LadyWYT

You can! I think it's slightly less efficient than other coal types, but not to the point it's a waste to use it. You will need charcoal or coke for the coffins though, as no other fuel type is appropriately carbonated.

Over two years? I'm not sure, as I've never bothered to count. My rough guess would be around 2-3 harvests per year on default settings. This I am also not sure, but I'm guessing that a single harvest isn't going to drain so many nutrients that the bush's health starts to suffer. I think it's more a case of the player just needs to sprinkle some bonemeal on their berry patch once a year to keep them in good health(and thus productive).

It's a bit goofy on the scaling, but realistically steel takes quite a bit of effort to process, at least by medieval methods, which the game is trying to reflect. Playing with 30 day months puts the game as a whole on a more realistic time scale, but the drawback there is it's going to take the player a really long time to do things like farming or livestock domestication. Additionally, the seasons will drag on perhaps a little longer than is really interesting. My strategy for steel-making is to run two refractories at once. Takes quite a bit of effort to set up, to be sure, but the output is going to be 32 ingots per firing rather than just 16. The refractories are also a convenient place to warm up in winter as well. For fuel, I'll often use brown coal, if I have access to it, but usually I'm building a really big charcoal pit(think close to maximum size). Takes a lot of work to fill, but produces around a couple full crates of charcoal per firing, so I don't need to fire it that often.

This is one reason why I'm not really a fan of Better Ruins. I have a better PC now than when I tried the mod, but still...I appreciate what it does, but I don't want my game to hiccup because it's trying to generate a mega-mansion. Also, welcome to the forums! Echoing Thorfinn's sentiments, it depends on what the mod does and whether or not it really fits the devs' vision. Popular mods are good candidates for things that could be added to the game, but just because a mod is popular doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea to add.

Hunter + Blackguard is a beast of a combination. That's typically the combo my friend and I roll with, and we can pretty easily dominate most any threat that comes after us. The worst enemy we tend to face is ourselves(of which there are a few stories in the funny story thread).

An in-game week is seven days. An in-game month will vary, and is nine in-game days by default. The processing time for steel will always take about an in-game week, to my knowledge, and does not scale with the month length.

Yes and no. My progression has slowed down a bit mostly due to my own choice, since there is now more stuff to do in the early game so I stick around at the bronze level for a while before moving on to iron. Berries are still a solid early food source, though I typically shift to meat and mushroom stew as soon as I have a cookpot because Blackguards really like filling meals. Seeds I wish I could sell to traders, because I have way more than I need thanks to all the extra wild flax and other grains. As for raw grain being edible again, I forgot exactly when it was fixed, but it was fixed in one of the early pre versions, so it's been edible for a while. One thing I've been experimenting with--bronze lameller. I donned a full set of it with a bronze falx and crude shield in a light temporal storm and was quite successful at hunting the monsters. Still needed to duck inside to heal a couple of times, but I managed to kill a double-headed drifter and got a handful of rusty gears along with a couple of temporal gears for the effort. The rusty gears felt like a really good reward at this stage of the game, since there's resources to buy at the local traders to make progress easier(like lime).

I voted for Mix, but want to elaborate on why: rather than do a snowy island, you might try the Patchwork world type. While it's completely unrealistic, it does make for a very different playthrough when you can have a tropical jungle right next to an arctic glacier. Alternatively, you could also just shorten the polar-equator distance and build bases in both the arctic and tropics, and simply migrate between them.

Haha, no worries! I play a lot of Blackguard as well, and when I'm not a Blackguard I'm usually a Tailor.

I don't think this is intended. It's been reported on the bug tracker and listed as a bug, so it should be resolved by the stable release, if it's not been fixed already. As I understand it, the nutrients are only used when the berries ripen, but even then it's only a chance to actually use up nutrients. I think it's supposed to take about two in-game years for a berry bush to deteriorate from bountiful to barren if the player takes zero care of the bush. Interesting. Sounds like something that might be adjusted, but it also sounds like it's probably fine. There's only so many berry bushes one needs in singleplayer, and this sort of feature would probably be really nice in multiplayer for players to share/sell cuttings to other players. This isn't the impression I've gotten. I think the intention is less to make bushes less available to players, and more to make the bushes behave like actual plants, as well as discourage players from just tearing up the local plant life and hauling everything back to base(which can be a real problem on larger servers). With the changes, players will need to put just a little more effort into establishing a berry patch at their base, but they can grow as many bushes as they want, as well as have potentially better yields than before. For wild bushes this is most likely so that players, especially newer players, will have more food options at the beginning of a game, where they're going to be struggling to survive. Once the game has been fleshed out a little more I would expect the berry bushes(and other plant life) to become entirely seasonal.

Are you playing Blackguard or Tailor? I think the foraging penalty applies to resin, not just berry bushes and mushrooms.

Something tells me there will be lots of shenanigans in multiplayer this update... Nice! No more needing to use creative or rely on the helve hammer to fix the duds!

It looks like some extra server utilities have been added in rc5, notably some changes to clear up queues, it seems, as well as a tool to allow servers to kick players who are AFK for too long. Hopefully that helps smooth out the experience for those who play on TOPS/other large servers.

Welcome to the forums! Could easily be some sort of expansion on the cave painting concept. Mix some paint, fill a bowl, and then use a brush in a similar fashion to the chisel to paint marks on appropriate surfaces. Though I'd also like to see the pigments able to be added to plaster mix to create brightly colored plaster blocks. Those would be so useful to have for chiseling details and decorations.

It could be countered by disabling players from creating water sources via bucket, but that limits options for creativity in addition to other issues.

I would like to see an exception for polar bears though, since those are known to deliberately stalk humans.

Not really. The best I can think of is just making a setting option for food to not spoil in player inventories while they're offline, so that players could at least reliably have food to eat if they need to log out mid-adventure. Or a setting to stop food stored on a claim from spoiling while the owner(s) are offline; I say "owners", since I'm not sure if claims can be set up to allow access to multiple players or not. There is(or was) a mod that added that kind of function to the player inventory, but mods currently are not an option for official servers. In a cooperative multiplayer setting I don't think food spoilage or resources are as much of an issue, since players are cooperating with each other and sharing resources/labor. But in cases where players are operating independently it seems to be more of an issue.

One slight problem--fast-moving water tends to be resistant to freezing. A thin layer of ice might develop on the surface if it's cold enough, but it has to be pretty dang cold for moving water to freeze solid. The main advantage of water power is that it's supposed to be consistent, with the disadvantage being that the player has to build their machinery at the source in order to actually use that kind of power. If rapids can easily freeze up in winter, then water power can easily become something players start ignoring since the benefits no longer outweigh the negatives.

I disagree, as that essentially renders the hunger penalty ineffective. The main balance point of Blackguard is that the class has the weakest early game in exchange for the strongest late game. The extra 30% hunger isn't really that bad, provided the player knows what they're doing when it comes to food supply, and just means that Blackguards will tend to prefer heavier meals like meat pie/meat stew, or otherwise be inclined to carry more food around in general. The good news is that there is a mod that allows you to do this! https://mods.vintagestory.at/expandedstomach Very nice utility, but it doesn't come without some potential drawbacks. The config has some preset difficulties for players who want to just jump right into playing, but the config also allows the player to adjust most things about the mod if they wish.

I'm going off what I see float through the forums. There are already tools in place to handle certain issues like food spoilage, yes, and I'm sure large servers take advantage of such. But it also doesn't seem to be an uncommon complaint that food stores spoil or harvests were missed because the player skipped a few days between play sessions for whatever reason. While that is just part of playing the game, and part of the drawback of playing on a large server, it does seem like one area where there could be a few extra server-specific tools to make multiplayer a little more manageable for players who can't necessarily log in every day to take care of their stuff. Plus if players don't feel as pressured to need to log in every day to make sure their stuff is in order/avoid losing progress, it might help take some pressure off the server queue. That's all.

Thanks for the writeup! It makes a lot more sense, and is the kind of change I wouldn't mind seeing in the game. Though it does seem like the kind of change that would go hand-in-hand with a proper rework of the temperature system, so I'm not sure we'll see a change like this in the near future. But I do like it.

Depends. I've been encountering more bears in 1.22, seemingly, and while some of them have seemed more aggressive, others have seemed less so. Yesterday I got swatted by a brown bear once and thought I was about to be "helped" back home, but for whatever reason the bear didn't give chase. I guess he was just angry at being woken up from a nap? There was also a black bear that started to chase me and then gave up after about 20 blocks. A few other bears, both black and brown, I've practically walked right by without them so much as giving me a funny look. Wolves I wouldn't mind seeing be a little more skittish when alone, and howling to summon packmates before attacking the player, if they're actually intent on hunting the player. If they're cornered or have pups, they should obviously be a little more aggressive anyway, but I do think the pack tactics would make them a little more interesting and dangerous as a predator. I think they're fine for what the game is right now, but I've been thinking a lot on how the status effect system could potentially change the game. One possibility that I think I would like to see, is removing the direct damage from certain things and replacing it with status effects instead. For example, poisonous mushrooms might no longer be listed as poisonous or directly damage the player when eaten, but may cause some unpleasant effects(including death) sometime later if the player eats them. A wolf bite might not immediately damage a player's health, but may inflict a bleed that will hurt the player over time if not tended, or become infected if not cleaned properly. In those cases the penalties are technically heavier than just "you die, try again!", but I do think they lead to more interesting outcomes since the player has more opportunity to not only survive a dangerous situation, but ways to handle the consequences that result from said situation without having to resort to a death run.

Having at least one official server per region would be great and take at least some of the pressure off the original TOPS. However, it's still a recurring expense, and money that goes into maintaining that infrastructure is money that's not getting used elsewhere in development. Not that that's bad or good, there's just tradeoffs. I think it's probably better to wait on opening new TOPS though, and instead add more tools to the game that make curating a large multiplayer experience much smoother. As I understand it, Vintage Story is balanced primarily around singleplayer, or a small-scale multiplayer setting with a few friends. Large servers tend to run into problems with food spoilage and spawn getting picked clean of resources and other issues due to the sheer number of players and time passing because there's always someone online. While this is true, the problem about working with third-party is that you lose some control over quality and service. Building your own infrastructure and staffing it is definitely more expensive, but then you don't have to worry about a third-party cutting corners, or raising prices, or deciding they don't want to do business anymore for some reason, etc. Not that third-parties will always cause problems, but Anego Studios is likely to be blamed for whatever problems there are, even if it's not something they're at fault for. Volunteers can be great, but relying too heavily on volunteer work can reflect poorly on a company in the long-term. You'd also still need to keep an eye on the volunteer moderators and make sure they're actually doing the job properly, and not abusing the position. Overall, I think splitting TOPS into regional servers at some point in the future is probably the best idea for handling things, preferably with Anego staff and infrastructure to maintain quality. The only drawback I really see though is that while it might alleviate some of the wait times, it's probably not going to fix them entirely since, well, a lot of players tend to gravitate towards the most popular servers, even if there are better options available. Likewise, if players are insistent on playing a specific server because that's where the devs/popular personalities happen to play too, opening new servers isn't going to fix that kind of problem.

Yeah, quenching for power should increase workspeed on tools like picks and axes, not just damage. I seem to recall seeing a bug report recently pointing out that the feature wasn't working quite right.

I wouldn't mind having some different materials to make handles from, but if the tool/weapon has been used enough to break, so should the handle. I like the idea but not the implementation, as it feels too much like Minecraft. A better option, I think, is having colorful cloaks, sashes, or animal pelts as cosmetics that can be worn over armor, or otherwise creating some sort of painting system the player can use to paint patterns on shields, similar to chiseling. I think options like those are both much more realistic, as well as offer much more options in general. I was thinking about this the other day, in that a Morrowind-style system would be interesting. By that I mean splitting armor into a few more pieces, and then letting players mix and match those pieces as desired to get the look/practical benefits they want. Don't have a lot of metal? Might want to invest in gambeson for legs/torso and use some plate for a helmet/boots. If you're wanting to focus primarily on ranged, maybe you invest in a plate cuirass but leave off the pauldrons to make firing bows/spears easier. I think it might be a bit much though. According to a recent interview, there's potentially some armor changes coming, but no information about what that could really be.