Discipline Before Dishonor

In wilderness survival enemies deal 50% more damage than normal, you have 5 less HP than normal, and I typically play it permadeath so the plate was a non-negotiable thing. However, if I had to do it all over again, I'd remove the plate gear temporarily as you advised to make the jump, after the flying bird thing pelted those arrows on me. There's a respectable grace period between peltings, so I could make the jump and then reequip the plate gear after. Still, in another post somebody suggested having a battle gauntlet of sorts where you have to fight through dangerous legions to potentially fix the elevator early and skip the parkour segments, and that would be an awesome alternative to have.

Hell yes! Like maybe there's a deep dark cave passage with several deep silt shivers, nightmare drifters, rust gear bowtorns, and maybe a couple bells, and you have to defeat them all and fight your way through the passage to reach that jonas part on the other side. That sounds amazing. You can handle quite a bit (even on wilderness survival permadeath which is my purview) by using fences to inch forward in caves. I've beaten two bells at the same time this way, kept pushing my territory forward with the fences until I'd finally cornered and defeated them, beating their spawns along the way, including but not limited to bell head shivers. This would mean you'd still have to fight the boss to get the lens afterward, but you could bypass the parkour headache bits by engaging in an extremely perilous combat option instead, if you preferred that

My main point of contention is this part because it literally requires you to be pixel perfect to get through it. I tried to do this three times and then assumed I was trying the wrong thing and started to look elsewhere - and I ended up dying in my permadeath playthrough, because I started to look elsewhere. Irony is, I was trying the CORRECT thing, but I think that because I was wearing steel armor for protection (which is really intelligent in a place this dangerous when you think about it) I couldn't make the jump, and this hoodwinked me into thinking it wasn't the correct path to take. This jump needs to be tweaked, otherwise more players will experience what I did, and they'll need to look up a video, just to find out that the problem was never with their own reasoning in the first place but rather with the dev's flawed implementation of the solution to this part.

Okay I read the handbook wrong, it says "as long as it's in a loaded chunk" and I took that to mean as long as it's in the same chunk. If it's a maximum distance of at least 100 blocks away then I could see it being used to get around the issues I was having. But I've recently generated an oceanic world with continents and islands, and that experience was much better. It almost made the elk completely irrelevant because I was able to use the sailboat to get to various quest locations, and it didn't require much on-foot travel. I was also able to sail and explore for bauxite, lime, etc. I definitely feel like random world generation would benefit from being tweaked to have more ocean access and islands in it, maybe just with much larger islands requiring the elk to explore thoroughly, a sailboat/elk combo.

That is exactly what I told my viewers after I died, I told them that no self-respecting individual should slog through this like I did, and that no sane developer would leave it the way it currently is forever. I stand by the former, and desperately hope these devs constitute the latter

I watched a video guide and I literally tried the exact jump that the guy did to complete that floor, I just didn't try it enough. I tried it three times but couldn't make it. Right here. I literally tried to do it multiple times without succeeding and came to the conclusion that it wasn't the right path, and thusly, it should be tweaked. It should be something that you can figure out without watching a guide, this was the only part that I couldn't figure out - and it was the reason we died. Irony is, I *did* figure it out, it just didn't result in success, likely because I was wearing steel armor and couldn't get enough momentum for the jump. Which is counter-intuitive, because in a place this dangerous, you DEFINITELY shouldn't have to remove your armor. And I was able to complete the ENTIRE tower up until this point with my armor on, so this jump should not be any different. This floor definitely needs some form of tweaking and adjustment, it needs modification and improvement from the devs.

The Devastation parkour segments hold us back. Brown bears are way too fast to justify in vanilla, but you can mod their speed down; There's no modded solution for how annoying the Devastation parkour segments are. The early floors are okay, but once you start nearing the peak of the tower, it gets absolutely ridiculous. There's a part with an iron fence too in the early parts of Devastation where it's impassable unless you enter creative to break the blocks in front of you. Resonance Archives are extremely fun, and Devastation is the complete antithesis to that.

Well, I'm grateful to know that you can right click to time-jump, but that still doesn't solve the problem of the fact that me and 200 people spent half an hour trying to figure out one part and never even figured it out. It was the same floor where you can first activate the elevator switch, we couldn't get past that. That one floor needs a tremendous amount of parkour simplification, because honestly, we tried countless things, and nothing worked. Our ideas became increasingly radical until eventually I died to a fall, and it shouldn't be *that* hard to figure out.

Technically the bone flute only teleports it if it's within the same chunk, so it can be a few blocks beside you but the bone flute won't work because you're in one chunk and your elk is in another

This whole parkour part is a mess actually, I had 210 people watching me do it and everybody was pissin' themselves laughing at how badly designed it was. I watched a youtube video about the parkour part before I did it on stream, and the guy said that for the whole game you can pole up to heights, but in the one place you need to do it, there's an arbitrary limitation upon you stopping you from doing it. Moreover, whenever you switch from the past to the present, everything moves a few blocks over. You'd think you could map out "okay, I need to jump here, time switch, and land there" but every piece of machinery and every wall segment actually moves several blocks over between the past and the present, so you can't actually map it out, and you're constantly paranoid that if you try something it simply won't work and you'll fall to your death. I got very high up on permadeath wilderness survival and simply used creative to fly back up every time I fell down, I burned through a whole bunch of bandages but eventually I ended up in a place that I couldn't get past because there was no parkour option to use, and after half an hour, neither me nor my full chat could think of what to do. We didn't look up a guide or anything, but it was a mess. Eventually I died to a fall while trying something new, a profoundly uneventful end to an 80 hour long series in permadeath. Objectively speaking this part needs tons of work to be viable, this glitch with the iron fence needs to be addressed, and the parkour part at the end needs to be greatly simplified. Explain to me how I'm supposed to hold shift to sprint, press w to move forward, press spacebar to jump, and ALSO press Y to time switch, all within a fraction of a second. It literally takes two hands to do. I think we all know this can't remain the way it currently is. I was playing an oceanic world (definitely the way the game is meant to be played, and I think we should update random world generation to include oceans and islands as a default mode of playing, and make the sailboat 2x faster with multiple sail upgrades available) and really enjoying it, had ten tons of fun. But this one part is nothing like the resonance archives, it's actually just purely annoying and takes everybody right out of the whole experience of the entire playthrough, and after half an hour of playing this part, you're kind of okay with stopping your playthrough, even if it is 80 hours long.

I can provide livestream evidence that this isn't true

In the ninth obstacle section found on the wiki right here, https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Guide:Devastation_area, I can't get past the fence. I can enter the present to get past the fence, but then I can't go back into the past to continue through the passageway. I had to enter creative and break the blocks just to get through. Livestream evidence can be provided upon request.

The main issue with the elk is that it gets heavily impeded when running through forests, because it has a tendency to get stuck on branchy leaves and such. This can leave you in a bind, because if the elk gets stuck, you could get attacked by a wolf or a bear. My suggestion is, add a "follow player" option to the elk. This way, players can dismount and walk through forests without riding the elk, and the elk can follow the player, teleporting beside the player to catch up, if need be. My initial observation toward the elk is that it's a real pain to use. The game requires traveling, and in playing on Wilderness Survival, I don't have a map. So, I have to rely on constructed waypoints to prevent myself from getting lost. But while riding my elk through a forest, it's REALLY easy to get turned around because every 2 seconds I have to turn 90 degrees to get around leaves and such. The elk, in order to be a net improvement from player traversal over terrain, needs this "follow player" feature. And it needs a safeguard in the form of teleportation, to catch up to a player if it gets stuck somewhere. A setting like this would also help greatly regarding mountainous terrain, you could dismount and navigate the steep mountains yourself, then the elk would keep up with you, teleporting beside you in any instance in which it got stuck, meeting up with you on the other side of the mountains. Simple truth is, too much realism comes at the cost of gameplay fun. It's not exactly realistic to have a teleporting elk to keep up with you, but then again, it isn't realistic to have floating dirt blocks either, nor transporting water source blocks, yet those are arguably necessary, as is this change to the elk. This is one area of the game where I feel like it's absolutely necessary to forgo realism for the sake of the player's convenience. This mount needs to feel like a reward for hard work, not a punishment for fools. I know the bone flute is in the game, but that doesn't help regarding a mountain range that's 500 blocks wide. A good alternative would be removing the range limit from the bone flute, that would make me REALLY excited. Though, maybe we could just make a mod for this very feature too, now that I ponder it. Still, would be a great vanilla addition.

I think the boiler/distiller are bugged and broken atm. If I fill the fuel slot of a boiler, then sleep, it consumes the fuel fully while making zero progress on the distillation process itself. Easily replicable, you can check it yourself. Moreover, I'm not actually sure that it's even producing anything whenever I'm gone from base beyond its render distance.

The fences are working! Thanks so much. I'm pushing a line toward the bells using fences and gates, whereas I was using blocks before. Fences are key