LadyWYT

Possibly, but I was thinking something more along the lines of the dwarven ballista from Skyrim, in that it's a sentient mechanical contraption rather than a rotbeast. In that case, I would expect it to be lurking in a larger ruin underground, or perhaps a bunker carved into a mountainside. That would make mountains a little more exciting for players to run across.

I'd actually prefer just a simple boost to sailing speed in proportion to current wind speed. What you've proposed here works on paper, but I think in actual practice it would be very frustrating, as it only ends up encouraging water travel in one direction. If wind direction is going to factor in, it really ought to be like Valheim's system, which...honestly, I'm not really a fan of. Valheim does sailing very well, but I do find it rather tedious, if not outright frustrating, since oftentimes the wind just isn't blowing in a useful direction and the game requires a LOT of sailing. There is a special ability to unlock that will make the wind always blow in a useful direction for a short time, but taking that ability does mean you're forgoing abilities that are far more useful on average.

She can attack at any time in the Devastation, though as @Maelstrom says the true fight is supposed to happen at the top of the Tower. If you're not near the Tower, or not yet at the top, she will just do the occasional divebomb. I will note though that there have been issues with this boss actually showing up to the arena, however, I think those have been fixed. If the boss got stuck on blocks though, I would screenshot the exact portion and go report it on the github bug tracker, as I doubt that's intended. I'm posting the rest under spoilers:

Oh wow. I knew that monsters could climb up ladders, but not down. Didn't know the same logic applied to bears as well.

I was thinking you could probably toss some basic wiring/tubing onto that pile in order to allow players to build basic door control switches and whatnot. Some handy little gizmos and gadgets, or perhaps some grander contraptions, but nothing fully automatic or overly complex like what can be done with redstone. By that I mean the player will always need to be providing some sort of input to the machines in question, much like they do already with the helve hammer.

Alcohol bandages are most useful at home, but it's possible to take a jug of alcohol with you and make them on the go(although maybe not in a high pressure situation). However, honey poultices provide the same amount of healing, without drying out, so I would wager a lot of players use those instead.

You don't want to look for marble as your source of lime, as it's very rare. If you happen to stumble across a deposit you could use it for lime, but you may want to save it for fancy building given that there are better sources of lime to be had. Limestone and chalk are fairly common finds, and it's not uncommon to find one of the two alongside bauxite(bright orange rock, you will need this later). Depending on what kind of rock you have around spawn though, you may need to do some traveling in order to find it. The rock layers you want to look for are sedimentary, which are on the surface. Lime can also be acquired via grinding up seashells; it's certainly not efficient, but it'll do in a pinch and you'll get two lime per shell. You can also sometimes find lime/lime-producing rocks in ruins, and can trade for lime at commodities/survival goods traders. If you're after lime for leatherworking, you should also keep an eye out for borax(found in sediment rocks). Borax is more efficient for leatherworking, and will be needed later for working meteoric iron and creating steel.

I'm thinking it's also because quite a lot of games took a look at Minecraft and instead of trying to do something new, just copied Minecraft and maybe tacked on a couple of extras as an afterthought in order to say they were "different". It's quite obvious that Vintage Story did take some inspiration from Minecraft, but instead of trying to copy someone else's homework, so to speak, Vintage Story developed its own vision, and that's one big reason of many that it's had so much success. You would think. It's like choosing Pepsi and then getting upset that it's not Coca-cola. Both are good sodas, and there are similarities between the two, but they aren't the same thing.

You should be able to repair the broken translocator with two metal parts and three temporal gears. If your class is Clockmaker, the temporal gear cost will be reduced to two.

Welcome to the forums! Creature behavior is something that is still being worked on, however, I will note that there are lore reasons for wildlife being unusually aggressive. As for the monsters...they're eldritch horrors, or machines gone rogue, so it makes sense for those to be super aggressive. I will note that depending on the creature in question, some have somewhat unpredictable behavior. I've had several wolves growl at me when I got too close, but run away instead of attack. Bears will occasionally continue sleeping or idling instead of attacking, although this is rare. Shivers are always aggressive, however, they are quite erratic and it's not out of the question for them to bite once or twice before scuttling away to parts unknown. I think to customize creature behaviors in the specific ways you've listed, mods are probably the best way to handle it. That way the player can have a ton of different options available, without clogging up the standard settings menus.

Fair enough, though I could see it being a minor change meant to make it a bit more clear as to who/what is being referred to. "Byzantine" tends to be a more familiar term than "Eastern Roman", and if it was referred to as a Roman crown players might associate it with Rome and Italy rather than the area that is now modern day Turkey. The term byzantine is also derived from Byzantium, which is just another name for Constantinople(the capitol). While it wouldn't be the term that the inhabitants of the empire use to describe themselves, I'm not sure that it's entirely out of the question that foreigners(main Old World setting and cast seems to be mostly from central Europe) might use other names to describe the location and its people/culture.

To my knowledge, the trader carts operate off the land claim system, so just moving them won't be enough. You can, however, bypass the claim restrictions in creative mode and build/destroy in the area as you see fit.

It was an issue that World of Warcraft ran into with one of their expansions. For years the game had a solid reputation of running on most hardware, but Blizzard upgraded a lot of the graphics, which increased a lot of hardware requirements. The result was a massive uptick in complaints on the forums as many players logged in to figure out that the game was no longer working correctly--enough players for Blizzard to actively have to roll back some of their plans and implement a patch for the older hardware just for that expansion, so they didn't lose a ton of subs. This is true. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see it implemented, but I am skeptical about how easy it would actually be to implement. It seems like it would almost need to be its own special update, kind of like what 1.21 was regarding world gen, and 1.21 also had quite a lot of issues implementing those changes. Even Minecraft had a lot of problems when it came to increasing world height/depth; the terrain is a lot better than it used to be, but early in Caves & Cliffs one of the drawbacks to the new terrain is that most of the world seemed to be hills, with very few plains areas to build in.

If I had the right spark to make that kind of meme, I'd take a stab at it. Of course, now that I think about it, if the players are allowed to have firearms in the game, then it's only fair to let some of the monsters have them too. People think the bowtorns are bad, but imagine turret locusts.

Gotcha. I'm assuming it's probably just an arid grassland in the temperate zone, as those aren't uncommon. A savannah will be similar, but have acacia or ebony trees and be much further south. Sounds like it. Atrocious spawns can be fun to play, but they aren't really the best for learning the game.

Pretty much. To get a "realistic" mountain, the view distance world height would probably need to be around 1000 blocks or so, which is going to impact performance significantly. Most players will want to be able to climb to the tops of said mountains and actually enjoy the view. While it's fine to have ultra-high quality options for high-end pcs, I don't think it's a good idea to balance the entire game's aesthetic around the most top-of-the-line pcs. At that point, the average player is going to see gorgeous gameplay in the teasers, only to be disappointed when their experience isn't what's advertised(or they don't buy it in the first place due to hardware requirements). The overall experience needs to be consistent over a variety of hardware. Yeah this has crossed my mind too. This kind of optimization would make increasing view distance/world height defaults much more feasible, but I don't think the concept is quite developed enough yet. Not that it isn't worth the time to develop, but I do think there are more important priorities.

Culinary Artillery and Expanded Foods are not yet updated for 1.21. There are a couple of unofficial "updates", but the unofficial versions only get the mods to sort of work on 1.21. There are still underlying issues that need to be fixed with a proper update.

I mean, in all fairness I don't know how well it works. I just know that it seems to offer a solution for surface stability problems, without turning off the mechanic entirely.

Actually, there is this mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/chunkstaboverride I'm not sure how well it works and would definitely make a world backup before trying it, but it could be used to "fix" the area so that a move isn't required, if it comes to that.

That should allow newly generated chunks to match the default 1.21 generation, so you should be finding an ocean eventually. They just seem to be very rare on the default settings, so unless you got lucky with an ocean spawn nearby you'll probably need to search quite a while. I'd recommend testing out some worlds with higher water percentages, and see if there's something more to your liking there, and then adjust the values on your played worlds again(backups, just in case!). The sweet spot I've found for my worlds is 80% land to 20% water; there's a few oceans in that case, that are easy to find, but land-based travel will still be dominant.

Congrats! Now we have someone else to help charge drifters late return and missing book fees. They're always checking things out, but rarely returning.

Yeah but my point on the view distance is that if the player can't actually see those grand mountains off in the distance, then they're going to be missing the experience. Sure, they could tell by the incline that they are climbing up a mountain, or traveling up a shallower incline to high plains or something. But if all they see at the top is pretty much the same general land features they saw at the bottom, due to not having an extremely high view distance, then what was the point? It's like going to the Grand Canyon and hanging out at the visitor's center(or a different poor vantage point); yes, the canyon itself is nearby, but if you don't have good vision of the actual scale of the size of it, it's not really going to be all that impressive. In the case of view distance, lower view distances are essentially a permanent poor vantage point, and work better with terrain scaled down to be properly appreciated with lower distances. Yes, the view distance can be turned up to 1000+ blocks, which is a more appropriate scale for grander landscape, but it requires very beefy hardware to run the game like that...and most players don't have top-of-the-line hardware. Edit: I'll also note some experience from the other block game regarding this concept as well. The Caves & Cliffs update added much grander mountains, yes, but at one point I also tried out a mod that made the landscape much more realistic, on a much grander scale. It did the job very well, but there wasn't enough view distance available to run the game smoothly enough to be playable(even with mods) and still appreciate the landscape. So I could tell that I was standing on the crest of what was probably an epic mountain range(Ozark style lumpy mountains), yet couldn't see any of it, which was very frustrating.

Ranged is still more relevant than you think. It's useful for softening up surface enemies like bears and wolves(if not dispatching them entirely with ranged), as well as softening up monsters in temporal storms or dealing with straggling bowtorns at daybreak. There's also one major enemy where ranged is an absolute must. Overall, I do think ranged combat could be a bit stronger, but I don't think changing the existing aim/fire system or adding stronger weapons is necessary. Currently, ranged weapons should be the pick when it comes to hunting, however, half the time I don't need a ranged weapon at all since it's so easy to walk up to creatures like pigs, bighorns and provoke a fight, or shoot a male deer once to provoke a fight. I think a better option to make ranged combat a bit stronger(without making it so strong it outclasses everything else), is to tweak animal behavior so that wild animals will avoid the player if they can, and only attack if they're particularly aggressive or cornered and panicked. That way, the player actually has to track down their kill, instead of walking up and starting a fight. Yeah it's definitely something I would check. Rifts don't spawn underground, but I do think more unstable portions of cave have higher spawn chances. Hmmm, not sure then. I would definitely keep an eye on it, and consider submitting a bug report if there's heavy storms but just no enemies(or very few) at all.

Yep! I've mistaken them for bears a time or two--extra creepy if you catch one doing it in the distance in broad daylight and don't recognize what it is at first. I'm pretty sure it's the same animation the bowtorn use as well, it just looks very different due to completely different monster designs.

Welcome to the forums! The first thing I would check is to make sure you have the correct password for the correct accounts, as your forum account and game account have separate logins. Otherwise, I would submit a support ticket about the issue here: https://www.vintagestory.at/support/