LadyWYT

They kind of are, but it hinges on the player having a very good memory and taking notes on when a storm occurs, and then making an educated guess on the time window the next is due to arrive. I have a good memory, but I'd rather see some sort of device that can give the player a rough estimate of the next storm's arrival, give or take a couple of days to keep it interesting. That would not only make tracking storms much easier, but make it much easier to just jump back into the game and pick up where you left off if you haven't played in a while. I forget who mentioned it earlier, but the idea about rift activity kicking up when there's a temporal storm incoming is a great one. A brief period of high activity shouldn't be anything to worry about, but an extended period of high activity should definitely cause some concern. I like this presentation. Ten blocks is definitely enough to keep a small room safe, or give enough buffer to maneuver around outside without getting jumped as much, but not so great that it can be cheesed to render storms utterly toothless. Or if nothing else, give the monsters a spawn animation(I think this has also been suggested before) and let them take a few seconds to crawl out of the walls/floor/ceiling. In that case, the inside is still dangerous, but the occasional monster unfortunate enough to spawn inside with the player can either be quickly killed while spawning, or softened up enough to be dispatched shortly after. Honestly I don't think they should scale with story/player progression, at least not directly, as realistically there are things that the player won't be able to handle without preparing for it first. Vintage Story doesn't really pull too many punches in that regard. However... In terms of temporal storm strength and how it scales though...the first storms will almost always be light, medium if the player is unlucky. Perhaps instead of scaling the storms directly with player progression, the storm strength instead determines what tiers of enemies are most likely to spawn. Light storms can spawn tier 0-2, medium could spawn tier 1-3, and heavy could spawn tier 3+. Special monsters like the double-headed drifter could still spawn in any storm, of course, but have higher chances of spawning in heavier storms than they do lighter. In that case, I think the player could be faced with opponents appropriate for their equipment level at the time, in way that feels more natural than just locking it to a story event. Given how much time it takes for storms to ramp up in strength on Standard difficulty, the player should have plenty of time to get themselves out of the stone age and acquire bronze/iron gear by the time the storms start getting particularly nasty. The more I think about it, the more I like what you've suggested. It keeps the lore behind the storms intact, while giving more options to passive/cautious players. At the same time, it also gives more options to the aggressive types. I know I would appreciate having a buffer radius between me and the fresh spawns, because I get jumped frequently while fighting. And if the nastier storms are what spawned the tougher monsters, that would make for better late game storms(no wimpy enemies allowed), albeit more dangerous ones(which by this time the player really should have decent enough equipment to handle them).

Lorewise, traders exist because they're the ones hardy and brave enough to fend for themselves in the wilderness while transferring goods from place to place. Unless I'm mistaken, it's also implied that the traders sprouted from remnants of the Hanseatic League, which is stated to have used their trading vessels to carry people to safety(or at least, attempt to) during the events of the Old World. There's also just the aspect that wherever there is civilization, there will be trade involved. Traders also exist thanks to the efforts of Jonas Falx and his associates in the Old World, since if Jonas's project failed there wouldn't exactly be anyone left to start civilization anew. As to how to figure all of that out...simply by playing the game with lore enabled, and then actually paying attention to how things are described and what dialogue/narrative text actually says. That's perfectly fine, but in order to get anything really useful out of a survey, it would need to be posted by Tyron or another developer in order to actually gain traction. Dev posts tend to get the most player interaction; posts by regular users are pretty hit-or-miss. With all due respect, since Tyron and Saraty are building their dream game, I think their interests are what should come first. Clearly, they have a story they really want to tell, and think is important to the game. If they want to put certain things to a community vote that's fine, and if they want to just forge ahead with a specific plan without a community vote I think that's fine too. But I don't think it's fair to just throw the lore/story out the window entirely when making design decisions just because some players only care about the gameplay and not about the world-building.

It's actually a thing in the game already, at least for soups and stews. You can reheat cookpots of food in the firepit, and eating hot food will restore some warmth. However, I don't think it's a well-known mechanic, since it's much faster and easier to just build a fire and warm up.

Unfortunately I'm not going to be of much help here, however, you might consider submitting a bug report describing the issue, as well as including your log files, over on the bug tracker. As far as using the dev tools to track down issues, it kind of depends on what sort of issue you're chasing. When it comes to hunting memory leaks, the VAO Dispose Debug was the option I was using. You might try that one if you're seeing messages in your logs related to some sort of item id missing vertices(or something to that effect, I forget the exact message). It spits out a LOT of information that can be difficult to read, but there should be at least something listed that can help you figure out the cause. You might try adjusting mouse sensitivity in the game settings or windows settings, in that case. Or if you can, try a different mouse entirely, in case the game is throwing fit about that specific mouse for some reason. It's a bit of a longshot, but worth checking. Any cheap mouse should do, and worst case scenario is you end up with a backup mouse in case your current one fails. When the fresh game copy was installed on a different drive, did you use the desktop shortcut to launch, or did you open the file on the drive and launch from there? If you launched via the desktop shortcut, you might check and make sure that it's pointing to the correct installation. Otherwise, the only other thing I can think of at the moment is to keep trying to narrow down the circumstances the issue occurs in. What you've described sounds an awful lot like a memory leak, but there should be some condition that triggers it, aside from playing the game for an extended period without rebooting your PC. I ran across a memory leak in an unstable release once, and the cause turned out to be a problem with item piles(my performance got worse as I made more piles, to the extent that the game was locking up whenever I looked toward my base). If you're on the VS Discord, you might try asking about the issue there as well.

OH THAT! I have no idea and honestly did not know that was something the player could change. My guess would be "no", since to my knowledge the density reading is based off the location of the first block that was checked. The main thing I would expect to change here is that you'll just have to walk farther between samples for the reading.

Pretty much. The absolute lore-breaker solution is removing the storms entirely, which can't be done without some major rewrites(not ideal). That leaves the question of, if the mechanic does get changed, then how does that change happen in a way that satisfies most players? The main hurdle I see there is that unique items critical to the story can't be added as unique storm loot since then there's no option for players to turn off storms and complete the story, and it's not really possible to add unique cosmetic drops to the storm loot table as then you get complaints from the same players about not having access to the goodies. Likewise, just forcing the player into storm combat doesn't seem like a great solution either, as that will most likely encourage more players to turn the mechanic off. The ideal solution, I think, would be something that strikes a balance between granting a better reward for facing the storm head-on, while still giving more cautious/passive players some passive options to deal with it and thus encourage the passive ones to try the mechanic instead of turning it off every game. And that's in addition to keeping the overall "looming supernatural disaster" flavor the storms have in the lore. How to accomplish that? I'm honestly not sure. Perhaps some wooden stakes and palisades could be added to the game, along with other fortifications, and the player could use them to reduce the likelihood of monsters spawning within the fortified area. In that fashion, a player could reasonably invest some time and resources in the early game to dig in and fortify an area prior to a temporal storm, and thus have a decent area to actually continue working in when the storm occurs instead of hiding in a bunker. For a proper bunker option, add fortified doors that lock from the inside, and prevent monster spawns in that space as long as all points of entry are secured via locked doors.

I think what he's referring to is ore nodes that are close enough to the node search point to be detected by the prospecting pick. By default, the propick has a search radius of 6 blocks, so the ore node must be within that 6 block radius to be detected. Increasing the search radius will make it easier to find ore since a greater area is being searched, while decreasing the radius will do the opposite.

For now it's normal. The ice will eventually melt off completely in chunks that you frequently visit, since the chunks will be loaded long enough for the ice to melt thoroughly. But otherwise, lake ice is in kind of a goofy spot right now due to how slowly it melts, so it's not unusual to have random bits of ice in the summertime in areas that you're not frequently visiting.

Been working on this Tobias drawing for a while, finally got around to finishing it. Pen and ink on 9" x 12" medium texture mixed media paper. Special thanks to @Tyron and co. for creating such memorable characters!

Welcome to the forums! I am no tech guru, but here are a couple of things you might check: You might check your mouse polling rate and mouse software, especially if you use a gaming mouse. I use a Corsair Harpoon and ran into a similar issue a while back. Setting the mouse to a lower polling rate and disabling the software while playing VS solved the issue, though I will also note that the software also seems to have updated and is no longer causing problems while running. Still, it's something to check, just in case. You might also try turning VSync off, as I've found that playing with it turned on can produce some microstutters occasionally. If you are running mods, it could easily be a mod problem, and the more mods you try to run at once the beefier hardware you'll need. Mods that add loads of items, or otherwise heavily modify gameplay by adding new systems, are prime suspects. You might try starting over with a fresh install of the game and ensure vanilla is working properly(to be fair, it sounds like you've tried this), and then add your mods back one by one and test as you go to see if/when the issue reappears. It's tedious work, but generally the most effective way to root out problem mods. Otherwise, you might try paring down your modlist a bit, or look into hosting a private server to play on in order to take some of the load off your gaming rig. Adjusting graphics might help as well. If the GPU isn't having problems though then it's probably an issue unrelated to the graphics. Maybe a memory leak? Check your log files to see if there's anything weird going on; if there's a memory leak it should be noted. If you enable the Dev settings tab, there are some options there that you can turn on prior to a play session to record more data to the logs when certain issues occur, that will help narrow down exactly what's causing the issue. The only other thing I can think of to try is try to see if there's anything specific that triggers the stuttering, such as entering certain areas of the map or interacting with specific objects.

Don't bet on it. While I do agree that a decent chunk of players don't care that much and only want flashy stuff that looks cool, I think there's likely a lot of players that would absolutely notice if the gameplay doesn't match what's being presented in the story. And if the gameplay isn't at all reflecting the world that the story describes, then the story becomes a complete joke that no one really takes seriously, and the game ends up suffering as a result. Skyrim, as fun as it is, suffers from this, as the world presented is fairly weak compared to previous titles, and the player easily ends up with situations like a granny pulling a knife and running out to fight the dragon instead of running indoors to relative safety and letting the guards deal with it. I would place the "Lord of the Rings" and "Hobbit" movies in a similar vein, both compared to the books and each other. The LOTR movies differ a bit from the books since film is a different storytelling medium, however, they do make the effort to match the original story as closely as possible and thus hold up very well. The Hobbit movies kind of follow the books but also deviated quite a lot, so while they're still fun to watch they don't have the staying power of the original lore. Whatever change is implemented for temporal storms, if a change is even applied, needs to match the lore set forth in the story. While some players may not care, the devs obviously have a story they care deeply about and wish to tell, and telling said story properly should be a priority. Of course, that doesn't mean that gameplay has to be sacrificed, as it's possible to have fun gameplay and tell a good story that remains true to the lore. So far the devs have done an excellent job balancing the gameplay in a way that's true to the lore as well as fairly realistic, while keeping it fun. However, there's no guarantee that the gameplay decisions are going to be the ones that the individual player likes either.

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.