LadyWYT

Sea level is around Y 100; Y 0 is bedrock level. If you travel downhill to sea level, then you're more likely to encounter an ocean, but it's still very unlikely you'll run across one on default world settings unless you either get lucky or do a lot of exploring. When you do find reeds, you can dig up the roots with a knife and replant them near your base. Make sure you use a knife though, as the roots will be destroyed otherwise. Depending on the mod, it may be possible to try them out and uninstall mid-play should you need to. FOMO will quickly kill a player's enthusiasm for playing a game, especially one like Vintage Story. It is possible to experience most everything the game has to offer on one world, however, there are certain concessions you'll end up needing to make as well. Most are related to climate, in that certain climates support specific types of weather, plants, and animals that you won't get unless you visit those climates, or settle in them(in certain cases). For example, only the arctic will have daylight the full 24 hours in summer, and only the tropics are warm enough to grow crops like pineapples consistently without micromanaging a greenhouse(which might not even help if the climate gets cold enough). It's also not unusual for a map to be missing a key resource or two for progress and require the player to search a few thousand blocks or so in order to find it. Some maps have everything one needs within walking distance of spawn, and some have practically nothing useful and make the player really work for their progress. Unless the world spawn doesn't look like it'll be very fun for you to play though, or you're tired of your current world and want a fresh start, there's not really a reason to restart a world just because the new might be "better". As for oceans or very large lakes...the primary use of such currently is convenient travel. Sailboats are expensive to build and limited to the body of water they're built in, but they're able to haul a LOT of cargo between ports. Water travel itself is also relatively fast due to a lack of obstacles and aquatic enemies; the only hazard you really have to worry about is ice, which won't damage the sailboat but will impede travel. Otherwise, oceans aren't really that useful--I think you can maybe boil saltwater down into salt, but I'm not 100% sure. Once a proper method of fishing is added, they'll likely be a lot more useful.

That is hunting in real life, yes. I was speaking from the standpoint of gameplay balance though. Dispatching large animals in one hit is what the butcher knife and livestock is for. Make hunting in the game too easy, and then the player doesn't have as much reason to even bother with livestock at all since hunting returns more value. I will also note that if it's possible to kill large animals with only a shot or two early in the game, then Blackguard loses a good chunk of its early game weakness. Something like the bloodtrail mod is fine, because it makes tracking the prey easier for the player, but the player will still need to put in the effort to hunt down and butcher the creature. If there's a bleedout, then all the player needs to do is just hit the creature once, which is rather easy, and then just wait a few moments for the animal to die before receiving a lot of meat for little effort or risk. If I'm not mistaken, there used to be a way to farm rabbits via moat around the garden, that was very effective at producing lots of redmeat for little effort or risk. It's since been fixed for that reason as well, I believe. Predator animals are edible, yes, but the meat tends not to be the tastiest thing ever. Hence why bushmeat isn't as satisfying or usable for meals in the game. Though I'd also wager it's also a balance to help push the player toward livestock or at least being particular about what they hunt, instead of relying just on bears and wolves to survive(both of these tend to have decently fast respawns, and are easy to trap/provoke to fight instead of needing to chase).

First off, welcome to the forums! Pressing X will switch the current item to your offhand slot, if applicable--bear in mind that holding something in your offhand is an extra 20% to your hunger rate. Pressing Q will toss an item to the ground, and I think pressing either shift or ctrl with Q(I don't recall which) will toss the whole stack. The default settings mean that the map will be primarily land, with no large bodies of water. However, the 97.5% means that you will eventually find an ocean, if you explore enough. For more ocean though, I would recommend starting over and setting the land cover ratio to something more like 80%--that should ensure a handful of oceans to find, with relative ease, while still having land-based travel predominant. By default, the beginning climate zone is temperate, although the higher up you go the colder it can get. You can turn on coordinates in the Interface tab of the Settings menu--the Y coordinate is what your altitude is. Generally, unless you're building up on the very top of a mountain, altitude isn't something to worry about. If you happen to be on a high altitude plateau, the climate may be more similar to taiga conditions than to temperate proper, but in that case, you should be able to tell by taiga creatures like elk, caribou, or mountain goats spawning nearby(potentially). The difference between taiga and temperate winters isn't that much. Taiga will be a bit colder and last a bit longer than temperate winters, but it should still be relatively easy to handle with some planning. Clay is something that can be difficult to spot, until you learn what it looks like. Discolorations can be a prime indicator, if playing with map colors, so you're on the right track there. Clay is most easily found in grassy areas with decent rainfall, or by low altitude lakes and ponds, and it's more easily spotted if the sides of the blocks are visible since they're a different color than dirt. Red clay is the most common type to find, and can occur at lower and higher altitudes. Blue clay only occurs at low altitudes, typically near lakes and ponds. Fire clay only spawns in bauxite biomes, or underneath black coal/anthracite beds. You can also acquire clay from panning sand/gravel or as cracked vessel loot, but it's better to find a deposit than rely on these methods. The map should be giving you the Y coordinate value for terrain you've already explored, so this sounds like a potential bug(assuming you aren't playing with mods that could affect such). Honestly, it doesn't sound like the best of spawns, though it should still be manageable for a new player...albeit perhaps more challenging than the average spawn. Generally, the average experience on a temperate start is going to be at lower altitude, with ready access to cattails and berry bushes and other convenient early game resources. I would recommend starting a new world with a spawn you like better, and saving this world for when you have a bit more experience with the game. Of course, if you don't mind the bit of extra challenge, continuing on this world should be fine as well.

I do like the blood trail mod, as it makes hunting a bit more intuitive, but not too easy. I wouldn't add a bleedout mechanic though, as at that point hunting will probably become much too easy given the player can just land a shot or two on a large, potentially dangerous animal and just...wait for free food. In terms of gameplay balance, you can get a lot of meat quickly just by hunting, but it takes some dedicated time and effort on the player's part. Animal husbandry doesn't take as much time overall, and is a lot safer, but it requires some time and resources invested up front to get the livestock going before it becomes incredibly profitable. If hunting is made too easy, there's not as much incentive for the player to ever invest in livestock.

Is VSync turned on? That seems to cause some issues for some setups. I'm also beginning to wonder if it's not an issue related to this specific type of hardware. It seems that there's been a handful of performance complaints from users with similar hardware.

I'm pretty sure it was two, but it could have been four very early in a test candidate.

This too, which I hadn't considered earlier. I was looking at the settings earlier and the shortest you can set the scaling is something like 15%, which is crazy, especially for locations like this. I did some testing on this specific location a while back, just to see how close the player has to get before it started to come into view, and the rough estimate was something like 1-2k blocks. It's an absolutely massive location, and one primary reason the default distances are as far as they are; distance is a handy way to keep players from finding things they weren't meant to find before completing certain portions of the main story.

Hmmmm, it could be the temperature then, not sure. If it's due to the temperature, hunger rate should drop when you go indoors(insulated space). As for when the player starts to freeze, I believe you have about one in-game hour after the frost overlay becomes prominent on your screen before you will start to take freezing damage. Like hunger damage, freezing damage is a ticking effect, so even when freezing you will still have some time to seek shelter and warm up, though you will need to spend a couple moments getting all nice and toasty before the damage will stop ticking.

Shivers "climb" in the same fashion that bears climb in the game--that is, they can handle heights up to two blocks.

Anything is possible, though I think whether or not players will use the mod hinges more heavily on what the mod concept is, and how well the concept is executed. A concept that has high demand, but is poorly executed, probably won't see a lot of success. Likewise, a concept that executed exceptionally well, but otherwise has no demand, probably won't see a lot of downloads either. The most popular mods tend to have broad appeal and execute their core ideas quite well. In any case though, when making a mod, I think it's more important to make something that you yourself wish to make as the author, and not just try to be popular. As for whether being client-only affects a mod's likelihood of being used...my understanding is that client-only mods can still be used on servers in many cases, just the users will need to handle the download and installation of the mod themselves instead of letting the server prompt them. Client-only also doesn't prevent a mod from becoming popular. A couple of good examples of popular mods that are client-only are Freedom Units and the HUD mod, and both of those will still work on servers(though only if the user installs the mod themselves).

Heh heh heh...this is a certain story location from chapter two, and will appear in all worlds that have been updated to 1.20 or later, assuming that lore content is enabled. If you are not currently pursuing the main story, you can venture closer to take a peek at what it is, but I don't recommend venturing into the location itself until you actually have the mission to go there. Spoilers:

Chromite can also be used as a mordant, but I don't think there's any reason one really needs to dye cloth, outside of cosmetics or crafting certain items for sale to traders.

You'll probably get a kick out of this then: https://mods.vintagestory.at/shivertweaks Allowing shivers to climb walls isn't the only feature--good luck! You'll probably need it!

To my knowledge, there've been no changes, outside of the new auto-loot feature of the falx. What you've described though seems to be typical of temporal storm loot in regards to temporal gear drops--you should have had a good handful of flax fibers and a handful of rusty gears to go with it as well, assuming you were able to get a lot of good kills in. If anything, I'd be more inclined to say that you were just having some really bad luck before.

Welcome to the forums! Certain places are more stable than others; the deeper one ventures underground, the less stable it gets. What you are encountering is unstable areas on the surface--that's all. As for how stability is determined, I believe it's tied to world seed. Chunks in Vintage Story are also cubic measures of space stacked on top of each other, instead of square columns that extend from world height to bedrock like in the other block game. In the case of stability, it varies chunk by chunk, so it's possible to have a mix of stable and unstable chunks on top of one another. I'm pretty sure the gears are just there as both set dressing and little bits of treasure to find. When I run across them, it also seems like there is a ruin somewhere nearby as well, however, I'm not 100% sure that the presence of a rusty gear always indicates a ruin. Still, it doesn't hurt to check.

Welcome to the forums! I believe creatures do indeed heal over time, but it's fairly slow. For roosters in particular, @Faithwalker is correct in that the old rooster will fight the young cockerels once they are old enough. In my experience, the old rooster seems to always win, which means he's able to heal from whatever injuries he sustained by the time he needs to fight again. Otherwise, I don't believe there's a way to directly heal a creature, with the exception of tamed elk--the player can heal them with bandages. If you're wanting to deliberately provoke fights between roosters, I would wait a few days at least before trying to provoke another fight in order to give the victor time to recover.

Welcome to the forums! 20 days is 20 days, regardless of how long the months are set to. I would assume it's balanced the way it is in order to prevent players from just unlocking and using the best farmland in the game en masse before the first winter. By default, months are 9 days long, which means that the player won't really be acquiring loads of terra preta until spring of year 1, but otherwise have a decent passage of time/change of seasons and will be using lower quality soil for their first growing season. If days per month is made longer though, such as setting it to 30, then the player can likely mass and use terra preta before the first winter. However, it's still a lot of work, and in that case each season will be much, much longer, so the player will have to make even more winter preparations, wait even longer for crops, wait even longer for establishing fruit orchards, etc. So it's similar to how the hunger system is set up, in that while it's grounded in realism, it's there more to pose a challenge to the player than it is to be 100% realistic. It's not realistic to die if mealtime is missed for a day, but securing a food supply is one of the major basics of playing the game. Thus death by starvation might not be 100% realistic, but it pushes the player to secure a food supply in order to avoid the consequences.

They're supposed to have elk? I suppose I'll have to pay more attention next time I see one. I've not seen them spawn with elk and not seen any elk wandering around nearby. The second location that contains the boss has seen quite a few changes since it was added to the game. Most notably: All in all, this section of the story plays a lot more smoothly than it did at launch, but players will still need to prepare themselves very well, as it is still quite a difficult section to complete.

That's only if the cause is a monster in a nearby cave, and only if you want to stop the monsters from spawning there.

Or I mean...ghost ship could have a very different meaning in Vintage Story, assuming some past genius thought it was a good idea to make a large seafaring automaton for transport. Imagine seeing a rusted out hunk of junk floating around the ocean and assuming it's just an old abandoned vessel...and then figuring out that it's actively hunting you! In this case, I wonder if it's feasible to designate a special selection of "natural wonders" for landscape generation, and have them generate very rarely. Stuff like Grand Canyon, Great Plains, Uluru/Ayer's Rock, petrified forest, etc. Doesn't need to look like the real world thing, just needs to be something that stands out. We kinda have some things like this in the game, like those epic overhangs, glow worm caves, and special big trees that only occur at world generation, but this is just taking it a bit further, it sounds like.

Honestly, I think this is the better route than having them mock the player for missing--have the drifters get frustrated when you manage to evade the rocks! They already have an animation where they appear to throw their...hands?...up in frustration, so it wouldn't necessarily require a new animation either. As for giving them food...I don't think rotbeasts actually eat anything, if they're even capable. The short story Ghosts suggests that they brutally maul specific targets and leave the mangled body behind. A temporal gear seems more like something that might distract them, or even start a fight between them, while also being a fair cost for providing such an advantage(because food is super cheap in comparison). From a game balance standpoint, I think it's fair to have animals make occasional noise to alert players to their presence, with some animals being noisier than others. However, I think a fair counter to that is to have most animals actively try to keep their distance from the player, if possible. That way, the player has to actually hunt the animal in question, not just walk up to it and provoke a fight(this is how I get most of my meat as a Blackguard--walking up to pigs and rams and starting a fight). As for large predators like bears and wolves...according to the lore, predators are more aggressive for unknown reasons(presumably, a reaction to the catastrophic events of the past), but it would be a little more ideal to have them try to avoid or actively warn players away from their territory, and only attack if that space is disrespected. That behavior is already somewhat present in wolves, it seems, as I've had them give warning growls without attacking, or even sometimes growl and run away.

Ah okay. Interesting... I'm not sure I've seen the idea quite laid out like that. I think the mountain ranges would be a little easier to implement than the ruins. It'd almost certainly have mixed reactions, given some of the initial complaints about terrain navigation when 1.20 launched, but needing to find a pass through the mountains or else go around seems like it would be interesting, especially if the passes have the potential to be snowed under during certain times of year. Aside from travel, it could also be something that affects the local climate, in that you could have one type of biome on one side of the range, and something else entirely on the other side. I'm also assuming that mountain ranges would be easier to place seamlessly into the landscape, since man-made structures tend to stick out. Though on the ruins note...shipwrecks. There's plenty to see and do while traveling over land, but sailing over the water can be tedious. However, imagine just bumming along in your sailboat, wondering when you'll ever find the opposite shore, and suddenly noticing that the funny-looking lump of coral in the reef you're sailing over isn't a rock. If I'm recalling correctly, the lore suggests that some of the Hanseatic League used ships to avoid the Rot, so maybe some of those ships sank and are just loaded with all sorts of valuable trading goods. Of course, the player has to figure out how to retrieve such treasure, before it can be of any use. It's also a good excuse to add potentially dangerous aquatic life such as sharks or squid(Humboldt squid are particularly nasty, as I understand it), or an aquatic monster like a diving bell that may or may not actually be hanging around points of interest like this.

Traders and ruins can already distract, however, usually when the player goes on an expedition, they'll be focused on achieving a particular goal and thus trying to save space for particular loot. Traders are already slated for an overhaul, but as they stand now...they're common enough that it's not really worth going out of your way to check a trader that is miles from anywhere you'd expect to venture regularly. If traders were a lot more rare, then it might be more worthwhile to check them out when you do find them. Ruins are the better distraction here overall, in my opinion. Obviously, ruins can't be too grandiose(performance) or lucrative(game balance), but having the occasional large ruin with a simple puzzle the player can solve for some more interesting loot than normal(noble attire, decorated storage vessels, valuable gems to trade, etc) would definitely entice players to allow themselves to get distracted. Of course, the player can always mark the location and make another trip later to check it out. Yes and no--it depends on the medium. For movies, most of the boring bits like walking are condensed to montages, or cut entirely. With books, there's also a lot of boring content cut(like potty breaks), because it adds nothing to the story and the reader can just reasonably assume that certain things happened to advance the adventure, without actually having to read about it. Otherwise, there is plenty of "boring" content like travel, that ends up being interesting because the story focuses on the character interactions that take place during that time, and not just the travel itself. For the videogame context, longer travel times can help the world feel authentically large. To use Skyrim as an example: Skyrim is supposed to be a vast, untamed wilderness in lore, but in actual implementation it ends up feeling small given that the player can easily get from one settlement to another with a few minutes' jog. In contrast, Vintage Story sets up a world that is mostly wilderness with very few surviving human settlements, and the premise feels believable given that the player has to actually sink time and effort into getting from point A to point B. That is so mean...but I like the idea. Ironically, this was a feature of Morrowind--some NPCs would lie to the player. While it's certainly an immersive quality, it can also be fairly frustrating at times, so it's a tricky mechanic to implement well. The main issue I see with generation on a scale like this, is that it's hard to properly appreciate without a very high render distance. Honestly, if one wanted to be ultra-realistic with rivers, they should require a raft or boat to cross, or else one must find a spot that can be forded. I don't know how you'd simulate such a thing properly though. Better Ruins already adds ruins on a grandiose scale--it's also a mod that's notorious for being hard on performance as a result. It's not that grander landscapes and ruins wouldn't be interesting, but the bigger and more detailed things get the more the hardware requirements go up. The game needs to provide the same general gameplay experience for players across a variety of hardware; that's not to say one should expect it to run on a potato, but players on lower-end hardware shouldn't be left holding the bag, so to speak.

Weird. It could be a drifter or shiver, as @Echo Weaver noted. Shivers are high pitched and raspy, but drifters have deep moans that can sound like a heavy breath, especially if it's the idle sound and not the aggressive noise. Bowtorn have some harsh idle sounds as well. If it's a monster making the noise, chances are that you have a cave system somewhere nearby, that's close enough to the surface for you to hear the monsters. As for it being the character's voice, that's not likely, outside of a mod affecting such(to my knowledge, no mods add idle noise to the player). The player character only makes noise if hurt, starving, or emoting, and those scenarios don't fit what you're describing.

/gm 1 to switch to creative, /gm 2 to switch to survival. Variations like /gamemode creative and /gamemode survival should also work. Toggling gamemode like that shouldn't hurt anything--the worst that can happen is you break a block by accident in creative, or otherwise switch back to survival in an awkward spot(such as while hovering above the ground).