LadyWYT

Well if the creatures get worse the deeper you go in the world, maybe they get better the higher you climb? I'm wondering if a rift can spawn at the top though, and bring any monsters with it. If they can...those drifters are going to be in for quite the shock.

Welcome to the forums! It may(or may not!) be a bit anachronistic, but I like it. Especially what happened to the sailboat a buddy and I have on our server. It uh...kinda got frozen in place. Completely unusable, although it looked cool. Yeah I agree here. An icebreaker attachment would be nice for keeping sailboats more useful in cold weather so that they aren't completely defunct(even if that would be realistic), but that kind of utility should be a significant investment so that the weather remains a challenge to sailing, and not something you can ignore completely by throwing some copper onto the front of the boat. I'd also add that if the sailboat is pushing its way through ice, it should be at a slower speed than what you'd get from sailing in good weather(that is, little to no ice).

Hmmmm...this would make climbing down cliffs a lot smoother.

In the current game? Yes. You can find them in certain story locations, maybe ruins as well though I'm not sure(I've found the occasional Jonas part or two in a ruin). Temporal gears are also a rare drop from panning; I think it can be gravel, sand, or bony soil, although I'm not sure. I tend to see them drop more often from bony soil when I get then from panning, but I'm pretty certain I've gotten a couple from normal gravel as well. It's still a very rare drop though--killing monsters is the fastest way to get them. Regarding my rebalance proposal, I see temporal gears being possible as part of the passive loot table, but still very rare. That way a player could get lucky and find one very early in the game, without needing to do a lot of panning or risk their lives against monsters. However, if one relies only on the passive post-storm scavenging, I wouldn't expect them to get more than a small handful of temporal gears a year. While temporal gears don't have much use now, I'm guessing that small handful won't be a sufficient supply to rely on once more Jonas tech items are implemented. Hmmmm, sneaky. I hadn't considered this. That being said, if a player goes to that trouble...eh, why not let them have the payout? I don't think it would break anything given the last-hit rule proposed for the more active loot system, and it sounds like it'd be a fun challenge for a more passive playthrough.

Durability shouldn't affect whether or not you can butcher the carcass. The worst that will happen with a low durability knife is it will just break, but the carcass should still be lootable. Though I will note that I am still playing on 1.20.7 due to playing on a friend's modded server. It's possible something changed with knife durability and carcass harvesting between then and now, but I don't recall seeing anything in the patch notes on it. Welcome to the forums! Just to make sure all the bases are covered, were you holding shift while right-clicking on the carcass? Flint knives are fairly slow at the job, so it'll take a couple of seconds for the harvesting animation to finish and the loot window to appear.

First off, welcome to the forums! Clay is a resource that's fairly common unless you're either in the arctic(changing in 1.21 I believe) or in a desert region. Once you've seen the blocks it's easy to find, but until you know what to look for it can be hard to distinguish deposits from surrounding grass. The most noticeable difference is the side texture of the block, as it will have a mottled reddish, bluish, or tan color depending on the kind of clay. The top of the block will be grassy, but patches of the clay will show through. If you are playing with true colors enabled for your map, clay deposits and peat deposits often show up as circular discolorations in grassy areas. The two main types of clay you can find are red clay and blue clay. Red clay is probably the most common, spawning at a variety of elevations(except perhaps mountain peaks) as long as the region isn't too cold and has enough rainfall. Blue clay has the same temperature and rainfall requirements, however, blue clay will only spawn near sea level, usually by a body of water. Fire clay is the clay type you will want for industrial purposes, however, it only spawns naturally under black coal and anthracite deposits, or in bauxite biomes. If you don't have a natural deposit of fire clay available, you can easily craft fire clay from the other clay types by mixing them with powdered calcinated flint. Blue clay can be panned from any sand or gravel. It is, however, a somewhat uncommon drop. If you're relying on panning to acquire clay, you will need to do a LOT of panning in order to get clay in any decent quantity that way.

Maybe instead of having strong winds damage the windmill, just have it wear down over time while working? That way you can use it safely at the most optimal times, but still have a reason to shut everything down when it's not in use.

I like the idea, but...if I were a trader, I would 100% be doing my best Moneybags impression and charging players a small fee for a safe place to spend the night.

Not really. There aren't any enemies to challenge your settlement or anything, unless it's maybe a mod feature. The worst that can happen is accidents, natural disasters(which are optional), and your own poor planning. Colonial Charter roughly quadruples the content in the game, I would say. I don't think you can name the villagers in Banished, but you can in Farthest Frontier, which is a sort of spiritual successor to Banished offering more RTS-like options for gameplay.

It's not as inconceivable as you might think. The Ancient Warfare mod operated on similar concepts. Banished is a small city-builder type game that also follows similar logic, especially if you play with mods like Colonial Charter. The premise is deceptively simple, but getting a settlement to 100+ people is relatively difficult, since there's both a lot to manage and it's not really possible to just change your plans on the fly if something doesn't work. You have to really plan several steps ahead in order to keep your town running smoothly.

The immediate idea that comes to mind is take Vintage Story's temporal storm mechanics and monsters, and rework the motifs a bit. Now instead of time storms, mechanical monstrosities, and eldritch horrors, maybe you have an evil wizard teleporting his orcish armies around, or an undead dragon with a slew of skeletons trying to break free of a dimensional prison. From there, you could add in more NPC settlements and let them explain the new lore as needed.

I wouldn't zoom the player out into an overhead view of the kingdom area; I'd implement some sort of map table instead. When you interact with the table, it brings up an interface with a small model of the settlement, along with a list of options to make managing some things a little easier.

You know, generally I argue against things like windmill maintenance, as it seems like it would be aggravating to need to check it fairly often or to come back from an expedition and have things falling apart. However, if there's prior warning like squeaky parts, so the player has more time to react, that seems fair. Plus upon further thought about the concepts laid out in this thread...applying brakes to stop your machines ought to stop them from wearing out if they aren't running, which also feels like a very fair implementation of a maintenance mechanic. Maintenance can still be a bit time-consuming, when a player has to do it, but the player can also cut down on the amount of maintenance they need to do and how often, by simply applying the brakes when the machinery isn't in use. I'm more inclined to support that kind of mechanic with that sort of implementation.

There used to be a couple of Minecraft mods for that kind of thing, back in the day: Tales of Kingdoms and Ancient Warfare. The former dove heavily into RPG aspects(though was never finished, to my knowledge), while the latter was less about RPG mechanics and more about the player creating infrastructure and NPCs to manage. There are probably a handful of other mods that do similar, at for Minecraft, but it's an area that's still being explored on the modding side of Vintage Story.

I dunno about for seas/oceans, but if rivers are ever implemented, that does sound like it could be an interesting mechanic as a local challenge. A player could avoid that kind of trouble by not building in the obvious floodplain. In the event they really want to build in such an area though, then building structures like dams or dikes would allow them to do so. Not really sure about this one, but if it just cracks a few blocks instead of destroying things, and you can fix it with some clay/other materials, then it sounds like it might be fair. Though I would expect it to be an optional challenge that's toggled off by default, much like lightning starting fires. Given how destructive tornadoes are, I really don't see them being a thing, outside of mods. I like this idea, but without the destruction. Most meteors aren't that big and burn up in the atmosphere, which would make for some fun stargazing activity at night(especially if there are meteor showers at certain times of year). It would also be cool to find a chunk of meteoric iron every once in a while, from the rare fresh meteor. As for the meteors big enough to leave craters, I think the craters we already have is enough. I'm not sure how easy it would be to code all of these into a mod, as coding is not my area of expertise. However, one really great thing about Vintage Story is that it's designed to be easy to mod, in terms of both playing with mods and creating them. So even if you don't have prior experience with creating mods, it's a good place to start learning.

I just went through a heavy temporal storm...only got around 16 flax fibers and a couple of rusty gears for my efforts, despite killing around 20 or so monsters. No specials. It's the kind of drops I'd expect for passive scavenging loot post-storm with this kind of rebalance, but not from a storm where I'm really putting in the effort to get my goodies. With the proposed kill tracker I could have had at least one or two special monsters and gotten some better stuff. Oh well!

Generally, I advocate for natural disasters to be a mod, and not part of the vanilla game. Things like tornadoes, floods, earthquakes and the like would certainly be a challenge, however...they also destroy player bases without much option for counterplay. Chiselwork takes quite a bit of time and effort, as does livestock domestication, fruit trees, and various other things--to have that wiped out by something you couldn't prevent/avoid isn't going to be fun for most. That being said, something like the blizzard idea you've laid out is an exception, as it adds more challenge, but also plenty of counterplay options. Players could stockpile more firewood/other fuel to keep warm, shovel snow out of the way, or build bases with plenty of covered area so the snow doesn't accumulate in work spaces. Likewise, as a seasonal challenge a player can know roughly when to expect such storms to occur, giving them time to prepare, and the storms aren't destructive either so there's no worries about losing chiselwork or other valuable efforts.

Welcome to the forums! I like it. It would add a seasonal challenge, as well as add a sort of "natural disaster" type of event without being too punishing, though I don't think I would freeze the water deeper than one block. I don't live in a place that gets a lot of snow, but I've sometimes wondered why the snow isn't able to drift a bit higher in the game. Or at least, why snow accumulation doesn't vary a bit over the winter. As for Tennessee summers and Southern summertime in general...it's not the heat that's the problem, as much as it is the humidity. It locks in the heat, as well as the cold(assuming it ever decides to actually be wintertime ).

Do whatever you need to do. You and the rest of the team at Anego have done a great job so far! I'm happy with the money I spent on the game, and look forward to what else you guys are cooking up.

Because you never know when a gaggle of dwarves and an old wizard man will show up at your door asking you to be their burglar.

Especially if we can be the dragons and pester those pesky dwarves for a proper Smaug experience. I really like this, as it's something I'd like to do in Vintage Story, but doesn't really fit the story or the lore. Which is perfectly fine! That is, after all, what modding is for, and if that kind of gameplay is added as a whole new gamemode/game with its own lore...well, then I can have my cake and eat it too!

OH! Okay yeah that makes a lot more sense. Not something I had considered for adding to the game, but it sounds rather interesting and useful, so...why not? You could probably make it a toggle like the "immersive first person" mode, so that players can choose which option they prefer. In the meantime, someone did implement the concept via mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/freelook

This is probably what you're looking for: https://mods.vintagestory.at/tailorsdelight

You are correct in that the cementation furnace needs 2 full piles of coal underneath the stone coffin in order to function(I think 3 refills is accurate as well, though it could be 4). However, you need charcoal or coke inside the coffin; black coal isn't a high enough quality to carbonize the iron ingots. For the fuel underneath the coffin though, any type of coal works. Personally, I use brown coal when I can, as it's easier to find than black coal or anthracite and doesn't require as much work to acquire en masse, unlike charcoal or coke. For a beehive kiln...honestly, I dunno on that one. I've not messed with them that much, and never done the math on the fuel costs. I just throw a few piles of firewood or peat underneath the kiln and call it a day; those fuels are easy enough to amass in quantity that I don't really mind wasting a bit in order to ensure the kiln fires in one attempt.

Personally I think the temporal storms are fine as-is. However, it's a subject that frequently gets brought up here on the forums, so I thought I'd take a crack at a rebalance that offers a bit more flexibility in terms of choice. With the current storms, the two main choices are either play it safe and get nothing, or go fight and get some loot(which really isn't a good idea in the early game). My goal with this rebalance was to make early game storms less of a hassle(you get a handful of useful things to scavenge if you play it safe), while making later storms more rewarding once you're equipped(you get more and better loot for being a good monster hunter). I generally look at temporal storms as a sort of giant rift, where the barrier between the Rust world and reality becomes very thin. Given the state of a certain spoiler location, it seems plausible that some odds and ends could be dropped by monsters before they disappear back to the Rust world(or wherever they came from). Nope, just speaking from my general experience. I've had some storms where special monsters practically spawned on top of each other, and other storms where I've not seen a single special monster no matter how many other monsters I killed. Generally, I only see one special monster per storm, regardless of my kill count, so it doesn't seem to be something currently influenced by the number of monsters a player kills. Right, hence why I said the average loot for post-storm scavenging is a handful of flax fibers and the odd couple of rusty gears or metal scraps. Stuff that's still useful, but nothing particularly rare unless you get incredibly lucky. To get things like temporal gears or Jonas parts with any kind of regularity or within a reasonable time frame, you'll need to take a risk and actually go fight the monsters during the storm, instead of waiting it out safely in a bunker. The better you fight, the better your reward.