Troy

I like to play with the global climate set to cold, because I like the added challenge of the shorter growing season, harsher winters, and scarcity of common resources like flax. It makes terra preta almost impossible to find without traveling tens of thousands of blocks south, so high fertility soil is a worthwhile investment for me. I'd say it's useful if you're playing with a self-imposed challenge that makes terra preta harder to find like that.

My only problem with drifters spawning at night is that there's no incentive to engage with them. Dealing with surface drifters is pretty trivial by the copper age. It becomes more of a nuisance than anything, because the rewards they drop aren't worth the time it takes to kill them. In Minecraft, the enemies that spawn at night drop worthwhile amounts of useful resources that can't be grown or mined, like gunpowder and string, so it's worth fighting them. In VS, even a low rift activity night will end with 20 drifters growling outside my door, and I'll get 5-10 flax fibers from killing them, maybe one rusty gear if I'm lucky. Flax is easy to come by even in the cold worlds I like to play in, and it's easier to get rusty and temporal gears from traders. Drifters don't drop anything that can't be obtained more easily through other means, so there's no reason to go outside at night and kill them except to shut them up. I know I can just sleep through the night or mute the game, but that's just me disengaging from the game. I'd much rather see a small improvement to drifter drops, which would increase my engagement.

This is a game in which you can carry thousands of cubic meters of stone and sand around on your back in a backpack. Compared to that, it's not that much of a stretch to believe a fox could get angry enough about being poked with a stick to bite you, and for repeated bites to cause fatal blood loss. If it's not your cup of tea, or you're frustrated with the direction the updates have taken the game, that's understandable. I remember getting fed up with vanilla Minecraft when they started adding new dimensions and boss fights but still just had one color of wooden door. It's just strange that dying to a fox was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Nope, no mods. Vanilla version 1.17.10. What's especially weird is that although the game calls it Terra Preta, and although it changes to a Terra Preta block, the nutrient values never go above 65%. I waited around for ages and eventually advanced time several months, and they never replenished to 80% like they would with Terra Preta. Now that I've experimented with it more, I'm guessing this is a bug.

I've been playing a world with a cold global climate. I've been enjoying the challenge and how a lack of certain resources changes the game. Certain items that aren't as useful in a temperate world are now much more useful, like high fertility soil. I normally don't mess with it in a temperate world, I just run around until I find terra preta. There's no terra preta in this cold world, so I've had to make use of high fertility soil for the first time. I bought some potash from a trader and applied it to some of my tilled high fertility soil. A few seconds later, the high fertility soil turned into tilled terra preta. Is that supposed to happen, or is that a bug? The handbook and wiki are silent on the subject.

Today I stumbled across something that I assume is fairly rare: a double trader camp sitting on top of a meteorite.

I think having a small audience gives the devs more freedom to follow through on a single, unified vision that doesn't have to have universal appeal. Like people have said, Vintage Story has features that would turn off a lot of people. Gameplay is meticulous because it's partly grounded in realism. Crops take a long time to grow, and you can't just magically force them to mature with some bonemeal. Metalmaking takes time and effort; you can't just slap some iron ore in a furnace and come back to iron ingots later. This kind of thing doesn't appeal to everyone, but for a small number of people it has a strong appeal we can't get with other games. To make it appeal to more people and gain a wider audience, they'd have to simplify the gameplay and make it less meticulous and detail-oriented, as well as make it easier to survive overall. You'd need more instant gratification and less delayed gratification. The game would lose what makes it special and sets it apart from other games. Of course, having a small audience means less financial support, which means there's always the risk of updates slowing down or stopping entirely if Tyron has to find another job to keep from going the way of the Little Match Girl. So I can see the other side of the argument as well. It's just that Tyron going hungry is a price I'm willing to pay for a game that trades mass appeal for something special. (This is a joke please don't get mad I am very funny.)

Personally I found the new player experience to be less difficult than you found it, and I'm a ten-thumbed nimrod with no patience. Vintage Story's in-game guide is far more helpful than, for example, Minecraft's recipe book. You press escape and you see an option that says "Survival Guide." You can't miss it, it's right above the option to rage quit your first game. It answers basically every question a new player could have. The first page of the book suggests some day one priorities: find stones, make stone tools, make handbaskets, then start thinking about pottery. If you're like me, you spend your first night in an unlit 2x2 dirt cube listening to 100 jerks growl in your ear nonstop. So you spend that night searching the guide for ways to make the next night more pleasant, like a bed and torches. Now you've got day two goals. Eventually you get settled enough to start thinking pottery. What does clay look like? You search the "blocks and items" tab of the guide for clay, and it shows you what clay looks like. Where can you find it? The guide doesn't say, so you wander around looking for it. As a new player, I wandered around for a few days not finding clay. Oh well, I found lots of other neat stuff, and the game is pretty to look at. Overall not a bad experience. You'll see it in the ground eventually, or you'll find it in some ruins storage vessels, or you'll find a trader who sells it, or you'll find it panning, or you'll notice it on your minimap. Basically you'll find it by exploring, which is a core game mechanic and something I wanted to do as a new player anyway. Where can you find copper? The guide tells you it can be found under loose copper bits, or you can pan for it. What's panning? You search for panning in the guide, and it explains how to make a pan and how to use it. I also didn't find the guide so overwhelming. You point out the process of entering the copper age, where there are tons of links to other pages which link to other pages which link to other pages, but the first page about entering the copper age lays out a basic step-by-step process: 1. Find 40 copper nuggets. 2. Make charcoal. 3. Make tool molds and a crucible. 4. Melt and pour the copper. I too found the guide a little overwhelming at first, but then I broke it down into one manageable step at a time. Gather the copper, then check the guide for the next step, making charcoal. Make the charcoal, then check the guide for the next step, making tool molds. Which molds do you make first? The guide explicitly says, "You might want to start out with a pickaxe and hammer mold." Make the pickaxe and hammer molds, then check the guide for the next step. I guess that's a lot of words to say I disagree, and I found my own new player experience to be just right.

I'd like to see secondary resources added to more trees. Currently there's just resin from pine trees. It would be nice to be able to strip bark from birch trees to make birch beer or to tap maple trees for maple sap, to be processed into syrup as an alternative to honey in colder climates. Pretty sure there are a couple of mods for this, but it would be nice to see it in the base game. The Carry Capacity mod ability to move chests and storage vessels around would be nice to see in the base game as well.

If I can't find enough reeds to craft at least a couple of handbaskets by the end of the second day, I start over with a new seed. I could keep moving until I find them, but that's more time than I want to spend hunting for the extra inventory slots I need to get started on actually playing the game. It just isn't fun for me. That's the only thing I consider essential for a good seed.

Another thing that makes Minecraft's Creeper interesting is that it can destroy your creations. Sometimes it's just an unsightly hole in your lawn, sometimes it's the wall of the palace you've spent hours on, sometimes it's your entire livestock pen. Vintage Story's in-game lore talks about a rot that consumes everything, so it would make sense to have an enemy that can destroy/corrupt/rot blocks around it. If it rots things with some kind of passive aura, you would have to deal with it quickly. If it rots things with some sort of attack, you would have to deal with it carefully, or better yet avoid it. It takes a fair amount of time to acquire resources and build things in Vintage Story, so an enemy like that could be really devastating and scary. Imagine watching your 3rd generation sheep rot away into mush because a certain enemy got into your pen and you couldn't deal with it properly. Then again that might be too devastating and hurt the overall player experience. Sticking with the rot idea, it could be a weak slime monster that doesn't hurt the environment, with attacks that do very little health damage but do extreme damage to your armor, clothing, and weapon durability.

Unpopular opinion maybe, but I actually like the slower attack speed. The slower, weightier swing feels more satisfying. It feels like I'm actually hacking with a sword now rather than flailing around with a weightless toy. I'd rather see slightly more damage per swing than more swings per second.

I use eggs. They take a while to rot, but they're effortless to farm. Even a small flock of chickens will produce 5-10 eggs a day.