LadyWYT

Suddenly "doggy biscuit" has a very different meaning.

To me they seem balanced. Keeping in mind that I've not gone hunting them or delved deep enough to encounter the really nasty ones: They do seem to avoid daylight, but they will occasionally wander out of a cave, if there's one nearby and they are able to. It seems a bit variable on whether or not predators will chase you. Generally they'll notice and come after you, but I've walked up on bears/wolves a few times and managed to get away before they noticed. It was a thing in 1.19 too, but it does seem to happen just a bit more frequently now. That being said...I still do not advocate seraphs testing their luck around large wild animals.

Finally got my hands on leather. Ended up opting to hunt for seashells...several many seashells later, and I come to find out that survival goods traders sell lime. Oops! That would've saved me a couple months of time, at least. As it currently stands, I've managed to make some basic iron brigandine, with a gambeson helmet, and hoarded several many meat pies and bandaids in preparation for the Archive. I'll have to tackle it in the dead of winter, it seems, but that should be fine...I'm just hoping there's no new nasties to deal with down in those tunnels. Thoughts on the update so far: Really enjoying it. Very glad that there's stuff to see underwater, especially since after spending so much time combing the lake bottoms for shells. Terrain generation feels a lot smoother, with proper highlands and lowlands along with the standard mountains and other strange bits. The more complex recipes for the quern and fire clay will take a bit of getting used to, but it makes sense for the quern. As for the fire clay, the flint processing felt all right as well; tedious, sure, but not too much hassle and gave a use for all the flint I inevitably acquire. The new tong animations are very jank; items will either be clipping through the tongs at weird angles, or outright floating in the air. Regarding the new monsters--so far they've been pretty fun to fight. Granted, I've not gone hunting them, nor have I encountered the really nasty ones yet, so I could always change my mind, but overall they feel nicely balanced. The thing that's given me the biggest spook so far was the solar eclipse. I forgot those had been added, was out harvesting grass, and the lights suddenly went out. Pretty sure I jumped in my chair.

Thanks! I did almost follow in your footsteps though, and fall down a deep hole far from base. It wouldn't delete the world, of course, since I don't play hardcore, but it would still have been frustrating nonetheless.

Status update: I found my way out of the granite and into sedimentary layers when finding a route to the Archive. Spent a good couple of hours or so searching the claystone, sandstone, and conglomerate...not a sign of borax anywhere. Nor any limestone or bauxite, for that matter. Which is certainly going to be a frustrating bottleneck.

Regarding that specific thing...

Oof, that's rough, considering that sounds like a super good setup. I'm bearing down on iron tier in my world currently, with the first temporal storm due to hit any day now. The Resonance Archive isn't too far away, so I may be able to hoof it there by winter and at least pilfer some of the goodies prior to fighting my way to the library. My main goal right now is figuring out how to get my hands on an elk, heh heh. Something tells me it's probably not happening prior to completing the Archive, but one never knows. Still haven't managed to figure out where the shiver in the basement is...not that I've gone looking. Between granite, andesite, and peridotite, I think I'd rather have granite the most, if I had to choose. I actually like the blue tint of andesite more, but the neutral grey of granite offers a wider selection of colors to pick from when building and decorating. Peridotite is way too green for me to want to use it as much other than an accent color.

Typically I play on the standard Balanced setup, but this time I increased the hunger and food spoilage rate a bit, in return for a small boost to health. I thought it would be a nice little challenge with a small benefit to go with it, without being too frustrating. Oh boy did the game decide otherwise. Spawn into the world, and there's nothing but granite for miles it seems when it comes to the stone type. Fewer food options than normal, fewer surface copper spots than normal, and quite a bit of jagged terrain to make navigation difficult. Wolves outside my camp, there's a shiver somewhere close to my basement clicking around. The main positives are there are sheep nearby to corral, a surface tin deposit, a treasure hunter within reasonable distance, and several meteors. I actually don't mind the granite maps that much; they're fun to play, so even if I end up rerolling I'll probably keep this map for tinkering with later. How's everyone else's adventures going so far in the update?

Terminus teleporter. Late game tech, but it will teleport you to the last place you died, I do believe. Exactly. That's part of the thrill of the adventure. You don't know what you'll find, so you'll need to both be careful, and make sure you're prepared. The higher the stakes, the higher the thrills and (hopefully) higher rewards. Well said on both. The slew of world options is there for a reason, after all. There's no shame in tuning the settings for an easier game, same as it's perfectly fine to crank up the difficulty if it's too easy. As a bonus, a lot of the settings(like "Keep Inventory") can be toggled on/off by running simple commands and reloading the world.

Salute to Fred the stunt drifter, sacrificing himself to showcase the scrap bomb. So excited to dig into the story content and really happy it's ready for a test run!

To me, the difficulty of getting a fruit tree going is part of what makes it satisfying to harvest one when you do get them established. Not only do they produce a lot of fruit in one harvest, that often keeps for quite a while, but having a proper orchard means that you sank quite a bit of time into that part of your farm. Even moreso if you managed to graft two or three different fruit types onto one tree.

One other possibility that I forgot to mention: if you'd prefer to keep the more realistic world climate generation, you might try changing the polar-equator distance to a lower number. The climate will still be arranged in "real world" layers that way, but it'll take much less time to travel from a cold region to a warmer one, and vice versa.

Oof. I really like melee, so this is the tough sell for classes like Malefactor and Hunter. Clockmaker at least has the bonus against mechanicals, and I don't like bells...though admittedly I'm not really sure how effective that bonus is. I'm probably just an oddball in the category, but I've never really had issues with it. Maybe it's because I have hoarding issues instead. Either way I've often wondered if the penalty to foraging and hunger should've been a little higher, in return for a bit more of a health/damage boost.

Unfortunately, this strategy is probably going to be broken in the next update, given the new enemies. Is that in the current 1.19, or in 1.20? When playing around in the 1.20 test patch I actually found the melee to be improved--the hits actually pushed the enemies back slightly, so it was possible to keep drifters and other things at a more comfortable distance without needing to backpedal as constantly. Now that being said, I still expect ranged to be strong in open areas, and for dealing with threats in general. It's a lot safer to deal with the threat before it reaches you, than it is to get up close and personal...but of course, dealing with it at range isn't always an option either.

I think this is one of the things that makes Vintage Story so appealing. It gives you all the information you need to progress in the game, but it doesn't explicitly tell you how to go about achieving that in your gameplay. That part you'll have to figure out for yourself, based on the resources you have at your disposal, and how you achieve the same sets of goals will vary based on how you decided to generate the particular world that you're playing on. That's also what makes the progression so satisfying; it was your effort that got you that nifty new tool/weapon, and not the game just handing it to you just because. Pretty much one of the points I was trying to make, albeit in perhaps the most inefficient fashion possible. This sums it up much better.

A bit of a tough task given that I tend to gravitate toward living in colder climates than the default temperate starting zone. Not quite turned myself into a fully arctic creature, but I'm getting there. I knew it!

I think it hinges on what season it is. I've not gotten an elk yet, but I'm wondering if it will be possible to pick up shed antlers, or if the antlers just disappear and being the process of regrowing.

Agreed. On the one hand, it seems like it would be simple enough to add a few simple scrap pieces for broken metal tools/weapons, that could be chiseled into nuggets and melted back down into ingots for use in other projects. That's how mods generally tackle it, I believe. Having played with some of those mods though...while it was nice to have, it also meant there wasn't much incentive to go look for new ore deposits, as having more ore wasn't as valuable as it once was. So for balance, I think the item breaking and returning nothing is fine. Also agreed, though I would argue that you could probably drop the durability cost to sharpen a weapon/tool, and still be fine. A sharp weapon would do more damage, and a sharp tool will work faster than a blunt one. Not keeping your weapons sharp means that you'll need more hits to kill an enemy, which means more durability lost from the weapon(each hit costs one durability point). Not keeping tools sharp means they won't work as efficiently, so you'll have to spend a bit more time on the task to get it done. To get around the tool speed and animation issue for this particular scenario, maybe set limits to which tools can be sharpened. IE, stone tools can't be sharpened at all, and metal tools when sharpened operate at the speed of the next tier only as long as they remain sharp(X number of durability points). To be fair though...lack of efficiency/damage and durability are good incentives to upgrade your stuff to higher quality materials, like steel. A grindstone and sharpening system would be a nice little bonus gameplay loop. You know, I've not been a fan of the "let's manually turn sticks into proper handles instead of slapping them into the crafting grid" idea, but if there were higher quality handles for higher-tier items(bronze+) then that might prove interesting instead of annoying.

Hmmm, this is very true. I'm guessing the hands might deliberately be kept free, so that you can continue picking up items if you wish, instead of having to constantly empty your hands. Agree with stackable bowls--it's easy to do this when cleaning the dinner table after a meal with family or guests. I disagree with the crocks though--those are bigger than bowls, even if the game models don't really show it, and should not stack. That being said...I've not had issues picking up crocks when I already had one in my hands, provided that I had other hotbar slots free. It would be nice, and might happen some time in the future. I'm not sure how hard it would be to write code to account for that.

https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Bot_System This is probably what you're looking for, if I had to guess.

First off, welcome to the forums! As Thorfinn said, you can always tune things like water/land distribution, terrain roughness, forest coverage, and more under the world settings. For more diverse biomes in a fashion similar to what Minecraft has, you'll want to go to "Climate Distribution" and chance that from "Realistic" to "Patchwork". That should make it so that biomes are randomly distributed and potentially save you the legwork of needing to travel tens of thousands of blocks before the climate changes. As far as I'm aware though(never played Patchwork so can only guess), the seasonal changes will still apply in temperate/colder biomes, so it might be a little jarring to see or cut back on the survival challenges. The main lore content is found via talking to a Treasure Hunter trader. He'll give you a task, and reward you with a map to the first major story location. It's quite a trek, but some of the goodies you can find there are other bits of lore about various things. As for other lore content...the more minor pieces are kinda scattered around in various places. Some of it you can find by talking to the traders about various things. Some of the traders sell things that provide insight(Artisan traders and tapestries); some items have flavor text that provides insight into what once was, or what might have happened. Panning bony soil is a good way to acquire lore books and other valuables. As for caves, it's not unusual for them to be empty. Sometimes you'll get lucky and find some exposed ore, or some long-forgotten ruins that may or may not hold anything of interest. Surface ruins sometimes have basements that have extra supplies, sometimes a lore fragment or two. In regards to world settings though, there's not really much you can modify here to make finding the lore easier, aside from perhaps smoothing out terrain to make traveling easier, and removing a lot of the survival challenges so you're not as likely to die while out and about. You could go the modded route with Better Ruins in order to have more interesting things to explore while still being "lore friendly", but it's not quite the same thing as the vanilla game. I will note though that the next update is right around the corner, and will be featuring a mount and a proper boat in order to make traveling around easier, as well as the second story chapter.

It does. It's great if you're wanting a huge variety to play with in your world, but not so great if you'd prefer to keep things simple.

Somewhat depends on how far out from spawn one travels, assuming that spawn is nothing but low fertility soil. Generally there's going to be at least some medium fertility soil close to spawn though; it's a little unusual for there to be none for miles. Now if there's a lot of forest around--I believe forest floor always drops as low fertility soil when broken. I will note that low fertility soil isn't entirely useless for farming...it'll just mean that you shouldn't wait too long to plant your crops, and you'll probably only get one harvest out of the field for that year. By the time you've scraped by your first year on that, you should have plenty of compost to turn into terra preta, if you've not found higher quality soil elsewhere. I don't know about using it to craft terra preta...I think high fertility soil should perhaps be a more efficient way of accomplishing that. And given what you pan out of the bony soil...I think there's more bones and deteriorated clothing bits in there than dirt.

Proper glassware and full range of craftable stained glass colors? Yes please! The main advantage of a glass bottle over a clay one, of course, being that you can tell at a glance what kind of liquid a glass bottle contains. Ironically, glass was fairly expensive in the Middle Ages(which is the general setting of Vintage Story), yet it's perhaps one of the easiest materials to obtain in the game.