Zippy Wonderdust

Hey there @Lilith Perez! I also get super-anxious when caving, both in Vintage Story and in That Other Block Game, and I actually have a really *good* sense of direction. I'm really claustrophobic in real life too, so I guess it carries over to my game life! I second @Brandybuck's advice, and would also add the following: 1) Don't forget that, as long as you have a pickaxe, if you get lost you can always simply tunnel up to the surface from wherever you are. Just always remember to bring a full 64-stack of ladders with you. Also, you can still climb up or down just fine if you only place a ladder on every *second* block; it'll make your supply go twice as far. 2) You can drop/throw torches down deep shafts and they'll stay lit, so you can see what is at the bottom well in advance. 3) Bring ranged weapons and plenty of ammo so you can snipe monsters from above/far away. 4) Always leave yourself a line of retreat marked with ladders for easy climbing and torches to prevent any nasty boys from spawning in behind you. 5) Torches and ladders are cheap. Make lots of them and bring at least a couple of 64-stacks of each. I hope this helps!

Even worse, picking up surface deposits (nuggets, flint, sticks) apparently doesn't count as a block change at all, so it doesn't matter how many you've grabbed, so long as you didn't build anything or dig any holes or fell any trees the whole chunk will get removed and regenerated. I've seen it happen. I'm not sure whether harvesting wild crops counts as a block change or not; that would require someone to do some more testing .

Yes, the number (in this case 16) is maximum number of total block changes a chunk can have and still be pruned. So in this example any block with 17 or more block changes will *not* be deleted. I'm honestly not sure what the game considers a "player alteration", but at a guess I'd say no to lightning and, um, maybe? to landslides. Lightning is a random event not caused by the player so which player ID would you tag the block change with? Landslides *can* be caused by player movement, so maybe the initial block change is tagged with the player's ID but not any subsequent ones in the cascade? Who knows? Not me. I did successfully run this command on my son's 1.19.8 world after we added the Better Ruins and Better Traders mods, and it worked a treat. Areas we had previously explored but not changed were removed from the db and we got the new mod content when we revisited them.

Using this Reddit post as a reference, you could (at least temporarily) reduce your save file size by using the following commands to 1) remove all chunks from the database that players have explored but not significantly altered, then 2) drop the pruned data from your save file and compact it. (Back up you data first! If this borks your world and you don't have a backup to restore from, it's *not* *my* *fault*.) /db prune 16 drop confirm /db vacuum

...and more testing was done. Scratch my earlier musings as absolutely wrong. I made a world with 90% ocean cover and used the various letters and maps to locate the resonance archive and two other locations (trying to avoid spoilers). Each location spawned on an island that had very obviously been generated just for them; each island was roughly circular and was approximately 1000 blocks in radius. On the bright side, they *did* all spawn correctly in what I would consider some pretty non-optimal circumstances, which makes me wonder what went wrong for @Joseph Goulakos...

I have no knowledge of how the VS map generation engine works, but based on some of the errors I've seen in the logs, I wouldn't be surprised if it uses some kind of "staged" map generation, where it does a computationally lightweight high level pass to determine ocean vs land tiles and very basic geography such as the amount of uplift for a tile. It could then leave the more detailed generation for a later pass that would only occur when a player occupies that region. That way the game could pick an arbitrary point on the map, quickly determine if it has the desired qualities (high elevation vs low, hot vs cold, humid vs dry), then recursively "search" outward from there until it either finds a suitable tile or perhaps times out. I have no idea if that is what actually happens, but it's certainly what I'd do! I also suppose it could do a bit of both; search for a suitable land type within a given radius and, if the search comes up empty, modify the map generation to create it. The newest version of VS (1.20.x) does that for the player's spawn location when 0,~,0 is in the middle of water it generates an island for the player to spawn on. This needs more testing...

Is anyone else having trouble harvesting animals and monsters since the upgrade to 1.20.1? I was playing over LAN with two friends on a shared world that had just been upgraded from 1.19.8 and found it suddenly almost impossible to harvest any kills. I simply couldn't get the contents window to open for a number of freshly-killed drifters (including two bowtorns) despite using exactly the same key combinations as before. I kept trying unsuccessfully until the bodies eventually de-spawned. Later on in the same play session I killed two moose and had similar troubles with them, although I was *eventually* successful after trying from what felt like a dozen different angles. It seems like the hit-box for dead animals and drifters has somehow become smaller or in some other way harder to activate. Is anyone else having similar difficulty?

There's a certain amount of "caveat emptor" involved in altering the wordgen parameters of this game. You might want to check out this thread before you make your final decision. If you are interested in experiencing all of the story elements of the game as the authors intended them then you probably want to play on a plain vanilla world with everything at the default settings. If the story is not important to you, and you are solely interested in the survival/exploration/building aspects, then go ahead and tweak the world generation to your tastes. Cheers and happy adventuring!

If that's true then it implies that the more ocean you have (the lower the "landcover" and possibly also the higher the "landcover scale") the higher you should set the "story structures distance scaling" to, which should widen the algorithm's search distance for suitable landforms . I've currently got mine set to 80% and 400%; maybe I should increase my story structures distance scaling to 200%, which is 4 times the search area, to compensate. Darn it. I wish I knew more about the inner workings of the VS mapgen algorithm...

Well that is... disappointing. Were there any messages in the games log files? Anything to the effect of "unable to create story location X"? Edit to add: What are your mapgen settings? In particular, what are your "landcover" and "landcover scale" settings? Mine are set to 80% and 400% respectively.

I've played on landscapes like this and haven't found it to be a big deal. I suppose one person's "crazy" is another's "adventurous"... I *did* say, right at the beginning, that the un-tweaked vanilla game has plenty to offer new players.

Addendum: If you just want to jazz up the landscape a little without loading any mods, try the following world generation settings: World Height: 320 Landcover: 80% Landcover Scale: 200% Upheaval Rate: 50% Landform Scale: 300% This should give you a world with some smallish oceans, taller and more frequent mountain ranges, and wider plains.

The vanilla game has plenty to offer, especially to new players, but if you are determined to tweak stuff (and I'm guilty of this too!) then you could try loading the Rivers mod. Just remember to set your "landcover" to 70% or less and "landcover scale" to 300% or more. Also, if you want to be able to swim or paddle against the current, I would suggest you reduce the "riverSpeed" setting in rivers.json to 2.0 or less. If you feel like changing the landscape even more, try combining this with Tera Prety or Plains and Valleys to get less impassable terrain, or if you want higher hills, deeper oceans, and some truly massive river canyons, combine Rivers with Worldgen Fix and crank your world height setting to 512 or more. Just be warned that this will significantly slow down your world generation unless you are running a pretty beefy CPU with lots of memory (say, 8 cores/16 threads and at least 16GB RAM) and a fast SSD. I hope this gives you a few good starting points.

I just did a search through the devlog news forum and found the following in the 1.18.0-rc2 notes... Feature: 2nd ocean system rewrite. Added saltwater where oceans appear. Crops on farmland die when exposed to saltwater. More configurability - more control over land/ocean ratios. Fixes main story event spawning underwater ...so I guess I'll just have to trust that all of the major story locations spawn properly 1.20. Wish me luck in my adventures in my Vintage Story Riverworld!

Thanks for the input on spawning mechanics in VS. That's stuff I didn't know. I think, however, you are possibly mistaking my intentions. I'm not trying to upgrade a current world; I'm starting a new one. Dropping into creative mode and scoping out all the locations in advance would be a bit anticlimactic for me, as I'd actually like to participate in and enjoy the adventure.

That squares with my own research. The only reports of problems that I have found all seem to date back to the 1.17/1.18 days. Still, it would be nice if someone more knowledgeable than I could point at a change-log note or a blog posting by the devs confirming "yes, we added code that avoids this problem".

I don't mean to trigger anyone's trauma flashbacks from old gaming experiences, but I was wondering about the current state of the whole "story locations vs oceans" situation. Y'see, I really like the Rivers mod. It makes the landscape so much more interesting, but to get any rivers to generate you need oceans for them to flow to, which means having a map with a significant percentage of ocean coverage. Personally, I'm fine with that. I think the sailboat in 1.20 is a great addition, and I'm a patient person; I don't mind if it takes 20 or so IRL minutes to to cross some big "boring" water. It's all part of the adventure for me. What I *do* mind is starting a survival world and playing for dozens of hours with my friends only to discover that a key story location (such as the resonance archive or one of the newly added locations) has spawned on the ocean floor, or outside the map bounds, or is otherwise all glitched up and unplayable. So here's my question: Does anyone know whether the story locations in 1.20 spawn reliably and in a playable state if the world has been generated with oceans? (Oh, and before anyone points it out, I am totally fine if translocators teleport you to "dead end" locations beneath the sea floor. I think that actually adds a little spice to things!)

Well howdy there fellow NixOS user! Distro / Kernel Release : NixOS 24.11 / Kernel 6.12.1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC x86_64 Vintage Story version : 1.19.8 Mono / .NET package version : Unsure (whatever comes with the current Vintage Story flatpak) Graphics driver version : Nvidia Proprietary 565.57.01 Works for client, mp server or both : client - yes, open to LAN - yes, dedicated server - untested Installation method used : Latest flatpak from flathub installed via Gnome Software app Hacks (if needed) : None. It just works, which is absolutely wonderful! (Although the mouse occasionally has this weird glitch where clicks are offset from where the pointer appears to be. Cycling from fullscreen to windowed mode and then back to fullscreen corrects it. Interestingly, I have the same issue when playing that other block game...) I'll remember your dotnet hack if I ever get around to manually installing a RC version of Vintage Story to try out alongside the stable flatpak.