Teh Pizza Lady

Okay I think I need to clarify something, because I don't think my other comments have said what you're insinuating they did... I'm not arguing that RNG is what justifies the helve's existence. I'm arguing that the RNG of the bloom defects fits cleanly into the overall progression and that the helve benefits from that in mechanic in a natural way because of how the helve is intentionally coded to operate (spawning missing voxels in favor of simply moving them around). Mostly correct....and nowhere did I actually claim that RNG justifies the helve. Where your argument is breaking down is what I actually said was that the defects give the helve an additional purpose...a niche, if you will, and in the same way that the various frictions in early game give their later upgrades a niche. And to be perfectly clear, the helve cannot be automated. The player still has to babysit it unlike the quern which is fire and forget for a stack of input. The helve still requires the player to swap in fresh blooms or ingots (for ingots and plates respectively) to keep the workflow going. Its strengths is in freeing your hands while it works, not replacing the player completely. This is why the helve can only do the ingots and plates. You are correct that it saves durability, a comment I made previously in this thread. The defects of the blooms don't validate the helve. They just simply interact with the way the helve operates and is intentionally coded and feels consistent with how other early/late progression transitions work. That's true for THOSE systems, yes... but it doesn't mean the game completely avoids random and/or unrecoverable losses. Take resin for example. not every pine tree generates resin if you cut down a resin-bearing tree, the source is lost forever newly grown trees do not spawn fresh resin nodes resin nodes cannot be created by the player So resin is now both random AND permanently exhaustible but it's still considered normal friction in the tech loop. Compared to a resin node disappearing forever (a huge loss if you don't live around a bunch of naturally spawning pine trees), a bloom missing a voxel and needing to be tossed on the helve is extremely tame. Granted if you live in a pine forest, then resin is probably not an issue for you, but due to the RNG nature of the game, it is for some players. My first play through that I remember gathering resin for was in a Larch forest. I had to travel nearly 2000 blocks to find resin because it was all either maple or birch trees with very few oaks and pines nearby. And back to the quern... it does randomly fail when the wind speed drops too low to power it. That's a random environmental event halting all progression on wind-powered tools in exactly the way you're saying that it doesn't do. Yet it's still considered a healthy part of the tech curve for the quern, pulverizer, and helve to be strictly reliant on the wind patterns in the game? This further supports my claim that the game already uses minor RNG and temporary setbacks to pace progression... not punish the player, just slow them down. And just to reiterate my points from before, I'm not claiming that the helve exists because bloom defects exist. My point was simply that the defects add value to the helve in the same way that other early-game frictions give value to every other mid-game conveniences. Removing the bloom defect would detract from that value because it would flatten iron progression into the same predictable, zero-tension loop of heat, bang, repeat. I don't think the game benefits from such processes becoming boring like that. I don't know how I can make it more clear....

So.... we installed SlowTox... Currently the blackguard is out in the front yard asking if the drifters are real while blindly swinging her sword. She came in, steadied herself against the wall and slowly looked around the room. I asked... how much did you drink? "uh... a liter... and two more mugs full?"

exactly why we need it.

I've said it twice and I'll say it again... the dev team is notoriously bad at keeping the handbook up to date. It's on the todo list, but it's very far down because most things are either well-known or announced in Tyron's news posts. But yes, it does need to be explained that the helve hammer can even assist with producing ingots from blooms that might otherwise be impossible to recover.

Really, it's no mystery that I think the "bug" should stay, but I actually think the game is better keeping the bloom defects exactly as they currently, even if they started life out as a bug (new sub plot for A Bug's Life?). A lot of the concerns you raise don't contradict what the mechanic of imperfect blooms is accomplishing in the pacing of the overall game. But that's precisely the point! Sure the randomness shows up late in the process, but that's also exactly why it works! Most of the smithing and bloom processing in this game is extremely deterministic once you learn the steps. Heat ingot, select template, pound metal, get product. Tedious... Having one small moment of uncertainty ("Am I gonna have this bloom fail??") preserves the tension of a system that otherwise becomes braindead and fully rote memorization of the process. If the result were guaranteed every time, the entire bloom-to-ingot loop would lose one of the only points that still feels dynamic within the whole smithing process. But the resource loss IS trivial. The iron ore deposits underground are often huge, with each ore guaranteed to produce at least 3 nuggets (worth 5 units each). But it doesn't meaningfully slow progression, it just paces it. The game already has small friction points such as resin scarcity for mechanical setups, crop cycles and rotation, charcoal pit production variances. Defective blooms fall into the same category of momentary setback, not a punishment. Removing it would shave away one more piece of pacing that the game has to prevent players from just blasting their way through the iron age without a care in the world. This is where your argument really starts to get under my skin. Vintage Story borrows realism where it's fun, not where it becomes administratively heavy. I suppose if you're saying that realism should have an effect on the end product, then we should have variable ingot sizes, variable impurities and metal qualities, variable carbon levels, different bloom grades, and tools that require more or less metal to craft depending on quality and the size of the wielder. For that matter, we might as well add a height slider to the character creation process so that the player characters aren't all the same size, too! The game abstracts all of that because excessive granularity creates more complexity than it does benefits. Having a bloom missing a voxel doesn't do that. It doesn't create complexity, rather it encourages the player to make use of the helve hammer to extract a usable ingot from an otherwise failed part of an historically imperfect process as you yourself pointed out. Holding the bloom mechanic to a realism standard that the rest of the game and the metallurgic processes don't follow creates an inconsistency in the game. Removing the mechanic altogether deadens the impact of the thematic journey of loss and recovery that the game promotes throughout it's story and lore. But this is how progression works in the rest of the game. Querns are slow to operate; windmills solve it Panning for copper nuggets is slow; making tools solves it Pit kilns are slow; beehive kilns solve it Early-game friction (the loss of a bloom) gives way to late-game convenience (I can just repair it on the helve) and is a core part of the dynamics within the Vintage Story ecosystem of mechanics. It doesn't trivialize the mechanic, it integrates it naturally into the tech curve. If the helve could no longer repair defective blooms, then it's only use would be to hammer out plates from ingots... which if you know what you're doing, can actually be slower than doing it by hand. The helve would just be a useless bit of tech at that point. No use at all to the skilled player. Not every game mechanic needs to scale upwards. Some exist specifically to give weight to later-game progression (panning -> mining as an example). Removing the bloom defects would not add meaningful mastery to iron. It would just make iron progression just as flat and predictable as copper or bronze. And also this mechanic has existed for over 5 years at this point without significantly harming player enjoyment or balance. No one is throwing a raging fit and uninstalling their game because one bloom was defective. In my mind, that's strong evidence that the defect is not only survivable, but important for the health of the game overall. If we change it now, we're not just "removing a bug", but completely restructuring one of the pacing anchors of early iron tech... and for what benefit?? Sometimes bugs become features and the game benefits from it as a whole.

They put them in the discord, right?

Players have been asking for this for a while. At least I have. Glad to see something done about it, but I was hoping for a specific "pass through" bearing type block tho.

It's not that the chance to fail is where the fun is, but it's knowing it's probably going to work right away and if it doesn't you have a fallback, that it's not a complete loss. If you find no joy in RNG, then you might as well just play the game on the exact seed every single time so you don't have to run the risk of getting a world with a bad start. Also you should turn off temporal rifts because you might get interrupted by a drifter or two while you're doing some task. In fact, while you're at it, find a way to turn off *all* RNG in the game and make it 100% deterministic because you might get shafted in some infinitesimal way....and we can't have that. Or just accept that this bug turned into a feature after going "unfixed" for 5 years.... yeah that sounds way easier.

Keep reading in the thread. What I actually said was that they left it in and Thorfinn pointed out that they even added more code to reinforce it so I said that what maybe started out as a bug turned out to be an undocumented feature. And then I implied that it was a happy accident that the behavior just happened to mimic real life so that's why I'm in favor of it staying. I'm not sure if that was clear so I'm just pointing it out. I'm not. I'm set on it being fun. Then it can be realistic or "uncompromising", whatever that means. Currently it's fun and mimics IRL so I don't see any reason to change it.

or just install the mod that does that...:P

yeah, that's why I say it probably started out as a bug and they just... left it. Over the course of 5 years, if a bug isn't fixed, then that means it's actually a feature. An undocumented feature for sure, but one nonetheless.

I think it was 100% a bug that they just left in because exactly that. It gives you a reason to build the helve beyond time savings. As with 2983749283 other things, they just didn't update the handbook to state that. Probably forgotten over time. I honestly don't care whether it's a bug or a feature, it's how the game works and I think it's cool that it mimics real life, even if accidentally.

TL;DR?

might be a memleak. Since you have memleak inspector mod. What does it tell you?

Adventure mode, AKA Project Glint, is still undergoing development. There just hasn't been much news about it because mostly what they have is concept art. I imagine once they get more nailed down, we'll start to see some advancements, not only to the VS game engine, but to Glint itself.

you are in fact... very correct.

Yeah like me wandering in to the kitchen because there was at least 4 servings left in the cookpot... "HEY DID YOU EAT THE LAST BOWL OF FOOD AND NOT COOK MORE??" Or trying to make food for winter and catching someone with her spoon in the cookpot... "HEY STAY OUT OF THE FOOD I'M TRYING TO PUT IT IN CROCKS, IF YOU'RE HUNGRY EAT A TURNIP!" Meanwhile the blackguard is standing there making hungry noises like her lack of planning for an empty stomach is somehow my problem. or the lore arguments/discussions... [EDIT] Actually losing count how many bears I ran into on my way to the first chapter 2 location was pretty funny.

I just make my blackguard forge my weapons and then gripe at her for eating all the food.

You can do that with iron blooms, sure, but I was specifically talking about blister steel. I even quoted someone who was talking about blister steel ingots. I would not use the helve hammer for blister steel. It's too slow for that. My process for blooms, if I want to be speedy, is to knock off the slag with a hammer and then toss it under the helve hammer while another bloom is heating up. in my current play through, I only have one forge, but in the past I've had two just because it's faster that way. I mean looking at the evidence, it's clear (especially from redram's comments) it's a bug, but I don't think it will *ever* be fixed because you cannot reasonably expect the blooms that come out of a furnace IRL to be complete 100% of the time, especially since operating a bloomery IRL is not an exact science. Fuel and ore go in. Metal and slag come out. Eventually you're going to get a hunk of metal and slag that is just mostly slag. Sorry (not sorry) but I place this firmly in the "bug that became a feature" category, especially since most people have learned to deal with it and it does mimic real life to an extent. My solution is to do what @MKMoose said and just chisel the failed bloom into bits and re-smelt it if it's that big of an issue that the helve hammer can just "magically" repair the blooms that didn't have enough voxels.

top tier edit Brutal Savage Wrecked

IRL if you add enough nutrients to any soil and get the composition just right, it can also be high-fertility soil. I've seen my dad turn the worst field of dirt into a bountiful garden. It just takes a lot of effort, fertilizing, adding stuff to that wasn't there before and tilling it in. Currently in the game we have 3 different types of soil and 4 different types of farmland. Here's how I think they could be done so that advancing your soil has meaning aside from "my crops grow faster now". Low-fertility soil - can support trees and shrubs. Trees that grow here are small. Fruit trees don't produce much fruit. Grass grows very slowly as well. Low-fertility farmland -- doesn't grow much of anything very well, but it's better than nothing. Harvest is minimal.. enough to get your seeds back plus a few other harvestables. Medium-fertility soil -- Trees are normal size. fruit trees produce a normal amount of fruit. Grass and other plants can grow here normally. Medium-fertility farmland -- Plants grow normally and often produce extra seeds. Crops produce a fair amount of harvestables. High-fertility soil - Trees grow quickly and can be quite large. Fruit trees have a chance of producing a double crop. Grass and other plants can grow here and do so at an accelerated rate. High-fertility farmland -- Plants grow more quickly, produce extra seeds, and can produce a bumper crop occasionally. Terra Preta -- Plants grow the quickest. You often have a chance to get in one last harvest before it's too cold to grow anything. Bumper crops are more frequent. Can regress to high-fertility farmland or worse if over-farmed. Between these you have: Prepared Low-Fertility Farmland -- you have spread plant matter or fertilizer or something over the farm land and tilled it in. Over time the farmland will have a chance to progress to medium-fertility farmland. Prepared Medium-Fertility Farmland -- you have spread even more plant matter or fertilizer over the farm land and tilled it in. Over time the farmland will have a lower chance to progress to high-fertility farmland Prepared High-Fertility Farmland -- You have spread the ultimate mixture of plant matter, compost, fertilizer, and everything you can think of over this farmland and tilled it in. Over time it will progress to terra preta, the ultimate form of farmland. You have done it. You are the ultimate farmer. Prepared Terra Preta -- Progresses to rot.. You got too greedy and your lands are now ruined. Tobias is disappointed in you. How could you? How dare you bring back the Rot??? It's not the best idea, but I think it compliments what you said nicely and gives the player reason to interact with the soil aside from crop rotations, fertilizing the soil and hunting for High-Fertility all the time. That way if you never find the HF soil, you aren't barred from having TP ever.

using a hammer and anvil is faster because breaking off scale happens in a 3x3 area with a hammer, but the helve hammer does it one voxel at a time. I wouldn't use the helve hammer for much more than processing iron blooms as well as plates of any metal type just because it saves time and wear and tear on your hand hammer. The wear when processing blister steel is negligible when compared with the fact that you're making steel in a medieval survival game. A very... polar... response to the topic. It's a game and games are supposed to be fun. If a tool in the game repairing your iron blooms is making you this upset, then I not sure any solution would actually make you happy with it in the long run. The helve hammer is a time-saving tool. The fact that it can form ingots that would be impossible with normal hammering puts it squarely in the power hammer category of modern blacksmithing where blacksmiths use heavy hammer blows to move massive amounts of metal around an ingot to reshape it if a normal hammer would take too long or otherwise be impossible. And true to real life, when smelting iron ore, there is a chance that you won't get enough iron to make a complete ingot. That is one of the hazards of melting down metals en masse. I agree with MKMoose's suggestion that failed blooms can be chiseled into bits and smelted again. Also breaking off bits with a normal hammer should yield a few nuggets that can also be resmelted. Scrap iron gets thrown in the furnace all the time because of how smelting the ore into metal is not a 100% efficient process and they want to make sure the furnace produces the amount they need every time.

Sounds like you settled in a warmer environment. Default settings has your cold tolerance pretty high. Try lowering it. You'll get cold when it's below 10c outside... then your winter furs will be more valuable. I'm also thinking that you never properly let the cold set in from getting wet by being outside while it was snowing? idk I get cold all the time while playing VS as a hunter, but my blackguard friend doesn't. I think maybe the class you choose also has a hidden cold tolerance. Try experimenting with different classes and temperatures. Your winters may just be mild. Ours get well below freezing, (deep negative temperatures most of the winter!) so that might also make a difference.

You, too, can poo in the new loo after eating the blackguard's suspicious stew that she made in the pot used for glue. The pot was made from blue clay, too. I rue the blue glue stew. It made me poo in the new loo.

you too can poo