LadyWYT

I think which is "better" depends on the player's preferred playstyle. Sinking mineshafts is safer and offers easier access to the ore, but it can also be a bit demanding on time and resources. Caving can be a lot faster, but it's risky due to monsters and no guarantee of the cave venturing near the ore that one's after, and no easy way in/out should the ore be there. Both options can be lucrative to the player, but both options can disappoint the player as well. In any case, both are viable, and it doesn't hurt to use a mix of the two.

Sounds like I need to get ready to break things in testing again.

Once you've covered the woodpile and built the little firepit on top, it should say it's ready to be lit. Once lit, it will give you a 30 minute timer warning you to cover it, in order to complete the charcoal pit. So the tooltip should already be there(assuming tooltips are turned on, anyway), but I don't think it will warn the player about air gaps, should any exist.

When it comes to monsters, there are two different types: rotbeasts, and mechanicals. Rotbeasts are going to be creatures like shivers, drifters, and bowtorn. Mechanicals are going to be things like locusts and bells. Technically, they're all supernatural monsters, but the mechanicals are more machines given supernatural intelligence rather than some incomprehensible horror.

Yeah--if you go into Account Settings and the Signature tab, there's a toggle that determines whether or not you can see other users' signatures.

Like @Bruno Willis noted, it's best to start small-scale with charcoal pits and doublecheck them to make sure all stacks are properly full before lighting and covering, and then upscale the operation once you've got a handle on small-scale operations. What probably happened here is that you had an air pocket somewhere in the pile, in that there was a stack of wood that wasn't a full stack. If that happens, the entire pit will burn to ash instead of turn to charcoal; you can check the pit by listening for burning sounds if you walk past. If there is just smoke, that's good, but if you hear burning noise that's bad--you can try to dig up the wood and put out the fire but it may not be salvageable. One tip I have on filling charcoal pits, is to only place full stacks of wood and pile partial stacks elsewhere for other use. A full stack is 32 firewood; if you only place full stacks then you don't have to worry about air pockets nearly as much. Agreed. In the case of YouTubers, they may or may not be using mods or settings other than default to make their worlds look that way; at the very minimum, they've likely tested several worlds before picking the one with the most interesting generation for their videos. Not that standard generation is bad, mind you, but when it comes to making entertaining content for a proper audience, the on-screen results are going to be a bit skewed.

I think it's part of the standard strategies. The main strength of locusts is their numbers; they aren't very strong individually but can quickly overwhelm a player just by swarming. The attachment limit does not grow, to my knowledge, so you will need to check it occasionally and clean out older pictures. How often you need to do this depends on how often you post pictures, and what size those files are.

If it's something like an iron bloom, that the helve hammer can handle, I just throw it under the helve hammer and let the machine magically fix it. Otherwise, you can place the messed up project into the crafting grid with a chisel to break it back down into bits, which can then be re-processed back into a usable ingot. Though in the event it happens with steel, you'll want to just ditch the mess and get the finished item from the creative menu, as steel bits cannot currently be refined without a mod. For chains specifically, you will always need two ingots. One easy way to mass produce chains is to let a helve hammer pound out the plates while the wind is going strong, and then just turn those plates into chain later by punching holes in them. Always start with the interior holes and work your way outward, just in case you make a mistake. The outer pixels can be moved to fix goofs on the chain template, but the inner pixels cannot.

The lighting gives it that cozy feel of a Thomas Kinkade...and then you notice the shiver in the bushes.

Technically all chairs are functional due to the player sit key(G by default). And there's quite a few items that can be placed on blocks, so it's possible to chisel one's own tables. As for pie-making tables...I'm guessing that's probably limited for simplicity's sake, though it could change in the future. I don't really mind keeping pie-making limited to a specific table though. Perhaps said table could be made bigger by combining two tables in the crafting grid, similar to how creates a trunk from two chests. Could also add tablecloths as a decorative option, which would not only look nice, but give more uses to linen(it kinda stops being as useful after you have a windmill, gambeson, and sailboat). Tailors could make fancier tablecloths, of course.

@ifoz beat me to the solution, lol. I will note though that if you disable the monsters, the story locations will lose some of their flavor and challenge. Not all of course--the puzzles will still be solvable, but monsters are part of the storytelling in a couple of locations.

I opt for #3. That way the fire code doesn't have to be messed with, and the brazier becomes useful. Perhaps fuel burned in it lasts a bit longer, making it ideal for lighting or warming oneself in cold weather.

Mods for a server are installed to a different folder than mods for singleplayer; each server will have its own file within that folder. You don't need to mess with them at all, save for going into the appropriate server folder and deleting old mods that are no longer in use, since leaving them there can cause issues. Mods for singleplayer though, you will have to manually switch on and off as needed for singleplayer worlds.

Welcome to the forums! Given that you've nearly filled your storage, I would vote you return home to drop off goodies and resupply, before venturing out again. As @ifoz noted, the village is primarily a trading hub, so you'll need gears to trade for the special goods you can find there. If you do have a lot of gears, I also don't recommend buying too many goodies in the village on your first trip; I won't say what the other locations are, but there's likely stuff there that you'll want to loot, so you will need inventory space to carry it. Village goods are best purchased before heading for home as well, so that you have the best chance of ensuring you can actually get the stuff home.

Jonas parts are used to build some useful late game tech, although how useful they are might be relative to player preference. Examples include a night vision mask, a single-use gizmo that can teleport you home, a gizmo that can teleport you to your last death point, a music player, and a contraption that zaps nearby rifts closed. While that may seem like a lot, late game tech is still very much an undeveloped portion of the game, so the actual use of Jonas parts is currently quite limited. However, given how rare they are, and the high likelihood of them being much more useful in the future, makes them valuable finds when you do run across them.

I mean, I don't know exactly how to trigger the exploit, but I have 100% taken advantage of it on occasion in multiplayer when it happens, at least in circumstances that food is a bit on the scarce side. Overall, it's something that players have to both be aware of and understand how to trigger in order to properly exploit it, and while it does break the game balance(especially on higher difficulties), I don't think the majority of players use the exploit and it's not as serious as a lot of other issues that affect other parts of the game. Hence why it probably hasn't been fixed yet. It's something I would expect to be fixed eventually though, since the player is meant to eat regular meals and not go days without any food at all. Sure, they could just cheat food in, but that's not really a good argument for leaving the exploit unfixed since the player can just bypass pretty much any aspect of the game via the console and creative menu. I think the game does eventually figure out that hunger needs to start ticking again, but it does seem to take a while for the game to recalculate. Usually the fastest way to fix the issue when it occurs is to just reload the world/relog on the server.

Bells and sawblade locusts can drop them too, I think, and I think the drop rates are similar. It's a fairly rare drop, but it can be worth it to hunt stuff like that if you're after Jonas parts in particular.

I'm thinking it's just easier to treat races as character classes, rather than trying to figure out the code for making race an entirely separate category to class. The latter route would allow for more depth, but is more work.

This feels pretty accurate. I do like combat, but I don't love it to the extent that's what I want to do all the time. I also enjoy figuring out tricky ways to handle the monsters instead of always confronting them head-on as well, such as starting a drifter brawl or just saving certain activities for periods of low rift activity or daylight hours. Strategic cowardice, or just playing smart? You decide!

Looking at it again--I think you also need to offset the large gear, and connect the main drive shaft to that via an angled gear. I'm not sure of all the ins and outs of machinery, but I know that I made the mistake of connecting the main drive shaft directly to the large gear on my server, and while it spun fast at first, everything ground to a halt as soon as actual machinery was connected. My friend had to fix it by offsetting the large gear from the main drive shaft and connecting via smaller gears.

Except...it's not possible to reach temperatures hot enough to smelt steel in the the game, not even with coke or a bloomery. It would be nice to have a way to process steel bits back into ingot form though, just in case the player made a mistake while forging.

Adding on to this: part of the growing pains for 1.20's release was due to a large influx of new players, to the extent that Anego's servers were having trouble handling the workload. Given that trouble, and that shivers/bowtorn were added in 1.20, and that there have been several many new players appearing on the forums as well as an increase in Vintage Story content on YouTube since then...I'd say the playerbase is actively growing instead of shrinking.

Exactly. If I recall correctly, the bow was still able to outclass firearms even in the 1600-1700s, just due to fire rate--bows could be fired about twice as fast, I think, with a bit more range and accuracy. However, bows required a lot more practice to use at that level of expertise, whereas muskets took a lot less practice, and advances in firearms eventually meant that the advantages a bow might have were diminished. In any case, I'd expect any firearms added to Vintage Story to be on the same level as the earliest medieval European firearms, to preserve both the medieval flavor as well as overall game balance. In a singleplayer scenario, a firearm is likely most useful either at very close range against a single target(where it's not really possible to miss) or against clusters of targets(where accuracy isn't really a concern, since you're bound to hit something). In multiplayer, firearms would be a bit more useful since they could be massed, but the expense of crafting and maintaining them could be a struggle depending on how many players need to be equipped.

This is probably working as intended, depending on the rift activity at the time. The ambient monster spawns for the area got turned down a bit in order to make exploration a little easier for the player. If it's a quiet day, there probably aren't a lot of monsters to find, but they should be there. If it was in the basement, I think that's intentional. I'm fairly certain the Tower suffers from some of the same weird space-copying that happened in the Resonance Archives.

Welcome to the forums! I think the problem is that you are trying to power both a quern and a pulverizer on the same windmill. A 3-sail windmill should be able to power either, assuming a strong wind, but you'll need transmissions if you want to power multiple things with one windmill. Transmissions will allow you to toggle specific pieces of machinery on and off.