LadyWYT

For the same reason that you can't do other basic things in videogames--it's not how the game was designed. And of course, to make climbing with your bare hands work in Vintage Story, you'd need to redesign the story areas already implemented to make sure they still offer the intended challenge...which is a lot of work in itself. Personally, I'd rather see the resources invested into other areas of the game, given that there's really not that much climbing I need to do that isn't already handled in the current iteration of the game. Rope ladders. Easily crafted, easily picked up once placed. For those really wanting to climb with their hands, I highly recommend this mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/verticality

I think a better option is something @ifoz suggested a while back--climbing picks. I think with a designated climbing tool, the story locations wouldn't need reworks, since using a tool on a block would qualify as attempting to tamper with said block and thus render the tool impossible to use within a story location. Of course, adding something like that then renders rope ladders a lot less useful, so I'm fine with climbing being left to the mods. A better option is just adding the ability to crawl instead. That would be more useful for caves and other tight spaces, wouldn't break current story locations(that I'm aware of), and would open up more options for hiding goodies in ruins and story locations.

I think one thing that would help VS combat, aside from perhaps tuning some timers and hitboxes, is just adding a few more sound effects. They did as much with the shields, and now shields are very satisfying to use because they sound properly protective, even if they didn't actually get a buff to their stats. Now I certainly don't expect monsters to start shrieking in pain(I don't think they can really feel much to begin with), but having some more varied grunts and things would probably make your hits feel more productive.

That, and gold tends to be more difficult to acquire en masse. Silver/gold items are more just a flex than anything, and possibly a holdover from the other block game. I'd still keep those as-is, but up the decoration on some of the models perhaps. As for more mundane materials like lead? No one's going to be bragging about having a lead pickaxe, or going to be excited about getting a lead shovel as a prize. You are correct in that silver and gold can be used for black bronze alloy, but again, both precious metals are harder to get ahold of than other materials, so no one's really going to be opting for black bronze. Especially not when you need precious metal for Jonas tech and lantern linings, if you're going to min/max on your lighting.

I mean, we had how many players complaining combat was too easy prior to 1.20? Only for the complaints to flip entirely with 1.20's release and rail about how combat was now too hard. Personally, I do like combat, but that's not why I play Vintage Story and I do agree that if it were made dramatically harder a lot of current players would quit. I'd also wager that while we might see an uptick of combat-focused players, most of them aren't going to stick around because combat still isn't the focus of Vintage Story and there are plenty of other games that do combat better. Combat could be the focus, but that would be a major shift in the game's direction, and at that point it's not Vintage Story anymore. Minecraft combat is pretty much point-and-click. You don't need to worry about weapon or armor materials, you just get netherite and then enchant it to make it even more effective, and there's no downside to wearing your armor all the time unless you want to be invisible. The only thing that might be a "challenge" is figuring out how to shoot long distances/moving targets, or the mechanics behind the mace(which to my knowledge are simple anyway). In contrast, equipment material matters quite a lot in Vintage Story--it determines how long your equipment will last, what it can protect you from(armor), and how much damage you can dish out(weapons). Not all armor is equal either; the more protective it is the more drawbacks it has, and wearing your armor all the time may not even be ideal. When it comes to ranged combat, you not only need to account for shot trajectory, but you need to release your shot at the right time too in order to get the most power and accuracy. For shield blocking, the material of your shield in VS again makes a difference in how much protection it offers, and VS shields also allow you to passively block some projectiles as long as you have the shield equipped. I'd also note that VS enemies tend to be more intelligent, on average, since they may attempt to flee when low on health, or otherwise keep their distance/hit-and-run. They're also not limited to one kind of attack either; most will either have both a melee and ranged option, and a few may have more than one kind of melee attack. Last but not least, I write all of the above looking at it from a PvE standpoint, not PvP. Once you introduce human opponents, things go bonkers quickly, as human opponents are very good at developing strategy on the fly and won't hesitate to try some very unorthodox methods to achieve their goals. I think to truly balance PvP, you need to either develop the game for predominantly PvP to begin with, or otherwise leave it to the individual servers to do their own balancing via mods.

I think it's probably territory that's better suited to the modded realm than for the vanilla game, since the vanilla game tends to focus more on realism for the most part. There's a reason that tools and weapons generally aren't made from soft metal; the material used needs to be tough enough to both get the job done and retain its shape after repeated use. Plus even if you ignore the realism aspect and add it anyway...if the resulting products have terrible stats to reflect the material used...why would you bother making them to begin with? Copper isn't particularly rare, and you can smelt it with tin to get a bronze alloy, which is much better. Poison is better suited for an alchemy mechanic. Brew your poisons from certain mushrooms and other things.

How far you have to travel depends on your world settings, but once you've reached tropical climates you should be far enough south to find them. I think they may be a bit on the rare side though, so you may need to do quite a bit of searching before you find some. As for their exact spawn conditions...that I don't know. I've not dug into the game files, or found them in-game myself as I usually don't range into those climates. In real life though, they are a tropical plant, so the tropics are the best place to look for them.

I would chalk it up to being jank due to the game being early in the development still, and not anywhere close to a finished product. A lot of animations are a little janky, not just player movement, but I think the priority right now is to just have something that looks decent and works.

I would check the area you had it last prior to the server crash; sometimes the marker bugs out.

It's not just a matter of low light level. If a creature can still see the sky, they're fine. If they can't see the sky and the light level is too low, then there's a problem, but there's still a little bit of time before they just keel over. As for the bear you chased into the cave--caves don't generally offer access to the sky or other light sources, so it makes sense that it would have despawned, though it's a little odd for them to despawn that fast.

I think there likely is. Either that, or we're getting distracted by having so much fun(or frustration) with other tasks, that we forget to keep track of certain things(like livestock due dates). So it ends up feeling like your critters took forever to give birth, when they were right on time all along.

The more depth you give it, the harder it gets to manage since there's more variables to track. The ideal state to shoot for is something that's easy for someone with 0 experience or knowledge to pick up and start playing, but difficult to master. Which, I think Vintage Story strikes that balance in its gameplay pretty well so far, including the combat. It's simple enough that a newbie can jump right into the game and be fine(though they'll struggle a bit in some areas), while more experienced players can crunch the numbers to figure out the most optimal equipment for given tasks or the timing needed to do stuff like dodge attacks, if they so desire. Any combat in a nutshell, really. From a realistic standpoint, the best overall weapon choice is going to either be a pointy stick, or a club, in most cases. A long pointy stick keeps the enemy at a nicer distance, while being cheap to make and easy to use. As for a club...the armor might hold up under the bludgeoning, but the body underneath said armor probably won't be able to hold up from the shock of the beating. To win a fight, all you really have to do is keep hitting the target until it can no longer move. The process of how you achieve can be easy, hard, or somewhere in-between, but it really is as simple as that. This is where I have to agree with what a couple of others here have already said--your best bet is looking through the mod database for mods that modify the combat and creature behavior, and see if that spices things up. That's one of the strong points of robust modding support; players get to season their gameplay to their liking, however mundane or outrageous it may be. There's even mods to make the shivers sound like clowns or dress the drifters in dapper suits! A couple of mods you might start with are these: Combat Overhaul: https://mods.vintagestory.at/combatoverhaul Shiver Tweaks: https://mods.vintagestory.at/shivertweaks There's probably some others out there that you'd enjoy, but I'm not entirely sure what you're looking for. If nothing else, you could take a crack at making your own mod, if you're feeling particularly ambitious.

Nah, I could easily see this. More aggressive or otherwise dangerous wildlife(like hippos, which have been teased) would add more variety of interesting things to encounter in the world, as well as a hazard to avoid. Doesn't need to be groundbreaking to be interesting in this case, and you don't really have to explain what these creatures are capable of either. Most people have seen them, or something similar to them, and will have a rough idea of what to expect. Monsters are a different case. I think there's still room on the roster for a few more, and new additions don't need to be particularly groundbreaking here either. However, in the case of monsters, the style of anything new needs to be consistent with what we already have, so that it looks like part of the same world and not something just plopped in for grins and giggles. Vintage Story monsters currently fit into two basic categories: mechanicals, and esoteric. The mechanicals are pretty straight-forward; they're robots, and the designs generally derive from human appearance or some kind of animal. The esoteric category is things like drifters, bowtorn, and shivers; the main features these all seem to share is a lack of a face, grey "flesh", a rusty metal "skeleton", and an overall shape that suggests they may have been humans at one point(the bowtorn is currently the biggest deviation from this last point). As for monster behavior, while it doesn't need to be groundbreaking for each new addition to the roster, each new addition should at least be exhibiting some sort of behavior that lets it stand out from the ones we already have, otherwise you encounter the issue of "it's a drifter, but kicks and throws sticks instead". I'm also guessing the next "common" enemies added, if any are, will most likely be mechanical. Mechanicals fill the "trap" and "supporting unit" roles rather well, and there's a lot more wiggle room there when it comes to design possibilities. We could see another esoteric monster or two as well, but the drifter/bowtorn/shiver combination that we have currently covers most of the "aggressive enemy" roles.

Just for the record, it's not possible to turn off monster spawns without disabling the lore content entirely. The best one can do, without installing mods or otherwise tampering with the game files, is to just set creatures to "passive" so they'll never fight back, and disable rifts/temporal storms if you don't want to deal with those.

One thing I will point out, that doesn't seem to have been touched upon yet...prior to 1.20, drifters were the only monster you'd encounter on the surface(outside of some crazy locust nest spawn location). A lot of people complained that the combat was boring because the drifters were too easy to fight(if you had the skill, you could tackle the heaviest temporal storms nude with nothing but flint spears), and wanted something more challenging. Well...we got more challenge in 1.20, with the addition of bowtorn and shivers. Now there are three types of monster to encounter on the surface(and elsewhere), with very different styles of attack, meaning that now you'll need to be much more careful and properly prepare yourself for adventuring and combat. Of course, with the addition of the new monsters, the complaints have now swung the opposite direction, with some players complaining about how difficult the combat now is since you can't just charge in guns blazing and expect to live every time. I'm not saying that 1.20 didn't have issues with the spawn ratios for the new monsters and stuff, because it did, however @Thorfinn hit the nail on the head earlier: the more complex you make a system, the more work you have to do to make sure that it's balanced, especially if it's a system that intertwines with others. And Vintage Story is very much a game that enjoys system overlaps. I wouldn't say they're intended to be avoided entirely. There's a few rare goodies you can get from the really dangerous ones, specifically. However, from a lore standpoint, monsters aren't something you want to mess with unless you HAVE to, and from a gameplay standpoint it's just more economical to avoid fights that you don't really need to engage in. Fighting wears down your gear, depletes your resources, and taking damage leaves you more vulnerable to accidental death.

I'm pretty sure it's to keep the antlers rare. I think antlers were bugged in a previous version, in that they weren't dropping from hunted deer at all, however that's been fixed. Whether your elk will drop his magnificent antlers if you(or something else) kills him though...that I don't know. If he does drop them, I'm not sure why you would want to go that route, given the elk's utility and how expensive they are.

I'd give it a bit more time and see if she produces any bacon bits. If you start pushing into late December/January and there's still no piglets, then I'd start to suspect that something's bugged. The easiest fix is probably killing the sow and spawning a new pig...I'm fairly certain you can change a creature's generation with console commands as well, but I'm not sure what command it is.

Welcome to the forums! I like these ideas too. Seems to be well-balanced and something that would remain useful through all stages of the game, for many different playstyles.

Better yet, instead of just making them disappear, add a death animation so they can fly apart into pieces when you hit them. No need for collision on the pieces, since they can just disappear when the animation is over.

As in a limit to carry weight and not just inventory slots, or something else entirely? I always chalked up some of the stack sizes to be a sort of "mass limit" to what you can carry, without making building stuff too tedious. In contrast, most things in the other block game stack to 64 max, with a few exceptions stacking to something that divides into 64 or not stacking at all. I'm not even sure that building right next to your stone deposit would help that much. If the stone bricks still stack like normal, then it's more economical to just quarry your stone and turn it into bricks on the spot, probably, instead of lugging the solid blocks back to your base. I suppose it would also incentivize building with more mundane materials as well, but overall I think it still ends up being a more frustrating building experience. Of course, it could just be an optional challenge that you can toggle on at world creation(default on for Wilderness Survival). Or something like Valheim, though in that case the weights of items still end up being a bit arbitrary for gameplay reasons. You can still carry around a lot more stuff like logs, ore, and rocks than you could realistically handle, but it somehow manages to avoid being too frustrating when it comes to building and getting things done. I agree with Thorfinn, a lot of the large stacks are just for convenience, with the smaller, more arbitrary stacks likely intended for balance. Smaller stack sizes for things like logs help push the player to focus their attention on a narrower selection of tasks at any given time; for example, instead of being able to go chop the whole forest and still have enough space for a mining trip or all those foraged goods, you'll need to focus on just one of those tasks and possibly make more than one trip to get it done. It does slow down gameplay a bit, especially in the early game, but it doesn't feel too forced, at least in my opinion. Overall player inventory in videogames is just weird in general, when it comes to realistic logic.

Or brigandine. It's got worse stats than chain, sure, but it's also cheaper to make. Not that iron is a problem, mind you, but if there are multiple players to outfit with arms and armor, resources might be a concern. Brigandine will still hold up well against tougher monsters too, so it shouldn't feel like too much of a downgrade, unless one is sticking to ranged combat.

One game that has a feature like that is Mount & Blade: Warband. If you manage to get a headshot on your opponent, it's almost guaranteed to be an instant kill(same applies if they land one on you!). While headshots are very satisfying to land, they're also incredibly difficult to do in the chaos of battle, even if your character is built specifically for ranged combat. Most of the time, headshots end up being left to lucky shots, rather than actual skill. I could see specific "vulnerable areas" being a mechanic for a boss fight, but boss fights are a different beast than standard combat. As for hunting...the main problem I see applying it to hunting is that it ends up giving Blackguards more power with less drawback. One of the big drawbacks to the Blackguard class is the ranged combat penalty, as it makes them ineffective hunters in the early game(it takes two spears to kill a rabbit). That paired with the increased hunger rate means they have a harder time keeping themselves fed. I suppose you could simply switch the ranged penalty for something else(though I'm not sure what, maybe increased range of detection by creatures?) if a mechanic like that were added. Definitely something to consider when adding new mechanics though.

Have you tried 90% landcover with 200% landmark scale? It means a tad more water, and the water that is there ends up being large lakes or seas. You can still see the other shoreline, in several cases, but the lake/sea is large enough that a sailboat becomes more practical than a raft if you expect to be hauling much cargo around. Likewise, the lakes and seas are also big enough that you can sail for quite a ways without needing to disembark. My friend and I used that setting on our server and so far it's been a pleasant experience.

Both fair points I hadn't considered. Regarding boulders, we kinda have that, I suppose, in the form of the cave-in mechanic, and the first boss fight. I don't know that I would make boulders much of a mechanic outside of specific story locations though, outside of the pure decoration that we already have, that is. Of course, in the instance of a boulder hurtling at you, it's not the speed that's the problem as much as it is the mass. The boulder will be moving slowly enough for you to be able to dodge, and attempting to block it makes no sense given that it has enough mass to easily crush you underneath. As for the acid, I would also chalk that up to a boss ability or other rare location-specific enemy. I'd also note that if the stuff eats through armor, you definitely do not want it touching your skin either, so wearing armor is still likely better than going nude. Maybe you could have some sort of counterplay with an alchemy system, and simply drink a potion to render yourself immune to the effects for a short time, but I'm not sure that really fits the style of the game. The other drawback to burning through a player's gear durability like that is that it limits how much they can really accomplish on that outing. For a one-time boss fight it's fine, since they'll be having a relatively uneventful trip back to base to rest and plan their next moves, but for more mundane enemies it likely ends up being a frustrating slog with more than one trip to repair and resupply, unless they sacrificed inventory space to bring repair materials with them. In contrast, with the current system, armor has enough durability to last a comfortable time for an adventure, provided that you equipped the right tier for the enemy tier that you expect to be facing. Lower tier armors can defend against higher tier attacks, of course--it's better than nothing. But they won't protect you as much and won't last nearly as long as you might need them to. I think you'll have fun with the story content. And I'd wager the combat will be a bit more interesting in the story locations, even if you're just facing "basic" monsters. Environment makes a pretty big impact on how easy or difficult a fight is, and if the setting is not in your favor even the most basic of enemies can be dangerous.

I seem to recall something being mentioned quite a while back about it potentially getting added to the game at a much later date--closer to the game's completion. I think the reasoning was due to all the possible inventory tweaks that may take place between now and then, that probably break a system like carry-on. So it makes more sense to add that system later, once inventory is really set in stone proper, and not slated for any further changes. Otherwise, I would guess it could be that the mod no longer fits the intended direction of the game. I can't say that I've played with it, but inventory space is at a premium in the early game, and one of the major challenges you'll need to deal with. Sticking a chest or storage vessel onto your back gives you a looooooot of extra slots to work with, which is a time-saver, yes, but takes a lot of that early challenge away.