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

I'm in steel plate but I must specify, I'm on wilderness survival so every enemy does 50% more damage. I'm still taking 6+ damage to nightmare creatures

I have a portal which takes me very deep underground. I'm livestreaming this, just in case anybody wants to look at the current footage of today's episode on Youtube to get acquainted with my situation underground. Basically there's a bell, and the shivers are so overpowered that I can't really progress past this part of the cave. Killing the bell seems like a fool's hope, and a lone nightmare shiver is ridiculously hard to kill because it keeps entering my body to attack me, making it so I can't counter attack. I feel like shivers should have their attack range increased, so that you can at least keep hurting them while they hurt you. In the current state of the game, shivers literally enter your body and you're constantly turning around trying to hit them. What advice can you guys give me to help me with the caving process? I'm making whiskey for alcohol soaked bandages, and considering using those entity bombs you can craft. But I really have no idea how to approach this, and if you guys told me that caving wasn't balanced and couldn't be done in the current state of the game, I would totally believe you without a moment's hesitation. I'm wearing full steel armor yet still being melted by whatever the bell summons, and I'm at an impasse with the bell. I've built walls and wattle gates as improvised fighting positions, but I struggle to lure the shivers to them, and struggle to keep them there. I'm trying to farm for jonas parts because I want the base return teleporter; I'm playing on Wilderness Survival, don't have a map, and I want to go to Lazaret or whatever it's called because I've already beaten the resonance archives and Lazaret is the next step; But I don't want to get lost, so I figured a base return teleporter would be a smart investment of my time. Or so I thought. I can't figure out caving to get the jonas parts, like I said I'm at an impasse, and I need guidance on how to approach this, or I need affirmation that caving is currently impossible due to the imbalance of shivers. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

This new update didn't break my save but it did break my orphan class mod and I have no idea why. Didn't notice until I tried to have a fresh start. Reverting back to 1.21.5 for now so that my mods continue working. Edit: Nvm, my orphan class mod is just completely broken now with no explanation even though it was working fine before

Okay, that's partially illuminating and I appreciate your input. Let's get a few more testimonies or inputs - worst case scenario, perhaps I could make a backup of my save in case anything breaks. Hopefully I could keep playing the backup and reinstall the previous version, if the newer version breaks something

Topic

Not all bears are the same. Brown bears are roughly 40% faster than black bears which makes you extremely unlikely to outrun them (brown bears have 0.55 speed, black bears have 0.4). You are most likely to be chased down and killed, and if you manage to get away from a brown bear, it's either because you got really lucky, or you had a pre-prepared trap to lure him into. Here's a mod that makes brown bear speed identical to black bear speed, which makes them acceptably challenging to battle in melee while not being crazy overpowered, even when unarmored and only using flint spears: https://mods.vintagestory.at/slowerbrownbears

I can win 100% of the time against a black bear, I have a higher chance of dying while fighting a male deer. It's only brown bears that seem wildly inconsistent and broken. Last night in creative I managed to kill two brown bears with a flint spear by running backwards, hitting them twice to knock them back, then slightly rotating 30 degrees, doing that over and over again. But the third brown bear, with the darker fur color? Complete pattern break. Same strategy, same pattern, different result, killed me four times in a row, as though he was just faster than the other two brown bears, or had more reach, or something. Maybe it has to do with how combat is initiated, like maybe if I strike first then the animal's wandering speed gets added to its aggression speed in some sort of glitch, but if they aggress upon me unprovoked then they switch from their wandering speed to their aggression speed as intended, that's my only theory right now. But something caused the results to be different between brown bears, they may very well be spawning with different stats or some sort of speed spread, reach spread, or something else, whether intended or unintended. But my research results in creative could be easily replicated and I could produce video evidence.

God bless you, go find a juice box that you can drink in your safe space

Anyway guys I fixed my problems. I made a mod right here https://mods.vintagestory.at/slowerbrownbears which reduces the speed of brown bears to be equal to black bears. I didn't make this next mod but it still works, I tested it in creative mode and nothing spawned in the well-lit area: https://mods.vintagestory.at/weatherthestorm. It effectively makes light level prevent spawns in a storm. Lastly, for anybody interested, I also made a class mod too so here it is: https://mods.vintagestory.at/orphanclass

So... In your mind, this constitutes abusive verbiage? For real? Like... Snowflake mentality much?