LadyWYT

Nope, I misread your initial post. The 1.20 change was that you can disable buckets from creating new water source blocks, essentially. But you can refill a bucket however much you want from pre-existing water blocks. So it's not quite the same thing, unfortunately. Fair enough. It would be a nice change in that sense, but given the player doesn't sleep very long at all it's not one I would really worry about. Maybe. The window in the bottom right corner I expect to someday disappear, given that it's the early access notification. I'm not particularly against a centered symmetrical layout, as those do look nice...but that layout also seems to be a bit overdone these days. The current layout of Vintage Story's main menu is something different and refreshing, at least in my opinion. I like this change; would very likely prevent a lot of accidents from players getting confused about whether or not the handbook has paused the game.

I'm guessing it's due to a swath of hills counting as a specific landform, so instead of a relatively small patch of very hilly terrain it decided to generate a much larger area of hills and cliffs. I'm not so sure it's a fault of the map, so much as it is a weak point in our modern sense of navigation. Thanks to how far technology has come, we're able to bore tunnels through mountains, bridge rivers, and pretty much carve a highway through almost any kind of terrain. As a result, we can travel in a fairly straight line from one place to another, though there are some exceptions. Back in medieval times though(setting of Vintage Story), things like mountains, dense forests, and large bodies of water would pose a significant travel hindrance, and in many cases be impassable. At that point, it's not so much the distance that one must travel, as it is the effort spent just getting from one point to another. Better to skirt obstacles and take advantage of easier terrain, even if it meant more miles overall, than to burn a lot of time and energy trying to pick your way through rough terrain.

Welcome to the forums! That does seem a bit odd, but I'm guessing it's set up that way to allow players a brief chance to grow a few crops(like flax) and progress, rather than needing to rely solely on cracked vessels or mob drops for certain things.

At least you can just buy lapis from an artisan trader! Though woad and cornflowers also work for blue dye, if I'm not mistaken. As for black dye, metal scraps are easy enough to find in underground ruins or pilfer from locust nests. One alternative I could see to using rusty metal though, that still retains historical realism, is possibly mixing strong tannin with blue or green dye(or even some other dark color), to achieve black dye. You couldn't make gray from it, but it would save you the metal cost.

Hmmmmm, have you tried this mod? https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/13620 Based on the description, it seems like it would be the one most likely to achieve the kind of terrain generation you're looking for. You'll probably still want to turn down the upheaval rate, and potentially tweak the landform scale to something larger. On the latter, it'll mean much bigger mountains, but the the idea behind a change like that is to have a lot more plains in between those mountains. Otherwise, I'm not sure that there's currently a way to generate huge plains with small strips of tall mountain to occasionally find. Big mountains might be an annoying obstacle, but if most all the land around them is flat they'll at least be easy enough to ride around, especially with the new mount system that 1.20 adds.

Black pigment for paint is fairly easy to get. Black dye for clothing is a lot more difficult. Historically, black cloth was very rare and essentially "rich people material". Usually it was made from iron, hence why it requires metal bits to make it in the game.

The handbook does already make note of this, but the information can be easily missed if one doesn't spend a few minutes reading through the progression guide and related chapters. One could learn most of the information, of course, just from trial-and-error in gameplay, but it's going to make for a much rougher experience.

I'm thinking the closest answer is probably "sort of". By that I mean that I think you're probably right in that the change was made to make the caves spookier. But they probably didn't mean to make light sources(the better ones, anyway) that obscured. So I'd wager it's a rough spot in the system that needs some refining.

This. When I build mine, I make sure I have access to both coal piles(ie, they'll end up sitting side-by-side when I'm down there inspecting them). I then place blocks in front of them, and chisel the blocks down far enough so I can easily see and interact with both piles. I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter how much of those blocks you chisel away either; so long as there is at least one pixel of each block between you and the coal piles, they shouldn't be spilling forward.

First off, welcome to the forums! Have to disagree here--the balance feels fine, and I enjoy having everything contained over on the left-hand side so I can enjoy the featured background screenshots. The only thing I would change is adding an option in the settings to disable the slow-motion camera zoom/wiggle. I don't mind the visual effect, but I've seen a few players mention that it makes them motion-sick. I don't think this is really needed given that making your character sleep is a deliberate choice, and there are already clues that coincide with making that decision. IE, your character lies down and the screen fades to black a second or two after, and you'll wake back up after enough time has passed with a similar fade-in from black. The only change I would make is having the player wake up almost instantly if they choose not to sleep for the full duration--currently, the delay on waking up means that it's very easy to oversleep. I believe this is being refined, but it's not really a priority compared to other things that need work. This feature actually got added in 1.20.

I'll preface with stating that I would like tame foxes in addition to dogs. But the reason I don't want foxes instead of dogs is that, aside from lack of choice, foxes make really irritating screaming noises, and in reality their pee smells horrendous...and the smell doesn't simply wash out of your carpet. Dogs are better for defense and other utility functions(like carrying stuff), since wolf-based dogs are bigger. A fox though could easily just be a cute little companion.

It sounds neat in theory, but the last thing I want to be doing is competing with an AI for space and resources in a singleplayer world. Besides, that kind of experience is already in the game, if one plays multiplayer. No need to train any AI!

Part of it is probably the algorithm reacting to your recent searches, but I think a large part of it too is Vintage Story slowly gaining traction as more people learn about it. New content certainly helps, since it gives YouTubers who make VS content fresh things to toy with and talk about.

Only if you mod it to be so. Fire clay just has the one color, no alternates. But if you like building with brick, red and blue clay do offer different colors, especially when fired in a beehive kiln.

Given the label I'd say it's one of the components of dungeon/ruin generation that bugged out.

Welcome to the forums! Prior to 1.20, clay can be found in two varieties scattered in large deposits through the cool to tropical climate zones, in areas where there is enough rainfall. Blue clay will have a brown/bluish-gray marbled texture, while fire clay will have a tan-brown marbling instead. Of the two, fire clay is the more valuable, as it's a required ingredient for refractories, bloomeries, and ovens(though it can be used for conventional pottery items as well). In 1.20, fire clay only spawns naturally under black coal and anthracite deposits. Red clay and blue clay are the most common clays and follow the same general spawn parameters as previous versions(large deposits in cool-tropical areas with enough rainfall). The only real difference between the two is that red clay has a reddish-brown marbled texture and spawn at higher elevations, while blue clay retains the same texture as before and spawns near sea level. You can craft fire clay from red or blue clay simply by mixing in some powder calcined flint(created by cooking flint and grinding up the resulting chunks). If you are playing with true map coloring enabled, it is possible to locate clay deposits by looking for discolored spots, but it does take practice and isn't always accurate. It's usually easier to keep an eye out for the marbled clay textures on patches of soil while you're exploring, and marking the deposits on your map as you find them. Once you've found a few, it gets easier to spot them from further away or on your map(when playing with true coloring enabled).

Welcome to the forums! I think the new mob spawns in temporal storms got tweaked in the most recent release candidate for 1.20. Haven't yet experienced one since the change, but the new mobs are supposed to spawn less frequently during temporal storms now.

I think I've seen them a time or two, but male bears seem to be the more frequent occurrence.

This is probably my favorite part of the fix list; means I can now decorate my stuff with proper hunting trophies! This would explain why I've never seen any female moose or mooselets running around.

Don't get me wrong, they're all still creepy. But for whatever reason I keep wanting to pat the surface shivers on the head, or toss them a stick/bone to play fetch. They're kinda weird spider-dogs, in a sense, though I wouldn't want to do that with the higher tier ones. But a surface shiver...I might actually keep one as a pet, if it were an option. It could live with the drifter that I can't actually befriend(though I always seem to end up having a small "drifter hideaway" somewhere near my base). Likewise, the bowtorn have their own charm. Not so much for their behavior, as they're rather annoying in that regard, but it's hilarious watching them turn tail and run away on their scrawny little chicken legs when you get too close to them.

Fair enough, but I think a mod to make sticks easier to get would be a better choice for a large multiplayer setting, in order to avoid singleplayer/smaller multiplayer servers from becoming unbalanced. In regards to pit kilns though, 1.20 adds a better option for mass production of pottery and related products, in the form of the beehive kiln. It takes a fair amount of resources to construct, but you can fire a lot more stuff at once with a lot less effort once you've got the structure built. Beehive kilns also do not require dry grass or sticks for fuel--all you need is firewood, peat, or some kind of coal to fuel them. Additionally, you can get different colors of certain pottery items depending on how you adjust the kiln before firing, whereas a pit kiln has a limited range of colors it can produce.

What comes to mind is YouTube's "automatic quality adjustment", where it plummets from high quality to the lowest without warning. Highly irritating when that happens, and if the in-game graphical quality is fluctuating without the player making the adjustments themselves, I would also expect the player to start getting frustrated. The other thing I'd be concerned about is the lag/stutter that can occur when such adjustments happen. On high-powered PCs it probably wouldn't be too much of an issue, but then again I wouldn't expect high-powered PCs to have framerate issues. In any case though, any kind of stutter caused by the game trying to adjust the graphical settings automatically while the player is playing is going to be rather annoying. Better to let the players make their own setting choices according to their own preferences and what their hardware can handle--there are already preset options available to help make that easy.

I wondered the same thing myself when I tried. This, however: ...is the more valuable addition, I believe. Cooking pots already act similar to crocks, but can be used for meal making. Crocks are better for long term storage, which you don't really have to worry about when riding around on the elk.

Welcome to the forums! Without spoiling too much, I will say that the second story chapter released in 1.20 really opens up the world. There's not a huge number of NPCs, but there's more than just a couple, and their personalities plus the space they inhabit is all fleshed out rather nicely. Depending on how much you want your world populated though, you might also want to look into the mods that @Brady_The linked.

I'm not on the Discord, but I'm guessing it's probably due to Discord being a bit easier to monitor than the forums. You don't need to visit a webpage and click through links with it, plus it's a lot easier to tell when there's a new message and which channel it's in.