hologramblue

Ah, perfect, there they are. Thank you!

This mod is awesome. I'm using it alongside several others, but I have a question, probably a noobish one (anyone can answer this, help appreciated) Ancient Tools adds recipes to turn debarked logs into firewood and boards (or, at least, those recipes vanish when I disable AT). Where are these recipes located? I'm trying to make a patch to them for personal use, but I've combed through the mod folder over and over and cannot seem to find the file path for them. How blind am I?

It would be for me (thx for the welcome, glad to be here thoughtdumping) Serious version of reply: I am admittedly probably a specific kind of player, I don't find combat fun (temporal storms and stability stay off) and instead I play VS sort of like a single-player Rimworld or Clanfolk. I like resource management, and my source of fun is figuring out answers to the question "what should I do next to meet my needs/achieve my goals with the tools at hand". I keep having fun as long as I have to put some real thought into those answers; my fun lasts longest when there are many factors to take into account that make the right answer a little different every time. As it is right now, VS is quite linear and my games so far (caveat: first year, up to bronze tech) have mostly been faster or slower versions of the same progression, with some seeds being objectively better/easier than others because there isn't a lot of horizontal variety in how to meet needs/achieve goals, just compromises I can make when a certain resource is less available. I know there's a lot on the roadmap so I'm not bothered by this linearity so far, but I'm excited for any new features that diversify the game world and what challenges it presents the player with. There are a lot of linear difficulty toggles in worldgen that directly increase/decrease ore rarity, combat difficulty, ease of satisfying hunger, seasonality, etc etc etc. Climate being yet another linear difficulty toggle would disappoint me immensely — in the real world and in many other survival/sim games, life in different climates/biomes demands different technologies and different strategies, fit to the resources and challenges of the local environment. And that's exactly the kind of problem-solving that's fun to me! I hope VS becomes the kind of game where when I'm designing my long-term base, I'm thinking about what materials are most appropriate for the amount of rainfall, how to vermin-proof my cellar, whether the local wildlife can climb or not, the best workshop layout to get summer work done without tiring myself out... And so on. (And, of course, I hope it stays the kind of game where you can toggle many of these elements in worldgen, so that players who don't want to spend their time outsmarting rats but do want to spend their time gearing up for temporal storms can keep having fun, too.)

Thinking through it from the top.... Cold weather threatens the player during the winter months, via food scarcity and hypothermia. Food scarcity is mitigated through food storage and hypothermia is mitigated through gear, shelter, and fuel. All together, it places pressure on the flow of gameplay through the year; to survive winter, the player needs to reach a certain level of technology and gather up adequate resources within a certain number of in-game days. (not accounting for playing at high latitudes bc I'm new to the game and haven't don't that yet sorry) If hot weather were to threaten the player directly, what pressure should that threat put on summer gameplay? My first thought is, it shouldn't demand technology or stored resources like winter does, because summer starts very early into a new game. The long arc of the year is still your preparations for winter; summer should throw some wrinkles and hurdles at you, but shouldn't be a Winter 0.5. What if the main effect of heat exhaustion in game was to slow down your work speed, and most of the ways to mitigate it were behavioral/location things like jumping into water, getting out of direct sunlight, or standing in one place for a while? It would pressure you to behave in fairly realistic ways for hot weather. There's only so many clothes you can take off, at some point you just have to pace yourself and stick to cooler times/areas. The fewer technological mitigations there are, the easier it is to deal with on year 1 but (as a tradeoff) the less you can insulate yourself from having to deal with it later in the game. And slowing your work speed isn't immediately lethal, but it's a big obstacle to your winter preparations that you'd want to work smart to get around. Maybe it could also become lethal heat stroke if you're under the effects of heat exhaustion for long enough. Climate differences could make this more or less of a problem; in temperate areas, the nightly cool-off might make heat stroke rate, but in tropical areas it's a serious concern. That could balance out how not having a winter to prepare for takes some of the bite out of a work speed debuff. Idk how exactly you'd want to mechanically implement this though lol.