LadyWYT

Weird. Any mods that you're running? I don't know of any that would cause behavior like this, but it doesn't hurt to check anyway if you're using mods. I'd still recommend a whitelist though, since while a password is decent protection, passwords could be more easily shared, whether willingly or by accident. Desync can sometimes cause player ghosts to appear, but to my knowledge that only happens when there are other players around--ie, you shouldn't be encountering a ghost of yourself. I think most, if not all, of the player ghost bugs have been fixed as well, though I suppose it's possible there could still be a bug lurking around. If you're certain that no one else is logging in to mess with you, friend or otherwise, and there's no mods that could be causing strange behavior like that, you might consider reporting the issue over on Github. Unfortunately that's about the best solution I can think of right now; hopefully someone else can chime in with better insight.

Welcome to the forums! The haybed thing sounds a little too specific on the timing to be an issue with desync, especially when you mention seeing another player. Was there a nameplate to go with the playermodel? Players will always have a nameplate, and you should be able to check the server logs to see who logged in and when. My guess is that either one of your friends is messing with you, or another player has accessed your server and is trolling. If you're not playing with a whitelist, I'd recommend enabling one to keep out unwanted guests.

Not quite. The ceramics serve the same purpose in the game, this is true, but as of 1.22 red clay fires into earthy orange ceramic and blue clay fires into earthy brown ceramic. That being said, I'd like to see red and blue clay have the same chances to produce clinker brinks. I don't know that much about brick making, but I do get the impression that clinkers aren't really a desirable brick, so it seems like both clay types should be able to produce the occasional dud.

Probably a few days to a couple weeks. It depends heavily on how well the bug-swatting goes. The more bugs that can be swatted without introducing new issues, the sooner stable will arrive. Otherwise, no one really knows, outside of maybe the devs. It'll be ready when it's ready.

Make sure the file size is appropriate for upload--if the file is too big the upload will be rejected.

It depends...they can get pretty big in the right conditions. In any case, I'd like to see them in the game too, as well as just a cactus overhaul in general. The saguaro cacti are a little too small and too similar to the other block game, and cacti in general should hurt the player if stepped on. Though the latter is probably better suited for a status effect system. Dragonfruit would also be a good addition here, since the parent plant is also a type of cactus. There's also agave, which isn't a cactus, but is a desert plant used to make alcohol. Yucca is similar and can be used for food or medicinal purposes, among other things.

Eh, I somewhat disagree. Expanded Foods is quite fun, and popular for a reason, but I also think there is room for improvement. Rather than just copy/paste the mod into the game, I think vanilla cooking would perhaps be better served by implementing butter churning and a new dough-working mechanic where the player needs to actually roll out pie/pastry crust with a rolling pin and then cut it into the appropriate shape with a knife, similar to how the pottery loop works. Expanded Foods' mixing bowl and saucepan are good ideas, but in some ways they feel a little redundant when it comes to cooking, so it seems like maybe some of the recipes requiring those items could potentially be reworked to require manual kneading to mix or something of that sort.

You'll also want to search grassy lowland areas that have decent rainfall, and not forests or thick shrubland. Forests, with the exception of pine forest in deserts, will be covered in forest floor, making it nigh impossible to spot clay if it spawned there. Likewise, shrublands may contain clay deposits, but those deposits will be very hard to spot due to the thick foliage covering the ground(which also makes threats like holes and bears harder to spot as well). Blue clay tends to always generate by water, while red clay can generate at some higher elevations but not mountaintops. As @Vexxvididu and @PoisonedPawn777 already said, you've likely run by a few deposits without realizing. From the top, clay can be hard to spot, since patchy grass will cover most of the clay's surface and the subtle texture difference can be difficult to notice while sprinting around. Clay is more easily noticed when viewed from the side, since it will have a mottled texture that stands out from nearby dirt. If you're playing with true map colors enabled, you can sometimes use the minimap to locate clay and peat deposits, as they will typically stand out as circular discolorations in the surrounding grass.

It's an herb from one of the Wildcraft mods, if I'm not mistaken. I presume herbs are something that would be added in proper quantities whenever herbalism is added to the game. My guess is that herbalism will either come with the addition of the status effect system, or shortly after the addition of such, since herbalism isn't really useful if it has no effect on the player. Herbs and spices haven't really been added. Licorice and fennel were added as new crops, and are used to make stinkbaits but can also be used as a vegetable in regular cooking. Technically, both are herbs, but they just act like regular crops and vegetables for the most part. They can't be used to make medicine or tea or anything.

Same. I don't mind some grindy skill trees from time to time, but for Vintage Story I'd prefer to handle it via mods so that I can choose when I want to grind and when I want to rely on hard-earned experience.

Maybe it would help if the refund policy were advertised a bit more prominently? I've not exactly read over it myself, but as I understand it, the policy is very generous. Might help cut down on some of the piracy if more players knew they could safely buy the game and give it a proper try and still get their money back. Steam's policy, as I recall, is much more stringent, only allowing about two hours' worth of gameplay total before the refund opportunity expires. Two hours isn't really enough time to give many games a proper try, especially not meaty games like Vintage Story. I mean I'd also say it would be neat if we could have some sort of wishlist feature in the Anego store, where players could perhaps gift copies to other players in specific regions. It could be a cool way to further support Vintage Story's development aside from buying the little supporter add-on. But such a system would also be rather easy to abuse, I think, unless it had some sort of strict oversight...and I'm not sure it's really worth that kind of oversight.

I think I would rather Anego set up their own infrastructure for regional pricing, rather than rely on Steam. I like Steam; it's very convenient. But I also don't really like how many things are so reliant on Steam either.

The moral of the story is to always check the ingredients before eating the meal. You just never know what the chef slipped in.

After you complete the first story location, you'll have easy access to better land transportation for chapter two. Make sure you bring food and healing supplies, as these are good standard supplies to have for any adventure. Tools and rope ladders are useful for traversing the wilderness, but aren't needed for story locations since story locations cannot be altered due to claim protections, so you'll want to leave that stuff at home or in a box outside the location. Regarding general equipment, tier 2 is the minimum for the first location, and tier 3 is the minimum for what comes after, though in singleplayer you may wish to opt for tier 3 on the first location as well since it can be quite tough. Temporal gears are limited to 20 respawns by default before you'll need to refresh your spawn point; this number can be changed to infinite respawns though, either at world creation or via the command /worldconfig temporalGearRespawnUses -1, where 20 is default and -1 is infinite respawns. Setting you spawn point via temporal gear when you reach a location and expect trouble is always a good idea, though if you happen to have built a terminus teleporter that won't be necessary since that device will allow you to teleport to your last point of death for the cost of one temporal gear. I will also note that it's not unusual for certain locations to have a few temporal gears available as loot, so you'll be able to replenish your supply. Regarding death by bear...most bears can be outrun, and if you have tier 2 equipment or better(which you should have), that should allow you to survive a fight with a bear if necessary. Medical supplies will allow you to heal after the fight. Though when it comes to story content, bears are the least of your worries. In general, it's best to be mindful of your surroundings and proceed with caution in unfamiliar territory.

Same, especially when it's done in a way that feels like it would still make for fun gameplay in line with what we already have, and not just realism for realism's sake. I like this suggestion. I think it would need to be a proper update of its own, almost, in order to implement the systems necessary to get it to work, but this would be a nice way to handle fruit trees rather than just sticking cuttings in the ground indiscriminately. I'm not sure we'd need a brand new knife for this, but I'm guessing the code that governs sacrificing temporal gears to restore stability could be tweaked and repurposed to allow the player to hold cuttings in their offhand and the knife in their mainhand while planting to accomplish this kind of splitting.

The first one is coming in 1.22 and is present in rc6, so they should be present in your world. They occur roughly every 1500 blocks, so they're not the most common find.

Welcome to the forums! The devs have said that worlds created in the rc versions(but NOT the pre versions) should be able to upgrade to the stable 1.22 release later, so you should be able to keep the save file going as there shouldn't be any world-breaking bugs or major world changes at this point. That being said, depending on what rc version you created the world in, you may need to do some searching to find the new berry bushes or the more polished procedural dungeons. The safest option though is always to wait until stable release before starting a new world. Mod use can definitely change the above though, since they may go through changes that may break worlds using older versions of the mod. I don't know how much of a factor that is in this case, but it's something to keep in mind. I think the main consideration here is to make sure you're using the right mod version for the game version you're on, and make backups of your world before testing updates just in case something does happen to go wrong.

Personally, I'd prefer they wait until the game is out of early access before involving Steam. As I said, they seem to be doing just fine without Steam at the moment, and acquiring popularity too fast before the game is ready to handle more players can stress infrastructure, as well as strain the community. 1.20 already had some issues with this at launch, since there was a bigger influx of new players than expected and the existing infrastructure just could not keep up very well. Some content had to be delayed as a result to fix the issues. A player's first experience should be as smooth as possible, and while Vintage Story is very good for an early access game...it's still early access. There will be bugs, lots of content that needs polish, and lots of changes between now and the finished product. Just my opinion, but launching on Steam now is likely to bring in more players than the infrastructure can perhaps handle, along with many of them expecting a fully polished game and getting upset when they encounter bugs/underdeveloped content/major changes in an update. To some extent, this is already an issue with the updates, and launching on Steam would very likely make that problem worse.

Raw ingredients should be stored in a storage vessel in a cellar. Cooked ingredients are best stored in sealed crocks in a cellar when possible; otherwise, store them in storage vessels or shelves in the cellar. Pickling vegetables, salt-curing meats, and turning fruits into jams will extend the shelf life for a few years. Really depends on the climate, the food type, how it's prepared and stored, and then what the player set the food spoilage rate to.

Probably because Anego Studios is doing just fine without Steam at the moment. Steam takes a cut of revenue, and has its own set of rules that Anego would need to comply with to ensure that Vintage Story can be sold on Steam(as is the case when dealing with any kind of middleman). I think Steam integration is still on the roadmap for the game's future, but definitely not a priority right now.

The problem with boosting the damage of other weapons to overcome the burst damage of the old spears, is then creature health needs to be adjusted as well. Otherwise the monsters and tougher wildlife like bears won't pose any kind of threat since the player will be able to mow them down more easily. Rather than try to adjust all those numbers, it's much easier to focus just on the spear's numbers, and adjust the health of some of the smaller creatures like chickens and rabbits to ensure that early game hunting isn't too hard. Heavier armor does impose harsher penalties on ranged combat, yes, however chain armor is quite protective while imposing relatively few penalties to movement and ranged combat. Gambeson is also quite protective as a tier 2 armor, with even fewer drawbacks. The non-stackable property of spears is a disadvantage, but if the player can outrun the enemy then it's a simple enough task to kite the target and pick up spears that have been fired, meaning that the player really only needs to carry 3-4 spears on average. With bigger backpacks in the late game the inventory space is even less of an issue. The only exception here is tunnel-fighting in the underground, but in that case the player can block off passages with fences or other blocks to stop enemies from reaching them. It's also worth noting that the Hunter class has traits that boost movement speed as well as range, ranged damage, and accuracy--armor penalties won't affect them nearly as much as other classes when it comes to ranged combat. Ironically, Hunter and Clockmaker are the fastest classes in armor thanks to the inherent +10% movement speed; the only exception is plate armor, in which case they're evenly matched with Blackguard. In any case, the main point is that if spears are going to be a weapon that hits much harder than the bow, then they need to have a slower fire rate to balance it out, especially when there's a class with inherent bonuses to ranged combat. That also tends to be ranged weapon balance for videogames in general--ranged weapons with low damage per shot typically have very high burst damage to compensate, while weapons that deal a lot of damage in a single shot will have a slow fire rate in order to make players consider those shots carefully. Adding a weapon that does a lot of damage with each shot, that also has a fast rate of fire, is an easy way to get players to always opt for that weapon in every situation, if not always pick the ranged class as well.

The burst damage is why the spears were nerfed though. Prior to 1.22, spears had rather high damage when thrown, and could be thrown very quickly, meaning that targets that didn't die in the initial barrage could be finished off with a hit or two in melee. If there's enough space, the player can easily kite enemies around to pick up thrown spears, even when wearing armor, ensuring they can have a steady supply of spears to keep throwing. While this kind of damage might be very convenient, it's not really good for the long-term health of the game when thrown spears are outclassing every other available weapon. As it stands, the spear has become a solid general purpose weapon, good for both melee and ranged combat but master of neither. In melee, it has a longer reach than the falx, but doesn't have autoloot available, has less base damage, and can't be sharpened for critical hits. In ranged combat, the spear hits harder per shot than the bow, but spears can't be thrown as far as a bow can shoot, they don't stack like arrows can, and the slightly longer windup for throwing means the player needs to be intentional about when they choose to fire the spear. Pretty much. When I finally did the math on the old spears, thrown spears turned out to be the best option for even the Blackguard, which has a penalty to ranged damage. It really says a lot when the class that isn't supposed to be good at ranged combat has a ranged weapon as its best damage output.

I went and looked it up--the change occurred in rc1. The initial spear changes had spears taking about twice the charge time they do now, with almost a point less damage.

I believe the climate bands really only apply to the general annual temperatures for that latitude, and not the rainfall. It's possible to have warmer or colder chunks mixed in--for example, the temperate bands can have pockets of cooler/warmer climates. Elevation also affects climate--the higher you go, the colder it gets. Rainfall determines whether a particular region is likely to be lush plains/forest or a desert. In the temperate bands, the areas with high rainfall will have better soil quality, and tend to support more forest, while the areas with less rainfall will be deserts or regions with low soil fertility. In the tropical climate bands, high rainfall tends to result in jungles, while low rainfall produces deserts and savannahs.

I tend to play the default world gen, for the most part, as I do enjoy it for the most part. The only setting I consistently change is turning the land coverage down to 80%. This ensures that the map remains mostly land, which I enjoy, while ensuring that there will be several large lakes and oceans to find and make use of in my travels.