LadyWYT

I'd have to double-check on vanilla, as I've been playing more modded recently. But I could swear it's a thing, just more rare than the single drop.

Clyde looks sad now...you should find him a friend!

I want to say that sometimes ore deposits will drop two chunks instead of the standard one chunk. That's in the base game, unmodded, as far as I am aware. My guess is your Blackguard friend is just getting very unlucky, while you're having better luck with the drops.

Maybe try halite-rock instead?

I'd presume that the meat drops are for gameplay balance, rather than realism. Realistically, yeah, you should be able to eat for much longer than a day or two off of one bear or moose carcass(or other large animal). From a gameplay perspective, that means you need to hunt much less, which means that the fat and hide drops would need to be upped, presumably, in order to ensure you're getting enough hides/fat for leather/machinery without also acquiring a ton of meat that will go to waste. Not that meat doesn't already go to waste...(I enjoy hunting in the game, so a lot of my kills get turned into compost). In any case, the other issue that increasing hunt drops poses, is that livestock becomes less valuable. Why bother raising critters if bagging a moose every once in a while satisfies all your protein needs? With the current setup we have, you could make this argument as well, however, you also have to hunt more frequently to get the same amount of meat, which in turn takes more time and effort. I wouldn't call hunting particularly hard either, even after the tweak that 1.20 brought with it, but the time investment serves as a good motivation to acquire and breed livestock, instead of relying solely on the hunt.

I dunno, the Standard difficulty feels mostly fine. I do agree that it will probably be pretty brutal for brand new players, but I also think that's okay given what Vintage Story is. The struggle is real, the learning curve is steep, but I can't say that it ever felt entirely unfair either. When I was a new player, I more felt pushed to hone my own skills and adjust settings as needed whenever I had trouble. That being said, some sort of "Tutorial Difficulty" wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea either. Let it be as you said--similar to the Standard, but with a few of the challenges toned down a tad in order to avoid killing newbies quite so easily.

...I didn't know I needed this until now. I wanna annoy my friend with it!

If you're not opposed to playing with mods, there are a few that allow you to boil water for salt. Requires the investment of time and fuel, of course, but it can be less frustrating than hunting those elusive salt domes.

I'd like to post more screenshots and stuff, but there's a limit to how many you can post on the forums without cleaning out the folder. And if you delete your forum folder, it deletes the pics you posted as well.

I've played with a mod that adds one. Ancient Tools, I think it was. I only made the thing once, and never again because it was useless. A quern will outperform the mortar/pestle every time, so a mortar/pestle should really have some sort of special functionality that the quern does not, if added to the vanilla game. Like the idea that @traugdor, I think it was, floated: require a mortar/pestle to mash up horsetail or other herbs for your poultices, rather than using the quern. I dunno. I think the information currently available in vanilla is fine; things like whether a space is an insulated room or not are fairly simple to figure out via contextual clues, or using a debugging command if you need something more concrete. Not that more information on the HUD wouldn't be useful, but I think the contextual clues are better and keep the interface from getting too cluttered. If more is needed, mods handle it well enough. I'm guessing this will be a base game feature at some point, but there's probably other priorities to take care of first. Make sure you're baiting the trap with some grain. It's also easier to catch chicks than it is adult chickens, since chicks are a guaranteed catch(I think), but adults can trigger the trap without being caught.

I think I may have found one of the bigger vanilla ruins with a friend, though I wouldn't swear to it entirely. I do know there is something labeled as "Tyron's Basement" somewhere in the ruin files, if I'm not mistaken. Not sure if that's the secret ruin either, nor do I know what it is, but I'm determined to figure it out one of these days.

I'm guessing what probably happened is you had a rift active near your base during the temporal storm, and it cranked out a lot of extra bowtorn based on the spawn patterns for that particular storm/day. I think each storm is supposed to have a particular spawn pattern that's selected at random, however, I'm beginning to suspect that the spawn patterns are set at random for each day, rather than each storm. The pattern the storm gets just happens to be whatever that day's pattern is. In any case, I'd recommend looking into acquiring some rift wards and setting them up around your base. It's late game tech(and I daresay monster spawns still need a bit of tuning, potentially), but it should help curb some of the influx of monsters in situations like this.

I just buy halite from the survival goods traders, and call it a day. If I happen to stumble across a halite dome while out exploring, great, but otherwise I don't really need salt. The little bits that I might want for cheese and stuff are easily supplied by traders.

Possibly, but in my experience, it's easier to ride around swaths of impassable/nearly-impassable terrain than it is to try to blaze a trail through it. However, I think if you were to employ this strategy, it'd be most efficient to do this in a forest. Use some shears to clear a better path and mark out the path so you can use it later on the return trip. Pretty much my general experience and thoughts. Smoothing out the uphill riding for one-block slopes would be a significant improvement, as currently it's rather jank. I might also change the elk's walking speed to be a bit faster than the player's walk speed, in order to make it feel better to ride in those rougher spots where you need to slow down. Otherwise, the elk tends to be a bit faster than travel by foot, and will also save you a lot of food cost since you won't be burning through your stamina while riding. It also allows you to wear your armor while retaining movement speed, as the movement speed penalty from armor doesn't apply when riding. Not necessarily. The elk's swim speed is slow, sure, but it doesn't tire and you don't get wet from the swim while riding. So it's simple enough to just find the narrowest point of crossing and swim the elk across. If it's wintertime and cold enough for the water to freeze, you can also leapfrog the elk over the ice patches. I still prefer the elk overall, I think, but traveling by foot definitely wasn't bad. It did mean that there were more options when it came to cutting through very rough terrain, but the drawback was more limited inventory space to work with.

Welcome to the forums! This ability is only available for a certain portion of chapter two of the main story--you'll know it when you're there, as it will come with a prompt in the chat and a clock icon will appear on your hotbar to indicate that the ability can be used. Spoilers for the ability: I will also note that it's easier to scroll over the icon on your hotbar and right-click to use it, instead of hitting the Y key, though you could also rebind it to something else. The other important thing to remember is that it does have a short cooldown on use, so you will need to time its use somewhat carefully.

Shears, my friend. You need a pair of shears to increase the yield of sticks from branches. Not yet in the game, but a mod like Primitive Survival adds some proper fishing options. You didn't need the hammer and chisel to craft the quern prior to 1.20, but the balancing change does make sense. It was a little too easy to get to the better foodstuffs before, plus it doesn't really make sense to toss stone blocks into the crafting grid with a couple of sticks, and have a perfectly shaped quern. I know some have suggested a mortar/pestle as an early alternative to the quern, and there is a mod or two that adds that. However, the drawback to a mortar/pestle is it's very slow compared to the quern, and easily rendered obsolete since the quern isn't really that hard to get, even with the crafting tweak. Agreed, there could be some quality-of-life improvements here. I'd wager it's set up the way it is due to material colors. Red clay is pretty dark, so it doesn't make sense that it would produce a light-colored daub, unless it was one with a red or brown tint. Drystone blocks require ashlar blocks to craft, which requires a hammer and chisel. They're also sturdier than cobblestone, requiring a pickaxe to break instead of your bare hands. I think it's fine as-is. Beehive kiln for mass-production of pottery and bricks. Late game tech, but useful if you're going to be firing a lot of things. You already can--the first two slots of a cookpot need to be meat, and the third can be a fruit item. There's a good variety there, and if you are using mods like Expanded Foods the options are increased further. I'd wager more food options will be added to the vanilla game in the future, it's just not a priority right now. Ctrl + Shift + Right-click. Some tools need a wall two blocks high to place this way. Once you get an anvil, you can make nails and a saw(for boards), and start crafting chests, trunks, and crates. Otherwise, good inventory management is critical in the early game, as space is at a premium. I'll also note that you can store many items on the ground itself, though it will get messy. Easier fix is to simply switch your gamemode to creative(/gm 2, I believe), give yourself the finished product while tossing the mistake, and use /gm 1 to set yourself back to survival. No need for mods! It's probably a code thing; once you use the ingot to start a product, it no longer counts as an ingot but rather as that item. There is a way to repair your stuff...just not something you can do yourself as a player outside of mods. Without spoiling too much, there's an NPC you'll meet later(assuming lore content enabled) that can repair some things, for a price. There's a HUD mod that can help you see whether or not a space counts as a room, greenhouse, or cellar. Otherwise, the best way to tell outside of using mods or debugging commands is to simply enter the room you wish to check and see if your body temperature continues to drop. If it does, you have a problem with the insulation for that space, or it's too big to retain heat. For cellars, all you need to do is look at the spoil rate of the containers within. If it's a very low value, the cellar is functioning. For a greenhouse, I believe hovering over the crops planted within will display how much benefit they are receiving from the greenhouse, if any. You can always buy more seeds from agriculture traders, as well as find them in ruins or collect them from wild crops. The wild crops are fairly common save for the cold climates, and can still drop seeds even if they aren't mature(though it's not guaranteed). The best way to collect a lot of seeds is to simply look for wild crops and harvest them whenever you find them. If you have access to salt, you can salt your hides to let them last longer. Otherwise, it's best to go ahead and turn them into leather if you have the means, turn them into pelts, or simply let them rot and turn that into compost. Rabbit hides I turn into parchment for crate labels.

Also helps when you can outrun the Blackguard that's trying to make you share your food.

If you're busy hiding under cover, you're not out fighting what the storm is throwing at you now, are you? I stand by my earlier point--it's a decent idea for a challenge mod, but I don't see it being an appealing mechanic for a lot of players. Livestock is a significant time and resource investment, and not everyone wants to keep their animals locked in a bunker. Likewise, if players can just be insta-killed in a temporal storm regardless of gear, they aren't going to be thrilled about trying to fight in temporal storms, even if it's a very rare occurrence. As for the health drain...that technically already exists. If you're out fighting in the storm, you're going to end up taking damage. If you take enough damage, you'll want to take cover and heal, before rejoining the fray. If you add a constant health drain on top of the damage you'll already take from enemies, all you're really accomplishing is forcing players to spend more time under cover rather than fighting, regardless of their skill or gear.

It indicates which search mode your prospecting pick is set to, and only displays when held. Currently, you're set to the density search mode.

What's the feasibility of perhaps adding in special bodies of water that have variable levels? Like puddles after a big rain, that evaporate in a few hours, or perhaps temporary watering holes forming in deserts and savannahs after it rains, that dry up after a few days? That way you could keep the simplified water physics that we have already, but still have some more interesting water features to find and interact with, without cooking your PC(hopefully).

I've not really noticed an increase in bears; the most bear trouble I've had is when playing with a friend, since we seem to have a knack for building our base near a brown bear's territory. All it really means it a lot of bear stew(thank you Expanded Foods!) and some free entertainment whenever one of us ventures into the woods without armor.

Odd. It looks like he's parked in a stable, so he should still be inside, but have you checked around the nearby area to make sure he didn't get out and wander off? The bone flute has a limited range, so if he managed to wander off(assuming icon is glitched) then he might be too far away to respond to the whistle. I'd also make sure that there's enough light inside--not sure if they despawn or not due to lack of light, but I would assume they do. If he despawned, that could have also caused an icon glitch, I suppose. The only other thing I can think of to check, outside of restarting your game or checking any installed mods, is to make sure an ownership medallion is equipped(which it should be, if your mount has an icon), as the bone flute won't call your mount otherwise.

I like the idea, but I would take it a different direction: tracks/other signs are visible to all classes, and instead serve as indicators of where certain animals are more likely(but not guaranteed!) to spawn. So finding a lot of claw marks on trees could indicate a high likelihood that a bear is somewhere in the area, while hoofprints would suggest a larger herbivore like a deer or goat. I'm not entirely sure how feasible it is to code though. If I'm not mistaken, I think there are fixed spawnpoints for creatures in the world, so I would assume that a handful of appropriate tracks/signs could be generated within a certain radius of the spawnpoint, in order to prevent players from too easily building traps on top of those spawns. The other issue I see potentially is the lack of respawning tracks/signs, should they be destroyed. Maybe there could be some sort of seasonal check around the spawnpoints to replace any missing details? I would say that perhaps the spawnpoint ceases to function if too many markers get destroyed, but I think that would make it too easy to deal with predators if that were the case.

Isn't this just the phantom from the other block game, after a fashion? Except perhaps even more irritating? Given how much people hate the phantoms, I don't think adding a flying monster to Vintage Story is a good idea, save for perhaps special circumstances for a story location or something. A decent idea for some sort of challenge mod, but I don't see it working well in the vanilla game. Domesticated livestock are a big investment, and it REALLY stings to lose them. I suppose players could just lock them away in a bunker, but that's not really fun to do aesthetically, or every time you play the game either. Likewise, it's not really fun to have to sit in a bunker for every single temporal storm either. If a storm can just kill you on the spot if you're not in the appropriate shelter at the right time, it's going to actively discourage players from even trying to go out and fight. It's also going to make for rather unpleasant travels when trying to complete the main story, as there's a very good chance that most players will be facing at least one temporal storm when working through chapter two.

It likely does, since you'll become hungry again after eating raw/basic foods than you will after eating meals. So you can end up eating more in a shorter amount of time, thus putting more points into nutrition.