LadyWYT

From a game balance standpoint, yes. The advantage of a spear in melee is the longer reach, while the advantage of using it as a ranged weapon is that it does more damage than a bow in return for having a shorter range, slower fire rate, and less efficient use of inventory space. By making the damage the same for melee and ranged use, the spear either ends up outclassing falxs/swords with ease, or being too underwhelming as a ranged weapon to be worth using.

Yes. If you can't make a firepit, you're not cooking food, smelting basic ores, or otherwise staying warm. It's very basic progression, but it is progress. I don't dispute that a lot of players have a background in Minecraft, but as far as I'm aware, punching the grass isn't the first thing players do in Minecraft. Most players, I'm pretty sure, go punch trees. Which they'll quickly figure out does not work in Vintage Story. Which is also introducing yet more controls, which some players have noted in other threads that the current controls already feel too complicated in some cases. Personally, I prefer just letting the grass breakage be left-click, and using a knife or scythe if I actually want that grass to be anything usable. And yes, grass will eventually grow back if the player breaks it(outside of the special scythe mode), but it also takes a little while. Yes, grass can be burned as fuel, but it's not really the most useful thing as fuel and I don't think players want to be dumping it in firepits every time their inventory fills up with it. Especially not when there's a simple solution that stops that kind of clutter from happening in the first place(current game mechanics). As a side note on a "no tools" survival challenge, it's also not enough to just add a way to make firepits without tools. Firestarters technically being tools aside, the player needs a knife to harvest animals, most crafting requires tools, and weapons are a tool for combat. With a strict "no tools" rule, the only option the player really has is living off whatever they can scrounge up for berries, mushrooms, and perhaps the occasional bug or beehive raid.

I'd like a few extra ways to build firepits without needing firewood, but I'm not sure what the point of removing the tool requirement entirely is. The player needs tools to do pretty much anything in the game, and I think also too many players get caught up on the "realistic survival" aspect and assume Vintage Story is a caveman simulator when it's not. Yes, realistic survival is part of the game, and a player can pretend to be a caveman if they want, but the survival aspect is really only the start of the game, as once the player acquires copper tools they have what they need to focus on homesteading and things other than just eeking out a bare minimum existence in the wilderness. For gameplay purposes, no. Realistically, yes, you can go outside and start ripping up grass with your bare hands, but from a gameplay standpoint players might want to clear the grass for whatever reason, but don't necessarily want to fill their inventory with it. Tossing it just creates clutter in the world that takes a while to despawn and can be easily picked back up by accident.

I wouldn't mind seeing some sort of reputation system, as that can lead to some more interesting NPCs, though I would still expect the default personality to be mostly friendly. If the player decides to complete certain side quests, and chooses appropriate dialogue options, then the NPC in question could have better deals, or perhaps special quests or dialogue. If the player decides to be a jerk and pick rude dialogue options, NPCs could develop colder attitudes, even going so far as to refuse to interact with the player if the player has a proven record of assaulting/killing NPCs, meaning the player will need to bribe NPCs for business or find some way to restore their reputation. I think in that case, there's enough of a safety net for players to hit/kill an NPC once to see what happens without ruining their game, while still providing serious consequences if the player decides they want to be an absolute menace. Would people game it? Probably, though I'm not sure that there's really a way to stop players from min-maxing or otherwise gaming systems. I think for storytelling purposes, most players would probably enjoy a system that allows the denizens of the world to respond somewhat to their choices, even if it's only for roleplaying and cosmetic rewards. Players could also choose to ignore roleplaying and always pick the options that yield the best rewards, but this kind of play tends to be balanced by the fact that picking the same options all the time gets pretty boring after a while.

First off, welcome to the forums! If the loot window isn't showing up at all when harvesting the carcass, I would try reloading the world and seeing if that fixes it. However... When mods are involved and strange behavior happens, it's usually a mod that is causing it. Are there any mods that you've added recently? If the modded game was working fine before, and isn't now, and you've added mods recently, most likely it's an issue with one of the recent additions. If you have mods that alter inventory/loot windows, or certain player actions, those could be the culprits too. Otherwise, it's difficult to say for certain. Even if no mods alter animal drops/behavior, it's possible that they could have weird bugs lurking within or conflict with other mods and cause issues that way. The easiest way to figure out which mod is causing the issue, if there are no obvious culprits, is to disable them all and verify that the vanilla game works correctly, then re-enable mods one by one and test them as you do so. It's tedious, but it will be very obvious which one caused the issue when the problem reappears.

I agree that we shouldn't be able to just use the traders' beds, though I would also say that barring the player from using the firepit and cookpot is probably a good idea as well. It's a little goofy, yes, but at the same time...I don't think I would be very happy if a stranger walked into my house and started using my stuff without permission. If they do, I wouldn't mind seeing a basic hay bed or something inside some of the trader compounds as a rough guest bed. The traders probably don't get that many guests, but I could see them having a place for one to sleep, just in case.

The antler sheds tend to happen while there is still snow on the ground, and will despawn after a time since they're a dropped item. They're somewhat rare to find at the moment and the player basically has to deliberately checking the areas that male deer inhabit around the end of winter in order to have the best chance of even finding the sheds. If the player wants antlers, the most reliable way to get them is hunting. As for starting the game earlier, I do think it would be nice to have an option of changing the start date, but the default start date itself shouldn't be set earlier since that will probably cause even more issues, at least in the current state of the game. Consider that the earlier the start date, the more the player will need to worry about freezing and starving to death, since the weather is cold and wild foods are still dormant, and given recent balancing animals may not be spawning in the winter either.

Not necessarily. It depends on the context of how the term is being used. Like @Teh Pizza Lady says, the Blackguards favor shortswords mainly because they're having to fight in incredibly cramped spaces. Weapons that have longer reach give a definite advantage, but that advantage is completely flipped in such spaces. As for why such a thing is class-locked...it's not exactly difficult to make a weapon, but it does take more knowledge and experience to craft a quality one. Given that Blackguards were basically the police(maybe even secret police and disappearing suspected rebels) in a situation that is quite desperate, the last thing they're going to want is competition when it comes to arms and armor, since competition means a greater likelihood of rebellion. Thus I would say it makes perfect sense to have that be a class-locked weapon; it takes special knowledge and skill that the other classes just wouldn't have had access to acquiring. As for a classic arming sword/longsword option, I do think it would be nice to have an option that all classes could craft, as well as a few other usable options like the ruined versions of weapons we can find. However, such weapons should have difficulties when fighting supernatural monsters, since the game makes it clear that the falx became the weapon of choice for fighting such since the more conventional weapons just weren't that effective. I don't know that any NPC has really described the Blackguards as "noble", not even the one that has a favorable view of them. I would say it's more a case of, at best, certain individuals appreciate that they did a difficult, nasty job that no one else wanted/could do, and turn a blind eye to how the job was done.

I think the idea is to cook the whole fish if you just need the satiety points, but otherwise flay and cook into a proper meal if you have the means to do so. By cooking the fillets into a proper meal, you're getting a pause on the hunger meter in addition to a lot of satiety. Probably, though it seems especially valuable for bigger fish that yield several fillets. In those cases, a single fish can feed the player for several meals.

Personally, I think in some cases the land features aren't nearly big enough, mainly for areas like plains and plateaus. Once in a while, I want to feel like I'm in Kansas, or certain parts of Texas, and a plateau feels pretty underwhelming when it only covers a couple hundred blocks or so. Mountains feel okay to me(though they could stand to have a peakier variant), since a videogame mountain is pretty underwhelming if you can't climb to the top and actually survey the land surrounding. Have you tried lowering the Landform Scale setting, or perhaps changing Climate Distribution to Patchy rather than the default Realistic? Lowering the landform scale should mean that land features are smaller, with more being able to fit within an area, while changing the climate distribution to patchy will yield a biome style more similar to Minecraft.

I second this. If there are multiple versions of the same mod within the server mods folder, it can sometimes cause issues. When a mod updates on the server, the server will prompt download of the updated version, but old versions of mods will need to be deleted manually.

It shouldn't, aside from you'll just need to wait for more creatures to respawn. You can free them if you really want, but it's probably better to just harvest them for food and materials.

Kind of, but not really. To my knowledge the way it works is that nothing happens while the chunks are unloaded, but as soon as the player enters them the game does a "time check" to see what should have taken place in the interim and updates everything accordingly. So you can plant crops, leave home for a while, and come back to a harvest, or frozen crops in the event it got too cold, etc. Ice is bit finicky on how it works though. The game doesn't update ice very quickly, so you can revisit a chunk in winter and it'll take a while for the ice to freeze, or revisit a chunk in summer and the ice there will take a while to melt. Snow, on the other hand, updates fairly fast, so most chunks should be appropriately snowy or not-snowy when the player visits them.

It does, at least solar eclipses, but they are quite rare.

Maybe try a different bait? Doesn't necessarily need to be stinkbait, since regular bushmeat and redmeat should work. I can't say that I know all the specifics of fishing, but different fish are supposed to take different bait and it might be that ocean fish don't like worms.

Honestly, this is partly how I got so invested in the game once I tried it. The creepy gears make sense enough if one watches the game's trailer, but the clock in the tree I just had to figure out. Why is it there? What purpose does it server? How could it possibly represent a game based on realistic survival in a meaningful fashion? In fairness, the tree clock is never directly explained anywhere in the game, but it does make a lot of sense once one digs into the game's core themes and story.

Yeah, plus I mean...whoever was originally living in those ruins probably wasn't in a life-or-death wilderness survival situation like that player, so it stands to reason they would have had the option of making better stuff. Of course, since surface ruins are easy to loot, all the best stuff has already been looted, leaving the stone tools and occasional metal tool that got overlooked. I like this idea too, though I think I would prefer the handaxe be used to strip branches off smaller trees and refine the result into a proper spear pole rather than using a basic stick(with the branches being sticks as byproducts), but...that would also require a rework of trees. I need to test the club as a weapon again though. It's probably still useless at the moment, but I recall someone mentioning it had a faster swing time than the spear, so it may actually be a decent weapon in certain circumstances. I was thinking of that as well when writing the post earlier. Sometimes I break a knife, or forgot to bring an axe with me, and am too lazy to run back to base to get my tools, so I'll just make a stone tool instead since it's convenient. In that case, I might start carrying an antler piece around for that purpose. Additionally, finding antler pieces occasionally in the wild would let the player access those tools earlier in the game, while still preserving the full antlers as proper hunting trophies. Of course, if the player has acquired a full set of antlers that they don't want to decorate with, they could use a hammer to break the antlers down into pieces for knapping if the antlers are large enough, or otherwise grind up the small antlers and antler pieces in the quern for bonemeal.

Yes, maps from treasure hunters lead to treasures like this. That being said... It is vanilla, but not triggered by purchasing a map. I'm not sure what triggers these spawns, but I've found a couple without having bought a map. Go figure. I'm wondering if the feature is a bit bugged, as I'm not sure they're supposed to be this easy to find, or otherwise spawn without purchase of a map.

They will not. At least, not without mods. Perhaps in a future update deer will be able to breed

A fair point, and I apologize for getting a bit heated about it the other day. After having some time to cool off and think about it a little more, I think it could work great as a "quench" mechanic for stone tier tech. By that I mean that the player can still make stone tools as normal, but if they use an antler, then they can make a stone tool that's a bit more durable and can work faster thanks to quality craftsmanship. This way players aren't locked out of faster progress, but have some neat options if they want to take things a little slower. I would also say that the stone tools in cracked vessels and stone parts from panning could be the higher quality stone tools/parts as well, since those drops aren't exactly exciting loot otherwise. However, if those drops were higher quality than what the player could normally craft, then it'd feel a little better to find those things as loot.

Beats me. I've quit trying to figure it out, for the most part, and just accepted that given some of the posts that float through the forums, a few players still manage to starve to death in the game somehow. Oh for sure. I would say it's intentional game design in VS's case, though not to the extent that the player is supposed to be completely ground into the dirt with suffering. Rather, I would say the intended balance is that the player is meant to struggle just enough to be a fun challenge and feel like the game has some serious stakes, but not so much that the average player can't complete those challenges with a little reading and thinking. It reminds me of many of the older games I played as a kid. Some of them were still easy, to be fair, but I think most games back then didn't have a problem with pushing player abilities and allowing the player to make mistakes and sometimes fail. Looking things up on the internet wasn't really an option(dial-up, and gaming stuff wasn't as widespread as it is now), and sometimes one had to just set the game aside for a while and come back later to try again. I think many modern games have discarded that kind of design in favor of designs that allow players to easily succeed on the first try, or otherwise don't really punish mistakes, possibly because that kind of design tends to keep players playing(because there's no real prompt to take a break) and more easily appeals to a wider audience.

I think if it's just a small friends group, you should be fine, even if the server is running 24/7. You can set the server time so that it pauses if no one is online, which definitely helps with the game pacing. Likewise, if you're all working together rather than running off to build independent bases, it's easier to manage everything since those who play more often can make sure supplies are stocked and whatnot for those who can't play as often. However, if everyone is operating independently or there are mods like XSkills installed that give a significant power boost to those that play more often, then it gets a little harder to keep things balanced as players who don't play as often will fall behind. My friend and I play cooperatively, and it's always worked for us. Time doesn't pass if neither of us is online, and we both play around the same general times as well. In the event that only one of us is online though, then it's understood that whoever is online is responsible for keeping supplies stocked and making sure the base doesn't burn down, so to speak. As for bigger servers types that you've mentioned...I have no idea. It depends heavily on the server and the goals of the community. I think as a general rule, the months might be set to maximum length and food spoilage rate turned way down in order to help make sure that players don't have everything rot just because they couldn't play for a day or two. I think a lot of players may also tend to settle in warmer regions where they can leave crops in the fields without worrying about them freezing. Depending on the server, they may also have a few mods to help manage such issues as well; I think there's at least a mod or two that's supposed to stop food in the player's inventory from spoiling if they are offline. In any case, I would also say that at least part of the responsibility lies on the player as well, in that if they're going to play on a busy server, they need to make sure they can log in consistently or otherwise have a friend group to work with in the event they're a more infrequent player.

You don't necessarily need worms, as regular bushmeat and redmeat, and maybe poultry too, can also serve as bait. And it's pretty easy to get any of those via killing small animals, though the bushmeat in particular is probably more valuable as bait than as a meal. I actually disagree--overall, berry foraging feels about as strong as before, if not a bit stronger. Fishing does feel strong, however, there also seems to be a good handful of players that struggle to catch enough fish or otherwise forage enough food to feed themselves, which suggests to me that the mechanic is fairly balanced. I want to say that in some of the earlier releases, it did take fish a little longer to bite, or areas could be overfished more easily. As for the fishing pole not losing durability...probably a bug that hasn't been fixed yet. Wooden pans are also supposed to have durability but have similar issues. In any case, based on my experience so far, fishing feels stronger as a supplement to traditional hunting, rather than a full replacement. Redmeat is more filling than fish, and yields hides, fat, and bones that can potentially be used for tools as well. Hunting also feels a little faster, if you know what you're doing.

That makes the situation slightly better, but only slightly. Either the player doesn't need the advanced knapping and can progress to copper as normal, or they still wind up stuck needing to wait several in-game months or rely on RNG to get what they need to actually get out of the stone age. Mind you, they have to do all that while managing to keep themselves fed, dealing with temporal storms, and dealing with potential injuries, diseases, and other natural threats. And that's assuming the player actually has the correct species of male deer spawn, as not all deer produce antlers large enough to be useful for tool-making(or in some cases, perhaps too large). The very best case scenario I can see here is players being left to scratch their heads wondering why they have to have an antler to make stone tools and progress, rather than just use a couple of tough rocks to make a stone tool instead. Logically, if someone were dropped into a real life survival situation, with nothing to work with, knapping with rocks is going to be far more feasible than trying to acquire an antler or other large bone. Sure, but that defeats the trophy aspect of antlers, really. They're mostly a neat item that the player can collect and use for decoration, or otherwise grind into bonemeal. To my knowledge, bones and antlers tend not to linger around for very long in the wild given that creatures like to gnaw on them, but it depends on the circumstances. Eh, I still disagree. Yes, some of new player complaints stem from preconceived notions of what games should be, but that doesn't mean they're entirely wrong in their complaints either. And yes, it's okay for games to be occasionally frustrating, but it's easy to push that frustration too far, which I think this idea does. I disagree. The next step shouldn't be so obvious that the player never has to think, but it shouldn't be so obscure that the player is going to end up stumbling around and getting frustrated trying to figure out just what they're supposed to do. I'll also note that yes, players do have differing ideas about "how far apart the dots need to be", so to speak, but you can't always expect players to just deal with it either. Like I said before, expecting players to spend around 60 real life hours stuck in what's basically the tutorial tech before allowing them to advance is just asking for frustrated players. Also worth noting from the FAQ section(emphasis added): If the overall goal is for the main progression/main story completion to take around 100 hours of playtime on average, forcing players to spend 60 hours just progressing past stone isn't going to cut it. Survival is one aspect of the game, yes, but only one aspect. I could be wrong, but most players don't tend to have very much fun if they're constantly trying not to starve, can't build bases because they don't have tools, can't fight enemies because they don't have weapons and armor, etc. The list goes on and on, and I daresay only gets worse once status effects are added. Challenges aren't fun if the player has no way to deal with them, and players don't tend to enjoy games that demand a huge time investment for the player to make basic progress. Which that kind of time gate also tends to be a prominent feature in MMOs or pay-to-win games, in order to force the players to spend more money. My point is that this kind of thing might be fun for you, but probably would not be a popular change for the playerbase at large by any means. For myself, it's the kind of change I would most likely mod out immediately, or otherwise move away from Vintage Story in favor of other games. I think that if you want to make the early game truly feel more impactful, in a way that is both fun and challenging, there are better ways to do so. A status effect system being chief among them, along with making plant yields seasonal. The game changes quite drastically when berries and other wild harvestables aren't in season, and the player can potentially suffer lingering consequences from getting injured or falling ill due to staying out in the elements without appropriate clothing.

Revisiting "From Golden Combs", but I think this covers my main gripe about the mod. Too many cosmetic options aside, it's fairly easy for the player to build one large Langstroth hive and cover all their beekeeping needs. To be fair, Langstroth hives take a bit of effort, requiring the player to use simpler hives at the start of the game, but they were pretty clunky to use(at least, last time I played with the mod) and it seems to me that the player should need to build at least a handful of hives in order to have solid honey production, rather than just build a single hive box and call it good.