along with it.

That's the story I was thinking of, yeah. I think on average my farms are probably around 100-200 blocks, though on my friend's server the farm size is probably pushing more around 400-600 blocks given that we're playing with longer months and increased hunger rate. For my typical solo playthroughs though, 100-200 blocks of farmland is more than enough for standard settings, and it usually takes me around 100 hours worth of gameplay to finish the current implemented story and achieve steel by the start/middle of the second game year. I don't really rush things either, and do take my time, but I also don't lollygag that much. For a speedrun though and achieving most things by the first fall, that takes a monumental level of effort and focus, and I don't get the impression that most players really find that enjoyable. Hence why I also consider "speedrunning" strategies outliers, and not really something that's detrimental to the game. What I typically find more issue with, is placing enough hurdles to player progress that they simply must sink several many hours into gameplay before they can do something like, say, leave the stone age, or have a productive farm, etc. Currently, the gameplay is balanced so that while taking your time to get things done is generally more ideal, it's also possible for a player to significantly speed up progress...provided they have the knowledge and focus required to do so. Pretty much. Making a farm that's a couple of thousand blocks is just as much a nightmare to me, as it is being forced to stick to a small backyard vegetable patch because game mechanics make large farms a monumental amount of effort(and thus not worth it, unless that's all one wants to do). I'd also note that one reason I prefer making bigger farms, is that it makes it much easier to manage crops via rotation. I don't necessarily have to plant every tile, I can just plant a portion of it with crops I actually need/want, and leave the rest to lie fallow and rebuild nutrients. But even then, fallow land isn't going entirely unused, as that's prime farmland for planting pumpkins, which require a lot of space but don't require many nutrients to grow(nor do they require critical nutrients like K or N).

That's where I got the idea from.

I would go the opposite route--trim the bushes to get cuttings, that you can then plant to get more bushes(similar to how fruit trees are propagated). No more breaking bushes to relocate them to one's base, as attempting to do so will just destroy the bush.

The good news is that there's really no time limit for completing the main story, so you can take it as fast or as slow as you like. If you want the ultra-immersive challenge route, don't use the maps from the treasure hunter at all, and instead try to find the locations yourself. I tried this once with a friend, and it was quite fun...except the Archive did glitch a bit and the entrance was completely buried so it would have been impossible to find without cheating...but anyway! Honestly, the best way to get around this, is mods. Otherwise, it's not really possible to separate lore content from the story, as there really is no story without lore content. While I do think the boss health is fine...I can also agree that this is probably a good idea.

It kind of is, but tin occurs in smaller deposits. Keep in mind too that surface deposits are a different beast than the deep deposits you prospect for. Figuring out which ores are common and which aren't is something that just comes with experience, and is part of the fun(or frustration) of prospecting. As a general rule though, if it's an ore required for core progression(like copper, tin, iron, etc), it'll usually be pretty easy to find. I do this too, although half the time I forget to actually prospect while I'm out on my adventures. It's useful data to have though, because even if you don't yet need those ores, it's handy to know where to start looking once you do need them.

I'm still going to be stubbornly skeptical about any kind of weed mechanic requiring maintenance for a good harvest, as that just does not strike me at all as being fun long-term. Granted, if the devs fit such a thing into their vision, I trust them to do it well, but until then the mod database has the best data to work with. A few have tried to implement weeds in one fashion or another, and such a mechanic has been suggested before, but most of the time it boils down to the player needing to babysit their farm in order to ensure weeds don't damage crops. And that's not very fun. You do seem to have opted for a less intense route here, in that the weeds are a slow-growing detriment and thus the farms only need checking occasionally. However, I will note that the weeds still appear to actively interfere with crops, so ultimately I see the player getting pushed to babysit their farm and getting frustrated as a result. On the flipside, if weed growth is so slow that it practically never interferes with growing crops...then that kind of begs the question, why have it in the first place? Just my opinion, but I think the current vanilla system is just fine. There are weeds, yes, but they don't require the player to babysit the farm to ensure a harvest. The player just has to clear out the weeds before they can use the farmland for more crops. Farmland is already incredibly expensive to craft, given that 16 compost only makes a single piece of terra preta, or two if using high fertility soil in the crafting. It's easy enough to have a small farm full of terra preta at the end of a couple of years, if one puts a decent amount of effort into composting, but larger farms will take a lot more effort. If farmland is made more expensive though, that does discourage the player from opting for large farms...but it also doesn't discourage them from just making a large farm anyway and replacing all the dirt every harvest. Dirt is, well, dirt cheap, especially in singleplayer, and if maintaining farmland itself is more effort, throwing away old dirt and replacing with new is definitely going to be an even more attractive option for those who just don't want the hassle. As for reducing nutrient levels immediately after tilling, no. It doesn't make logical sense, and it punishes the player for doing something we want them to do, which is establish farms. I think these are a great idea, but as a cosmetic and not something functional. Greenhouses are much better suited to this kind of cultivation, since they extend the growing season. The limited size of a greenhouse though makes it more optimal to use a watering can, if the player really wants to maximize the use of the space. Overall, I like most of the ideas, and think they would potentially fit in the game nicely, in one form or another. But just for me personally, anything like a more intensive weed mechanic is going to be a very tough sell. As I've mentioned before(or tried to), I don't necessarily mind putting a little more work into farms, but I want to be doing it according to my own time, and not so much feel like I'm being forced to do it to get a decent result. The other thing that I will also note: while I'm not a "speedrunner" type myself, I do like that Vintage Story supports that style of gameplay for those who do enjoy it. So that's also why I'm not really keen on adding more mechanics to force players into specific styles of gameplay. Long trips aren't really an issue here, but multiplayer is, depending on the server. Agriculture traders would be very strong in this scenario, since they reliably sell seeds. The server type that will have the most issues here is large multiplayer servers where players do their own thing, instead of cooperative gameplay. On a cooperative server, players can help each other get set up, but in the "every man for himself" scenario it's likely the landscape is just picked clean for miles and new players will struggle significantly(which, to my knowledge, this issue is already present in multiplayer). Likewise, bigger servers are harder to manage due to the player count, and often require specialized setups to handle so many players. On smaller server, especially cooperative ones, it shouldn't really be an issue. I don't really see an issue here, to be honest. An experienced player will always be able to accomplish things more easily than a new player. I think if anything, reducing wild crops might make the first winter a bit more satisfying, since newer players will probably need to rely on their hunting and foraging skills to store enough food the first year or two. To be fair, it might be frustrating for a few new players, but I will also note that one observation I've seen some new players make, is that the first winter was...underwhelming. Granted, they didn't seem too disappointed by the experience either, but I did get the impression that they expected to need to do a bit more hunting, foraging, and preparation than they actually did. As for more experienced players, yes, they could just achieve roughly the same results as the current system simply by scouring the landscape and getting enough seeds to plant a large farm to supply them through the very first winter. However...with wild crops being made a lot more rare, they'll have to devote more time to that task, and that's time they aren't spending doing other things, like mining, or hunting, or charcoal-making, etc. There is some multi-tasking that can be done, yes, but do keep in mind that inventory space is limited. Most players I would expect to start with a small farm and rely on hunting/foraging to round out their food stores for at least their first winter, and work their way up to bigger farms that can easily satisfy all their food needs.

Gotcha. Do you have a modlist to share? Most likely, it's a mod-related issue. Thirty isn't that many mods, but you could have some that are much more demanding on performance, and performance impacts are a lot more noticeable on weaker hardware as well. It's also possible that one of the mods could have a bug or two that is causing issues.

I see. Hopefully the devs can help figure out a way to save the world, but at the very least, it's probably useful data to have on their end in regards to what can happen to worlds that span multiple updates.

Honestly, with it being a very old world, I would submit it to the issue tracker. If you can manage to repair the chunks even a little at a time(it sounds like you've managed to do this?), an alternate solution is to repair only the chunks you care most about, save the builds as blueprints(or however this happens via worldedit), and then import the builds into a brand new world. For items, make a list of the important stuff on paper, and then use creative to give it all back. Unfortunately, it's not a solution that preserves the world, but worst case scenario, it should allow you to at least preserve the builds.

Not really. I suppose resurrection sickness, in that the player receives a debuff to health and attack power for a short time after death(World of Warcraft did this). However, that's not really fun either. Maybe just drain a hefty chunk of the stability gauge instead to respawn with your items, but if you don't have enough stability/would fall too dangerously low, then you lose your items instead?

That's what I thought too, but maybe the block has to be mined if all block gravity is disabled? I wouldn't know, as I've never disabled gravity entirely.

I do agree, however, despite my distaste for lost items, I actually opt to keep the penalty on rather than turning it off. My reasoning for that is playing with the threat of the penalty helps keep me cautious, and prevents some stupid stuff from being a solution(like eating a deathcap to save a walk home). If I do happen to die, and can't be bothered to run back to get my stuff, it's easy enough to pop into spectator/creative and use a bit of console magic to pick up where I left off. Plus I mean, leaving the death penalty on also gives a reason to build the terminus teleporter, and use all those temporal gears that inevitably pile up.

Welcome to the forums! You basically have two options here, the first of which is just doing a LOT more prospecting. From the looks of the map here, you've done a lot of prospecting in a few chunks very close to home, but little more. I would suggest doing more general searches, in a 1000 block radius(more or less) from your base. Once you pick up another trace of cassiterite, then you'll want to do more localized density searches in that area to see where the best dig spot is. The second option is to just dig at the best reading you've already found, and see if there's any ore. Poor and Very Poor readings aren't ideal for digging, but that doesn't mean that the ore in question failed to spawn, just that it's not too likely to have spawned there. Cassiterite is a common ore, so it's generally not too hard to find, even at less than ideal readings.

Probably because the handbook is still very much a work in progress, and therefore the information within isn't as polished. This page would be a prime one for polishing though. I do recall the Archimedes screw having a description in the Guides section, under mechanical power, unless I'm recalling incorrectly. In any case, what the item in question does, is transport items via chutes, but only when powered. Under normal circumstances, the player must rely on gravity to do the work.

I wouldn't be surprised if the feature were added someday, but I've not seen anything to suggest it's a feature that will get added anytime soon. Until then, hammer/chisel, or mods are the way to go. There seem to be a handful that exist, like this one: https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/28046 I will note though, the mods that do exist are for older game versions, so they may or may not work properly.

Or just...dugout canoe.

To my knowledge, they don't rot unless you take them out of the flowerpot.

If I'm recalling correctly, brass is almost a 1:1 ratio of copper and zinc. There's a little wiggle room, but it's very easy to be off by one nugget.

I mean...I would say the opposite. Vintage Story is pretty good at killing players, and while it does give players a fair chance it's pretty unforgiving of mistakes. The first boss fight is no exception, and will push the player to their limits. I would also say that higher difficulty for certain points of the story is also appropriate, since those particular plot points are meant to be unusual circumstances, and not something the player encounters regularly. On the contrary, I would say bears are a more appropriate initial test, since bells are an outlier from every other common enemy(at the time of this writing). Bells have a lot of hitpoints, yes, but have zero attack and instead summon monsters to attack for them. A player who has never dealt with a bell before may end up panicking and attacking the monsters who are hurting them first, instead of dealing with the bell first like they should.

But they are actual storms...time itself is affected, and time affects everything. The whole point of temporal storms is that they are supernatural disasters that the player must work around, and not natural storms that the player can simply avoid by a short jaunt to a neighboring region. The player needs to either fight their way through it, or otherwise build some kind of bunker and wait out the storm in safety. For players who really don't want to deal with the mechanic, there is also the option to disable temporal storms, or at the least sleep through them. Well it's a mechanic I enjoy, partly because it makes the world and story premise feel authentic, so... There is a reason though. Certain past events messed up the flow of time, essentially, and the player character is a lot more sensitive to temporal anomalies than other living creatures are. For those who don't enjoy the mechanic/don't want it to get in the way of building, there is the option to turn the mechanic off, and for those open to modding there are multiple different options for changing the gameplay. If temporal gears alone were powerful enough to fix instability, it would have been fixed a very long time ago. Fixing instability is something that will take a lot more effort, and is a concept better suited for Jonas tech, or perhaps a major story plot point(or both). As I said before, if one really doesn't want to deal with the mechanic, there's already the option to turn it off, or mods such as this one to otherwise season the game to one's personal taste: https://mods.vintagestory.at/chunkstaboverride

Probably also worth checking to make sure his graphics drivers are up to date, as well as just checking his hardware against his friends' hardware. Outside of drivers being out-of-date(or even potentially faulty), or his hardware being too weak for the game setup he's trying to run, it's possible that he might be using a different brand of hardware that isn't playing nicely for whatever reason. Reports like this aren't uncommon on the issue tracker, in my experience, but yeah, the first question they will always ask is "Does the issue happen without mods", since mods are really good at causing issues. Checking the mod pages themselves is a good idea as well, since if a mod is having issues there are usually a few comments reporting said issue. Also worth checking to make sure that everyone is using the same version of mods, and that all mods being used are up-to-date(or otherwise functioning properly on the latest game version). Older mods don't always play nicely with newer game versions(or newer mods), and old mod versions can have bugs that aren't present in the newer mod versions. Case in point--there's been an issue or two reported for the mod I helped develop, that turned out to be the user using an old version of the mod instead of the new(where the issue had been fixed). In any case, welcome to the forums! A couple of other things to check, in addition to what Professor Dragon already suggested: Server logs: Oftentimes, when there's an issue, the server will be spitting out errors. Such errors may or may not cause players to crash, but if the server is spitting out errors around the time that crashes happen, it can help narrow down a cause. My friend has used this method several times to troubleshoot issues with our server. Other clues: Is there some other consistency to these crashes aside from the rainstorms/lightning, and who the crashes happen to? If the crashes only happen in a certain area, it could be related to the weather(especially if it's an area that has a lot of rainfall on average), but there could also be something else there that's overloading the system in that area specifically and causing the crash.

Welcome to the forums! Smelting doesn't require a room; you just need to make sure that nothing can put out the fire under the crucible. And as @Vexxvididu already noted, the fuel you're using needs to burn hot enough, for long enough, in order to smelt the ore. It is possible to "coast" on coals, but if the temperature of the ore drops you'll lose your smelt progress and have to start over. Another thing to keep in mind that in regards to alloys, you need the proper ratio of ores in order to achieve a smeltable product; if there's no viable output the ore won't smelt. Also, the more ore you try to smelt at once, the longer it will take to smelt, so the ore can be hot enough to start smelting but you may not see any progress on the meter for several seconds, as it takes a fair amount of time to smelt large quantities of ore. In any case, charcoal is sufficient for smelting copper and zinc, so the first things to check are ore quantity and ore ratio. Given that you said the meter still reads as "cold" despite the fire burning at maximum charcoal temperature, I would suspect that you have the wrong ratio for the alloy you're attempting to smelt(brass).

Well like Maelstrom said: Unless the boss is optional, it's generally not possible to actually run away from said boss. The most running will do is buy the player a bit of time to heal and/or think up a new plan. The current boss design allows this; to further illustrate my point from my previous post, I was in dire straits when doing the fight with my friend a couple of days ago, but with some careful maneuvering was able to step back and buy myself enough time to heal before jumping back into battle(Blackguard, steel brigandine, alcohol bandages). It took a minute for me to catch my second wind, and the situation was dicey, but it was certainly doable. Likewise, I will note that the set design for this boss makes it quite clear that once you jump down that hole, there's no getting back out unless you either kill the boss, or he kills you. Of course, I will also note that generally, trying to run away mid-combat generally leaves one open to attack. This is why in TTRPGs, enemies will oftentimes get opportunities of attack if you are moving within their zone of control and they have the means to attack you. It's a similar case with the first boss in VS--his zone of control covers the entire room, so as long as you're within his space and he's still alive, he'll be able to attack you. If he were only limited to melee attacks, he wouldn't be a threat at all, since the player could just stand at a distance and shoot him to death. Likewise, if the player could just run out of the room, heal back to full, and jump back in to keep fighting(without the boss resetting), he wouldn't be a threat either.