LadyWYT

The steel requirement to mine it is probably to encourage players to upgrade their tools in order to progress, instead of relying on the cheapest tools for everything. It also ensures that players have access to what they need in order to process it, instead of letting them dig it up and then get frustrated when they can't do anything with it.

It's probably a mod that got forgotten about. If not a mod, then I would say it's most likely a wolf that you didn't get the best look at, or possibly even a shiver. It wouldn't be out of the question to mistake one of those for a modded creature if other mods are installed, if you didn't get a good look at it.

Teleport yourself to Tobias's Cave via commands, then try the teleporter from his side. It was a little janky when I was messing around with it, but as I recall that got the teleporter link to function correctly.

Welcome to the forums! This is probably the best answer right here: making your own class via mod, that greatly increases her character's attributes without changing your own in kind. Also a good idea, for a non-modded solution. Steel armor isn't foolproof though, and it will still slow a character down when worn, so it may not be the best option necessarily. However, if one were going this route, I'd also recommend potentially spawning in the admin blade with the armor. It's an overpowered weapon with high durability, that should one-shot most anything in the game, but it should also take care of the monster problem.

My current strategy whenever a temporal storm hits.

I'm actually debating borrowing from a certain design and making a prison-type structure instead of tinkering with an arena. A designated arena is great, because you can ensure you have a lot of space to easily run around, as well as add obstacles to slow down enemies. However, I think with a prison, you could build yourself a safe room to wait/heal in, and have a series of large cells for enemies to spawn in. Then just open the cells at your leisure and slaughter whatever's inside, without it being able to get away. Could work, but the main drawback I see to this is that you'll have much fewer chances to run away and attempt to get to safety, should you need to. Not that dying is much of an issue, but each time you do it not only drains your nutrition significantly, but also wears out your armor and clothing a LOT faster. I think it would also end up discouraging players from risking the storms until they have top-tier equipment, which may or may not be an ideal thing to do. Personally, I like what we have now. There's a better chance to get to safety should you be in dire straits or caught unawares, and unless you're sporting full plate armor it's somewhat simple to chase down the monsters in many cases. Shivers, in my experience, tend to employ a hit-and-run tactic. They like to run up, chomp you a couple of times, and then run away for a few moments before trying to ambush you again. So if they run away and you don't want to chase, they'll likely return soon enough. Or they might decide to spaz out on the spot, which makes killing them a lot easier. As for bowtorn, you'll need to either avoid packs of them, or be willing to dive right into the middle of the pack and scatter them. In the case of the latter, that will involve chasing them down, but since they're slow, that's not hard to do either. They also cannot take punishment, so it doesn't take many hits to kill them.

Welcome to the forums! 1.20 changed the way that fire clay spawns--now it only spawns naturally under black coal or anthracite deposits, or in small deposits in bauxite biomes. You can, however, craft fire clay from one of the other clay types simply by adding calcined flint powder. You get this powder by baking flint into calcined flint chunks in a firepit, and then grinding those chunks into powder.

I dunno, I have a sneaking hunch that the nightmares we'll need to deal with in the future won't necessarily be restricted to the deepest parts of the underground. Granted, I do expect them to be location-specific for story purposes, if they are spawning outside the normal conditions.

Welcome to the forums! Outside of flax twine and linen, you can also sometimes buy sewing kits from traders(commodities and survival goods, I believe) or occasionally find them as ruins loot. You can also turn off the class-exclusive recipes, if you so desire, which will remove the restrictions on who can craft what. You can also grind chalk, marble, and seashells into lime; it doesn't require only limestone. Marble is rare though, so if you find it you'll probably want to build with it instead of grinding it up. Seashells aren't that rare, but it takes a lot to make any significant amount of lime. Assuming you're after lime for leatherworking, keep an eye out for borax. Borax serves the same function in leatherworking, but is more efficient, plus you will need borax later for making steel. Last but not least, you can sometimes find lime as loot in ruins, or for sale by commodities traders. In addition to what @StCatharines already noted, you can also find temporal gears as loot in certain story locations. If you pursue the main story, you're guaranteed to find them, though it may be useful to have one or two with you on certain expeditions. You can also find them occasionally through panning gravel, sand, or bony soil, though it's a very low chance.

I like the idea, but I think if it were added, it should be a bit more than just "bigger campfire". You could maybe have a block similar to the forge block, that only accepts wood, peat, or fat as fuel, but can extend the burn time by a fair amount(not enough to accomplish the decorative lighting purpose). Make it require the ashlar stone blocks, so that players need to sink in a bit more time and resources to acquire it as well, but not so much that you couldn't have a big hearth area by mid-game. In regards to what purpose it serves...cooking. More efficient cooking, since it retains heat better and thus needs less fuel to cook the same amount of food when compared to a campfire. And since you can chain multiple hearth blocks together to make a multiblock hearth(perhaps max size 6 long by 2 wide), you can have multiple things cooking at once. Of course, to cook anything over the hearth, you'll need to build a cooking spit first. Simply hammer one out from some iron rods, and use it to roast meat or hang cookpots(each spit could have two slots). Link multiple spits together for larger hearths. As for decorative lighting...I think there are some decorating lighting blocks available via creative, that could probably be used to simulate decorative fires. If nothing else, decorative fires that are only available in creative mode would be an obvious thing to add. We already have decorative crops, so decorative fires isn't too much of a stretch.

I don't see a reason this wouldn't work, at least at this particular stage of the game's development. It will require quite a lot of work though. Not sure. I would presume that the water blocks will simply spread to whichever blocks they can under normal means, without mixing, until you place water source blocks with a bucket.

Mountains and forests posing a major obstacle to travel is fine, in my opinion. Realistically, rough terrain like that should slow down travel or be impassable. On default settings, going around doesn't really take that long, typically, so I wouldn't say that the elk is at much of a disadvantage when compared to travel on foot. I do expect the elk to improve in the future, however, as it stands right now it still offers a major advantage in that it can carry a lot of stuff for you(and there's probably quite a bit of loot you'll want to pick up along the way) and reduce the amount of food you need to eat on said travels.

Hmmm, I like the concept of having bright enough light levels cause the creepy music to subside, however, I see an issue. Lanterns are very bright, but if the player is holding a lantern(which is likely the case when exploring caves), then the creepy music will never play. I wouldn't play the surface theme, just prevent the creepy music from playing. Or perhaps recycle one of the more subdued themes from the main story(or a variant of those themes) and use that for underground portions where the ambient lighting is high enough. I think this already exists in the game--it's only available via creative though, so you'll need to switch game modes to set it up.

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.