Tom Cantine

Maybe horses went extinct with the Rot.

My second time (first time without cheats) I only died to it once, but I had already pushed on to get steel plate armor before even visiting the Archives. The chief advantage of the armor was I could afford to ignore the locusts. Jumping to avoid the slam attack helped, and would have helped a lot more if I had more practice at the tactic. But I did have some success doing damage by just kiting normally, and taking advantage of the spear's reach (since you really can't move very fast in plate armor). Still, not really a fan of this sort of fight. Or of fights generally, to be honest.

Aesthetics and subjective quality. Something like the comfort mechanic in Valheim, but more individualized and possibly subjective. Maybe a hidden set of variables within each food. The hidden set of variables in the food production could be derived from such factors as what kind of wood it was cooked over, how big a batch it was, how close to spoilage the ingredients were. Making cheese: what kind of picked vegetable was used to curdle the milk? What species animal gave the milk, what generation? Making wine: How close to spoilage were the fruits, and how close to spoilage was the juice before it was sealed, and what time of year was it sealed? Was it raining when it was sealed? Was the soil under the berry bushes high fertility, low fertility? All these things would contribute to the hidden taste variables of, I dunno, maybe 16 bits of data total. And then these get compared to a preference key in the seraph who consumes the food, and most seraphs would have the same preference key but maybe one bit would be randomly flipped, so that two seraphs wouldn't get exactly the same reaction to the same food, but they'd MOSTLY agree that THIS cranberry wine is a superior vintage to THAT cranberry wine.

That's probably not it. I'm on a Mac too. Speaking of which, have you ever seen the moon in game? I have not and I'm wondering if it's a Mac thing....

I wouldn't have a problem at all with someone getting a friend to pay the tax, or reset the adverse possession timer for that matter. If you have someone who has permissions on your claim, and they're still using it, then the claim's not abandoned.

And just because you regard it as blatant theft doesn't mean it IS. The common law has evolved over centuries, finding rules for resolving disputes over just this sort of thing, and adverse possession is not an easy thing to establish. There are very specific requirements for it to be successful, and all it takes for the lawful owner to defeat it is to check in every so often and say, "Hey, get off my land!" Whereas the squatter has to be openly and conspicuously using the land for quite some time, long enough to be recognized by the locals as the effective owner of the place and long enough for their occupation of the land to come to the attention of the registered owner. Adverse possession rules arose because of a legitimate need, more an issue in the days of deeds than today, but the moral, practical and legal arguments for such a system still apply. Now, I'm not actually arguing that adverse possession should be maintained as a legal mechanism. Here in Alberta it was just abolished (in 2022), and I'm kind of indifferent about that. But I do think it's important to challenge this widespread idea that property rights are an absolute pre-legal Fact Of Nature. (I think the framers of the U.S. constitution made that mistake when they drafted the 5th Amendment, for example). Property rights are inherently a creature of law, and they can be created (e.g. copyright), amended or abolished (e.g. chattel slavery) by legislatures, and reassigned by courts. So I would argue not that we should never ever violate the absolute sanctity of someone's ownership claim (over land or anything else, IRL or IG), but rather the debate should be about when it's appropriate to do so. And I don't think we disagree too much, in that you recognize that the server administrators should have that power. But ideally the server administrators will be applying consistent, reliable principles in exercising this power, and incorporating some of those principles into the game's code could streamline their workload.

Yes, it's certainly the case that people have to leave the game with every intention of coming back. It's ALSO the case that lots of people join a server, put down a claim, and then disappear for good. In our village, there are abandoned claims of both types. As for adverse possession, it's a thing in common law, and for very good reason. thought perhaps less so now that many jurisdictions use a Torrens system of title registration. Even so, the rationale behind adverse possession was to include a mechanism for bringing the property rights more in line with how they were actually being used, and the Crown has always had an interest in seeing land used most productively. (Analogously, a server administrator will often have an interest in facilitating player activity and interaction.) That said, the reason I included an adverse possession timer in this proposal was to reflect the reality that an abandoned claim out in the middle of nowhere isn't in anyone's way and isn't likely to be challenged or squatted upon, whereas idle claims in busy areas are the ones that cause the most disruption to town life. Abandoning a claim in the middle of a busy community is just kind of a dick move. I will note that since making this suggestion I've revised my thinking somewhat. Somewhere else I made a suggestion of tying claims to a kind of "property tax" in RG, which might be calculated with reference to such things as temporal stability, and proximity to traders, TLs and other claims. Naturally it was not a popular suggestion: everyone hates taxes. But I do think it might be a good option for server operators who want to experiment with various economic models. Also, since writing that I've explored the potential of combining claims, group permissions, and locks. So at least in the settlement I expect to be establishing after The Wipe, some of these problems will be significantly ameliorated.

Early game, one of the very first things I try to do is make a cooking pot and a bowl, even while I'm travelling in search of a more permanent home. As I'm out foraging, I'll cook whatever I can get in that pot, and so that often includes porridge with berries. I don't think I'd say I have a FAVOURITE way, though. If we had garlic butter, it might be bread, but we don't.

I'm in the process of trying to plan out a structure for a multiplayer community that doesn't depend on any single player staying active in the game indefinitely. In other words, I'm looking to work out a mechanism for succession plans, ways to transfer ownership/control of a group or a claim to a new owner. I know I can, as the owner of a claim, grant full build/destroy access to other players, but is there some way, short of releasing the claim to be reclaimed by a successor, that I can hand over the ability to grant/revoke permissions on the claim? Simply releasing the claim and starting a new one could be really awkward and error-prone, not just because the shape of the original claim may be a complex of multiple cuboids, but also because its existing permissions structure may be include a bunch of different individuals and groups. (The workaround would be for all the claim commands used to create or modify the claim to be recorded in an in-game Deed book, but that's still pretty ugly.) Similarly, can the ownership of a Group be transferred? I know you can designate other players with Operator status so they can invite/revoke other players to the group, but if operators cannot name new operators, this only prolongs the inevitable by one generation. Are there commands mods can use to change ownership of these things?

So far what I have discovered empirically, by moving about and taking .weather readings at various times and places, is that the tl, tr, bl and br percentages do indeed seem to be fixed to map coordinates. I have also noticed that the percentages always seem to add up to 100, allowing for rounding errors. (I have reached a point on my solo world where one of them is 99% and the others are all zero, but I haven't been able to get the one to 100%.) Science marches on...

I suppose this would be another good science project in game. Thank you, the older thread contains some clues that might be useful, too. I won't tag this as a solution yet, because the mystery remains, but it is at least a resolution, for I can go on with resolve, knowing what I must do.

The command .weather gives a succinct summary of the current weather, but it gives four of them, labelled TR, TL, BR and BL. That sure sounds like abbreviations for Top Right, Top Left, etc. but I'm not certain. And also, I don't know how these regions are defined; are they fixed weather cells tied to the map, a weather pattern that moves ACROSS the map, or just a derived summary generated around the player's position? Or is this the sort of thing an in-game scientist should explore empirically?

Ah, these kids today, growing up with dynamite and trinitrotoluene and all these other newfangled explosives. Let me tell you, back in the old days before old Alfred wheeled out his special formula boom putty, all we had was black powder, and we were glad to have it let me tell you! Maybe you don't think it's worth it to save a few swings of the pickaxe, but if you was the one swinging that pickaxe I reckon you'd think differently.

Yeah, I'm puzzled by this one. I'd been filling my sheeps' feed troughs with flax forever. I would be surprised if it wasn't meant to be a valid food.

I had a minor miracle the other day. I went to take some cuttings from a cherry tree, after picking all the cherries. Didn't want to damage it too much, so I only took the three lowest of a nice, full productive tree. I finish my cutting the third low branch, and I noticed some cherries I somehow missed picking. I go to pick them and realize the three branches I had just cut regrew seconds after I cut them. I mean, we know branches regrow, but I have no idea how or when the code triggers it. I presume it's just a random tick, and if so, the miracle was that the tick happened just as I was finished taking the cuttings. So I might build a small shrine and treat that as a sacred cherry tree.