Aranyani

Until drifter and animal hostility settings are offered separately (and ideally expanded), my game mode is always rifts 'off' and creature hostility 'passive.' I would love to have caves be dangerous and fun to explore, but unfortunately that is currently not an option if you want relative peace on the surface. It's the number one thing I have wanted since my first experience with VS. Why it's not an option already is baffling.

I love this poll. It really highlights the specific tools that most require the durability and power of steel. It's exactly what you'd expect people to spend their precious steel on. Also makes sense that there are very few people who either never make steel or do so infrequently. We are almost evenly divided between the 'often' group such as builder/project people who NEED steel tools (includes late-game veteran players who do it just for fun like LadyWYT) and the 'almost never' group who have tried it out but prefer small builds, exploring etc. and find that iron tools serve them well enough so steel not really worth the extra effort (I'm in this category myself). A very successful poll Zaph, nicely done!

If you don't like killing bees and destroying their homes to get honey may I suggest OrekiWoof's bee house mod. https://mods.vintagestory.at/orekiwoofsbeehives

Once again, flint is not the problem here. Flint cooks easily in bloomeries. We are talking about quicklime lol. Maybe this technique would work for quicklime too though, idk.

This thread is so confusing. How did we get from quicklime to a disjointed discussion on calcined flint and bloomeries? Can lime in fact be quicklimed in a bloomery or anywhere other than a campfire? Why on earth was the massive nerf of mortar (of all things) implemented? Why does lime require stacks of charcoal and an entire day to cook? Does mortar really need to be such a huge gatekeeper? Baffled on many fronts over here. But trying to get things back on the rails for OP because I am dreading the project of making mortar myself.

Thank you, that mod comes very close and addresses the problem thoroughly but I'm looking for the option to have a peaceful relationship with the animals in general, even in winter. The behavior of animals on 'passive' right now is fine although if I were allowed to wish for anything I would set provocation to something like 1-3 blocks for all animals except those protecting babies, then maybe 6-7 blocks at most. Obviously hitting or attacking them should provoke. Some kind of feeding mechanic would be nice too, where if you have extra meat you can leave it for the wolves and they will eat it, similar to the decoy mechanic in The Long Dark. There's lots that could be done that would enrich the experience of interacting with animals in VS. No matter how animals are adjusted, I still think drifter hostility should be a completely separate setting.

Completely agree with you. I just got to play with the new forging mechanics last night and the bellows is the game changer, fun to use and feels very immersive. I've seen people overuse the bellows, and there's no need for that at all. Two puffs of air with the mid-range bellows is enough to work iron and meteoric iron, reheating is fast and makes sense. To make good use of fuel it's smart to be working two items at once so the forge is always keeping something hot. I'm pretty slow at smithing and for single ingot items generally only have to reheat once or twice. Made the iron anvil with no more difficulty than normal lol. Great change to VS and remarkably well implemented right out of the gate. o7 EDIT: I was using black coal and bringing things to around 800C. I think if you're using charcoal, only one puff with bellows would probably be enough for that. Hotter temps only needed if you prefer to work the item all in one go without having to reheat.

I think the wavy/nausea effect of alcohol should be completely removed ASAP. Or at least make it an accessibility toggle. Or something that only happens after drinking nothing less than an entire barrel of aged whiskey. The fact that the whole screen starts moving after just one sip is the most ridiculous and nauseating thing ever and makes fermented fruits in this game something I fear more than the rot itself. Alcohol manufacture could be such a great part of VS with fun taverns popping up everywhere, potion shops using them to make tinctures and battle enhancements, mining strength, running endurance, etc.

Or another option that keeps temporal stability as a mechanic but limits most of the drifter encounters to underground or during storms: rifts off

Trader Camps is a great mod if you're willing to make a new world or travel to new territory. It will still generate the single vanilla traders but you'll also find wagon camps of 2-3 traders together, usually in the old wagons. There's even the occasional abandoned wagon camp. You can sometimes find all three traders milling about around a campfire which is cool. Overall I think much more interesting and immersive than single traders evenly spread out across the landscape. Love the mod, wouldn't be surprised if something like it made its way into vanilla.

Algernon's Watersheds mod has a great discussion on world settings and what they do under the 'Setup' heading if you scroll down on the page. I like continents and oceans too, and after playing with world gen settings an unreasonable amount, this is my favorite that I have settled on: Plains & Valleys + Watersheds (optional but such a great mod) + Landcover 50%, Landcover Scale 150%, Upheaval 0%, Landform Scale 200%. If you want more ocean and less land (islands instead of continents) reduce landcover even more but you'll have less traders probably.

World settings seem to matter a lot as well. Make sure your landform scale is at least default (100%) if not higher. I have mine set at 200% and get a decent number of ruins in caves. Once you set landform scale less than default, you'll mostly have a bunch of short empty caves with no ruins in them. If you don't mind modding, there are several mods that make adjustments to ruins content and frequency. The mod called 'Better Ruins' has some very interesting new cave and surface POI ruin builds made by members of the community and you can find fun building blueprints in these as well.

There are plenty of mods that make various adjustments to drifters and animals, but none I can find that would allow for hostile drifters and passive (unless provoked) animals. This seems very logical and necessary to me to separate the two hostility settings but no one else seems to care. This is my top suggestion for the game and my first ever post. Hopefully I'm not alone out here wanting this lol.

I can't believe this whole thread happened and no one mentioned the fact that there is currently NO way to make only drifters automatically hostile. Why can I not have hostile drifters and animals that are only hostile if provoked? Is that too much to ask? Apparently so. THAT is why I play on passive. Sure makes cave and ruin exploration a breeze. With all the other options we have, you'd think combat would allow for animal/drifter differences in hostility. If there is a mod for this please someone let me know.