LadyWYT

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/

Simple, just open a coffee shop and the theater kids will take care of the rest.

DO IT! It's an absolute blast! I will note that I've not done the theater performance specifically, however, I played on a roleplaying server in my Warcraft days and there was a guild that played the part of a theatrical group and would put on plays about various lore events in the game. Very creative, very entertaining to watch, and something even the shy types and non-roleplayers can into easily simply by being the audience.

It's supposed to be a cut from the back loin, and then cured, smoked, or sometimes rolled in cornmeal during preparation. Similar to ham, but leaner and generally more of a light breakfast/lunch protein. Though I do want to say that not everything marketed as Canadian bacon is the real stuff; I think some of it might be "fake" in that it's ham been made to look and taste like the proper thing. https://www.jonesdairyfarm.com/news/what-is-canadian-bacon/ https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/What-is-Canadian-bacon

If you watch their idle animations, they'll bend over backwards as well. Which, I suppose, is actually bending over forwards, if they were backwards to start with.

The only official public server I'm aware of is The Official Public Server(TOPS); however, I'm not sure of the rules for playing on it. I think it has a lot of players though, so it may be difficult to find an open slot to join. For official servers in general, Anego Studios does offer their own paid hosting, but the official hosting does not currently support mods and is EU-only(to my knowledge). There are third-party options though, if you're looking to host a modded server or are outside the EU, but if you're just looking to play and not host you might check out the Multiplayer section of the forums for public server options. For Vintage Story server information in general: https://www.vintagestory.at/selfhosting/

I don't know about anchovies on pizza as I've never really been a fan of them, but pineapple on pizza is absolutely delicious when paired with Canadian bacon and a gooey stuffed crust.

Well now I have to ask--what climate zone did you start in? Low fertility is probably the most common type, with medium fertility being the next most common(and occurring in areas with higher rainfall). Barren soil though...the only places I recall seeing that is the arctic, and mountaintops in the cool climate zone. By default, the starting climate is temperate, so if you kept that as default it sound like you may have gotten super unlucky and spawned on a glacier. In any case, you can craft terra preta, which is the best possible soil, but it takes a lot of time and resources, so you may want to start over with a better spawn in order to have an easier time with farming. The default month length is 9 days, and a day in Vintage Story is equal to 48 IRL minutes, I think. The actual amount of useable daylight you have in that day though varies depending on latitude and time of year, just like real life. In any case, you should have plenty of time before winter hits on default settings(around the end of October). Maybe, maybe not. It depends on how much time you sank into technology versus establishing food supply. Technological progress is always good, but you do need to keep yourself fed for it to be of any use. If you're good at hunting and gathering though, it's not hard to devote a day or two to hunting and foraging and sealing the resulting meals into crocks for later.

It might be a meme, but that doesn't mean it's not true. I wouldn't necessary call medieval firearms weak, as much as I would very clumsy and ineffective compared to more modern firearms. The main advantages initially were the ease of training and the shock factor, because boomstick is very scary to those unfamiliar with the concept. Poor accuracy is compensated for simply by massing gunpowder units and firing in volleys. As for armor, guns are one reason that cavalry shifted away from full suits of armor to a heavy cuirass instead. The curiass will protect one of the most vital parts of the body, and the metal can be made thick enough to withstand gunfire while still being light enough for the soldier in question to actually use. If I'm recalling correctly, it wasn't just metal armor that was effective in withstanding early guns either; some Native American shields could stop musket shot, provided the rawhide used to make the shield was thick enough. In any case, it wasn't until muskets were introduced and improved, and rifling discovered(both of which were post-Middle Ages), that firearms became strong enough for classic armor to lose its value. From a gameplay standpoint, it's not out of the question to include firearms in a medieval setting, but firearms shouldn't be so strong that they easily outclass the other available weapons and become the default "must-have" for players to rush to acquire. They really ought to be just a supplemental weapon to the late game options we have already, so "expensive, slow to reload, poor accuracy/shorter range, and limited damage to heavy armor" is fairly realistic and balanced. I think Age of Empires 2 handled the balance of gunpowder in a medieval setting quite well: the gunpowder units were a late game option(for appropriate civilizations) and offered very powerful attacks, but were expensive, had slow rates of fire, limited range, and poor accuracy. In order for gunpowder units to be effective, you had to mass them in order to ensure enough shots landed to efficiently kill targets.

Congrats on the find, and welcome to the forums! Just a side note for future reference--while tin bronze is probably the most common type to make(and the type you will need for a certain trader quest), there are two other bronze alloys as well if you're having trouble finding a good source of tin. Bismuth bronze can be made from copper, bismuth, and zinc, and has a bit more durability than tin bronze but a little less damage. Black bronze has higher durability and damage than both other types(although it could just be the highest damage only), and is made from combing copper with gold and silver. I dunno man, magnetite is rare, but I've found more magnetite than I have limonite.

Welcome to the forums! When I first started playing, I too made plenty of poor and uninformed decisions, and burned through plenty of worlds before I got enough experience to be confident about hanging on to a long-term world, with the settings I enjoyed the most(similar to standard difficulty). It depends on whether or not you're really attached to your current world. In my case, I found it less frustrating to just start over whenever I made a major mistake, since I didn't have the experience to really get to bronze(at this point the time investment in a world is usually fairly significant). On these "practice worlds" I generally used easier settings as well in order to reduce my frustration. Once I got enough experience to confidently make progress, I took off the training wheels and started a fresh world for long-term play. Starting over fresh is probably what I would recommend, since that's a solid way to learn the most critical survival skills quickly. If you've got the early game handled(food supply, set up a base of operations), the rest of the game can be handled easily enough. However, I would also recommend holding on to your first world for a while before you make a final decision on whether or not to keep it. While you might hone your skills in practice worlds, it's possible you might want to return to your starter world once you have more experience, and continue the adventure. I'm not going to say that winter isn't a concern, because it is, but it's not the big scary thing that it seems to be at first. For brand new players though, I do recommend just making "survive the winter" the first goal. If you can handle the planning for winter, you'll be able to tackle anything else in the game you set your mind to. I'll also note though that in the event your foodstores do run a bit low, you can still survive by hunting animals, foraging for mushrooms/overlooked wild crops, or resorting to digging up cattail roots. It'll be rough, but it is doable, and it'll be one of the stories you can share around the proverbial campfire later with your friends.

In fairness, it's difficult to tank as a Blackguard when the hunter is seemingly the tastiest thing the enemies have ever seen. It's not unusual for the hunter to be running around screaming in terror while I'm trucking along behind desperately trying to catch up and dispatch whatever beasty is giving chase.

You could try changing the scale of landforms, or otherwise tamper with the world height to see if it achieves something more realistic. Just scaling up the landform size will make the mountains bigger, but I'm not sure that will make them "realistic" like what you're talking about. Changing the world height is more likely to make them taller, and thus more realistic in that sense, however, changing world height may significantly impact performance and gameplay in general, as the game isn't really tuned for extreme heights. In other words, it's probably possible to achieve something a bit more realistic, but your mileage will vary and it'll take some fiddling with the settings. The main issue I see regarding realistic generation of things like mountains, is view distance. What's the point of having such grand landscapes if the average player won't have the hardware to support a view distance required to appreciate it? I think the general idea behind the design choices is to have a landscape that is fairly realistic, but scaled down to be properly playable/enjoyable on a variety of hardware.

Are you sure? Because I mean...could just order more pizza.

This is my general assumption as well, though in fairness the bowtorn is probably the toughest one of the current trio to figure out. I'm also not entirely convinced that all the rotbeasts were humans either. The drifters probably were, as their design is fairly straightforward, but shivers are more animalistic in their design, and it's not entirely out of the question that the monsters are a composite of human, animal, and rust/rot corruption.