LadyWYT

Maybe, but as I understand it the moat/pit method is quite slow, since you're relying on the animal to get close enough to the bait to be attracted. Hunting might take more effort, but you can cover more ground quickly and thus make more kills within a shorter time. So much this. Bows are better in regards to inventory space and can be fired faster, but in the early game spears pack a harder punch. I tend to carry 3-5 spears on me when hunting in the early game as a Blackguard.

Why wait when you can have it now with mods? https://mods.vintagestory.at/vsairshipmod

Welcome to the forums! Pit trapping is a way to catch animals, and usually involves a moat around farms or a farmland tile they can't reach, since crops will lure certain wildlife(was bugged but fixed in 1.22). That being said, I would recommend hunting while you get your farms and livestock up to speed. Chickens and rabbits are easy prey, but boar and deer tend to be better since they yield more meat per kill along with larger hides and fat. Don't forget to cook the raw ingredients into proper meals as well, either via the cookpot or pies. Meals are much better at solving the hunger problem than basic raw/cooked food.

Spring is typically when I start cleaning out whatever stuff in the cellar is getting old/starting to go bad in order to make room for fresh stuff. It's also a good time to start getting the fields ready for planting or heading out on short adventures since cold weather is no longer an issue. I'll often start to build new stuff around this time as the snow melts off, since it's a little easier to visualize things when snow isn't covering everything. Summer is prime time for exploring, though I often find myself hunting quite a lot during this time as well. Also a good time for hauling lots of ore back to base, or building stuff given there's lots of daylight to work with. Autumn is when I focus on bringing in the full harvest of grain, vegetables, and fruit, as well as preserving foodstuffs for the winter, if I haven't started already. Sometimes I'll go on mining trips during this time as well, but it's not unusual to be chopping woodpiles and refining charcoal during this time either while trees are still sort of growing. Winter is when I spend most of my time at the forge and refractories, processing ore and refining steel. The wind is ideal for powering machinery and the heat makes dealing with the cold rather easy. Late winter is when I'll plant fruit tree cuttings, if I have cuttings to plant. Ironically, despite winter not being an ideal time for adventuring, I seem to end up going on more adventures during this time than in better weather. It's not unusual to be doing story content--chapter 2 especially--during the dead of winter.

Welcome to the game and forums! Conserving energy is generally ideal, but it shouldn't become such a focus for the player that that becomes all that they do. If food stores are running a little thin in winter, they can be supplemented with hunting or foraging up what mushrooms and edibles there are to find. It'll be rough, but doable. One of my primary wintertime tasks, aside from just sprucing up my base, is working the forge and refining steel. Winter usually brings lots of wind, which is great for powering a helve hammer via windmill. The forge will keep you toasty warm, and the refractory will also provide a great spot to warm up while it's being fired. Same holds true for the beehive kiln. Mining and underground exploration are also good activities if you've got the gear for it, since the underground tends to hold a relatively stable temperature year-round. The way I tend to look at it is that while the player might have infinite lives by default and death isn't too terribly punishing, it's also not really great to be dying multiple times in a row either, nor is it typically very fun. Generally, when player death occurs, it tends to mean that there is room for improvement regarding strategy. That might mean storing more food for winter, or acquiring better equipment to go fight monsters, or just not poking the bears when all the player has is improvised armor and a stone spear. Really depends on the situation. Another way to put it is that surviving is a little more than just not dying. In order to survive and thrive, the player needs to figure how to stay alive and acquire the resources and equipment needed to accomplish what they wish. I think this might change with a status effect system, if some of those effects persist through death. Death itself, or multiple deaths within a short time, might have negative effects of their own as well to help encourage players to actually try to stay alive rather than just take the dirt nap and respawn like nothing happened. World of Warcraft had a similar idea, in that typically when the player died they could run back to their body as a ghost and respawn at that spot with a fraction of their health. If they couldn't reach their body or just wanted an easy out though, they could respawn at full health with the spirit healer in the graveyard, though they would be severely weakened for one hour as a result.

Same. Happiness in VS is a Blackguard in a strawberry patch. My grandma had a patch of strawberries in her garden. It never seemed to produce many strawberries though. She didn't figure out why until she caught the dog eating the ripe strawberries one day.

Someday I want to take a crack at making a strawberry bed in real life. Except I think I'm going to try to put them in a stack of terra cotta pots as a stylized raised bed. Dunno how well it will work, but it will be a fun project to try. Might even help keep some of the critters out of the plants too.

You can! I think it's slightly less efficient than other coal types, but not to the point it's a waste to use it. You will need charcoal or coke for the coffins though, as no other fuel type is appropriately carbonated.

Over two years? I'm not sure, as I've never bothered to count. My rough guess would be around 2-3 harvests per year on default settings. This I am also not sure, but I'm guessing that a single harvest isn't going to drain so many nutrients that the bush's health starts to suffer. I think it's more a case of the player just needs to sprinkle some bonemeal on their berry patch once a year to keep them in good health(and thus productive).

It's a bit goofy on the scaling, but realistically steel takes quite a bit of effort to process, at least by medieval methods, which the game is trying to reflect. Playing with 30 day months puts the game as a whole on a more realistic time scale, but the drawback there is it's going to take the player a really long time to do things like farming or livestock domestication. Additionally, the seasons will drag on perhaps a little longer than is really interesting. My strategy for steel-making is to run two refractories at once. Takes quite a bit of effort to set up, to be sure, but the output is going to be 32 ingots per firing rather than just 16. The refractories are also a convenient place to warm up in winter as well. For fuel, I'll often use brown coal, if I have access to it, but usually I'm building a really big charcoal pit(think close to maximum size). Takes a lot of work to fill, but produces around a couple full crates of charcoal per firing, so I don't need to fire it that often.

This is one reason why I'm not really a fan of Better Ruins. I have a better PC now than when I tried the mod, but still...I appreciate what it does, but I don't want my game to hiccup because it's trying to generate a mega-mansion. Also, welcome to the forums! Echoing Thorfinn's sentiments, it depends on what the mod does and whether or not it really fits the devs' vision. Popular mods are good candidates for things that could be added to the game, but just because a mod is popular doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea to add.

Hunter + Blackguard is a beast of a combination. That's typically the combo my friend and I roll with, and we can pretty easily dominate most any threat that comes after us. The worst enemy we tend to face is ourselves(of which there are a few stories in the funny story thread).

An in-game week is seven days. An in-game month will vary, and is nine in-game days by default. The processing time for steel will always take about an in-game week, to my knowledge, and does not scale with the month length.

Yes and no. My progression has slowed down a bit mostly due to my own choice, since there is now more stuff to do in the early game so I stick around at the bronze level for a while before moving on to iron. Berries are still a solid early food source, though I typically shift to meat and mushroom stew as soon as I have a cookpot because Blackguards really like filling meals. Seeds I wish I could sell to traders, because I have way more than I need thanks to all the extra wild flax and other grains. As for raw grain being edible again, I forgot exactly when it was fixed, but it was fixed in one of the early pre versions, so it's been edible for a while. One thing I've been experimenting with--bronze lameller. I donned a full set of it with a bronze falx and crude shield in a light temporal storm and was quite successful at hunting the monsters. Still needed to duck inside to heal a couple of times, but I managed to kill a double-headed drifter and got a handful of rusty gears along with a couple of temporal gears for the effort. The rusty gears felt like a really good reward at this stage of the game, since there's resources to buy at the local traders to make progress easier(like lime).

I voted for Mix, but want to elaborate on why: rather than do a snowy island, you might try the Patchwork world type. While it's completely unrealistic, it does make for a very different playthrough when you can have a tropical jungle right next to an arctic glacier. Alternatively, you could also just shorten the polar-equator distance and build bases in both the arctic and tropics, and simply migrate between them.

Haha, no worries! I play a lot of Blackguard as well, and when I'm not a Blackguard I'm usually a Tailor.

I don't think this is intended. It's been reported on the bug tracker and listed as a bug, so it should be resolved by the stable release, if it's not been fixed already. As I understand it, the nutrients are only used when the berries ripen, but even then it's only a chance to actually use up nutrients. I think it's supposed to take about two in-game years for a berry bush to deteriorate from bountiful to barren if the player takes zero care of the bush. Interesting. Sounds like something that might be adjusted, but it also sounds like it's probably fine. There's only so many berry bushes one needs in singleplayer, and this sort of feature would probably be really nice in multiplayer for players to share/sell cuttings to other players. This isn't the impression I've gotten. I think the intention is less to make bushes less available to players, and more to make the bushes behave like actual plants, as well as discourage players from just tearing up the local plant life and hauling everything back to base(which can be a real problem on larger servers). With the changes, players will need to put just a little more effort into establishing a berry patch at their base, but they can grow as many bushes as they want, as well as have potentially better yields than before. For wild bushes this is most likely so that players, especially newer players, will have more food options at the beginning of a game, where they're going to be struggling to survive. Once the game has been fleshed out a little more I would expect the berry bushes(and other plant life) to become entirely seasonal.

Are you playing Blackguard or Tailor? I think the foraging penalty applies to resin, not just berry bushes and mushrooms.

Something tells me there will be lots of shenanigans in multiplayer this update... Nice! No more needing to use creative or rely on the helve hammer to fix the duds!

It looks like some extra server utilities have been added in rc5, notably some changes to clear up queues, it seems, as well as a tool to allow servers to kick players who are AFK for too long. Hopefully that helps smooth out the experience for those who play on TOPS/other large servers.

Welcome to the forums! Could easily be some sort of expansion on the cave painting concept. Mix some paint, fill a bowl, and then use a brush in a similar fashion to the chisel to paint marks on appropriate surfaces. Though I'd also like to see the pigments able to be added to plaster mix to create brightly colored plaster blocks. Those would be so useful to have for chiseling details and decorations.

It could be countered by disabling players from creating water sources via bucket, but that limits options for creativity in addition to other issues.

I would like to see an exception for polar bears though, since those are known to deliberately stalk humans.

Not really. The best I can think of is just making a setting option for food to not spoil in player inventories while they're offline, so that players could at least reliably have food to eat if they need to log out mid-adventure. Or a setting to stop food stored on a claim from spoiling while the owner(s) are offline; I say "owners", since I'm not sure if claims can be set up to allow access to multiple players or not. There is(or was) a mod that added that kind of function to the player inventory, but mods currently are not an option for official servers. In a cooperative multiplayer setting I don't think food spoilage or resources are as much of an issue, since players are cooperating with each other and sharing resources/labor. But in cases where players are operating independently it seems to be more of an issue.

One slight problem--fast-moving water tends to be resistant to freezing. A thin layer of ice might develop on the surface if it's cold enough, but it has to be pretty dang cold for moving water to freeze solid. The main advantage of water power is that it's supposed to be consistent, with the disadvantage being that the player has to build their machinery at the source in order to actually use that kind of power. If rapids can easily freeze up in winter, then water power can easily become something players start ignoring since the benefits no longer outweigh the negatives.