LadyWYT

I do agree, but I think a bush rework may very well make berries a seasonal food item. That is, there may only be one or two crops of berries per year, depending on the species, and the different species will probably produce their crops at different times of the year as well. Thus it could be very possible to have lots of different species in one area, without being overpowered. Basically, having a big berry patch available at spawn isn't going to do much good if they only produce one crop, and it's either not in season yet or the player has no means to preserve the harvest. Or if they're several different types with differing seasons, there may only be enough berries available to serve as a light snack at the best of times. I agree here. It would be similar to how Wildcraft handled it, in that breaking bushes would yield sticks or dry grass, depending on the size of the plant. Though I'm not sure about requiring a shovel to transplant berry bushes though. For actual bushes it probably works, but for stuff like blackberries and raspberries those grow on thorny canes that spread via sucker shoots. It makes more sense to take clippings in cases like that, rather than try to dig up the entire parent plant. Perhaps the propagation method might be dependent on the species? It might be a little clunky to implement, and learn to use, but it would give more depth to that area of farming.

I haven't really had a thorough look through the handbook yet, but I like the new berry models, as well as the concept of turning flax grain into seed oil for uses elsewhere.

I would say this is more practical for the other stuff that bony soil can drop--primarily candles, since bees can be a bit tricky to find sometimes and a candle drop can be used for an early lantern. Otherwise, it's a nice way to get the silver and gold needed for a pickaxe, or other basic tool, but not really for an anvil. Cassiterite can be difficult to find sometimes, but it is a relatively common ore so it's often worth checking Poor/Very Poor readings if better readings aren't available. That being said, if tin bronze isn't turning out to be an option, the next best option is bismuth bronze. Bismuth and zinc(sphalerite) ore are common finds as well, and it's not unusual at all to find those two when cassiterite seems to be rare. Additionally, it's also possible to purchase cassiterite from Commodities traders; bismuth and zinc as well, I think. Doing a little exploring and trading for rusty gears to buy the ore is likely going to be a lot less tedious than trying to pan for the silver and gold required to craft a black bronze anvil.

Hello, and welcome to the forums! Don't forget to say hi to Dave when you see him!

Definitely agree. While the rocket boars were a bug, it was a bit of an interesting prospect to have the target up and escape. Granted, once you figured out what was going on, it was easy enough to track down the boar and finish it off. Likewise, the occasional target will still sometimes escape, even with a mod like Bloodtrail that adds a tracking mechanic. I don't know that targets should be able to escape more often, at least not when injured. But it does seem fair to make it harder to approach wild animals, or at least make them flee when a shot misses and not just when the shot actually hits them.

I'll try to test it later, but I'd wager it depends on the class in question, and how the pig is being attacked with the spear. I want to say that in 1.21 it took 4 melee hits with a copper spear for a Blackguard to kill a pig.

Yeah, I agree with @marmarmar34 here. It's a very trivial change to add, and sets the precedent for other trivial changes to be added as toggles/options, which just leads to settings bloat. I'm also fairly certain that the reason the offhand penalty exists, is to discourage players from using the offhandas a free inventory slot, or otherwise running around with a shield/lantern in the offhand all the time like it's the other block game. Same goes for the increased hunger rate while wearing armor--the extra protection is nice to have, but it's not something the player gets for nothing.

To be fair, the current footsteps in 1.22 are pretty quiet. I'm not sure how much they'll help players notice approaching threats. That being said, the bears do have idle grunts and grumbles now, that are easier to notice, and they seem more inclined to wander around rather than sit in place. So I think overall, there might be fewer maulings in 1.22, but we'll see.

Can confirm this is the case. I borrowed a trader's bed the first night in my world. It does, but packed dirt blocks kinda work too. The key I think is to just keep the lean-to tiny--just big enough to cover a bed and a campfire.

According to the "Ghosts" short story...they set up pitiful little camps in the woods. In all seriousness though, I think it depends on the personality, aptitude, and cultural background of the seraph, as well as what kind of climate and materials they have to work with. Probably the easiest general shelter to set up, realistically, is some sort of basic lean-to that's just big enough to sleep in. For a more permanent structure, a log cabin makes a lot of sense if there's plenty of forest around, while a sod house makes more sense where trees are scarce. For a dry climate, building with adobe/wattle-and-daub is going to be an attractive choice. For me, I usually opt for a design similar to the one in the middle, though I make it a full A-frame in most cases, sometimes as a longhouse with 2-3 rooms. I also sometimes skip the thatch roofing and jump straight to the sod roofing instead. Is it very realistic? Eh...perhaps not, but then again there's quite a lot of progression in the game that happens faster than it realistically would. The way I've been handling that from an out-of-game roleplaying standpoint, is using bonfires to keep monsters away, camping out of sight and not making noise when there's rift activity about, and since there's two characters in the story--having one keep watch while the other sleeps. Staying the night at a trader's outpost is likely also an option, provided neither the seraph nor the trader is an absolute jerk. It doesn't really work long term, given that traders seem to prefer solitude, and the seraphs obviously have a mission to complete, but in a world that harsh leaving someone to fend for themselves in the dark is pretty much a death sentence.

Welcome to the forums and the game! I daresay this is something we'll see when the status effect system finally gets added to the game. It only makes sense that wounds would be covered by such a system, and I think animals will likely be able to inflict wounds on players almost as easily as players can wound them. In the meantime, you might try out this mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/bloodtrail While it doesn't make the animals bleed to death, it does make tracking them down a little easier.

They can be tempered and quenched, yes. I've not played around with that mechanic yet, but as I understand it the first quench is basically a freebie, and it's only with successive quenches that the risk of breakage starts going up. Essentially, the more you push the quenching process, the more deadly the weapon can be, at the cost of potentially breaking the piece before you can finish it. Already that gives spears an advantage over the bow, however, the bigger factor, after further thought, is the charge time, I think. In previous versions, it was possible to essentially chain-fire spears, getting off several shots before a target could close the distance. The charge time for spears though has been increased quite a lot, so I'm beginning to think that a player will only be able to get one, maybe two spear shots off before a target closes the distance. If you really want Blackguards to struggle with food in the early game more, a much better change would be making wild prey animals avoid approaching players, similar to how deer and goats already run away when you get too close. It already takes Blackguards an extra shot to kill a target at range compared to other classes, or two extra shots when compared to a hunter; requiring an extra shot on top of that is just going to discourage more players from even giving the class a try(which isn't really ideal). However, some lucrative prey animals, like boar and sheep, will let you walk right up to them...which means that a Blackguard can walk up with a bronze falx and kill a boar in about three hits, or otherwise do enough damage in melee to finish a fleeing target with a single spear. And some lucrative prey animals, like male deer and rams, are easy to bait into charging you, so you can fight in melee instead of needing to hunt at range. By changing prey animals to notice players a little more easily though, and have them move away as the player approaches, that prevents Blackguards from exploiting the AI quite so much and pushes them to actually need to rely on ranged weapons if they're going to be doing much hunting, as well as makes hunting a little more interesting for all classes in general. That is, the animals can potentially die a little more easily to ranged weapons, but you're not going to be able to set up a good shot if you're giving them advance warning by running around through the bushes and otherwise making a spectacle of yourself.

This is also why I upgrade to steel as soon as possible; not only are the tools faster, but they last a little over twice as long. Makes digging out lots of stone for building less hassle, same goes for stockpiling logs or digging up lots of dirt and clay. I typically build two refractories and run them at the same time, so I get 32 steel ingots per firing. Wintertime is the perfect time for this kind of work as well, since not only is the wind better for powering the helve hammer, but the hot coal piles underneath the refractories provide a convenient spot to warm up when working outside.

This is what you must do to achieve calm water in Vintage Story; the water physics don't work like in Minecraft. Those bubbles indicate where the water flow is. If you empty another bucket of water on those spots the water should become calm.

Amaranth, raccoons, purpleheart trees, whitetail deer, and pudu didn't exist in the Old World region either at the time, but we still have them in the game. So this is one case where an anachronism like tomatoes and potatoes would be just fine.

In fairness, it is a pretty fun game.

Seriously. https://github.com/anegostudios/VintageStory-Issues/issues/8032 It also seems to mess with the ambience cues, and low temporal stability seems to be lacking monster spawns as well as triggering health loss about as soon as the temporal storm effects of low stability trigger. If you're trying to use a temporal gear to restore stability, it's also possible to hurt yourself without using the gear or restoring stability, if you release the mouse button too early. Oh for sure, and it's the kind of experience I think would be perfect for procedural dungeons as a rare encounter. It's just not something I'd want to see scattered everywhere like a fantasy biome. I ran into similar issues with biome mods in Minecraft, now that I think about it, and even the newer pale garden biome in the vanilla game. The new biomes were fun to find and look at and all, but some were a definite eyesore, and the ones that were more likely to spawn monsters just added to the problem.

If there has to be an obvious visual cue, this would definitely be preferable to some kind of screen overlay, obvious textures, or obvious sound distortions. Visually, I just prefer the beauty of nature to be preserved throughout the world, with the story locations and other rare instances being the few exceptions to the rule. To cite Thaumcraft as an example that adds obvious messed up areas to the world; I did play with that mod several times, and it was interesting, but Minecraft also isn't a game that really tries to be rooted in realistic nature and process(despite some odd design decisions). So finding weird, whimsical, or downright creepy stuff scattered about is rather expected. Were you playing 1.21 or 1.22? If 1.22, what very likely happened is you stepped into a rift, or otherwise had one spawn on top of you. Outside of the cog drain, it's not currently possible to notice rifts otherwise(outside of a cluster of monster spawns if it's dark enough), as they're missing the graphics, sounds, and the cog spins clockwise for whatever reason.

Yep! So is licorice, though I don't know what nutrients either require.

It is optional, at least at the moment.

I disagree. The unstable areas are hazards that can sneak up on players that aren't paying attention. In my experience, it's quite doable to hang around in one for a day or two before needing to leave. If one doesn't pay attention though, they may drop more stability than intended, or otherwise go venturing into caves or potentially even a temporal storm with a decent chunk of their stability missing. In short, yes, it is subtle, but that's also part of the appeal, at least to me. There's just enough hazard there to require a little extra planning and caution when dealing with those areas, but they aren't going to be eyesores that require no thought to avoid. Fair, but in turn I was using that as part of my example as well, on why I don't really like the suggestions I've seen about changing visuals about unstable areas. Rusty metal textures aren't natural textures, same as rusty metal scraps and other things related to the Rust World. Rust is a natural process, yes, but when you find stuff like that out in the woods that's generally someone's garbage dump, or a long-abandoned residence. That is, it's man-made, and not natural. In the case of Rust World corruption, that's not natural either, so if I see it scattered around in pockets everywhere, that are a common find, then the world is going to feel less like a natural living world that I'm trying to survive in(with horror elements as a backdrop) and more like a standard videogame setting with omnipresent monsters and horror features. In short, it ain't my cup of tea.

The main hurdle I see to making the damage the same, is that Blackguard and Hunter throw a wrench into that balance. If the melee damage is too high Blackguard will be too strong, since the extra reach makes it harder for a target to get away from a brawl. If the ranged damage is too low, then a lot of players are going to be upset, since I think more players tend to throw spears than use them in melee. I do like this proposal though--it feels pretty fair. I would throw a quiver into the mix as well, with the idea being that the player can fit it with a poison capsule to soak their arrows in until they're fired. To my knowledge, poison loses effectiveness when it dries, and it's not really practical to try to poison a spear or sword in the middle of combat, nor is it always an option to poison the weapons right before a fight occurs.

Fair enough, but I do like examining designs. Plus it's fun trying to reason why a design might be off-putting to some.

I can't really recall transparency being an issue when scaling an image. What tends to be more of a problem is pixels versus vectors. I'm probably butchering the terminology here, but basically, vector art utilizes smooth curves, so it's easy to resize the image without losing image quality in the process. A rasterized image--that is, one made out of pixels--can be shrunk much easier than it can be made larger. Shrinking a rasterized image is usually easier to do since the software is just removing pixels from the image to make it smaller, which makes it a bit easier to preserve design quality(not really an issue though, since small images prioritize saving space so preserving detail isn't a priority). When making a rasterized image larger though, the software is adding more pixels to the original image so it makes its best guess on where to put them based on what's already there, hence why image quality suffers more the larger you try to make the original design(ie, it gets really pixelated, really fast). There's also stuff like image dpi(dots per inch), which is basically just how many pixels an image has per inch of image--if I'm recalling correctly, the standard for print is 300 dpi, but it's also been quite a while since art school. With the logo itself, I don't think it's the edge transparency that is a problem, as much as it is perhaps the lack of a defining outline. The colors the logo uses are similar to the background coloring of the menu, so some of the details start blending in as a result. A dark colored outline around the logo would make it much easier for the eye to tell where the logo ends and the background begins.

The hotbar cog is fairly obvious, yes, but like I said before, it's also fairly easy to forget about since it only takes up a small portion of the screen. Visuals that cover the entire screen, however, are pretty much impossible to ignore unless they're extremely subtle...which kinda defeats the purpose if the intent is to make unstable areas more obvious. Parts of the world are unnatural, but the world as a whole appears to be mostly natural, outside of a few specific locations and events like rifts/temporal storms. That is, the unnatural parts remain in the background, for the most part, and aren't sitting there staring the player in the face. Placing locust nests, rusty debris, and weird rusty textures around an unstable area like Thaumcraft did with taint would make the unstable areas extremely noticeable, yes, but then the world as a whole just doesn't feel natural and the player's not lulled into a false sense of security as a result. It also makes it pretty much impossible for unstable areas to ever catch players off guard as well, which in my opinion isn't really ideal. The more ideal design, to me, is a beautiful, natural world that's inviting to explore and interact with, with some unnatural elements in the background that will catch the player off-guard occasionally, and provide brief moments of suspense in areas where the unnatural is highly concentrated. That is, part of the reason certain story locations have the impact that they do, is that the anomalies within are quite rare, and specific to those locations. If such anomalies were absolutely everywhere, then such things would just become...common...and not really be interesting to find anymore because, well, they're everywhere.