LadyWYT

Could be a Windows 11 thing. I have very similar hardware, but run on Windows 10 without issues.

This is my general thoughts as well. I don't play with the mechanic enabled, simply because I like keeping my landscapes mostly pristine, and I like digging simple but nonsensical holes. If concerned about performance, I would make a test world with the mechanic enabled and see how well your PC handles it, before fully committing to a playthrough with that kind of challenge.

To my knowledge, there was a community poll way back when, and that was the name picked. "Seraph" is generally used in a religious sense, yes, but apparently it's also an alchemy term for a superhuman.

It's the game lore, dude. I wasn't talking IRL terms. Seraph, in the context of Vintage Story, refers to humans of the Old World that were altered into something else, hence why they're a bit taller than the human NPCs, with odd-colored skin and certain abilities like respawning. It's canon lore that the player characters can't actually die; they just reset back to a specific state, as it were. As for why NPCs chose that title, that's up for the players themselves to decide.

https://www.vintagestory.at/roadmap.html/ Here you go. Keeping in mind that while it's a list of planned features, nothing is guaranteed. For this specifically, you'll probably want to search the mod database--there's at least a handful that cover this particular concept, in various ways.

How small are we talking here? And when you say "second layer as surface layer" do you mean the rock type itself is different? I'd like to try this strategy but I'm a little confused.

Welcome to the forums! My first question is...are you using mods, or is this happening in the vanilla game? And if vanilla, then which version?

First off, welcome to the forums! Rivers are not currently a thing in Vintage Story, unless you are using mods. There are oceans, but how common they are depends heavily on world settings. By default, large bodies of water aren't common at all, but you will find an ocean eventually if you explore enough. For a better chance at finding oceans though, it's best to reduce Landcover to something like 80%; doing so ensures a world that is still primarily land-based, but has several seas/oceans to explore. As for rock types...it varies by seed. Generally, most worlds will have a selection of key resources near spawn, but require you to explore for others. Sometimes you get a spawn that has everything you need right by spawn, but that's fairly rare. And sometimes the spawn is lacking in resources so the deck is stacked against you. If you're not impressed with the spawn of a world, best to create different worlds until you find one that's fun for you. Aside from that, the idea is to just roll with the punches and make the best of what the map has to offer.

Well technically...in-game seraphs can't actually die either. The respawn mechanic is 100% canon. So the player isn't actually dying, as much as they are getting reset back to a specific point in time.

From what I've seen, the bowtorn that do spawn behave as they should, in that they will retreat if you get too close and will despawn at the end of the storm. Aside from the occasional straggler monster, that is. That's not to say one couldn't get a good handful of bowtorn spawning in the storm itself, but it's much better compared to what it was.

I'm guessing it was probably messing up because it was installed on your dad's PC but not yours. Once you installed the mod on both PCs then the connection worked. If you remove the mod from both, it should work too.

That is a cool looking mod. Typically I just try to mark routes with charcoal or lime...except I forget to actually bring marking materials most of the time.

Overall the propick gives you an idea of where you might want to dig, but you're never guaranteed that the ore in question will be there. Only a node search will tell you that. It can be frustrating when the propick lies, of course, but more often than not the data it provides is fairly useful. There are certain ores that seem to be harder to find than others, and magnetite seems to be one of those ores. If you're searching in andesite rock, I think there's a better chance that you'll find it, as that's the only iron type that can spawn in andesite, but I'm also not 100% sure. What I do know is that I've checked a handful of Decent-Ultra High readings for it and not found it, but found it just find at Poor or other sub-optimal readings. The times I recall finding though, have also been in andesite. I wonder if it's possibly bugged in some fashion, and not quite working as intended? Because this does seem very odd. Of course, it could also just be an older system that could use some refining. I would think that the density search should be accurate to what should actually be there, with any existing ore that wasn't reported just a happy bonus. That way players can confidently pinpoint good dig sites, while having the occasional happy little surprise instead of the occasional unhappy disappointment.

Ah okay, that makes a lot more sense when you put it that way. Honestly the current enemy health pools feel fine to me, but I wouldn't go any higher than that. Going lower would make them feel less like a supernatural threat as well, though I would perhaps lower the health pools of natural creatures like bears and wolves a bit. Unnatural threats should feel unnaturally resilient, but natural creatures should feel dangerous but quite mortal. As for the nightmare level enemies, you really don't encounter them particularly often, and special nightmares like the double-headed drifter are even less common. I think the key to balancing here isn't to nerf their hp or give the player enough power to trivialize them, but rather give the player just enough power to be able to deal with that threat level only if they don't get complacent. In other words, steel tier equipment(and higher, in the event of potential Jonas tech) should make nightmare-level more manageable, but nightmare level should still wipe the floor with the player easily enough should the player get overconfident. On this note though, maybe weapon tier needs to be looked at. It seems that weapon tier should be important when it comes to what kind of threats it can handle, but may not actually matter in practice. If high tier enemies had built-in resistance to low tier weapons, to the extent that the player actively needs something like a tier 4 weapon to think about countering nightmare enemies, then I might be more inclined to throw out most of what I said above and lower enemy health pools across the board. Although in that case, players get forced into meeting particular requirements for certain content, instead of being able to take skill-dependent risks(like going after the first boss with no armor and a handful of spears). Should players be taking that kind of risk? Eh, probably not, but that's really for the player to decide.

Well...recently I enlisted my hunter friend's help in keeping the nasties off my back while on an iron mining expedition. Neither one of us had armor and the ore was at a nexus of cave tunnels. Hunter got beat to a pulp fighting off the monsters, but it wasn't the monsters that did him in. He would have been fine had he not come running around the corner and spooked me. I was just a tad bit fast on my reflex with the falx, though thankfully the revival mechanic had been added to the game and I had bandages.

I can't say that I've ever played Terraria, but from what I understand it is rather ridiculous on just how much damage things can crank out.

I've found plenty of marble, but I can't say that I've ever found phyllite--I'm thinking that one might spawn deep down. As for tips on finding the stuff in general...all the marble I've found has been pure accident. I was running around the world looking for something else, and saw exposed rock on nearby cliffs that had different light colors to it--in many cases, the suspicious light pink of halite. It wasn't halite, but marble. Otherwise...I'm not sure there's a good way to find it, aside from maybe checking all the "normal" rock types in the game and seeing which types can be host rocks for marble. Then just search for those rock types, perhaps, though there is no guarantee of finding what you're after. I would go back and check the area around it. It's entirely possible there is more than just the single block, but buried out of sight. This would be a prime time for traders to offer marble blocks for sale though. It would probably be pretty expensive to obtain that way, but it would offer the player a guaranteed way to get what they're after.

Seems more like temperature appropriate for the Cool climate zone to me, but then again the cooler region is similar to temperate. Altitude definitely makes a big difference--I had a world that I settled near spawn, but on a high altitude plateau, so the overall climate was more of a taiga than anything temperate. I'm guessing what's probably happened here is OP either settled at a higher altitude, or strayed to the north and settled in a colder chunk. There are climate bands, yes, but they can be sprinkled with chunks that are warmer or colder.

Well to try to steer the thread back on topic: when I think of power creep, I think of stuff you find in a lot of MMOs...World of Warcraft especially. Back in the olden days, the player was mostly a nobody, and went on the hero's journey battling low level threats like kobolds to facing off against major threats like Ragnaros or the Lich King. And then at some point there was a turn, where the threats got more and more epic until the player is the default "champion of the known multiverse" or whatever...at which point everything stops making believable sense. Aside from just the power creep in the lore and story though, there was also just the way the player was on the never-ending treadmill of replacing gear. The best stuff you could possibly obtain at the end of an expansion became somehow worse than the most basic gear of the new. Going at power creep from a different angle...Skyrim had similar problems, but in a different fashion. Now don't get me wrong, Skyrim is a very fun action game, but you can do everything...literally everything...on one character. It destroys a lot of the worldbuilding, but it also puts a damper on a lot of replay value. If you're playing a mage character there's no reason not to use heavy armor and weapons too, same as if you're playing a warrior there's no drawbacks to learning magic either. Pretty much everything is the same, unless you deliberately go out of your way via mods or roleplaying to assign things value. In any case, I don't think Vintage Story suffers from either of those problems, and I really hope it never does. The game has a pretty good balance of things right now, in my opinion, and if it became just another action game slog of always chasing the stronger enemy, it would lose most of what makes it special.

Welcome to the forums! Typically January is the coldest month, at least in my experience. If you're wanting to settle somewhere warm enough for crops to grow year-round, the easiest way to accomplish that(without starting a new world) is to trek south until you find redwood or bald cypress. While not tropical areas, the areas should still be warm enough to grow crops year-round, especially if you have greenhouses.

These are already being worked on and should be added in the next update or so. Otherwise, I would recommend looking into mods like Floral Zones or Fauna of the Stone Age(unfortunately, not all of these are updated for 1.21 yet). They tend to be very stable mods, and can add quite a lot to warmer regions, and fit quite well with vanilla as well. If you're worried about saves, best to start a save specifically for a modded playthrough, and stick to just a handful of well-known mods, since those are typically kept up to date.

Or just the standard monster community meeting at dawn outside my house, assuming there's a rift or two nearby, anyway.

I would like to say they don't, but I've seen enough comments from players who've managed to do so...usually newer players who don't understand the mechanic yet, to be fair. Otherwise, I've seen several complaints from players who haven't built in unstable areas, but wished they could, since they enjoy playing with the mechanic but also like to have a way to build in prime spots that they find. Which is fair. That's why I suggested some sort of tech gizmo to fix the instability--it offers a good goal to work towards in the late game, for many different applications. Not just building scenery. @Diff I think for a temporal anchor(or whichever gizmo fixes the stability), I'd opt for something that can be picked up and transported. Most things in the game can be moved around, and it's very handy to have the ability to do so anyway in case of a misclick. Likewise, if a player is just using it to temporarily stabilize an area(such as a mining expedition or something), then they're going to want to move the device around. Even for more permanent installations, players might still want to move it once placed, due to a change in the planned architecture.

It takes three if you're a Blackguard, which is still quite easy to manage. Bowtorn tend to be harder to manage when there's more than one, or a bunch of drifters there to dogpile. But in those situations, yeah, you want to be running and avoiding, and not fighting.

Except then players are left with two vastly different systems to pick from, in addition to being stripped of the option to learn to play in an easier gamemode like Standard or Exploration before they jump into something like Wilderness Survival. The way the game is currently built is that Standard is the baseline intended experience, and a few things are tweaked to make it easier or harder in the cases of Exploration and Wilderness Survival. The game will play by the same rules regardless of which one the player picks. As for just making it a toggle with a list of additional configuration options...no, just no. I can appreciate the thought put in to fleshing out the idea, but that's thirteen additional options listed there, minimum, all which require a completely different system of gameplay than the original. I would also question how such systems interact with all the other systems in the game, given that many things in Vintage Story are often interconnected, and it's difficult to change one without changing another as a result. Hence why I say this is all a great idea...for a mod. Mods allow players to choose additional challenges like this for their game, without changing the base experience for everyone else. And given how many players already seem to struggle with food supply, even with experience at higher difficulties, I don't see something like this being enjoyed by the majority of the playerbase. There was actually a mod that implemented an idea similar to this; the name was Realistic Starvation, I believe. https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/10343 The two biggest flaws I found when playing with it were as follows: 1. It trivialized hunger completely. Since the player takes several in-game weeks to starve to death, there's really no pressure to find and secure a steady supply of food. 2. There was absolutely no reason not to eat every scrap of food the moment you acquired it, since there was no limit to how much you could eat in a sitting or any drawback to overeating.