Toroic

I think this is a very fair take. Part of what I enjoy about VS’s crafting is the immersiveness and the educational aspect (I had no idea what a pit kiln was before VS), but it is a slow paced game and certainly not the only one I play. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and the developers aren’t aiming for mass appeal. There’s too many anti-QoL features (like needing to learn which ores correspond to which metals, how prospecting picks work) that make the learning curve very steep at the start, on top of being a niche game to begin with.

Are you factoring in that hunter in chain moves at 101% speed, and blackguard in plate moves at 68.5% speed? I don't think there's any practical scenario where they're not shoved in a tiny room together where blackguard closes the gap. Unlike a death knight, there's a huge speed difference and blackguard doesn't have any gap closers. I was mostly thinking about a pve perspective where hunter is throwing 9 damage spears and 7.2 damage arrows, and blackguard is dealing 6.9 per melee hit. Skipping straight from brigandine to steel is definitely viable, though it does tie into what you say next. I think the cost issue very much comes down to how ore distribution works. Copper veins are somewhat small though I wouldn't call it rare. Tin is not usually found in huge amounts, though a little goes a decent way. Iron though... once you find an iron vein you're set for the rest of the game. It would be really nice if that was the case, but the reality is that the gap between iron and pre-iron is enormous and iron isn't rare. Because of how tiers work, armor below iron not only is not very protective against higher tier wildlife and rust monsters, but it also gets shredded by the extra durability damage. There's really only two playstyles, and anything other than ranged early game is a lot of work to take a lot of hard to dodge damage. The idea that lightly armored with range is the pro strat and blackguard + melee is the noob tank strat doesn't really work. Blackguard has the weakest start of all the characters, and by the time someone gets to iron plate they really aren't a new player anymore. I've played a lot of crafting survival games. VS has some of the most interesting and immersive crafting, but also the most boring and one note combat of them all outside of boss fights. Wildlife is very aggressive and VS is not really a "cozy crafting game" though you can definitely get into a flow state while crafting inside your base. Right now I've been using mods to bridge the gap with combat overhaul and many of SaltyWater's movement mods, including the one that lets you do a directional dodge. It's *way* more fun to be bobbing and weaving and parrying in melee combat than just running away and spamming spears at every enemy until they die, and vanilla just doesn't do melee combat well at all in terms of risk or reward.

VS combat from the player in the moment perspective is too simple. You spear spam or arrow spam difficult enemies to death, using your falx only for cleaning up weak enemies while progressing from improvised to gambeson to iron chain to steel chain armor. VS combat in terms of damage calculation formulas against the player is too complex. It's not intuitive to estimate how much damage you'll take from getting hit by an enemy that does X damage of Y tier. This also makes deciding which armor is better against a certain enemy unintuitive (like my above example where gambeson is better vs double headed drifters than black bronze brigandine, but worse against surface drifters). This mostly affects new players, as vets mostly just follow the improvised -> gambeson -> iron chain -> steel chain progression and don't bother with 80% of the armor types available because in addition to being overly complicated to compare, there's clear winners and losers with most of the armors being more expensive and less effective than chain.

I'd be more inclined to leave this alone because the current state is that the damage the weapon says it does is the damage it deals to enemies, and enemies are already hp scaled to make the harder enemies harder. This idea is good because it makes using higher tier weapons more rewarding and you don't need the current level of hp inflation on bosses and harder enemies to create a challenge. There's obviously a desire for simplicity in combat from VS players (or perhaps there's survivorship bias here on the forums) so I am trying to be careful with deep mechanical changes that make damage calculations more complex. There is more nuance in theory, but I'm not convinced about it in practice. Players generally want a minimal penalty armor for around the base (leather, gambeson) during non-combat phases and a more serious protective armor option (typically iron or steel chain) when on away missions. Improvised armor is a huge upgrade over nothing (though it gets shredded by wildlife due to tier) and copper and bronze armors are overall worse than gambeson, which generally is inexpensive due to a big flax farm being important for automation and also supplying a substantial amount of food. Armors cheaper than chain don't make a lot of sense when an iron vein brings a player from nothing to abundance in terms of material, and both scale and plate scale more in tradeoffs than they do in additional protective capacity. I love specialization within a group, but if two people in chain are cheaper and more effective than one in plate and one in chain, that is not much incentive to spend the extra resources and deal with the downsides for what is ultimately a worse option. Players often are too obsessed with min-maxing for every small advantage, but I also believe that developers have a responsibility that if they're providing two options that there are mechanically supported reasons to choose both. Not a player choosing (perhaps unintentionally) to make their situation more difficult. I agree that complexity may be better suited to mods, as in Valheim for example while damage types are easy for players to understand and does promote weapon type diversity, you still end up with some "winning combinations" like bow and mace due to how enemy strengths and weaknesses line up. Complexity has an inherent cost and if it is not paying off in terms of fun or immersion then all you're doing is increasing the learning curve. I am increasingly unconvinced that Blackguard is even average offensively, let alone "a monster" purely based on how much higher base damage is for ranged weapons. A blackguard with an iron falx will deal 6.5 damage per hit (6.89 if using their unique shortsword). Using a tin bronze spear they will deal 4.94 damage in melee, and 6.3 damage when throwing. With a longbow and iron arrows, 4.89. A commoner with an iron falx will deal 5 damage. Using tin bronze they will deal 3.8 and 7.5 damage. With a longbow and iron arrows, 5.75. A hunter with an iron falx will deal 4.25 damage. Tin bronze, 3.23 and 9. With a longbow and iron arrows, 6.9. With their unique recurve, 7.2. Given how fast you can throw spears in close to medium range, and how ranged weapons have substantially higher base damage then the melee weapons in the same metal tier, and with how easy it is to just backpedal and throw spears against a single target (like a bear or boar or wolf) I'm really not seeing where a blackguard is substantially out-damaging a commoner in any scenario. Compared to a hunter, I think they get blown out of the water offensively despite both being combat focused classes. Hunters are getting 6 damage spear throws basically from minutes after spawning. Agreed on all counts. What I would be proposing is that there is no passive block chance (not that 15% matters much currently anyway), and armor wouldn't change at all in terms of damage taken. Armor is for passive mitigation, shields are for active mitigation and armor as a whole is effective at passive mitigation. Movement penalties are a tough thing to balance because speed inherently has defensive value (nothing is better than not getting hit to begin with), as does being able to heal faster. Plate is trading mitigation (good defensively) for speed (bad defensively) and healing (bad defensively) and even with very good absorption numbers it can feel very fragile because against high tier enemies dodging is harder, active blocking barely mitigates the damage, and healing can quickly become very stressful because it takes so long to work. One issue I see with the armor design currently is the only real levers that exist are cost, protection, and penalties. Despite multiple types of penalties, they tend to all scale together and frankly with how large iron veins are, the cost really isn't relevant which just leaves you having your least penalties or most protection as options, and scale armor satisfies neither. I like all those ideas, and they're a good way to create more niches for armor types, which is ultimately what I want. My posts are long enough already, and fully "backing up" my statement would require an essay at the end of what is already a post with a lot of positions. Determining design intent can be very difficult when dealing with subjective measures such as "Make something fun" or in the absence of direct statements from the designer. What I find much more useful in terms of evaluating design quality is looking at player engagement and player sentiment. Temporal Storms and random low temporal stability at the surface are two game systems with both negative player sentiment (both highly complained about, even from fans of the game) and low engagement (people afking/sleeping through temporal storms, and simply avoiding basing in places with low stability). Of the two, low engagement is by far the biggest problem because it means you designed something that players don't want to play. On a game level this is a flop with no players. On a more granular level this is represented by development time that has either no contribution or negative contribution to the player experience (as players stumble into it once, go "that sucks" and avoid it from then on). Combat in VS is probably the 3rd most complained about topic, an extensive overhaul is one of the most popular mods, and it is quite common for players to use pillars and pits to avoid combat. New players definitely struggle in the early and midgame with how aggressive wildlife are and how copper armor was never really intended to be part of the progression. I don't buy the argument that combat was just intended to be a simple, secondary part of the game because both of the story locations are exclusively focused on exploration and combat. The formulas determining damage taken are not simple, the types of penalties armor applies are more complex than most voxel games. My position is not "Bring Combat Overhaul into VS", my position is that the current state is too simple, too much equipment is of dubious value (clubs, shields, glider, most of the armor types), and we easily could bring more skill expression without making the game too complicated.

The fact that you say that once you have iron chain, you're "done" really supports my argument because in practice there's a lot of false choice. Combat in VS is both needlessly complex in terms of options and programming, and overly simple in practice. You and I have had several back and forths with the core disagreement being if the situational options really are situational at all. I always appreciate your detailed responses, you clearly have a lot of hours of experience in the game, and I believe you are a skilled VS player. What I do not believe is that you are making decisions based on what weapons and armor to use based on a firm understanding of the underlying mechanics. For example, you talk about weapon tier, but weapon tier has no effect on damage dealt to enemies other than the raw damage dealt. I just confirmed this in a vanilla world against a corrupt drifter using a commoner. In VS, enemies don't die at 0 hp, but when they drop below 0 hp. 5 thrown flint spears (5 damage each so 25 damage) and an obsidian spear (5.25 damage, for a total of 30.25 damage) will kill despite being all tier 0. Similarly, 4 tin bronze spears (7.5 damage each, so 30 total) and a punch will kill a corrupt drifter despite being all tier 2. Raising the tier of scrap weapons will do nothing to make them more viable for pve purposes, the only thing that matters is raw damage, which is why thrown spears are so overpowered at every stage of the game. You could make a copper falx to do 3.75 damage per hit, or you could throw practically free flint spears for 5 damage each while having the advantage of range. I don't think that VS needs to be Combat Overhaul level complex with enemies having different damage vulnerabilities (though I do like this feature to encourage players to use diverse weapon types), but having shields being able to actually block damage completely and having a parry mechanic would go a long way towards making melee more viable of a choice and having more skill expression in general instead of every fight being kiting with spears/bow in light armor. To use a very specific example, I have pretty good aim in VS and find hunting with spears to be pretty easy. I also find melee kiting enemies to be pretty easy. In general, I find melee in VS to exclusively be useful for killing weak enemies who die in 1-2 hits, or when fighting one drifter or bowtorn at a time in an area with plenty of room to maneuver. In most games a shield allows a player to stand and trade with enemies with good timing (such as in Valheim) and that's just not the case in VS. Valheim's combat has plenty of flaws itself, but most people would agree Valheim's melee combat is more skill expressive and effective than in VS. In all other cases, ranged attacks do more damage and are safer to use for only a trivial increase in cost. There's definitely been an underlying idea that if VS combat was made more complex it would be less new player friendly, or that it would mean that enemy attack patterns need to get more complex to compensate. I believe that is a false equivalency. Minecraft barely has more deep combat than VS, but it is still objectively deeper, and while armor tiers have a very obvious and linear progression (and bosses are still very much ranged spamfests outside of some cheese strats) I don't think VS actually has more choice in armor sets in practice, with the vast majority of endgame combat being done in steel chain because even with the change to how healing efficiency works (making plate armor significantly less awful because you can still heal without taking it off), being able to move and shoot is just more useful. The other thing that confuses me is that currently there are different damage types like blunt and piercing, but they have zero impact on damage dealt or received. Why have a vestigial mechanic and do nothing with it? Was the original intention to make damage types matter? My concrete suggestions are that: 1) melee damage is increased at least 30% of what it is now as a base value (weapons like the club need bigger bonuses) 2) Active blocking with a shield is on right mouse instead of crouching 3) Shields can fully block attacks of their tier and below, with damage "leaking" through from higher tier attacks. 4) Movement penalties for all armor sets are reduced, with plate armor being about half what it is now. Those 3 changes alone would put melee combat much more on par with ranged combat, and if the VS team wanted to make things like damage type matter vs certain enemies (as it does with combat overhaul) there would be a much stronger and diversely viable base of options to build on.

As @LadyWYT said, surface stability is randomized and you just happened to get unlucky with part of your base overlapping an unstable area. Randomly unstable areas on the surface are one of the least liked VS features for exactly the reason you're experiencing: they're making an otherwise cool base location terrible to live in.

When I mean that combat is complex I mean the programming around armor is very (and I would argue needlessly) complex. Answering the question of "which armor protects me best against X enemy" is non-trivial. For example, let's compare two armors: Gambeson and Black Bronze Brigandine. Which is better against surface drifters? You would probably guess Black Bronze Brigandine, and would be right. Which is better against double headed drifters? You would probably guess Black Bronze Brigandine, and in reality it's Gambeson because Gambeson is less penalized by being attacked by a higher tier enemy than brigandine. Given that Brigandine is more expensive to produce and has massively higher penalties for wearing it, you would assume it would provide better protection. The formulas that drive damage calculations in VS are very complicated, and making informed decisions about which armor will protect you best are not intuitive for new players or really anyone who hasn't looked over the tables on the wiki showing how this all works in the end.

It is entirely possible that VS never gets expanded combat and that the developers are happy with the current state. It is also important for players to keep reiterating that the current state of combat, despite being very complex with creature and armor tiers, is very poorly designed in terms of actual options it provides for the player. For realism reasons, copper, gold, silver armors are not effective. Chain is somewhat expensive (and tedious to produce without a helvehammer) but similar in protection and substantially less penalties than scale or brigandine. Given that most people when they find iron have a large vein, the cost really isn't a concern. Have you ever seen someone use a club? Or a scrap weapon of any variety? There's a lot of "traps" with equipment that a skilled player will just ignore. No one is wasting resin on wooden lamellar armor or weapons other than stone spears early on. Copper is only for tools, and bronze is also good specifically for pickaxes and helvehammers so that you can rush iron. Any extra is nice for spears. Gear progression isn't intuitive, a lot of options aren't viable, and combat without mods tends to be very linear and the same strategy for every enemy type.

No, I'm not missing the point. No one other than you appears confused about the fact that we're talking about a player paying for Anego to host a server, at which point the mod selection would be decided by the person paying for the server. This is exactly how it works if you went through any of the dozen companies whose entire business model is providing server hosting. At no point was anyone talking about free public servers provided by Anego. I understand that the title of this thread is poorly worded because there are games where the company hosts "official servers", but in the context of this discussion we are specifically talking about Anego hosting servers that a player is paying for. The person paying for the server is who chooses the mod selection.

I agree that more variety in mob type would be a good thing, but disagree that you need to have complex enemy mechanics to justify complex player mechanics. Minecraft has relatively simple enemy mobs, and map to VS mobs with skeleton/bowtorn, zombie/drifter, spider/shiver but minecraft actually has more sophisticated combat with critical hits, shields that can fully block damage, and additional effects on weapons (such as cleave on swords). Combat Overhaul does not make combat as complex as For Honor or Mount and Blade either. Only some weapons have directional attacks and parrying and blocking is not directional. Vanilla VS combat is very narrow in the sense that the safest and most effective way to fight almost everything is to kill it at range (long range with bow, or midrange with thrown spears) while being in highly mobile armor like chain because it has the least penalties and comparable protection to non-plate armor. There's a lot of room to give the player in VS more combat mechanics for skill expression before you're required to make more complex combat encounters. To be clear, I still support mobs with more varied and complex behaviors (and bowtorn fleeing when you close the distance is a good start) but combat needs a rework due to multiple issues: 1) Melee is relatively weak and higher risk compared to ranged 2) Most enemies are exclusively melee and easy to cheese with pillar strats or kiting 3) Rust creature loot is generally terrible 4) Shields are weak and unsatisfying to use 5) Armor types other than leather/gambeson/chain have too many penalties for the additional protection they provide. Healing and moving faster inherently gives a defensive advantage that especially for a skilled player is far better than anything plate offers.

Not only have you missed the original (if somewhat unclearly worded) question, you also put together a terrible argument against it. Obviously no one wants to have 10 GB of mods they don't use installed, and no one is discussing that strawman taken to absurdity. VS "official" server hosting though appears to be a very simple way for Anego Studios to self-host servers for players as a paid service that generates them some additional reoccurring revenue. Not supporting mods makes this much less complex, and only supporting servers in central Europe makes me suspect they probably own their own server hardware. The wiki has a list of vendors whose primary business model is hosting servers, and those do allow modding. It absolutely can be done (and at comparable prices to what VS is offering) but really works better at an enterprise level not when self-hosting for one game. In practice, if you're looking to host a modded VS server you should be looking to 3rd party vendors with the understanding that a little technical knowledge will be required for setup and administration. If you have no technical knowledge and are unwilling to learn, then you can use VS "official" server hosting because it's intended to be as simple as possible.

The first thing you need to remember is that this is a game, engagement is optional. Material reward isn’t necessary to motivate players to engage with the world, things can just be fun. The problem is that a lot of players find that the most fun way to deal with temporal storms is to not play vintage story for ten minutes until they go away. People do not need material rewards proportional to the effort to beat the Resonance Archives, and the glider definitely wouldn’t qualify. Temporal storms aren’t fun to engage with, nor are they rewarding, and are also fairly low-effort to ignore. Many survival games present challenges, but also rewards for overcoming them. Ignoring them and staring at a wall typically is not rewarded.

I love melee and being an absolute bruiser, and having played a lot of blackguard and then tried hunter, hunter is vastly better at all phases of the game. For a new player, Blackguard is probably the worst possible starting option due to their dismal early game, and as far as moving in armor goes, Hunter (and Clockmaker) is faster than Blackguard in every armor except for plate. Negating 25% of the slowdown only matches a 10% improved movespeed when the movespeed penalty reaches 40%. That isn't to say Blackguard isn't viable, all classes are viable but they're the best class at the least effective combat style (heavy armor melee) Shields in fact are terrible against anything that isn't a low damage ranged attack, and from the number crunching and testing I've done, shields are largely ineffective defense against any enemy of similar tier (as in, low tier shields against low tier enemies, or high tier shields against high tier enemies). What they are quite good for is fighting lower tier enemies, but those generally are a trivial challenge anyway so it's just a "win more" mechanic. Because they reduce damage by a flat amount, and that amount is reduced before your armor mitigation is calculated, the best shield in Vintage Story reduces a two headed drifter's base damage from 24 to 19... assuming you don't get the 10% chance that active blocking randomly fails. Against a double headed drifter while you're in full plate, this reduces the damage you take from 3.2 to 2.7. This is not worth attempting to actively block instead of dodging where you just don't get hit in the first place. As long as you dodge 20% of the incoming hits you come out ahead over actively blocking. Iron chain is significantly better than brigandine, having a much smaller movement speed penalty (-9% vs -15%), ranged penalty, and healing penalty (30% vs 51%). You're 100% correct that it's more expensive, but most people who hit the iron tier find a large enough vein that they have plenty to spare. 1) Even in the situations you describe, a thrown spear works because there's no real need to "aim" anything. The main use for melee is cheaply dealing with weak enemies, which is a niche but not an important one. Everything significant (high tier enemies, and both bosses) are better fought at range. 2) Torches are pretty cheap and absolutely will make caving easier. You also can use dirt blocks to create cover or block enemies off as needed. Off hand torch and spear is great for dark areas. 3) I'll grant you that may be true for the first winter, but in subsequent winters the cold is not a significant barrier. The first winter is also the only time where food scarcity is at all a concern. Beyond that it's trivial. "I think you should be honest here and just come clean that you prefer ranged combat over melee." I don't prefer ranged combat over melee, I actually prefer melee combat but am willing to use both if one is more effective in the situation. The problem in VS is that I can't find any situations where melee combat is more effective. Ranged combat is far stronger in VS than melee combat during all phases of the game, and the melee combat is much weaker than in other survival games, of which I've played many. In most survival games, melee does more damage than ranged because it inherently has more risk because you are in attack range of enemies. In a game like Valheim for example, melee combat has high dps and with correct parry and dodge timing you can also avoid damage in melee by understanding enemy attack patterns and using good timing. VS doesn't require me to learn enemy attack patterns, just have decent aim so they die before they close the distance or using dirt pillars as I throw spears into their face. The skill expression other than some basic aiming skill is minimal. Yes, it is my opinion that temporal storms are terribly designed and implemented, and the fact that so many people who really like VS don't like or engage with temporal storms is a very strong indicator that the design and implementation are poor. They're not a fun challenge, nor are they rewarding (most enemies drop nothing), so people just wait them out. If I need flax I'll grow it, if I need gears I'll trade for them. Temporal gears? If I need more than are found through playing naturally, it's more efficient to do caving under light-controlled conditions. If your definition of a "good base design" is one that is good in a temporal storm, then the "best" base design must be one of the cheesy mob farms that autokill the weaker enemies and leave the stronger enemies at low health for easy harvesting. I fully understand how VS works, and I like the game while understanding the things it does well and the things it does poorly. Combat is done poorly, and improved significantly with Combat Overhaul (as is the Blackguard class as a result of melee being much better and more skill-expressive). Temporal storms I usually leave the option to sleep through so if I ever care about Jonas parts I can get them.

I wouldn't describe taking extra damage and surviving as "reward" though, so much as "fail to punish". Yeah, you just bonk surface drifters in steel armor and be fine, but the game isn't rewarding your for that strategy so much as failing to punish it. However, there are games with parry mechanics and higher melee dps than ranged dps where going toe-to-toe and timing parries correctly is how you can maximize the damage dealt while not taking any damage through correct parry timing. VS really, really rewards you throwing spears or shooting anything that doesn't basically die in a hit or two.

You'll miss nothing. Surface temporal stability adds no challenge, it just occasionally makes an otherwise good base location unviable.