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.

I'm busy running a university! How am I gonna have time for a career in the theatah?

I get that, but I've never had a problem with it myself, because I'm always finding interesting projects. In TOBG, I would build roads between all the villages I found, and develop geographically appropriate infrastructure. And that never ends. In VS I can do that with traders, establish roads or sea routes between them, develop villages near each and pretend there are unseen human NPCs populating them, and so on. But in multiplayer the possibilities absolutely explode. I have long thought about how much fun it would be to build a theatre (perhaps modeled after the period-appropriate Globe Theatre of Shakespeare's day), and then actually -- ACTUALLY -- put on performances there with other players. I mean, there are already SO many costume pieces and props available, the game includes a few emotes, and I've even found scraps of an actual script for a play in the lore of the game itself. On TOPS, I built a university with an astronomical observatory, which I actually use to measure and calculate the movements of the stars and the sun and how they change with season and latitude. I've invited other players to conduct original research in geology, agriculture, entomology (there are 169 unique specimens of Lepidoptera in the game to collect if you're so inclined), and there's work to be done in physics and the VS-specific field of temporal studies. I excavated a ruin and I'm going to be preserving it as a museum, having logged all the contents of the vessels and bony soil (of course I saved the bones for proper respectful burial). I've been thinking about ways to establish something approximating a legal system, with courts to resolve disputes between players and enforce contracts. You could run a courier service, or a commodities broker, or shipping. There are art museums on this server, with genuine works of art, and quite a few players spend most or all of their time just chiseling magnificent creations. When you can engage with other players on a server, you will never run out of things to do.

I actually prefer to deal with bowtorns during the day. I can shoot them from farther away.

Right now, I would settle for there just being a proximity TEXT chat, that would just display over your head and not echo to a separate chat window. So you could talk to someone you just randomly met on the road without spamming the general chat your "Hello, where you from, stranger?" banter.

Okay, I know this is not a sexy topic, but I think it's important because it addresses some problems that come up all the time on multiplayer servers. One thing that happens A LOT on multiplayer servers is the formation of towns, but there is at present little more than the honour system to get people to comply with any kind of town rules, or to prevent random passers-by from just establishing claims in their borders and never logging in again. Moreover, when players with claims leave the server for whatever reason (losing interest in the game, moving to another server, getting hit by a bus), those claims can become unusable, rapidly turning the place into a ghost town. So what I'm proposing here is a general scheme to allow functional towns with actual enforceable laws (at least with respect to zoning bylaws and building codes), as well as a succession system for abandoned claims. The way I would build a town from scratch today is to lay down a whole lot of small individual claims and then, as a landlord, grant individual revokable permissions, but this is unwieldy and doesn't really allow for a variety of government types, and would be absolutely doomed if I were the one to drift away from the game. So the idea here is an additional claim layer for a group settlement. Call it the town claim. To create such a claim, you'd first need to be an operator of a group. (By default this is the person who created the group, but there already exist commands to grant op status to another player). There would then be a new command, something like /land groupclaim, to mark out the territory of the town claim. It'd use parallel commands to the existing /land claim tree for defining cuboids and such. Town claims would not directly affect anyone's ability to build or break blocks. Rather, they would only affect the ability to make or keep personal claims within their borders. A town claim might have permissions allowing everyone to make personal claims, or only members of the group, or grant claiming rights to specific individuals, or no one (thus reserving the land as a free-for-all). Importantly, town claims would empower group leadership to revoke personal claims within the town, thus enabling them to effectively enforce town policies. Two final additions to the existing claim and group systems are highly recommended here: the ability to transfer ownership completely. That is, it should be possible for the owner of a claim to transfer their claim to another player, instead of having to free the claim and make the new player reconstruct the claim from scratch. And it should be possible for the owner of a group to not merely name new operators, but relinquish full ownership of the group to another player. These are small changes, but they'd vastly expand the possibilities, and in particular allow for effective succession plans for when a key player leaves the server. Edit: I play on a non-PvP server so this hadn't occurred to me, but another town claim permission could enable/disable PvP within the town borders.

I tend to play hunter myself, so let me say a few words in the class's defence. The advantages really apply above ground, not so much in caving. You're HUNTING, taking down animals at range for food and other resources, and it's explicitly stated that you don't do well underground (claustrophobic). That said, I still run escort for people mining in multiplayer, mainly because by now I've acquired steel chain armour and can sort of tank most first hits, but even so, the key to security while mining (and anywhere else) is awareness: don't get surprised, so you don't need to tank those first hits in the first place. Hunter, or rather the play style that hunter attracts, is relatively good for this. It's more than just being alert, but being ACTIVELY alert, maintaining awareness of the terrain and where to focus attention, putting up temporary barriers (I carry a stack of hay bales at all times) to block approaches from unsecured areas, and so on. Many combat-focused games encourage bad habits. Or rather, the common emphasis of such games does. Vintage Story isn't a combat game, but a survival game, and the key is to pick the right tool for the job. Sometimes melee combat is the right tool for the job, but in my experience that job is usually cleaning up a mistake in preparing.

Personally, I have always had a strongly simulationist streak in my gaming. I like to use simulations to explore aspects of reality, even if the simulation is highly abstracted like chess or sudoku. And sometimes if it deviates sharply from reality, such as if there's temporal storms where inexplicable horrors manifest outside your dirt hovel, even the ways it differs can bring more understanding of the real world. In Minecraft, I always found myself trying to understand the logistics of how villages and towns form and connect to each other through roads or other means, what kinds of infrastructure gets built where and why. I had elaborate house rules to help me guide my experiments, usually in solo play, but tried a few things out on larger servers too where we were trying to form communities. I find that Vintage Story is (MOSTLY) better suited for a lot of this, and incorporates organically many of the sorts of things I made my own house rules for. (There's still some things, like redstone, I haven't found an adequate parallel for.) And because I've become quite active on a public server here, I am getting to delve much more deeply into the problems of organizing a village, managing social resources and conflicts, designing rules and social norms to make for a sustainable and prosperous community.

Well, bear in mind that that "just the legs" are also just the part that are keeping the rest of you out of the water (and the part you'd be using to get out), so if they're cooked, so are you.

It was only a problem in the mathematical sense of something to be solved, and I solved it. I have no problem with having been presented with such a problem I certainly have my own aesthetic preferences informing how the game should be, but I tend to accept most of the game reality as given. That is, while I have lots of suggestions to enhance the game (I want to be able to fish! Why aren't there crows? When can we have coffee and garlic? Let's have an expanded two-layer land claim system to allow communities to establish enforceable building codes and standards!), I feel like I should accept the directly lore-related choices as given. So the fact that temporal storm beasties might still linger, I take as a deliberate part of the canon, and try to look for a satisfying in-game explanation. Temporal storms are unpredictable where they let monsters slip through into our world, so presumably as they wane they're unpredictable in the places where they'll let them slip back out, meaning that the monstrosities can be stranded here. And if they detect a hated seraph, they'll keep trying to find and kill it. So there's no obvious way for them to go back where they came from, and no particular reason for them to wander away from where they smell seraph. It's a problem to deal with, and the game is all about dealing with problems.

Fine, Kalzamar. I know this was your last post in the thread, so I'm not really replying for your benefit but for anyone else still reading here, and in particular to give a counter to your claim that people are leaving the game because of the shivers and bowtorn: I'm not, and neither are a lot of other players. The "You just lost a customer!" play just doesn't carry lot of weight; we all know that VS is not a game everyone will like. And as for dismissing advice on tactics as a derisive "git gud", I would like to assure other readers that it's really not that hard. I generally dislike combat, not for mechanical reasons but because I'm just not a combat player. I like to avoid it if I can in favour of other less costly solutions. I don't really enjoy fighting, so I'm really not the kind of player who hones his reflexes for skillful hacking and slaying. And yet, not long ago, I won a sniper duel with FOUR nightmare bowtorn who were still hanging around outside my base after a heavy temporal storm. It's not that hard if you prepare and plan, but preparing and planning takes a bit of effort. Admittedly that preparation included a recurve bow and iron arrows, but all that meant was I didn't have to hit them as many time to take them down. I still had to HIT them, and avoid being hit, while keeping track of where the others might be maneuvering. It was a challenge, but if a reluctant warrior like me can pull it off, a motivated combat player should have no trouble. In other words, don't become discouraged if the challenge seems too much for you. It's doable.