1Joachim1

they already answered your question, however i will add a bit of information about climate and exploration
 

On 7/24/2023 at 1:11 AM, WanderingQuill said:

Is there something I should be looking for besides rainfall being common?

-Ideally caves. they are not as important as they are in the other super famous, super simple block game but they can contain ruined rooms and those ruined rooms may contain either money in the form of rusted gears (that will allow you to buy food "in extremis" in some vendors or even seeds) or better yet, translocators.

translocators. they must be repaired using temporal gears and they will teleport you to another random translocator. why is that important? because they are usually really far away one to another (easily >1k blocks) making exploration really easy

-Appropiate climate. unless you changed the world parameters a radious of 100 to 1000  blocks isn't that much. you may want to move to the south, which is usually the home of terra pretta (the warmer the climate, and rainy the more common it is, however it is still very rare) which is the best soil of the game, so you can use your "winter" months looking around the equator of the world. in a standard world the distance from the pole to the equator is 100k blocks and if you haven't changed anything then you spawn around 50k blocks from the equator (and that's why i said 100 to 1k blocks isn't that much) 

-BEES: they don't like rainfall and don't like colder climates, so you will have a really hard time finding bees in your area, so since you're gonna visit the south, make sure you hold a spot to be able to carry bees to your main base. check the witki for more details about bees

my advise is to stash as much food as possible for the winter time and then proceed to explore to the south until you find the hot climate that allows you to at least farm during the winter.
 

looks like after the harvest everything is "settling" to a more normal behaviour. maybe it was something about the conversion of the world that messed up the farm.

you can also water them by hand making a watering can out of clay if placing water in the same level is not a viable option. keep in mind that any block in contact  with water can have 75% humidity and every block apart is 25% less and it affects growth speed.

[water][75%][50%][25%][00%]

and also

[water][75%][50%][50%][75%][water]

On 7/20/2023 at 12:44 PM, Streetwind said:

And they were all planted at the same time?

yep

4 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

That's weird, all right. Were you watering them or just counting on your irrigation ditches to supply everything? Reason I ask is that the row that is at ~50% moisture level absolutely should have been slower than the row with ~75%. Or did you just wait for both to be mature, instead of harvesting it as it came in?

Pretty good luck finding terra preta, though. Three full stacks. If I find a single stack in a game, I feel pretty good about it. My current game is June 2, and I have found a total of 11 blocks from 2 different deposits. (Yes, usually it's half or 3/4 of a stack per deposit, but not in this game...)

that's what confused the heck out of me too. the save already had 2 ingame years (i stopped playing mid may year 2) and used to explore a lot in the winter times to the south, the save was prior the 1.18 update tho, i couldn't play before because i was in another country for work, but i'm home again and i took the save that i already had because i had a cozy house and a lot of paths.. the save uses the "from golden combs" mod  but i higly doubt it changes anything about the crops.. 

8 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

What does the tooltip say when you mouse over the crops that grow the slowest?

It should list things like nutrient availability, moisture, and growth speed.

everything is more or less the same fir water. for the ones more in the middle (encased in water), humidity is 75%, the ones more on the left side (Without water) are around 50% humidity (as expected)

all of the linen is growing in terra pretta. 

the ones that are growing 4/9 have 65'9% k with a 96% speed growth
the ones that are growing 3/9 have 71'2% k with a 97% speed growth
the ones that are growing 1/9 have 80% k with a 107% speed growth.
the mature ones were sitting on a 41,9% k 

so in a previous post (Growing (a beard while waiting) ) i asked why crops took like 2 full months to grow. but now i have another question related to them. why are they growing so differently between them??? 

if you check the image you can see that some linen has grown to maturity (9/9) (first row on the left, middle-bottom) but there's some that's not even started to grow. most of it sits at 1/9, some at 3/9 and 4/9

what's goin on with this crazy disparity? 

also, the coldest temperature i've registered in my place is 10ºC and onions are "cold damaged" (which in the tooltip says they can support -1ºC) and it's 10 of may 

On 6/13/2023 at 11:35 AM, PhotriusPyrelus said:

I mean, if you want to talk about realism, a single oak tree produces literally hundreds of acorns...  You can't have a pine or maple tree without your yard being completely littered with pine cones or 'helicopters' in the Autumn.  So why do we even have to break blocks to get tree seeds?

i totally get your point, but again most of those seeds never sprout and there's a fun reason for the oak ones, and in the other hand a lot of them are eaten, fall in a too shady place and at least in the field my parents have all pinecones are eaten by squirrels and luckily we have a sprount once every few years but that's it. 

Oak trees, as I said, are really really fun, because they control the squirrel behaviour. they produce a regular amount of seeds (low quantities) so squirrel population keeps low for a few years, then they sky-rocket the production of seeds one year and have a massive increase of fertile seeds, with so many nuts the squirrel adopt the "i have to store a lot of food for the winter" instead of eating as much as possible which makes them bury the seeds (edit: yes, they bury the seeds every year to have food in the winter, but the "bloom years" are special and the squirrel eat less seeds in general because they can store a lot more), planting a lot of fertile seeds in the process. since the tree produced so many seeds the squirrels are unable to eat them all and paired with the fact that they forget where most of the seeds are planted (this is really fun tbh) you get a massive reproduction of trees and if i remember correctly this behaviour is a loop of 5 years which consist of a 4 "famish" years and one "bloom" year.

once planted the seed has to sprout and survive which is a whole new story. oaks have a strong relationship with other life forms in the wild. you can plant an oak and it may spout and grow, but without the proper conditions, and mind-blowingly without the proper fungus and the amount of "brothers", it will grow "ill-looking", with a small trunk and not so many leaves and it will be quite prone to illnesses.

things that make seeds not sprout: 

not proper symbiotical relationships close-by.
not enough brothers
too crowded space
not a cold-enough winter
too cold winter.
not a wet-enough spring
too wet
not a fertile seed
not fertile soil
too fertile soil
not enough light
too much light.
too arid
too mineral rich
too close to bioaccumulators (such as the fly agaric)
too many pests 
too much poo and/or pee
ground too acid
gound too basic
seed having a strong growth inhibitor (thus not sprouting before decomposing)
seed not having a strong growth inhibitor (thus sprouting in non-optimal conditions and dying)
seed not having a strong enough root-producing agents (thus not having the proper root system and dying out of starvation)
ground too soft (seeds get buried too much)
ground too hard (plant can't develop roots properly or get washed away by rain)
terrain suffers a lot of transit (animal paths)

so... do you rather have 100 seeds in your inventory which are only obtainable in the fall and on top of that only one of them sprouts into a tree or do you prefer to have 1/100 chance of getting a seed which will sprout for sure?

do you want realism? make any crops that have >45% water rot in 3 days 

On 6/19/2023 at 4:07 AM, PhotriusPyrelus said:

Can't you coat the arrows then then let them dry?  When it penetrates the target's flesh, the blood will rehydrate the venom and pick it up, carrying it to the rest of the body to do its damage.

the issue is that, paraphrasing paracelsus "everything is poison, nothing is poison, quantity makes the poison" and by that i mean that you can have a certain amount of poison and nothing can happen (depends on the potency) for example,  fly agaric is known as a "killer mushroom" per se, but it's name is due to the use of said mushroom as insecticide.

the reality is just more than just an hallucinogen. HOWEVER it is indeed poisonous so DON'T eat it unless you know what you're doing. but then, why don't use it as a poison? the question is.. how you get all the poison out of it. distill it? it's poison is water soluble so, boiling it will "detoxify the mushroom" which dilutes the poison itself and discarding the water makes, according to some sources, the mushroom actually  become edible, but DON'T TRY IT anyways. so you have the problem of having a low concentration of poison so you need a big injection, low concentrations = not really a poison but more of a dangerous hallucinogen... on the other hand you could dry the mushroom which increases the potency of the poison itself, but then.. how you make others eat it?

but how long does it take to be effective? depending on the dose around 30 minutes up to 90 and with the proper care people could completely recover in 24h. (there's no antidote, however), since it's a slow acting poison.. then there's no actual use in a "fight" that should last for a few seconds...

what about the effects? because some poisoned traps could do the trick.. welp.. that's the fun part. everything OR nothing! dangerous things OR safe things! YAY! it's the lottery mushroom. you either feel euphoria or relaxation, ataxia or loss of equilibrium, delirium or twitching drowsiness, happiness or sadness.. but the worst poisoning is having the deliriums followed by "block of neurotransmitters", hallucinations, confusion and irritability...


and under any circumstances you want to face an irritated wolf or a bear that's having hallucinations and episodes of seizures, but the best case it will enter into a coma so.. that's not that bad. will you take the risk?

9 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

I've never really understood the rationale behind making hand-breaking leaf and branch blocks giving more drops than their auto-destruction at being axed.  It's tedium for the sake of tedium.

it makes sense for me. delicate breaking is better at getting clippers (useful branches and/or seedlings) that go full caveman and just fell a tree. of course this is a game and it's not an obligation to be as realist as possible but yet.. 

12 hours ago, brndd said:

StepUp runs into a strange Vintage Story bug on Linux in that it fails to work if any shared libraries (read: DLLs) are injected into the game with LD_PRELOAD. Steam Deck does this for some of the overlay features and such. On desktop Linux it can be triggered by running the game with Gamemode.

thanks for the tips!  but i had an issue this last week with the steam deck and vintage story. somehow the last update (18.5) and some linux things made it so buttons could not be pressed because mesa was automatically turned on, however when i turn it off via arguments the game randomly freezes, and i can't even load a world without the freeze occurring, so i can't right now.. 

On 6/1/2023 at 3:00 AM, PhotriusPyrelus said:

Be nice if we could make some venom-tip arrows with them.  I don't know how realistic that might be; I don't know if you can make venom from poisonous mushrooms.

if i go full nerd i can tell that the issue with the poison-tipped arrows is not the poison itself but the arrow. there are not so many poisons that are easily accesible and will stick to the arrow tip. the acceleration and/or the "wind" the arrow experiences will make the poison just slip away from the tip, which gives you two options, regular arrows + some kind of sponge-material which will greately slow down your arrow AND not assure the application of the poison, or a special caged arrow which will have it's balance thrown away thus flying lesser and dealing less damage. those are the two real reasons of why there are not burning arrows IRL. too much of a hassle for too little reward.

if your intention is to kill mobs faster your best bet is to make a Hupa tribe barbed arrow or if you want to increase your odds of finding the arrow in the corpse by adding a hook on them. the arrow will probably still break, but the head will still be there for sure 

still, eating a poisoned animal is... a great way to... teleport to the spawn point. but if you rather kill drifters just let your iron arrow heads rust in the ground close to your sheeps ... being honest, being on a sight of drifter shaking having spasms sounds kind of fun... 

4 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

20 seeds on day one, mind you. I still think 100 is crazy talk, but 20 is super doable. I will certainly acquire more later-on, usually around a full stack.

Harvesting 20 flax crops gives you about 160 fibres on average in 1.18, or 10 linen sheets. That's half of a full-size windmill already, so a single harvest of 40 flax crops will check that box. If you can plant 40-60 and get two harvests in your first year, which is perfectly doable even if you only start planting after an ingame month has already passed, then you'll be set for pretty much anything.

If you have the ability to start early with leatherworking - for example if you have borax or limestone or chalk in your area - then it helps if you only make like 2 linen sacks and upgrade the other slots directly to leather backpacks.

well Thorfinn didn't say 100 seeds on day one. it was me adding up his seed planting:

On 6/8/2023 at 11:17 PM, Thorfinn said:

I believe I planted 62 flax on day 2, and another 50-some on day 4.

110 seeds on the first week for me is crazy. not sure how you people do it. but finding SO MANY crops is insane for me. maybe i got tunnel vision or i'm just not observant enough (i have Attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder so i usually struggle doing a single thing and usually i start a bunch of them at once and spend a lot of time doing nothing useful) how do YOU find so many crops @Streetwind ? when i watch youtubers they just turn the corner and there are wild crops waiting there, but when i do it the only thing i see are crows and vultures waiting for me to starve to death lol.

4 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

Honestly, that's not a normal amount of seeds by any definition. Just reading "100+ seeds in one ingame day" makes me go "I'd rather have a conversation with Clippy the MS Word Mascot than play this way". It sounds genuinely unpleasant. Like someone telling me to run full speed to the grocery store, screaming the entire way, when calmly walking will do just fine.

I collect like... 20-ish flax seeds, maybe 30 if I'm really lucky (or playing malefactor instead of blackguard) before picking a place to spend the night. I don't usually pick up any seeds other than flax either before settling down, except maybe for onions. Gotta have onions.

yeah.. i usually go with 20 flax seeds too, but that brings me to the "it's too expensive to use ever".. 20 fibers give you a single linen sack.  and 16 to repair one single cloth piece... thinking about the windmill basically hurts XD

a bit of a necro, but since it's already done.. just lets hop on. i used to get a heck ton of seeds trying to get a decent amount of sticks in the "birch-bush" areas, while it's true that i'm not an aesthetical builder i tried to get a lot of trees going on near my house to make charcoal. birch weren't good at making a lot of wood but meh... but instead of messing around with the leave chances why not making a special tool for that? the tree clippers are tools that exist in the real world. shears may give you a wide-range of cutting leaves (to get sticks, or to clear areas faster) but you don't want to "destroy" branches wildly if you try to get "cuttings" so, maybe you need something more delicate. tree clippers that increase the chance of getting a seed at the cost of being a slow way to break the leaves and only breaks one at a time

you know what? i have 0 idea of coding and even less idea of modding but this is the perfect excuse to learn. 

On 6/9/2023 at 7:26 PM, Thorfinn said:

But I think it's close enough to right that if you climb a ladder around noon and check "C" (or install something like HudClock) you can find out what height you need to be around there to avoid stunted crops. Then just look around for something about that height. Better yet, look at the coldest temperature at around midnight, and make sure you are planting somewhere sufficiently above the minimum temperature. Turnips being a little chilly is better than being too hot. Rye is another one that is just a royal pain for being stunted.

 

well, i thought that the temperature display was the average in the area (like "the maximum temperature in this area is 27ºC in summer") not something that accurate.. guess i'll have to check it constantly. never bother with the hudclock even tho i seen it because taking even more screen space is not an option tbh. maybe when i get back to my country..

On 6/9/2023 at 7:26 PM, Thorfinn said:

vanilla. You want to avoid mods if you want high counts. Certainly anything affecting mapgen. Though I love things like Wildcraft Trees, it obscures your sight too much to see crops well. Even things that do not affect mapgen slow things down just enough that I'm sometimes seeing flax suddenly "appear" while I'm looking off into the midrange distance. My best ever was 126 seeds on day 1. I was really hoping to end up with needing 3 stacks for flax seeds, but alas...

... welp. i need to re-evaluate my life choices. i haven't found that many crops EVER. Even more, i don't think i ever had 120 seeds (counting every single seed i owned) in any of my playthroughs... no shit i was finding a constant lack of flax on everything and felt like repairing clothes were insanely expensive. 

for the mods i usually avoid them. Not because "i want the most vanilla experience" but because i'm unexperienced enough to not need extra content yet. (for example in the other overrated block game i used to play so many mods that the game used to take around 10 minutes just to load them all) the only ones that are a must for me are wild farming and anvil metal recovery. and i don't think they have a change in the world generation, but for certain, even when i didn't have any kind of mods i struggled finding seeds.

how do you do it? you use a stack of ladders and climb upwards? i believe someone mentioned that trick in this post about dirt uses... was even you? that would be funny... anyway thanks for the tips... i usually kind of rush the game, i like to have bronze tools before summer (so i could have a nice door that did not break and last a bit longer than the copper ones but that's not important anymore)

Sadly doesn't work for me. Tried to uninstall, delete everything,  restarted the steam deck. Installed game, added it to steam, added all parameters (including the env=mesa_glthread=false at the end)  and the buttons indeed work but the game freezes anyways at random..

9 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Yeah, you definitely want to get turnips in early and late, never in the middle. Though check your temperature noon or so of the first day. You may not even be able to plant turnips early enough the first year unless you head north or turn your upheaval back up so you can find a plateau to do some highland planting that first year.

please don't even mention the chance for flax to burnout... that's kinda annoying tbh. standard upheaval 30% produced like 5 serrated worlds that looked like they were Seismogram in venus... it's not only not viable for me, but a nightmare in a steam deck...  (stepUP mod gave me troubles last night when i tried to install it. the comments say it works 1.18 but doesn't seem to do it for me) 

it would be interesting to know how much the temperature changes with height. is there a way to see it? (or there's a scale somewhere?) first time hearing that tbh. i could have been using my terra pretta on the sky..   

10 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Do crops automatically adjust growth times for longer months?

yes, or at least they used to do it. 

10 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Another possibility is that Vinter Nacht did a good job of balancing Fields of Gold for use with Golden Combs, though he said in that thread he did not intend for you to be able to get all frames of a Langstroth placed in the first year. My best was just short of 5 full, but that was by foregoing every use of linen but sacks. I believe I planted 62 flax on day 2, and another 50-some on day 4.

 

man WHATTF O.O i really hope that those 110 seeds in the first week is due to the fields of gold mod because there's no way i find that many seeds even in a full run... that's actually insane (and makes clothing repair viable...) i'll have to take a look... 

10 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Man, isn't that the truth! When I have to play on my laptop (17", I think) I only do about a quarter, maybe a third as well as playing on my home system.

This is the first game I've ever played where the screen size made this dramatic of a difference.

man i feel like i'm a totally noob... which i am, but not at this level... even tho i use an external mouse and a bluetooth (foldable pocket-sized keyboard) i'm really really struggling with everything  

On 6/8/2023 at 1:46 AM, zamtoid said:

I'm having a weird issue since updating to 1.8.5 on my steam deck. I can open the game but when I get to the menu screen I lose the function to click anything to enter a game or look at the settings. Sometimes I am able to get a click or two in before I lose the function, but most of the time I open the game and can only move the cursor around, and then have to exit by hitting the steam button and exiting through the steam menus.

I've tried different controller layouts, messing around with turning the proton experimental settings on, and I've tried uninstalling, deleting all files, and re-installing, same issue still occurs. I've done that a couple times now, haha.

Any help would be very appreciated!

i was about to post the exact same issue. the fun thing is that it has been progressive for some weird reason. i had the game installed since a long ago in my steam deck.. i installed it from discorvery without any guide whatsoever (i thought if it was in the discovery app it would run nicely) but yesterday i got the issue. i decided to add some more mods (through filezilla in a pc.. i want my deck to be as "cookie isolated" as possible) and then launch the world it started to load the world just fine then it stopped, it froze. so i had to manually close the game (from the steam button => close game) dissabled one of the mods i had and tried again.. and then i tried to enter the game again and the buttons were not working, so i decided to force closing it and then launch again, this time it worked, but the world didn't load... (got stuck in the "it senses" phrase) tried again repeating the process dissabling the 3 other mods that i added but leaving the ones i had previously active.. in the last try i had to then forced exit -again- and tried to load it up, no button functionality anymore. no matter how many times i tried to load the game, the buttons did not work.

On 6/8/2023 at 2:53 AM, mard said:

Interesting. I'm running Vintage Story 1.8.5 on latest stable SteamOS 3.4.8, all Flatpak packages updated, I can't reproduce this issue. I am using --env=LC_ALL= --env=LD_PRELOAD= --branch=stable in launch parameters. I can navigate the menus just fine, enter the game, exit, mouse is fully functional.  I wish I could be able to troubleshoot it, I'd have something to work with.

If I was facing the problem you described, I'd try to do the following:

• Make sure that all Flatpaks are up to date in Discover.
• Add --env=LD_PRELOAD= to game's launch parameters as described few posts above. This will force Steam not to load some its own libraries that interfere with the program in some way. I think it's related to Steam overlay, which is not used outside desktop mode if I understand it correctly.
• Set mesa_glthread to false (if set previously with flatseal), or force it anyway by adding --env=mesa_glthread=false to game's launch parameters. mesa_glthread offers some substantial performance gains, but in my experience it leads to some weird problems.
• Rename/move/remove Vintage Story client settings file, $HOME/.var/app/at.vintagestory.VintageStory/config/VintagestoryData/clientsettings.json
• Make sure that the controller profile bindings in Steam are in order and not modified in some unpredictable way
• Try editing/adding --env=LC_ALL= or --env=LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 to launch parameters... It shouldn't make a difference, but who the heck knows, I had enough weird locale-related problems in the past.
• I'm grasping at straws at this point, but tools such as Decky may interfere with the game... If you use it, try disabling it temporarily.

Let me know if any of these help with your issue. If not, we'll need to dig deeper somehow, but I'm at a loss how to troubleshoot it.

i don't remember seeing the 1.8.5 update on the flatpack version (discovery) but i was in the latest stable version of steamOS, however it is true that i updated everything else it was availeable (like 10 hours ago) 

On 6/8/2023 at 4:09 AM, zamtoid said:

Your mention of Decky reminded me I did install it recently, so I uninstalled it and still had the same issue. But I feel like it has to do something with that, between the last time I played VS and now I set up an emulator, Cemu, to play BOTW. I haven't played any other games or messed with any other stuff in the console. I tried adding the "--env=LD_PRELOAD=" into the launch parameters but that didn't do anything either.

I don't have the time right now to try the rest of your suggestions, but I'll report back soon when I do have some more time.

i also tried to uninstall it and it didn't fix the issue either. i made sure to press the "clear all data" from the discovery tho. (made a backup of my world and manually removed the mods with the filezilla client so i could have a list of the mods i had already in the world) but i don't want to wipe out the entire steam deck... i have too many things that i need on hand (i'm living in the netherlands for now for work until july the 7th )

On 6/8/2023 at 8:09 AM, mard said:

Hey, you're welcome. I'm happy you were able to fix the problem! But I'm sorry you had to wipe your Deck clean to figure it out.

I'm left with more questions than answers. I have been under impression that Mesa OpenGL threading is disabled by default on Steam Deck. I confirmed this not too long ago, by passing mesa_glthread=true to Vintage Story. It behaved in a noticeably different way, only then I was able to experience weird resolution glitches.

But now, I'm having second thoughts. Your case suggests that Mesa GL threading is actually enabled somewhere, because turning it off explicitly with mesa_glthread=false fixed the problem. So it must've been enabled recently, but then why I can't reproduce the problem by turning it on manually like in your case? BTW, are you using stable branch of SteamOS like me, or enrolled into Beta?

I don't know what to think of this. Flatpak's Mesa package states clearly which applications are run with GL threading by default. It's defined in /var/lib/flatpak/runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default/x86_64/22.08/active/files/share/drirc.d/00-mesa-defaults.conf. There's also this SteamOS native file in /usr/share/drirc.d/00-mesa-defaults.conf that looks mostly the same. In any case, I couldn't find Mono in either of them.

For time being, I think it'd be the best to advice users to explicitly set --env=mesa_glthread=false in case of encountering weird issues.

if you wanna test something you can use me as a test subject. i'm not able to apply this fix right now because i'm at work, but later on i can try it. if you want me to do some testings or providing you any kind of extra info about the system/updates feel free to ask.

14 hours ago, mard said:

Mesa upgrade came from org.freedesktop.Platform upgrade in Vintage Story flatpak, beginning from 1.18.2 onwards. But GL threading was not enabled explicitly in this flatpak for sure. If it's really enabled, it must be something that came with Mesa's default configuration, which is proven to work on most configurations but sometimes leads to weird regressions.

it would be good to put it in the OP, big scary bold letters. 


welp, what else i can say.. thank you all for posting the issue and the answer i'll keep you up if it worked for me if @mard doesn't need any extra info. 

3 hours ago, Streetwind said:

My recommendation: get used to the default growth times. There is plenty of food out there to hunt and forage, especially in singleplayer, and plenty of things to do other than sitting on the fence of your garden watching it grow.

welp, screw myself. for the time the turnips grow they were damaged due to the heat. they dropped 1-2 per plant so i've not really noticed the "balance increase" yey-ho... i guess i'll leave the crops be. hope the flax fiber is getting a boost too. i have a mod (for the golden combs) that uses MASSIVE AMOUNTS of linen...

besides the pun in the title, i noticed that since i last played (probably 1.17?) the growth time of crops has skyrocket-ed. i'm not a super lucky person and i used to never find so many crops, thankfully there is wildfarming that allows to get seeds from extra cops (i didn't want to install it in this run)... but now i'm also playing on a steam deck (AKA small screen) and i'm finding even less food (even tho i turned the upheaval setting down to straight 0% the rough terrain is also being the bane of my existance) just to find out that crops take like 6 years and a few goddess blessings to grow up (i believe it's slightly more than 2 full months with the month lenght set to default, on terra pretta and 100% wet farmland?) 

what's going on? i'm aware that 100% humidity is not the best for crops but... it used to be way less painful. is there a way to change that setting? (i swear i haven't seen it unless it's shared with the tree growing ones...)

seeds determine stone placement AKA the stone layers which includes how the terrain deforms (AKA mountain and plains). then once the stone is placed the game generates a pseudo random heat map for EVERYTHING separatedly. you can "see" the ore heatmap with a prospector pic. just generate one world, go to creative, get a propick and prospect something in a really obvious place. then re-create the world with the same settings and repeat the process.. you'll see how different it re-created the ore map.

once the heat map is created then it applies the chances. for example a 1% chance of spawning a berry bush MAY spawn it, however a 99% MAY NOT spawn it. this is the reason you use your propick until you get something really dense and then you start scouting the area nearby.

this induces a lot of variability, which in one hand is desirable but renders the world impossible to recreate and on the other hand it makes the replayability skyrocket.


lets be honest. most people would love to have a world stuffed to the brim with a lot of food and with all the ores nearby but the game is not about advancing technology but adapting to the rough conditions and surviving

1 hour ago, Headshotkill said:

You can easily make use of corrupted biomes with a large rift in the center which potentially spreads outwards over time to get the same effect, this way you have true stable calm areas and temporal instable areas. This way everyone gets to choose where they want to settle and what they want to experience. Like the sound of drifters moaning every night? Set up camp in a corrupted biome, or perhaps you're forced by circumstances to set up camp in a corrupted biome. This can be combined with better loot spawns/ruins to make the increased danger worth the price. If a biome is extremely corrupted you can spawn drifters and other supernatural stuff at day time as well.

welp. IMO a "corrupted biome" could be interesting indeed, but, as you say, only if it has potential for a really, really good loot but.. whathever you do UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE DO.NOT. ALLOW IT TO SPREAD. "spreading" is a terrible mechanic that almost never works. cleaning chunks in thaumcraft (the other java-based block game) was SO BAD that i used to lose multiplayer servers.. and cleaning tainted terrains in terraria is intensive (and destructive). 

looking at a perspective tho, we have that mechanic already. the deeper you go in the mines the more corruption gets to you and you get "insane" (to name it in some way) faster.
 

2 hours ago, Headshotkill said:

So I've read a lot of replies which refer to the lore of the game and use that as a way to decide drifters spawning at night is inevitable, but to my knowledge a lot of the lore is flexible and should never overrule good gameplay.

the lore is there to explain why things are like they are. there's no point on saying in the lore that the world was blessed with peace forever and then make it a living hell ingame for the "enjoyability" factor. yes, it can be flexible, but i still fail to see the "overrule good gameplay" you're talking about. i still don't get what you mean with that. 

if you live in a plains area (no forest nearby) then wolves and bears are non existent... everywhere else during the day you have to deal with them, which can be a lot to deal with... sadly they are "neutral-hostile" which means they are living their lives and minding their business unless you're too close to them... but at -some- nights there's something else actively looking for you with the only objective to kill you no matter where you live. so removing the drifters at night makes the game pointless.

the thing is... peaceful nights are boring everywhere. they are dark as heck but that's it. you're better off illuminating a place and setting some stone fences (to use a bit of those 9 Qintilion stones you get while mining) if you want to work at night. which btw if you do, then drifters are not a problem anymore... also as soon as you've seen the terrain once you have a rough idea of what's going on in that area even at pitch dark in calm nights. you even have the map/minimap as a reminder.. HOWEVER, ≥ medium nights in the wild are insane. you don't know where did that rock came from which took a bit of your health bar.. and suddenly you're surrounded by predators crawling out of everywhere.
 

As i said previously, if you don't want rifts to spawn next to your house then build the device to stop them from appearing. that will -at least- stop your "calm nights" from becoming noisy. but again, dunno what you did to your game, but most of my nights are kinda peaceful. even at early game most nights you can easily get out and kill the 2-3 drifters that are noisy in your door and that's it.

2 hours ago, Headshotkill said:

This and you still get temporal storms anywhere on the map so at regular times you'd experience the crazy supernatural stuff anyway

turn your render distance to the max in a sunny day... to have fun.
 

make packed dirt and mud blocks and path blocks.. mudbricks are nice to build because they are more or less pretty, packed dirt i use for watch towers, which i also use for shelter. the color makes it easy to see, plus it's as abundant as long as there's soil. the path blocks are a godsend, makes you go faster (33%) without increasing the consumtion of food. it's also a great way to get rid of stones too.. 
 

1 minute ago, Headshotkill said:

 it's what I think would make the game work better with less annoyance and more fun throughout

hm... i guess everyone feels the fun in different ways. for me the actual challenge and planning is enough to be real fun, noisy nights are the reminder of what's going on outside... otherwise it becomes more and more the other famous block game that i allways had to heavily mod in order to enjoy

there are plenty of things i agree that could make things less "tedious", for example if you read the forum one post about "fruit tree frustration" i mention that trees are not fun for me..

i'm in the same boat as Jackal Black, there are reasons for everything and i don't find the night-spawn mechanic bad/outdated, on the contrary, it's quite lore friendly. you know (or should know) who are the drifters, and now, better than ever, everyone can get an idea of what they are, it's not a spoiler if you talk to one trader they will happily explain that god himself cursed the land and specifically cursed them to roam for the ETERNITY IN THE DARKNESS. the fact that they pop out of nowere.. i can understand it bothers you, it's a threat... but at the same rate, ferns bother me, like they infuriate me.. because they are, 99% of the time, the only reason i die. 

i however, approve the DEN block. it could be an interesting way to do things but as Jackal Black said i'm gonna of course try to cheese it as much as possible, not because i don't like it, but because it will most likely make my life easier, which is the whole point of a survival game, survive.

the temporal rifts are also tied to lore, the problem is that the whole land is cursed and that makes it so nowhere is safe, not even close to your home, you're living in a nightmare.. and that once it reaches a certain point, brings up the temporal storms. you're surviving in a supernatural world, making the supernatural be underground only it's not reasonable for me. you don't want rifts close by? build the contraption to keep them closed. you don't mind them? don't build it.

the fact that "early game" homesteading is not relaxing and becomes easier and easier is just a proof that you're doing things properly. increasing the upheaval just a tiny fraction will tear that "relaxing" part quite dramatically. it will create more "extreme" worlds with more mountains, more dangers that you won't be able to find as easy.. but the fact that they are outside.. you still forget that you're living in a nightmare. it hurts the homesteady? it does not. it's a reminder that you're not playing the other block game. you don't want to hear them? sleep through the night. it's a nice price to pay, don't you think? you're just asking for the game to be easier.

for the exploring part.. spelunking for you brings excitement, for me it's just tediousness... need to illuminate everything, fight monsters that are constantly spawning and delete the cages in order to be able to mine for 15 seconds just to find "poor" mineral is exciting the first time, not the second, at least for me.

i don't really know if we are playing the same game, but having a base, like a 4-5 block tall box where you can fit everything (cooking utils, forge utils, storage area, sleeping area, garden, and stables) it's allways required. campfires give no protection at all, you have no option except for building a base, specially 'cause you can be stoned to death from far away, the drifters are a tiny bit smarter since few version ago. a stray wolf and bear can maul you to death, specially bears can tear through armor like paper. if you want safety then live far away from forest, but then you won't have easy acess to wood. yourself are saying it "being inside my base it's safe" yes, so get your ass outside and just live around a campfire!

living in colder climates (like i do) reduces your food options, but increases the lifespan of the food it also kills you quicker tho, hypothermia is quite real on this game on the other hand, you can grow food in warmer climates, but makes it spoil faster. there's no penalty on having too much heat tho... the whole game is a balance and it's your job to find the sweet spot for you.