LadyWYT

I can confirm that it does not. There is, however, something in the Archive that can mitigate fall damage. In retrospect, there were a couple of hints of what I was about to get myself into, that I also brushed off as simple narrative set dressing. Very much was not. Not that Vintage Story doesn't exaggerate a bit with its narrative descriptions, but I'm going to start paying more attention to warnings from NPCs and lore documents.

@Thorfinn might be able to offer a better answer than mine, as he plays permadeath and I do not. As for what I experienced and how I would expect it to stack up for those that do play it: It's probably going to be a rough time. Now to be fair, I did not have the smartest game plan when I tackled the challenges of chapter two, and I think there were a couple of things that might have been overtuned(I played through a couple of versions ago). A highly skilled player could probably manage without dying, but I agree with @SlateSlavens, you're not likely to accomplish it the first time. The content is quite different from chapter two, and while most of it is pretty easy, the challenges that are there make the Resonance Archive look like a tutorial area, in my opinion. For your first playthrough, I'd recommend giving yourself an extra life or two, instead of limiting yourself to just one, to potentially cut down on frustration. That way you don't have unlimited mistakes, but you're not going to potentially lose a ton of progress because you got caught off-guard either. Depends on what you're comfortable with handling.

Welcome to the forums! I don't believe graphite currently has a purpose, other than being a collectible knick-knack you can display in your home. It may get a use in a later update though, and there may be a mod or two out there as well that add uses for it(though I can't recall any that do).

Not a permadeath player, but played 1.20 quite a lot. The only times I've really died were to dealing with bears and wolves in the earliest portion of the game, and later on to silly mistakes brought about by my own complacency. Doesn't mean the new mobs aren't dangerous, but like the other monsters we have, dealing with them is mostly optional. I tend to wait until I am appropriately geared before delving into caves or braving the temporal storms and nightly rift activity.

This is why I end up fighting raccoons for the berry bushes in the earliest stages of the game. Especially in colder starting locations.

I once had a hole next to my house that I walled off a section of to avoid falling in myself. It did have a way to climb out though, so every once in a while a drifter would spawn down there and make his way up to the rim, pause to throw a rock...only to promptly fall back down into the pit. Since there is a brief wind-up in the rock-throwing animation, this often resulted in the rock getting launched straight up into the air as the drifter disappeared from sight. It was not uncommon to hear a subsequent "thunk" as said rock proceeded to fall back to earth and bonk the drifter on the head.

Ooo, great question. I think Maelstrom has the best advice, in that if you find yourself in this situation, it's best to leave out a portion of calorie-rich food, much like you would feed an outdoor pet. Blackguards are great at keeping areas free of threats and it's not hard to keep them happy, so if you can convince them to hang around they'll happily keep your base free of pests...provided you keep them fed. In the event that you really don't want such uninvited guests though, the most important thing to remember is do not try to use force to get them to leave! Force is acceptable for Malefactors who try to steal your shinies, but Blackguards are very tough fighters. In the event you do manage to anger one, the best thing to do is run away and find some horsetails to help heal any wounds inflicted(you may need quite a lot of them). As for keeping them out of your food stores, you could try padlocking the cellar door, but this is likely to be ineffective as Blackguards are good diggers and most are smart enough to tunnel their way in. The better way to discourage them from eating your foodstuffs is to simply stick to a diet they won't appreciate. Most Blackguards aren't terribly picky eaters, but like @Maelstrom mentioned, they do love calorie-dense food, and that comes primarily in the form of redmeat. If you stick to a vegetarian diet, you can still get protein from food like soybeans, and it tends to result in fewer stolen meals(though that depends on what the Blackguard in question is willing to eat). If the above isn't working, you may need to consider a more drastic approach: poison. This method is risky though, as it relies on the Blackguard not paying attention to what they're eating, and there's a chance you may forget and eat the poisoned meal yourself. The good news is that most Blackguards don't think too hard about food, so if you form the base of the meal from a nice redmeat stew they will likely eat it without question. The best way to poison the stew is to use funeral bells as at least one of the ingredients. Funeral bells are a must because they are guaranteed to kill a Blackguard; anything less potent will be capable of killing you, while only giving the Blackguard nothing more than a bad stomachache. Hmmmm...have you seen any Malefactors poking around? They're very hard to catch in the act, but they have a penchant for shiny things.

Fair point. I would make it infinite, since other mechanical things do not degrade from use, and making them degrade isn't the best idea for reasons I stated previously. That being said, whichever method was chosen(wear-and-tear or no) needs to apply to all machinery, and not just one. Haaaaaaa...more like 80+ stacks, with my current setup. It's not the biggest possible charcoal pit, but it's big enough to produce at least a standard crate-and-a-half of charcoal per firing. Maybe two crates. Really wouldn't want to do that with immersive firewood chopping!

Neither am I. In reality, I doubt the wood-chopping process would need to change if a sawmill were added. Just the convenience of having a machine to refine logs into planks and firewood instead of having to do it yourself in the crafting grid would be incentive enough to build one. And there'd still be mods in the event it wasn't immersive enough.

Just a side note here, but 1.20 was supposed to include coral reefs as part of the package. Unfortunately, that feature wasn't working as intended, so the devs have pushed it back for a future update for now, which leaves the oceans mostly barren. I daresay that's also why the settings for default world generation haven't been changed to allow for proper oceans, despite the addition of a proper boat. Until there's more to see and do with large swaths of water, land maps will probably be more fun for players to play on an unmodded client.

I swear I saw a mod that disables them there a while back, but I can't seem to find it now. That being said, I'm confident someone will make a mod that can disable them from spawning, either shivers specifically or a "catch-all" type mod that can be configured. In regards to controlling which monsters spawn in the world and which don't though, I think that's best left to mods rather than implementing a new game setting.

I do like the idea of a sawmill, and I'm not entirely against making woodcutting more immersive persay, but I'm also not sure that it's the best idea(there'd likely be a lot of backlash). However, fire clay was changed to be a more grindy process, and that change has felt fine, so who knows. The main issue I see(aside from the grindy nature), is that without some other kind of mechanical power than windmills, making a change like this now would put even more strain on the automation process. It's fairly easy to get a small windmill set up before the end of the first year, and while tedious, you can juggle a helve hammer, quern, and pulverizer around it as needed. But it's tedious, and the wind isn't always strong enough to power your machines. And wood, whether it be firewood or planks, is something you always need, and don't want to sink hours into chopping by hand. Now if there were a waterwheel or some other slower but more consistent kind of power available in addition to windmills, I could see a change like this working, as then you wouldn't have absolutely all machinery bottlenecked by how much flax you can manage to plant. A fair point, but I think one better suited to be an optional challenge setting, similar to to "no placing infinite water sources from a bucket". It might not be the most realistic thing, but it's nice to be able to go off on an adventure and know that things aren't going to be falling apart while I'm away. And being away from home for extended lengths of time are no longer optional, if one is intending to play through the main story. This I think you could fix by simply requiring an iron helve hammer or better in order to work steel, just like you need certain tiers of pounder caps to pulverize certain materials. In that case, players could still sink the resources into building a copper helve hammer if they really wanted, but they certainly aren't going to be accomplishing much with it other than hammering out plates of soft metal.

Sounds about right, in regards to the other classes on default gameplay settings. And while surface drifters aren't particularly dangerous when compared to other enemies, they are still dangerous en masse. It depends. Blackguards have a bit more health, do more damage in melee, and aren't as penalized by armor. The drawback though is that they do less damage at range, have a harder time foraging, and require more food to keep alive. They're a late-game powerhouse in the right hands, and the drawbacks aren't that hard to overcome, but it's also not a class I would really recommend for someone brand new to the game unless they really enjoy playing tanky bruisers.

Playing Blackguard, I can kill a surface drifter with two hits from a steel falx. For a surface shiver, it takes me three hits, if I'm recalling correctly. They aren't skittering tanks, but classes that aren't Blackguard will probably need an extra hit or two on average to kill a shiver(in melee). If it helps, shivers can't currently climb over fences. Bowtorns seem to like to pick a spot to camp and aren't keen on moving unless you get too close. Agreed! I'm afraid of the dark again.

There do seem to be different patterns to them now. I had one medium storm that was just drifters, no bowtorn or shivers. Another medium storm was a handful of shivers and bowtorn. The shivers can still be a bit aggravating, but the bowtorn numbers feel a lot better now. Overall, I'd say the tweak is working as intended. What I really would like though, is some Jonas parts. I've been having the worst luck getting my hands on those, outside of seeing them in the story locations. At this point, I'd probably have been luck cavern delving and hoping I run into a sawblade or two.

That's kind of what I was thinking--proof of concept/laying the groundwork for things to come. The boat is functional, but underwhelming for what it should be able to do, given the speed limitation. I'm not really shocked about the wind speed not affecting it, although it does seem a bit odd, given that it seems like it might be a trickier thing to code properly. I don't know that it's walking speed specifically, but I think it's the same value that player walk speed has. Hence my surprise that the sailboat was as slow as it was. Granted, I wasn't expecting to feel like Sonic, but I expected it to be on par with the elk, at least. It should really be a bit faster, since historically travel by water has been the fastest option, when it's available. The drawback, of course, is that the sailboat is a bigger resource investment, and there may not be water where you wish to go. I mean...I am not great at reading and understanding the magic math numbers. But the code + explanation does track with what I've experienced when tinkering around in the game.

They're adorable, especially with throwing rocks. Basically grumpy old men that just want the seraphs to get off their lawn, lol. The rock throwing is fine, in my opinion. Surface drifters are fairly harmless, and the ranged attack means you do need to think a little harder about how to defend against them, unlike some of the enemies of the other block game. For high level drifters, the rocks also provide an excellent window of opportunity for either attacking or fleeing, since drifters need to stand still for the animation and the damage is the same for a thrown rock regardless of the drifter that threw it. Plus I mean...it's funny to watch them fight each other if one hits the wrong target with a rock. Once in a great while, you'll see drifters manage to kill themselves with their own rocks too. The scrawny little legs crack me up. Otherwise, they're a nuisance, but not really difficult to deal with, and I say that as a Blackguard. In regards to having more warning that there's one about--I've noticed that bowtorn are rather quiet until they notice you. At that point, that's when they make their strange shrieking bark before shooting at you. If you hear a shriek-bark, it's time to move or equip a shield before you get speared. Nope! They stun themselves, believe it or not. The idle animation where they spasm into a scrunched up pile of shiver for a few seconds triggers randomly both when they're aggressive and when they're peaceful. It's very useful for getting in some free hits, especially since shivers are beefier than drifters or bowtorn. Higher level shivers have two other idle animations, but those will only play when they are peaceful. I don't know why, but somehow the shivers strike me as "cute" too. Not that I like dealing with them, mind you--they still spook me. But they do act like big goofy spider-dogs half the time. You should see one try to swim.

I had completely forgotten about that!

Pretty much same general thoughts I've stated elsewhere: I don't love it, but I don't hate it either. I could see it being an option, albeit a somewhat niche one that to me is redundant since we have teleporters. But I can't honestly say that I'd say no to flying around for fun either; it'd actually be a super-useful building tool, now that I think about it. My main concern would be that flight renders the other methods of transport obsolete or unbalancing other parts of gameplay in other ways, as that has happened in other games. Ugh, I hate to say this, but given how much...colorful...commentary there has been on the travel methods that were literally just added to the game, I can only imagine what sort of salt mine adding flight might produce. Especially if it's both expensive, difficult to obtain, and slow. That being said, goofing around with friends in an air balloon sounds like a lot of fun the more I think about it(I can just imagine the friendly trolling opportunities among good friends!), and using it for building would be great. So you know what, I think you've actually changed my mind on the idea, and I'm more inclined to support it. Though it's something I also expect to see made into a mod sooner or later.

I will note that some of those features only have placeholders right now--they aren't functional yet. I'm not sure if they'll be finished in time for 1.20, or be released in 1.21 or later after more polish.

Welcome to the forums! My best guess is that there's a spawn point for pigs nearby, and another pig or two spawned in the pen(or managed to climb in--you might want to check the barriers). I'm assuming you have a food trough with feed in the pen as well; livestock needs to be at a good weight in order to breed, and the females also need to have eaten 10 portions before they'll mate(assuming they're otherwise ready to mate). The male animal doesn't actually need to be in the same pen with the females, to my knowledge; he just needs to be within a 10 block radius or so in order to breed. Now if you haven't been feeding your pigs, or there's no male anywhere nearby, then yeah, it's rather odd to have one of the sows somehow pregnant. At that point, I'd suspect some sort of weird bug, or a mod issue if you're playing with mods.

It does get a lot better--I have a steel axe and it only takes me a couple seconds to chop down a tree, unless it's a really big one. I would be inclined to agree that shortening the chop time wouldn't be an issue, but the idea is for players to acquire better tools. Stone axes get the job done for cheap; the slow chop rate and lack of durability provides progression incentive. It's not just a factor of it being easy and quick; it's how often you'd need to be doing that task. Chopping a log or two for a fire pit is one thing, but filling a charcoal pit is quite another. Smaller charcoal pits don't require as much wood, but you'll need to fire them more frequently since they don't produce as much charcoal. A big charcoal pit will produce tons of charcoal, but may end up requiring several dozen stacks of wood to fire, which is an awful lot of chopping to do in one sitting. Automation like a sawmill would help, but one drawback to automation is that production of some parts usually requires a lot of charcoal/coal. Turning a quern by hand is also rather immersive, but that does not make it fun. More immersive wood-chopping seems like it would be nice, but I also think it would end up with results similar to powering a quern manually. Throwing stacks of logs into a crafting grid with an axe to get firewood might not be the most immersive thing, but it allows a player to get several stacks of firewood in a few seconds, rather than needing to sink a few minutes into chopping those same logs into firewood.

Welcome to the forums! The good news is this concept already exists in the mod realm, although I'm not sure how well it's working on more recent versions of the game(it appears to be slated for a 1.20 update): https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/8567 The tedium is what I would be concerned about with a change like this, and I don't think decreasing the time it takes to chop down a tree really fixes the issue. Players need to chop a lot of firewood in Vintage Story--a LOT--and while it might not be too bad in the early game it's going to be a huge pain later on when you're trying to fill up a big charcoal pit. I could see it working if you added a way to automate the process with machinery, like a sawmill, but that's about it. I would rather something like this instead, I think, though maybe without the tree-felling chaos that Valheim's system can result in(if I chop a tree, I don't want every tree next to it to be getting knocked over too). However, I'm not sure how much work it would take to implement as a replacement for the system we have currently; it seems like it would require more effort than it's maybe worth.

I suppose if you didn't want to go to the effort of turning it back into thatch with a knife, you could always just set a torch to it instead. Probably not the best idea though if your house and nearby decorations are made from combustible material.

It does exist, but the spawn parameters have changed. It now only occurs naturally under black coal and anthracite deposits, and apparently has a chance to spawn in bauxite biomes as well(though in small, rare patches in this case). Crafting it from other clay and flint is probably going to be the most expedient way to acquire fire clay, in most cases.