LadyWYT

Welcome to the forums! What's most likely going on here is you're standing at the border of two different weather patterns for those chunks. One chunk probably has a higher chance of rain than the other, and is currently experiencing a storm, while the other is not. It's not an uncommon occurrence in the game, but it does look a bit strange when you stumble across situations like this.

Quite the opposite, if the changes result in things like this: If the focus is survival, exploration, and homesteading, the player probably shouldn't be needing to worry about combat-specific data like stances, damage types, DPS, etc. Those resources are important in an action game, because the player's focus is going to be on the action, and not so much what happens outside of combat. In my opinion, things on the roadmap like the proposed status effect system, herbalism, and wolf taming should be added to the game before worrying about ripping the entire combat system apart and rebuilding it from the ground up. Like I said in a previous post, the status effect system will be a huge game changer when it comes to how the player approaches enemies, as it brings the potential for much more severe consequences if the player is underequipped for the situation(or much better results if the player has the proper gear). Herbalism will likely introduce poisons in addition to more complex healing mechanics--how do those affect combat? Same issue with wolves--if the player can train a whole pack of them to obey commands, how should enemies and other things be balanced to prevent that option from being so strong that it becomes the default choice? For myself, I do enjoy combat, and I enjoy it in Vintage Story, but combat is not the reason I play the game nor what I want to be needing to focus on the majority of my time. For more action-packed combat, I play other games, simple as that.

I would assume that it has something to do with the player not being human. From a pure gameplay standpoint...it's probably a lot easier to repurpose the wolf pup model as a trade item, than it is to try to code an entire system for taming and training wolves.

Have you checked out the world edit tools? I've not messed with them myself, but they make this kind of work much easier. https://wiki.vintagestory.at/How_to_use_WorldEdit

Not to spoil too much, but...yes, very much so. Currently there are only two chapters implemented of a planned eight, however, that is only regarding the main story. There are various things scattered around the world that, while somewhat related to certain major events, it's left up to the player to draw their own conclusions about what happened there. To start the main story, you'll want to be on the lookout for a treasure hunter.

Welcome to the forums! As @MKMoose already noted, you'll have better luck just by making some calcined flint powder and combining it with one of the other clay types to get fire clay. Fire clay deposits can spawn naturally in bauxite biomes, or under black coal/anthracite deposits, but there's no guarantee of finding fire clay that way either. It's also worth noting that as long as you are playing with lore content enabled, you can sometimes find fire clay as cracked vessel loot--the forage type vessels, I think.

Just for the record, this is fine for a multiplayer scenario, but not a singleplayer one. Shivers can skitter behind the player with relative ease, especially if there are multiple enemies, and in singleplayer there is no one else there to break the shiver's hold on the victim. The result is a quick death that, while realistic for what the monsters are, is going to feel incredibly unsatisfying due to the relative ease the monsters will have obtaining that hold. The one exception I might make is for the deepslit shiver, since it's a rare encounter and has much bigger jaws that could easily grab and pin a player in this fashion. However, even in this scenario, I think the pin will still need to be rather brief in order to give solo players a fighting chance of survival, instead of just a fast death screen. It's a similar case here, though I would argue that the damage shouldn't be lethal as long as the player is wearing a metal helmet(although jaguar jaws are made for piercing caiman skulls). This kind of scenario should realistically be instant death otherwise. Overall, the ideas aren't bad, and would be just fine as a mod, but they aren't something I would want to see added to the base game either, given that it shifts the overall dynamic to more of a standard action game, and not survival-homesteading.

Just my two cents here, but I'm guessing the concern is probably that a drastic overhaul of combat will place more emphasis on that specific aspect of gameplay, and thus turn Vintage Story into more of an action game as a result. There is some combat required for completing the main story, and occasionally the player will need to defend themselves while hunting or mining, but for the most part a player can choose when they fight, even on the default settings. The impression I tend to get from a lot of combat overhaul suggestions, is that overhaul results in the player either getting pushed into combat because that's now the intended "fun"(similar to how the answer to almost every enemy in Skyrim is "kill or be killed"), or they feel forced to partake due to combat rewards being too lucrative. Players who love combat and want to spend most of their time fighting/preparing to fight will love an emphasis on combat, however, the Standard game mode is supposed to be a balance of multiple gameplay styles, not weighted specifically for combat.

This is normal; most of the time the corpses will disappear after the storm, but occasionally a corpse or two(or a live enemy) will linger. In terms of loot, the monsters that spawn during storms have the same loot tables as they do under normal circumstances. The main benefit of storms in this regard is that they spawn a lot of enemies, and can spawn special enemies like the double-headed drifter and deepslit shiver that drop much better loot than the average opponent. There are similar special enemies that spawn in the deep underground as well, however, it tends to be easier to fight on the surface than underground in many cases. As for looting the corpses, using a falx to kill monsters will extract some(if not all) of the loot that the monster has, allowing you to just pick it up off the ground. Otherwise, you'll need to learn to be fast with a knife. This is not normal at all. You might check the Interface tab of Settings and make sure that you have "Auto show/hide chat" and "Auto open Chat only on current group" turned on, or at least make sure one of them is turned on. If both are turned off though, that might be why the messages aren't popping up. If both of those options are turned on, the next suspect would be mods, if you are using them, that is. If you're not using mods and on the most recent game version, then it's probably a bug and you'll want to head to the bug tracker to report it. I don't see any reports that indicate that bug exists, but it's happened before so it's not out of the question.

I'm against this idea mainly because I don't think it's a good alternative to turn temporal storms into what's essentially a "quick time loot event" by adding a unique resource that can only be acquired during the storm. It is a solution, sure, but the "unique resource" would have to be something entirely optional and not in any way critical to completing the story or other parts of gameplay, since if a player turns the storm mechanic off they won't have a way to access that resource. A better solution, I think, is perhaps change the way that temporal storms spawn enemies. Perhaps instead of the enemies just blinking into reality, a special mini-rift spawns first, remaining for a few moments before spawning an enemy and disappearing. The player, as a seraph, could have the option of sealing these rifts to prevent the enemy from spawning, at the cost of some of their temporal stability. That kind of mechanic gives the player more control over what happens in the storm, as well as something else to do besides just "fight, hide, or turn it off". The stability cost also ensures that the player will have to strategize a bit depending on the storm; a light storm they can probably close every rift and not deal with monsters at all, while in a heavier storm they may need to fight a monster or two(or sacrifice a temporal gear) in order to keep their stability up while sealing rifts. Well, yes, that is what temporal storms are supposed to be--unnatural disasters that are an obstacle the player will need to work around. The reason they likely don't affect animals or NPCs, is either the coding for such behavior isn't implemented yet, or more likely just gameplay reasons. Livestock is difficult to acquire but very easy to lose, and NPCs will eventually respawn if they die, but it does take a while. This is also for gameplay reasons; weaker storms at the start of the game are more manageable, since the player doesn't have particularly good options for anything. In the late game, the player is much better equipped for a variety of scenarios, so it makes sense to throw stronger storms at them. Ironically, according to what a certain NPC notes about the storms, the temporal storms of the present are actually much weaker than those that occurred post-cataclysm. It's possible that something could be causing the storms to strengthen once again, but if that's the case it has yet to be explained. Agreed, though I do think the rift activity should also keep a somewhat randomized pattern as well. Have to disagree here. Given what temporal storms are(unnatural disasters), they really shouldn't hold any kind of benefit, aside from whatever bit of loot the player manages to extract from monster kills. They're a distinctly bad thing, and presumably one of the things we're trying to fix in order to save the world. From the gameplay standpoint though, I would argue that if temporal storms can shorten the time it takes to finish a task, they should logically be able to do the opposite as well. Which I think is guaranteed to frustrate players, even if the time extension penalty isn't a thing, since the "benefit" is relying on pure RNG. Of course, if the storm is just providing that benefit in every storm, then the player has much less incentive(from both lore and gameplay standpoints) to try to find a way to fix whatever's causing such storms, if a fix even exists. At the very least, if storms offered benefits like that, most of the NPC dialogue regarding them would need to change to reflect that.

For the record, the correct Mods folder should be empty if no mods have been installed previously. The incorrect Mods folder will have a readme file in it that says "Do not put mods here".

To be clear, you said this about the instability mechanic earlier as well: This is also a matter of personal opinion, because there are players that will adamantly tell you that it's an absolute fact that surface instability is boring, unengaging gameplay because it stops players from building whatever they want wherever they want, and there's absolutely no counter other than "don't build there" or "just turn it off". Temporal storms are much the same. Not everyone finds them fun, hence why there are options to customize them. The player cannot stop them directly, outside of turning them off, but the player has options when it comes to dealing with them(work indoors, hide in a bunker, go fight monsters). There's nothing wrong with finding a mechanic boring, and suggesting ways that it could change, but keep in mind that those changes are going to apply to everyone else. Altering or removing a mechanic from the entire game(for everyone) due to individual preference isn't the best logic to use, since not everyone has the same tastes. If that logic were fairly applied, there would be a lot more than temporal storms getting removed from the game; the end result would something very watered down, that likely satisfies no one.

To be frank, this is a matter of personal opinion. To you, they are obviously not engaging gameplay, and that's fine. I myself find them interesting, since they keep me grounded in the world and I have fun planning around the storms. One of my most memorable moments in the game was racing with my friend against the clock to reach the safe haven of a certain story location before a temporal storm arrived. We didn't make it in time, of course, and ended up running through the dark during the storm trying to stay alive, as death would mean respawning thousands of blocks away back at base. It's fair to not like the mechanic, and obviously it's not a mechanic that will be everyone's cup of tea, hence why there are options to turn the storms off or sleep through them. However, turning storms off by default for the Standard difficulty would be a massive disservice to the story and its setting.

That would be nice. And I do find it a bit strange that the longest intervals result in weaker storms. I would have thought the opposite--fewer storms but nastier when they occur.

This is part of the Better Ruins mod, and not vanilla lore. I'm not exactly sure what all it entails, but it is a structure separate from vanilla story locations.

Welcome to the forums! Disable your mods and ensure the vanilla game is working properly first. Once you've verified that vanilla is working, then you can start re-enabling your mods one by one, testing as you go. It's tedious work, but it's the best way to tell exactly which mod is causing the issue so you can remove it. When using mods, do keep in mind that while older mods do sometimes work on newer game versions, it's not a guarantee. It's best to verify that a mod for an older game version is working correctly on a new version before adding it to your modlist. Likewise, beware of mod versions marked "dev", as those are versions still in development and more likely to contain bugs or cause issues.

I would also note that new suggestions also need to take the Standard game balance into account, since that's the game mode intended to be the default(multiple gameplay styles accounted for and settings tuned to satisfy the widest variety of players). Many suggestions that I see float through the forums aren't necessarily bad, as much as they are clearly balanced around individual preference.

Possibly, however, I think the big game changer will be the addition of a status effect/earnable trait system. If the player can earn bonuses to things like melee damage, ranged damage, physical resilience, etc. that allows them to fine tune how they operate in combat. If those changes aren't permanent, that also allows them to potentially do things like practice combat styles to keep the bonuses, or practice styles to switch bonuses as needed. As for status effects...combat becomes a lot more serious than just a numbers game when there's suddenly the potential to get an arm or a leg broken, or a concussion, or some other serious injury that will inhibit your abilities for a while. I play with a mod that adds that concept to Skyrim, and it makes me think much more carefully about how I approach things. I often end up carrying around some medical supplies because when something does happen(it's not so much "if" as "when") a healing potion just isn't going to get me back on my feet. While the player can easily equip a set of gambeson and defeat most things without hassle now, that's not likely to be the most attractive option with status effects since gambeson won't stop bones from getting broken or puncture wounds, etc. It might still prevent the player's death, however, the player probably won't be keen on constantly waiting on injuries to fully heal.

My solution as a new player was to just turn the temporal storm frequency to the longest interval, which also happened to be the setting for the least intense storms as well. That way they were still part of the world, but less spooky and I had plenty of time to prepare or do whatever else I wanted before one arrived. Of course, like many of the settings I originally turned down while learning the game, I gradually returned to the defaults for a better challenge.

Right, and I hold similar opinions. However, at the time I posted that suggestion, the OP seemed to be more interested in the realism and survival mechanics than they were the lore. While I do think the game is lacking without the lore, players who are indifferent to the lore or otherwise don't really enjoy it will probably enjoy a game mode like Homo Sapiens(I mean that is why that game mode exists).

Welcome to the forums! This is already possible via making one's own textures for the game. It's also worth bearing in mind that the devs have their own artistic vision for the game, and texturing takes quite a lot of work. The more textures there are, the more disk space the game will require. It's much better to keep texture packs as optional mods, rather than bake them into the game directly and bloat the file size.

Well...if you shove a pointy object at a flat surface hard enough, the pointy object will stick.

Honestly the more frightening noises are the ones you typically don't get to hear, since they have a rather large aggro range. They will bonk their heads against the ground as an idle, as well as stand up on their hind legs(which makes no noise at all).

Did you update the game recently and did you remember to update the game's data path if you installed it on a different drive? If you installed the game elsewhere, the files will remain where they are supposed to be but the data path for your saves and mods and stuff will get reset to the C drive, which means the game will assume you need to login again.

Not in my experience. Bowtorn require the space to be more than 2 blocks tall, but it can still be less than 3 blocks. I've seen them spawn in rooms that were 2.5 blocks tall due to the ceiling being slabs. Granted, they prefer to spawn in spaces that have at least a 3 block high ceiling, so it's not as common to see them spawn with ceilings slightly lower than that.