EnbyKaiju

Yeah, absolutely. This feels like a system that could "easily" be added to fruit trees as well. Especially since the entire purpose of grafting fruit trees is to get a consistent fruit identity (too early, can't think of a better word). The idea of being able to keep rootstocks is also a great one, especially if they ever introduce blights or similar to the game and you need to replace withered trees & bushes. Hell, cuttings with positive traits might even end but being a viable trade good on larger servers. It definitely makes the idea of transporting cuttings from around the world to regrow a lot more enticing. I can also see greenhouses for berry bushes becoming more desirable with all this too. Since those make it easier to keep track of plant conditions. So many possibilities

Thanks for the notes! These indeed sound like a great balance. It doesn't make it super easy, but also encourages folks to be more observant and focused on what they are doing. It also brings to mind a lot of early plant domestication where crops were chosen and cultivated over time. Bigger fruits, more fruits, more sugars, nicer colour...etc Honestly this just has me more excited and I'm here for it. I'm gonna grow the biggest strawberries in the world!!!

Yeah, okay, these changes in the long makes it feel like the berry system is falling into place nicely. There's a real early game/late game dynamic shift, with the focus on cultivation for positive traits and establisbed plants over the years. I'm getting more excited for this by the change log. As LadyWYT said, it looks like enough to keep you going through foraging in the early game, but not such a huge boost like it currently is that you're able to live long-term off berry harvesting right off the bat. So you'll need to engage in other kinds of food production like fishing until your crops come in. I'm looking forward to that sense of "earning it" pride that will come from a berry plantation I've carefully maintained over in game years, and that the farmer's life in multiplayer is coming with more things to keep them busy.

They said in the notes that the moisture level won't be part of the equation. I think at the moment they are just using the default crop setup until they roll out the proper one. They did say it was an undercooked taster of what's to come. I'm expecting we'll probably see something closer to the intended in the next experimental or two, they still haven't got most of the new berry bush types in there and are holding on to all the old ones.

Yeah, I hope they give us some good uses for the coking oven sometime soon because it's a relatively large resource outlay for something that only does one thing (and not very well). Needing to use it to make higher-tier metal alloys makes a lot of sense and is probably what's intended.

They are also now adding leather as a "sheet" you can put over the top of other blocks. So if you wanted to make a leather covered sofa or something you'll be able to do that. Make something that looks like those leather blocks the traders have on their caravans. I'm with LadyWYT though and most of mine ends up going to trade goods. No doubt later down the line we'll get even more uses for it. Especially with all the new clothes coming out.

This makes sense to me, think I was just looking at a bunch of historic examples previously and wasn't taking the material composition into account. A mostly-nickel material would definitely make it shinier in comparison. Though it does make we wish we had more uses for nickel in VS overall as it's currently pretty lacking. I'd even settle for nickle-alloy plating for lanterns in the late game.

That's why it's an experimental/unstable build A lot of stuff is still being worked out. It happens when you do major reworks of game mechanics...or minor ones even.

If we're going for dangerous fight birds let's not stop at ostriches. Let's do this properly... Vintage Story needs to add cassowaries to warmer climates The closest thing the modern world has to a terror bird, and I need it, lol

Yeah, this is a good way to word it. And very much my thinking too. There's nothing stopping folks from going out and grabbing those wild ones, it's just the harvesting them in bulk in a plantation setup that is made more complex by this system (as far as we can tell) Put more effort in now, come back with a much bigger harvest later. So that makes me think the drop rates might be higher for cultivated plants as a result too.

I'm guessing they probably took a look at real life berry plantations and tried to meet the mechanics in the middle. I doubt they will be a super complicated system but having some level of complexity & attention required for it. Honestly if all the end change results in that we need to grab cuttings like fruit trees, and once a year we have to throw a handful of bonemeal onto each plant then I think that's plenty of a change to shake things up. That being said I still have memories of the blueberry farm next to where I lived when I was a teen and the horrid smell of the yearly dump of fertilizer, lol On the plus side the result of all this will mean that growing huge berry plantations over time through cuttings will be a lot easier. But we won't really know until everything is settled. Thinking about it though, if they did want to make things needlessly more complex they would make fruit trees take like 2-5 years before fruiting just like the ones IRL. (I do not want this, btw, just theorising needless complexity that VS doesn't need)

Depends on the fruit. They have semi-realistic storage times. So apples & pears last for ages when stored in a cellar, cherries last a few days...etc. It's all very variable based on what you want to grow and how long you want to store it. I can't remember the more tropical climate tree fruit, but most of the temperate ones last longer than berries.

I hope in time the devs find more ways to encourage folks to actually engage with the crop rotation/fertility system. The game is built on a lot of mechanics that are supposed to engage folks and have them learning & adapting in the way civilizations past have. And to be honest I find just destroying fields and replacing the soil to just be a waste of the devs' effort to give folks systems to involve themselves with. It's also a real industrialised mindset. The four field system was created to help agricultural workers not deplete the soil and ensure the health of the dirt ecosystem, it was a way for farmers who weren't in floodplain style farms (like farmers along the Nile) to replenish the nutrients & keep working. I know that's not how a lot of people see it, and I'm not criticizing folks who see it differently to me, but "tear it up and replace it after every crop" just feels like not playing to the strengths of the system in place. If the berry rework is a positive way to encourage folks to engage more, I'm all for it. Farming is a lot more work than gathering in the setup, but a lot more rewarding in the end, it should feel that way. Again, my thoughts, I like this system. The added complexity & reliance on focused efforts is a huge win to a game built on hundreds of immersive mechanics.

Just toying away in creative and stacking rusty gears in piles up to 64 is so satisfying. No longer will we leave dinky little piles around the place we have to break to pick up. The flaunting of post-apocalyptic wealth is upon us! It's these little changes, like being able to remove single candles at a time from placed batches that make every update feel special

Very true. And we already use the animal aggression side to bring in angered pigs & rams, so it just means working the other way if they aren't going hostile mode. I think pigs are still going to be the easy win, especially if you find a protective boar around piglet season. I'm gonna miss early generation sheep staying put though, haha. We're going to start needing sheep bells.

This is very much akin to real life handling of fruiting plants. Orchards are kind of a set and forget thing, given they can take multiple years to ripen IRL all you really need to do is prune & occasionally propagate. Berry bushes get like a yearly fertilization as having a lot in one place can strip the nutrients bare (if that plot even has the right nutrients which is unlikely with a lot of introduced varieties (can you tell I'm excited to have my own blueberry farm in VS instead of working in one IRL? lol). I just really appreciate the balance. Taking cuttings means whole process takes longer, but you can make a lot more of them if you're willing to not just 100 days the game. It also means berry bushes are a renewable resource that you can set up at different bases, just like fruit trees, without stripping areas. It's not harder for difficulty sake, and it's not just realism for realism sake, it's realism for game immersion sake and it's so good. Having more animals just try to avoid the players is going to be interesting. It's going to make domestication a little more challenging and again require players to put more work in to get them up to a decent generation. I'm here for it.

Oh yeah, they said it was very undercooked, but this is a great indication where the new version is going and I love it. I've personally always disliked how easy it is to make a massive berry farm & kinda bypass early game food survival in part (and the kind of metagaming that results), and I hate how in doing so players would strip areas bare of fruit growing plants. This not only encourages folks to take it slower, but to leave the plants there for later foraging and for the wildlife (even trash pandas need to eat). So now planning out berry farms will be the same as regular orchards. You need planning, time, and commitment. And as someone who has worked on berry farms in the past and seen how long they take to bring to fruition I am so here for this. Can't wait for full implementation!

I start exploring from day one, with monsters turned on from the start, those early days are great for just wandering until you find somewhere nice to settle down. Since forage is so freely available. The monsters don't really worry me that much, as if you're playing with lore content on you can always bunk down with a trader if you need to, or a little dirt shack and a hay bed only take a few minutes to put together. I honestly find being eaten by bears and wolves to be a far more common occurrence in those early days than monsters, haha

Absolutely!! A reflection of 15th century bighter-coloured attire would be incredible! Especially if you need to go hunting for dyes that were on the more tricky to obtain side like indigo or those really rich red & purples. While I love having access to many of the dyes we have already in the game they are a bit vibrant compared to what they would be, so expanding those out from duller hues to the really vibrant ones in the later game would be such a wonderful experience and make for great personalisation. I think the closest we have to a high-tier dye in the game is cinnabar. As there are multiple methods for getting the same kind of blue (maybe make the lapis blue more vibrant too?) Lots of possibilities!

Yeah, makes total sense, and I appreciate that the devs are slowly working more different cultural aesthetics into the game in a way that makes for a very personalisation-based approach. With all the styles currently in the game, and what it looks like is coming, I can imagine folks making villages that have completely different cultural aesthetics even using the vanilla collection. And even if those more East-Asian influences only stay on the periphery I think there is enough already in the game to say "We haven't forgotten them, and they aren't being ignored." to give me starting points. I know what you mean about the homogenization of cultures from an American viewpoint too. By making different cultures more visible in media like games it definitely helps to normalize them & make them something folks become familiar with. We see a lot of othering when it comes to different cultures, so I'm absolutely here for Vintage Story going "oh hey, Slavic culture is actually amazing, so here's some artistic/aesthetic/historic includes to make you want to learn more." And I think that's part of the power of Vintage Story as a game and piece of art, it gets you interested in learning. I hecking love games that make me want to learn more.

All this talk of clothing has me really interested to see what styles they include going forward. I was talking with a friend I'm on a server with and he pointed out that some of the new clothes that were shown off looked very Baltic inspired. He's from Estonia and said some of it looks very much fitting with the kind of attire you'd get historically around the Baltic sea. The villager stuff that was introduced in the more recent story build feels a lot more like attire from the Eurasian Steppe. Which makes me wonder if the VS team are going to work to include more cultural designs from around the world. We know that there is some level of interaction historically in the world to at least as far east as Japan, though I don't remember if there's any references to the Americas (pretty sure all the lore events happened before colonization efforts began over there). Personally I'd love to see more Mongolian, Ming dynasty China or pre-Edo period Japan. Get a big more variety in the mix that would make for fantastic immersion. What do folks think? Think they might go that way or stick to mostly Eurocentric styles on top of the semi-fantastical they have in already?

This is super cute! It feels like the kind of store I could see myself walking into and not emerging until the store closes with arms full of weird old trinkets.

I think we all do that at least once in our playthroughs. It's kind of a rite of passage and one you learn from, even though it hurts. I like to think of it as a perfect example why houses went from wooden structures to stone & brick as they got closer together and there were more fires around, at least in urban environments, but one miss-placed pit kiln or errant bolt of lightning can really wreck your day. Proud of you for moving on, and hope that you find new gems soon to replace the ones the fire claimed!

There are definitely a few bigger mechanical bugs that I can imagine would be pushing back the full version release, and that's to be expected when they work to implement so many new systems in one go. But honestly I don't mind waiting a few extra weeks if that means the devs can avoid crunch and get all the issues worked out at their own pace. Heck, they have been doing so much streaming recently for design work for dungeons and that's just making me more happy to wait because the longer they have to tinker with all that the cooler the end result is gonna be. So I can wait for the quenching system to be refined, and all the other systems at that. Though weirdly I've been playing on a friend's server recently and the thing that at this moment is getting me most hyped is the berry rework. Seem to have a new "Oh, this mechanic is going to change the way I play forever!" moment every week, haha.

I also tend to play with very small landmasses (between 0-10%), so if I start up and there's nothing decently viable then a full restart is a heck of a lot less time lost than trying to get from island to island trying to find something. But then I also do wilderness settings so a few quick death-respawns will usually land me on a solid selection of nearby landmasses to check out. I think everyone's approach is going to be different in what they choose based on how they play the game.