Beanz

Yea, that's on my end for writing a "spur of the moment" idea before putting more thought/consideration into it. I'd say in-game years* (or roughly 5-10 in-game years), but idk how long that would take irl before you actually see your base/structures decayed or reclaimed by nature. As far as how I envisioned "nature reclaiming player-built structures", I just figured that if you're going to abandon your base for a long time, you'd come back to a place that has tall grass, trees, or vines all over, not necessarily seeing the actual decay of the blocks, but just seeing that nature took over while you were gone, and now you need to mow your lawn. absolutely! just adding to the homo sapien experience of surviving through looming terrors like heat death and what have you.

I wanted to run a local persistent world that continues on weather the player is there or not. The idea is that over time, whenever the player is gone for in-game weeks, any nearby structures that the player has made will slowly be reclaimed by nature. This would also depend on the materials used when building: If a player was gone for several in-game weeks, solid stone walls will last with fewer degradations while a mud hut with thatch roofing would be unrecognizable pile of dirt with long grass growing. If anyone has mods that would work/fit with a persistent world, do share here! I haven't found any mods that weather player built constructions, but I've found a couple that are definitely worth adding: https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/15354 - Wildgrass https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/15265 - Jack's Tall Grass (not sure if it's compatible with Wildgrass or not) https://mods.vintagestory.at/trailmod - Natural Trail Mod (more to come in due time)

Began my journey in finding copper ore (Homo Sapien run). Simple question: do ores not show up in blocks until you've prospected the area? I ask because of a recent event when caving, and not seeing copper until after I had prospected the area and seeing copper appear in a location I had thought I seen to contain no copper (i.e. the rock blocks I saw previously not having copper, suddenly showed copper). I also saw the same case from a youtube video, where they explained how one finds copper (harder to tell if its the case due to camera angles not showing the blocks previous state prior to using a prospecting mode).

VanillaPlus WorldGen (I haven't used it yet, but by the looks of it this might be what you're looking for.) Otherwise you might want to invest in a few shovels, and maybe a pickaxe.