brndd

Allowing JSON patches to match and modify specific entries in arrays would be really good.

Unfortunately the config file only really helps with durability. The power settings in the config don't do much, to the point where I thought they were broken and had to decompile the mod and look at the code to figure out what they're supposed to do. MaxStrength just increases the strength cap. It doesn't increase the power of a waterwheel unless it's hitting the strength cap, which I believe you can't really hit to begin with. TorqueBonus caps out at a value of 4, but if you set it to exactly 4, it leads to a division by zero and gives you infinite torque (lmao).

.NET had a massive architectural shift between versions 4 and 5, and as such upgrading from 4 to 5 (or in this case 7) was a completely different matter than upgrading from 7 to 8 is going to be. The changes from one version to another after the .NET Framework and .NET Core merge in .NET 5 have been much less dramatic. The changes between 7 and 8 are listed here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/compatibility/8.0. Odds are pretty good that updating is literally just a matter of bumping the version number, assuming third-party libraries have updated (which they likely will have by now, because 7 is EOL).

If you're willing to install mods, I'd recommend trying the Plains and Valleys or Fields and Plateaus mods. Personally I'm playing with Fields and Plateaus with upheaval turned to 50% and it makes for fairly realistic terrain. Even with upheaval disabled I find vanilla terrain generation right now to produce far too much weird, jagged terrain.

I travelled about 5000 blocks the other day to find medium fertility soil. Once I returned home via another route, I found another area with it 200 blocks from my house.

1.18 had changes to how creature weight is determined, did it not? Perhaps that ended up affecting drifters.

StepUp runs into a strange Vintage Story bug on Linux in that it fails to work if any shared libraries (read: DLLs) are injected into the game with LD_PRELOAD. Steam Deck does this for some of the overlay features and such. On desktop Linux it can be triggered by running the game with Gamemode.

This mod might still work in the latest version: https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/400 That being said, there are also other weapon mods that might have less neolithic spears available.

Yeah they don't spawn on Calm nights, which are fairly common. AFAIK they also only spawn near temporal rifts rather than randomly everywhere, though I could be wrong on that front, and even if I'm not the distinction would be somewhat meaningless given that temporal rifts spawn randomly around the player.

I tend to evaluate my chosen worldgen settings somewhat carefully with creative flight before I begin playing on a world (either that one or a different one created with the same settings), so I suppose it would make sense I notice the janky terrain more often than someone who runs along on foot.

I find the new worldgen to be way too bumpy and jagged 90% of the time. Seeing terrain like this makes me wonder if it's actually even supposed to look like that or if it's a bug. It feels like there's too many "extreme" terrain features competing for attention, and as a result almost all terrain ends up being extreme. I prefer using the Plains and Valleys mod (or the Fields and Plateaus mod) since that gives more naturalistic worldgen.

Online gaming is so convenient these days that LAN parties don't really exist. I feel like we sort of lost some of the culture of trying out new games with friends in the process, which was, let's face it, mostly enabled by piracy at LAN parties. In a couple of friends circles/gaming communities I am a part of, we try to keep that tradition alive with semi-regular "Friday game nights" (not necessarily occurring on Fridays) and, for longer-term games, private servers, and the hardest part is always finding a game that 5-10 people actually own and want to play. For the obvious reason that people tend to not want to pay money for a game they will probably play exactly once, most of the games we end up playing are free-to-play titles and older titles with no DRM. I feel like the Minecraft offline server thing strikes a pretty good balance here. It's inconvenient enough that it's very much inferior to actually buying the game (painful to install mods or even launch the game, servers get little in the way of user verification so cracked public servers are difficult to moderate, etc.), but is sufficient for LAN parties and private online games among friends. As it stands, it's pretty difficult to convince people to try a niche indie title like Vintage Story ("looks like minecraft? no thanks, i don't like minecraft i'm not twelve"), so I think some kind of try-before-you-buy solution would be beneficial to the game.

I figured I'd not mince words with the title. In Minecraft you can set a multiplayer server to "offline mode" to allow clients to connect without a valid game licence. AFAIK Notch basically added this feature to enable small-scale piracy of the game for LAN parties and such, and it's a small miracle Mojang-Microsoft haven't removed it from the game yet. Vintage Story doesn't seem to have such an option, and I'll be frank, I wish it did. It's very difficult to get friends who aren't the biggest fans of block games to try the game out with you in multiplayer. I think it's one of those situations where piracy can actually increase sales: these people are very unlikely to buy the game without trying it, but some subset of them might buy the game after trying it out in multiplayer with friends.