Tom Cantine

I'd been doing a lot of nomadic stuff, practicing for the wipe of TOPS, and I soon found that making just a single cookpot and bowl as early as possible was a REALLY GOOD MOVE. Even better if you find some peat to fire it with, because it'll be ready sooner. I wasn't fully into what you'd call the Pottery Age. Just two items. No jug, no crocks, certainly no molds or crucibles. Just a pot to cook in and a bowl to eat from.

I have also (very recently!) discovered the utility of the humble club. Much more durability than a spear, not QUITE as much damage but you can smack away at things faster. So it's not a terrible melee weapon to chase down that wounded boar with.

I feel that spear hunting IS quite viable early game, but it emphasizes stealth and surprise, as well as anticipating the escape path of the fleeing animal so you can follow up (again stealthily!) The other thing that makes the spear viable is that it works on fish. If you can maneuver a fish to somewhere near the surface, you can kill it with a thrown spear. I don't really have a problem with slowing the spear aiming time. One of the main complaints about spears (and the reason we didn't have iron ones, I think) was that we auto-reload with other spears in our inventory after throwing, so people could spam them too fast. That becomes a much bigger problem once you get iron, because iron ore is so plentiful relative to the materials to make various kinds of bronze.

Size and definition of "location" left as an exercise for the in-game scientists....

I see fish. Not often, which kinda feels realistic to me actually. But it's worth noting that they avoid you, and they'll probably notice you before you notice them, so a lot of the time I only notice them just as they're swimming away. You can exploit this behaviour, by the way, because they're not very smart at pathing. Chase them into a corner in the shallows, and you can hurl a spear at them. They flee melee insanely fast, but a missile weapon will work. This too seems entirely appropriate and realistic. Spearing fish works, but the conditions have to be just right to get close enough, while investing in a fishing rod and bait makes it a lot easier.

I think this is quite appropriate, though. Foraging for berries is an entirely realistic early-game strategy, and as one becomes more established, they become more of a niche luxury, a tasty embellishment for staple foods. At this point producing and using them in any quantity does indeed involve more intensively farming them. I like the fact that, on a server, if someone is known for producing lots of blueberry wine, it's an actual flex rather than just another common local crop.

I'm generally positive about the new berry bush mechanics, not because I know a lot of about horticulture (I don't), but because it creates a nice role opportunity for specialization/ and division of labour on servers. In the village I had on TOPS, we had a player who started a vineyard that looked quite beautiful: rows of neatly spaced berry bushes, each "supported" by a wattle fence next to it. Trouble is, there were also berry bushes all over the rest of the town, undercutting the ambitions of this player to serve as the town's vintner, or rather rendering his contributions entirely cosmetic. With the new system, building and tending to a productive berry farm now takes as much attention as other roles like cheesemaking or baking. I like this a lot.

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.