seraph of candles

It's a reference to the game code, and is best read in context with the previous line, "and made the hive UI update more reliably." I misspoke slightly. Basically, to quote my girlfriend who explained it to me: "the info shown in the tooltip is part of a tree of attributes / whenever an attribute in the tree is changed, it gets marked as 'dirty' / the next time the game goes to read that attribute or any attribute below it on the tree, all the dirty leaves on the branch are recalculated / which is why it will update the flower count at the same time that it swarms / the leaves are stale but the logic is internally consistent / if nothing ever tries to recalculate the tree, the tooltip will just never update" This is why hives will randomly jump from detecting 0 flowers to detecting 80 after a lengthy delay where the tooltip refuses to move at all. It's why it's harder to establish causal relationships, like realizing that the hive stops growing at certain temperatures and resets when it gets cold enough, or realizing that sunlight levels matter for the advancement of the hive.

This one's quite simple! Everyone knows wild hives can be super hard to find, and I think right now they're hard in a way that feels more frustrating than challenging, a way that forces backtracking and second-guessing, mod installment and music disabling. It's also super luck-based, rather than being a purely skill-based challenge. I think there are a lot of ways one could fix this while still preserving the feel of a "honey hunt", but here's my thought for a simple, immersive fix: Similar to fireflies, small clusters of humming forager bees should spawn in chunks containing (or adjacent to a chunk containing) a wild hive. The forager bees function as ambience features and have no in-game effect... except telling you that there is a beehive somewhere in the area. This would save people from making those infamous treks across the continent to find beehives only to find multiple on the way back. It would allow searches to feel genuinely productive, instead of people possibly worrying about being thorough enough. For two other related suggestions, I think a lot of the problems with current beekeeping could be fixed if the team make wild hives a little slower to break (reducing the risk of breaking them by mistake while clearing leaves) and made the hive UI update more reliably. Currently, it seems like the tooltip recalculates (and notices "dirty" files) far too inconsistently, meaning you get very little feedback on whether a transfer is working until it's halfway complete. People shouldn't be asking "is this a bug?" unless they have a bee on their finger and are curious about entomological categorizations.

I think it's a difficult balancing act. Done badly, flight can actively discourage players from even interacting with their builds, let alone building anything new. My guess is the team is being very cautious and erring on the side of uselessness for now. You should still feel the need to build roads and secure paths, to put in front doors and solid, realistic roofs. I totally think there are ways to let flight and gliding complement those builds instead of negating them, but it's tricky! Hopefully they thread the needle later on. Gliding should be fun.

This seems smart to me! Grass is also very obstructive when I'm trying to mine away other blocks. Being able to ignore tall grass blocks would be really handy for saving time and durability.

*Battle music music plays as Gandalf the Grey fends off an enraged Lobelia Sackville-Baggins*

So, I think the ship might be sailing on this--the writing is on the wall for domesticated wolves, for example--but I think it'd be really neat if the game presented a middle-ground between "wild" and "domesticated" that went beyond the flight distance steadily dropping. I'd love to have the option of forming more complex partnerships with truly wild animals, like raccoons, foxes and maybe even bees to a super limited degree, without capturing and breeding them. IRL, fully wild animals can develop a certain rapport with humans, even though they remain unpredictable and dangerous. Here's the idea: You can make any animal "trained" through persistent carefully-governed interactions, like food exchanges and maybe an item like a signal whistle. (This could be a fun way to integrate something like the Instruments mod--maybe using the item on the animal opens a small UI of teachable tricks that the animal can potentially learn, or maybe training involves triggering special game behaviors which you then match with a consistent note. That latter idea sounds really hard to code, but more potentially immersive.) Tricks might include "Come here", "Stay", "Go away", "find a wild beehive", etc, depending on the animal. Now, domesticated animals can be trained over time with extreme reliability, naturally. That's the obvious goal of domesticating wolves or whatever; we aren't circumventing domestication by doing this. But wild animals, even fully "trained" ones, always retain a certain level of unpredictability. They always have a chance to lash out at people who get "too close". The aggression/flight range drops precipitously--eventually, after enough time, some types of trained animals might let you be right next to them as long as you're crouching--but it's not reliable to keep a trained wild animal around all the time. Maybe you run into a wolf in the woods and find it ignoring you/saving you from drifters because you trained it previously. Maybe a wild raccoon leads you straight to a beehive it found and looking at you expectantly, awaiting its treat. It's likely to be little things. Wild trained animals aren't tamed animals. They just have an understanding with you. Now, each type of animal has specific "triggers" that increase the range again. Being in a "room" space instantly drastically increases the aggression range for any wild animal. Being around food sources or having a low Weight does, too. Certain animals might also have special triggers--foxes increase the range when they see chickens, bears increase the range during the fall, wolves increase the range drastically when they see other wolves. Looking straight at an animal or carrying torches might also affect the radius. The training might even backfire if you're not careful, attracting wild predators who expect you to give them food and get agitated when you don't (please do not feed wild animals IRL, it's super unsafe for you and for the animals!). They're semi-friendly, but also still very much wild. It's like how people IRL can treat chimpanzees like pets... but they really shouldn't.

Ooh, I really like your ideas! If we want to do whittling for decorations, here's a thought: It's like a chisel, but you can only do it with something like firewood. So, wood-only, small shapes only. Could be cute to add soapstone later on, too, with similar limits.

Yeah! For what it's worth, I agree that it's not combat music. I think it's about tension, not active danger.

Currently, Hallowcroft specifically only plays during the afternoon/evening hours, so it may be intended to indicate that things are getting more dangerous/tense as the night draws closer. That says, I would really like it if it only played when a large animal appeared within a certain (very wide) distance of the player, or basically "within eyeshot". Sometimes it plays, and you haven't noticed the thing yet, but suddenly become very paranoid--is there a deer? Is it a wolf? You start scanning your surroundings. You may not see it through the trees. Similarly, I think Hallowcroft should only have a chance to play when you're outdoors/in wide-open spaces. It doesn't quite feel right when you're hearing it from the comfort of your house.

I always interpreted this song as being about anxiety, and my assumption was it played when my character "thought she saw something". Honestly, I thought its name was Heartbeat, but apparently that's another song. It always gets my heart racing.

A spectator mode would be great, too, honestly!

So, I love temporal storms in theory. They're incredibly cool and tense and humbling in a way that feels very exciting. The visuals are breathtaking. The warning is terrifying. The way it messes with your audio, your dialogue, even your music if you have a mod... it's really cool. Corpse runs are especially riveting, since they see you running through this impossibly trippy landscape. My problem is that when that warning comes, there's nothing I can do to prepare. I can't run for cover, since drifters will spawn in my house. Digging a pit increases my odds, but makes death guaranteed if one spawns in my space. My friends and I had a "coward's cross" where we all stood in opposite corners of a little cross-shaped hut around a campfire with spears, which was kind of immersive (if a little boring--we passed the time while reading our lore finds to each other), but, like, there's nothing we can actually do if a two-headed drifter appears. We just die. Currently, the smartest thing to do is apparently to run. I think that's intentional--it's a humbling moment where all your gear and fortifications become meaningless--and once mounts are added, it'll be even more exciting. The trouble is, it doesn't really work the way we want it to, does it? Like, when you get that warning, you don't drop everything and run for it. You don't need to get distance overall. You wait for the storm to run, then start sprinting in a wide circle. You just have to get distance on wherever you were three seconds ago, since drifters are slow and don't spawn ahead of you. It's just sort of a sprinting-hunger tax. So, my solution? Localize storms so they are heavier in areas where recent player activity has been high. Now, instead of waiting to run, you can immediately drop everything, rush to meet up with your friends, and start fleeing for 'high ground'. If you make it into the mountains next door where you rarely go, the storm will be lighter, or even let up altogether, and then you can wait the storm out from safety, watching as your home is overtaken. But that's an if. I think this would help clarify the real meaning of these storms. You aren't supposed to batten down the hatches and grab your best weapon and get ready for a fight, at least in the early-to-midgame. You're supposed to run for your life. Briefly, the corruption of the world reasserts itself, and your home isn't yours anymore--it's theirs. And this can make the experience later on, when you get better gear and maybe stand a chance at defending your home from the doomed spirits, all the more satisfying.

I'm so sorry, I'm bumping an ancient thread instead of making a new one because I think the OP has a lot that's still valuable to us now! We have alcohol now, but I really want them to add stuff like the ability to age wine, and I really hope the eventual "Herbalism / Brewing System and Potion Effects" system they have planned is folded into brewing. It'd be cool to have a real eventual use for all this blueberry wine. Maybe there's a really good aged wine called 'ageless wine', using a handful of weird ingredients and methods, and it can heal your temporal stability a little. Personally, I love it when magic feels tactile, almost mundane. Like another craft. Also, I think that magic--potion-brewing, sculpture-carving, rune-painting, whatever--is at its best when it's fussy. Like, what if some potions can only be brewed or aged in certain areas? Gotta bury that potion barrel beneath snow at high elevation and wait until the next full moon. Gotta wait for a thunderstorm to gather this particular ingredient. Gotta find a special kind of moss that only grows in certain ruins. This potion needs to be brewed in conditions of temporal instability. This potion can only be brewed in an open space during a temporal storm, and it needs constant stirring while it's cooking, so better have friends protecting you while you work. In general, we want to avoid two scenarios that I consider equally bad: Potions/magic as a mostly useless, situational thing that gets in the way. Potions/magic that's easy, flashy or obvious in a way that makes this game feel less like Vintage Story. I'll only accept a wizard throwing a fireball if she had to spend an hour drawing sigils in the dirt first. We don't want magic to take over gameplay.

I absent-mindedly wrote up a thread about this and forgot that a thread already exists. XD Still, I wrote it up all nice, so I'll repost it here. A big problem with the heavy aggression of wild animals is that it promotes a very "man vs. nature" mindset in the game that I personally don't really click with. IRL, wolves don't consider humans prey, and generally only attack when threatened/conditioned to associate us with food/very hungry. Aside from polar bears (who take what they can get), bears are similar! Wolves and bears are about as dangerous as mooses, which is to say, very very dangerous, but not murder machines. I'm a little worried about this, too, because the upcoming 1.20 update is likely to make wolves and bears much scarier. It's gonna be harder to kill them from a distance, and they're gonna become much better swimmers. Those are realistic changes, but the unrealistic aggression is going to create a toxic mismatch. I really think wolf and bear aggression should be dialed way back by default, closer to where boars and mooses are now. Then, you have it go up under very specific conditions, like their Weight being low, multiple other wolves being detected nearby the player, and most importantly, an incoming Temporal Storm. The latter condition would also create a cool in-universe signal for players! Animals becoming way more aggressive than normal? Raccoons charging at you like they're rabid? Wolves suddenly turning and chasing you from halfway across the map? Better get inside and batten down the hatches, there's a storm a-coming. In my opinion, this game's true danger should always be from unnatural threats. If anything, "man+nature vs. the Rifts" feels a little closer to what I would personally like to see. I think this change would maintain a good amount of tension with hostile animals, especially in the hungry months, without inadvertently spreading (sorry, my annoying environmentalist hat is coming on) damaging anti-wolf propaganda about wolves being pure evil monsters. I live in the American West. Wolves have a very complicated place among us. I'd like a little more of that complexity to be reflected here.

I think it would be really cool if predators could enter a secondary hostility mode called "stalking", where they'd follow the player at a healthy distance but keep aggro on them for longer, even if they can't continuously see the player or pathfind to them. Maybe it'd trigger if they initially attacked but got hit/spooked by fire, and it would reset when you spent a certain duration out of sight. I 100% agree that the "pure aggro" wolves and bears feel a little uncomfortable, as someone who lives in a region where wolves enjoy an extremely mixed, cynical reputation. Predator animals are complicated, but they're not Tartakovsky-style murder machines bent on the destruction of all life. I think it would work if wolves and bears started out normal and became more aggressive during Rift Activity/the leadup to temporal storms. Actually, weird animal behavior could be a neat storm indicator, if they ever wanted to replace the text dialogue with more immersive feedback.

As a former Tailor skeptic, the Tailor's design has become something beautiful to me, and I honestly hope they largely leave it be. The Tailor's mechanics basically come with a built-in narrative: you start out weak and useless, a pampered city slicker. Your experienced peers outshine you everywhere, and you might feel, in a strictly numerical sense, like a total burden. But then the first flax harvest comes in. Then winter hits. Suddenly, the dynamics have changed. You discover that your skills at tailoring apply to armor and warm-weather clothing alike. You become invaluable. I think the arc risks getting a little weakened if the Tailor's also really good at trading, and it also sort of hurts the idea of a fish out of water. Traders are themselves kind of weird loners. I do think the Tailor wants for play guidance. Most classes sort of guide your early gameplay, but the Tailor's play guidance early on is "focus on things that aren't penalized". I think a light touch is needed, but even a gentle nudge towards being able to get thread/dyes/hides sooner somehow would be nice! I almost wonder if the game needs a third delineation for classes--currently it's effectively "Commoner" (starter class) vs "Everyone Else" (non-starter class), but the Tailor and probably Clockmaker are clearly designed for group play and are a lot more challenging. Oh, and to be clear, I love the idea of each class getting different dialogue. That's a great idea. I want that. As for new classes? I think we're mostly set, but... I think a Documentarian would be cool. Someone who gets earlier-game writing options, like some Vintage Story version of signs/"notebooks" out of birch bark and charcoal. Maybe some expanded abilities involving ruins and lore books, even. A Cataplasmist/Apiarist/Brewer whose specialty is in some combination of alcohols, poultices, medicines and potions could be fun.

Good to know! No reason ladders can't be branches, really. Or you add a "crude ladder" option, although I'm pretty sure that's what rope ladders are for. Like I said, the exact dividing point feels a lot fuzzier for me, personally. This part's just brainstorming!

I think more customization is always fun! It's low-stakes for me, though. I can see the appeal of a game server where the map gets to roughly correspond to a normal fantasy map, with a single central equator and everything. Not likely to ever matter for me or me friends, but that's why it'd be a customizable option. I do think that currently, with how optimal the tropics seem to be, it might sort of turn the spawn area into extremely prime real estate? I don't know how to feel about that. A little off-topic: I was just about to tell my girlfriend how chill these forums seemed when I clicked onto this thread on a lark. Goodness gracious, folks.

Thank you, Thorfinn! Super excited to be here, trying very hard not to post five different Suggestions threads on the same day now that I've arrived. I'm trying to pace my hubris a little bit. I think that anything above the "crude"/"makeshift" blocks--fences, doors, etc--would be a great start. Anything that requires boards should probably also require sticks. Glass blocks, too. Sticks could be used for stuff like tools and rough-hewn fences (and might be a bit better than branches), but would generally be an unnecessarily pricey substitute. I'm not wholly wedded to branches being usable for fences and ladders, either. Fences, ladders, torches, tools, bows/arrows, barrels, barrels, doors and pit kilns were just examples of the many things you use sticks for, and I think splitting some of those off to be cheaper might reduce the stick strain. I'm avoiding pinning down the details too much, admittedly, because that's... sort of the hard part. How exactly to divide the item is much more complicated than the simple idea of "maybe we could divide this item", and I think it's a question better reserved for people whose first post on this forum wasn't this exact thread. XD EDIT: An idea I've sort of hesitated to bring up, because I think it's a little less-than-immersive, is being able to very inefficiently (like, 1->1 or 1->2) whittle firewood into sticks as well. If the whittling idea turns out to be the only idea here worth salvaging, I think that's a viable way to address the stick frustrations. Just, you know. Kind of a boring one for me? Alternatively, you could drop the stick shortage concern and turn whittling into purely a method of getting wood shavings.

Oh, I really like both your "game change" solution and your current fix!

So, my idea has a few branches to it, but the core is this: Split sticks into sticks (sometimes found on the ground, extremely versatile for crafting) and branches (commonly found on the ground or in large amounts from leaves, useful for early-game crafting and bows but generally worse than sticks, can fit in your offhand slot). So, how do you get sticks? Well, there are three main roots you can take. Sometimes you'll find the perfect stick just laying right there on the ground. Any kid knows this. Yes, fine, you can probably saw boards for sticks. It's one of those threads. You've been stickrolled. But the real way you get sticks, early on, is from whittling. How does whittling work? Well, you could make it a knapping system, but I don't... really want to. I think whittling can be a very immersive activity if it functions more like panning. You sit down by the campfire, get out the branches and a knife, and get to work with a cute, simple animation. The odds are randomized, because some branches just don't make good sticks, but this is still the best way to get sticks early on, and sticks are extremely useful. You could potentially make branches extremely common and tweak the return ratio however yew like. It's also the first way to get wood shavings, which is admittedly a peripheral suggestion but one my partner is obsessed over. She's very into mycology, see, so the idea of gathering bags of wood shavings and inoculating them for mushroom farming really excites her. Wood shavings could also be an alternative to dry grass in campfires, pit kilns and egg boxes. The Case Against (and Against That) Wait, if you made sticks rarer, didn't you just make the problem of stick scarcity worse? (The problem to me seems to be "sticks" occupy two roles in the game. One of those roles requires them to be fairly limited, a useful resource for specific recipes. The other requires them to be extremely plentiful, since you need them en masse for stuff like improvised fences and pit kilns. My solution is to let sticks be slightly rarer at the start, but easily-replenished, and let branches be plentiful in the gathering stage but less useful later on.) Splitting an item creates more inventory clutter. (This is partially why I suggest letting branches fit in the offhand slot. You could also make sticks properly stackable like firewood, or create some sort of "bundle storage" option. I think this is solvable. You could also prevent players from gaining tree seeds until they whittle the branches, reducing inventory clutter abroad.) Splitting the item creates greater confusion for new players. (Sticks and branches share a lot of the same recipes early on, so the differences will mostly come up after the players have gotten used to the game already. I also think it would actually be clearer to Other Game players that you can't hew branches from logs, so it could create less confusion, not more.) Whittling would be boring. (Correct! But I'm that girl who really likes panning. You're barking up the wrong tree. Sometimes it's kind of nice to gather around the fire and do a calming, monotonous task, especially in the wintertime or during drifter sieges. The slight random chance element adds some small excitement, too. Time-filler tasks are not inherently a bad thing.) There are too many tree puns on this thread. (That's knot true. ) Conclusion Look, I know people complain about stick scarcity a lot. I'm not blowing any minds here. I also know that the team has very deliberately separated "sticks" from "logs" in the resource bar, and I don't want to dismiss their reasons for doing so. That being said, I think I have an original angle here, and I personally would absolutely adore the ability to whittle as a nice busywork activity. I think splitting the item up gives the team more freedom to set the scarcity where they want it while improving overall immersion. It's just something I'd like to see in the game, and that's all there is to it.