Tom Cantine

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.

With respect, @Kalzamar, your experience is very different from mine. I have never found bowtorn or shiver to be an impossible challenge, even in early game. I appreciate that you think it's boring to stay in a dirt hut all night, but it's important to understand that this is a survival game, not primarily a combat game. Combat is important, but we're not here to just kill monsters and get treasure. We're here to manage our resources and figure out strategies to survive and, hopefully, prosper. And maybe if we're up to it, tackle the story progression. I do not find early game night time boring or impossible. Challenging, sure, but that's kind of the point. With proper planning and tactics, it becomes easy, but figuring out that proper planning and tactics can be a struggle. Time management and prioritization really make a difference. On day one, I may knap a knife and an axe and a shovel, but that's to speed up the absolutely essential GATHERING process. Gather as many berries and stones and sticks and a bit of grass and some firewood, and make the smallest most rudimentary shelter you can out of whatever you can collect fastest. Don't stop to eat, just gather. Run away from dangerous stuff. If I have time I like to spear a couple of fish, but leave hunting for day 2 or 3. The first night, there will be PLENTY to do, crafting baskets, cooking and eating, knapping more tools and weapons. You may think these tasks boring, but they really are the key to prospering in a survival game. But you know, if you're really into just combat, you might want to join a multiplayer server where you can specialize in patrolling and guarding the camp while your other companions tend to the other stuff. Even then, though, you'll need to acclimatize yourself to the fact that much of a soldier's life, even in wartime, is boredom.

Yes and no. There IS a fairly well-known edged weapon called a falchion, and it's even kind of similar in function, in that it's a sword-like edge with the weight far forward for heavy chopping, sort of like how the falx looks like it's designed to strike with the very end with a chopping motion (though the end is a stabby point). I think it kind of makes sense. And the Falx family could well have taken their name from the weapon.

In a word, knowledge. Yes, the lore books and scrolls and tapestries and things that tell us about the past, but I think there could also be things like recipes or schematics, knowledge of HOW to do something that previously you couldn't do. We already have a glider schematic in the game; it seems to me that there could be other lost technologies from before the catastrophe to recover. But the point of that is that they were trying to preserve what they could to rebuild society some day. And so I think it makes a lot of sense for them to have kept books, scrolls, patterns -- information to help the survivors recover knowhow that would otherwise be lost.

I have, on occasion, ordered a "double-double" at somewhere other than a Tim Hortons. Oh, and besides coffee? The game needs garlic. And butter. Garlic butter.

I am a little surprised no one has mentioned the usefulness of a hopper/chest as a secure mailbox on a claim, but maybe that's so well-established as to not need mention. Or maybe this is just a single-player thread. Okay, well, another use I am planning is in my in-game physics research. I have already established that falling damage is linear with height, just as one would expect from a potential/kinetic energy model. This data was collected by jumping off ladders of varying heights and recording the values in the Damage Log. I have read that items falling down chutes gain momentum with height fallen, and that this speed is translated to horizontal momentum at an angled chute. So my plan is to drop items down chutes of various heights and measure how far away they come to rest after the bend, to see if I can work out more of the physics of this world. Basically, Galileo stuff.

Oh, that's just what they WANT you to think! The codes go way deeper than you think. I've said too much already.

The relative "importance" of these things is always contextual. We can all think of situations where it's more urgent to heal than to open the door, and we can all think of situations where it's more urgent to open (or close!) the door than it is to apply the bandage or eat the food. Trying to guess that THIS particular item in your hot bar should change the normal priorities because you're focused on a particular scenario is just a recipe for greater confusion. A more generally applicable principle is ultimately going to be more efficient in the big picture, and arguably, being aware of WHAT YOU HAVE IN HAND is pretty darned important all the time. For example, I play on a laptop using a trackpad, not a mouse, which means that sometimes if I'm not careful I click with the wrong "button". So if I'm going to talk to a trader, I make sure I do NOT have a weapon in my active hand. Ideally I have RG in that hand or nothing, or occasionally the stack of resin I intend to sell on the Auction House. This ALSO avoids the problem of trying to eat instead of interacting with the trader. (Besides, it's just rude to talk with your mouth full.)

That's pretty cool. Have you considered building a henge or something along those lines? You don't need metal for that. And you can get decent precision by building it big enough. My first observatory was tiny, just 5x5 with the observation point in the center. I actually had to do some measurements on my seraph to find the minimum width I could pass through, so as to make the observation chair narrow enough to ensure a constant viewing position. But with the outer edge of the glass dome being only 40 voxels away from the observation point, there wasn't a lot of precision. The next dome was 9x9, which is much better, but still introduces some artifacts when chiseling. The instrument I'm planning now is called the Solar Occlusion Instrument, and it's meant to measure two things. First, I want to get the visual diameter of the sun. So the plan is to have a somewhat distant vertical slit (maybe 10m?), and to time exactly how long the sun itself is visible passing behind it. This time will give me a fraction of 24 hours, and be easily convertible to degrees of arc. Second, I want to test the hypothesis that despite its wide visible disk, the sun acts as a point source of light. I've noticed shadows seem to remain sharply defined no matter how far away from the object they are cast; there is no penumbra. So for this experiment a second slit will be set up a good distance from the first, such that light can only pass through both at a very precise angle. I will then time how long the sun casts light on the surface under/behind the second slit. Kinda neat how these experiments mirror those in the real world, where bigger and bigger baselines/apertures are need for finer and finer precision. Which is why I think a henge kind of structure would be so effective.

I think you are looking at an artificially narrow sample of what you consider "games". Watch children playing with their toys sometime: they are constantly inventing stories and engaging in make-believe, an instinct to imitate and rehearse the things they may find themselves doing in adult life. Formalized games like chess evolved out of this and the story element often becomes so abstracted as to be almost absent, but that doesn't mean the game isn't story-based; it's so story-based that we forget it's there. In the last century, we saw the emergence (or resurgence?) of the roleplaying game, which took formal rule-based elements from wargames like Chainmail and started re-introducing more story elements to become Dungeons & Dragons, and then a host of other systems, which in turn informed the growth of a whole lot of computer game genres, where story is central. And that brings me to the point I started to type last night for this thread but fell asleep before I could finish and the thread grew. FOR ME, much of the appeal of a game like Vintage Story is that it captures so many aspects of the human story that tend to be minimized or ignored in games like Valheim. Don't get me wrong, I love Valheim, but it emphasizes a very narrow range of challenge: the main danger or peril we have to overcome is dying gloriously in battle. And in a way, there is no failure there because dying gloriously in battle is how you are celebrated and taken to Valhalla in the first place, so win or lose the fight you're still a hero. But I think, from a human perspective, there is also drama in the myriad other challenges we face, some of which also are modeled in Vintage Story. Worrying about how you're going to have enough food and fuel to last through the winter is no less compelling that worrying about how you're going to defeat Bonemass. And more to the point, BOREDOM! I know it sounds strange to say this, because you typically play a game to escape boredom, but realistically overcoming boredom is a bossfight in its own. Being stuck inside during a cold winter or a temporal storm, you get restless, but that in itself is an opportunity to develop the virtue of self-discipline. Maybe boredom is the wrong word, because I think I'm immune to boredom (my mind is ALWAYS racing along) but tedium is definitely a thing, and endlessly grinding stuff in a hand-quern before you get to wind power is absolutely tedious. But I never get bored doing it because there's always so much to be doing in my mind: planning meals, crafting projects, trying to work out the most efficient way to smith a tool with the fewest hammer strokes, etc. And this is greatly enhanced by IMMERSING yourself in the game's reality. I mean, really suspend disbelief. Disbelief ruins the game. In the extreme disbelief case, you're not really playing any kind of game: you're just clicking a mouse button and pressing some keys. That's not really a bear; it's just a pattern of pixels on your monitor. Ho hum. What could be more dull than clicking buttons? But if you accept the premise that this isn't just an image on a monitor, but a bear trying to eat you, that's where the excitement starts to come in. Let it in all the way. The grind is a grind, absolutely, but be IN the grind. Feel your frustration and boredom at having to turn this stupid basalt quern handle again and again and yet again and jeez, why do you really need a pie after all if it's all this work? Just make porridge. Except dammit, you've been digging peat all morning and looking forward to that pie, and.... That's how I play, anyway, and I really enjoy it. I get that not everyone is into this kind of immersion, and that's fine. I really get from the OP's comments that they're kind of stuck in the narrow paradigm of winning and losing. And that's fine too, but to appreciate a game like Vintage Story more fully, you kind of have to get beyond that and embrace the nature of life and all its challenges, not all of which are as sexy as slaying dragons.

This is something I've been working on, as a player, for some time now. I built a sort of observatory, and spent long cold nights tracking the movement of stars and marking their progress by chiseling colored inlays into the glass observation dome. Prior to the most recent update, I determined that the stars moved around a point (the south celestial pole) approximately 17.5 degrees above the southern horizon. Oddly, this did not seem to change with latitude or the seasons, and it was quite a different ecliptic from the one I got by tracking the sun's path across the sky. After the update, the stars are supposed to move more in accordance with the latitude and seasons, and I'm working on making new measurements to confirm this and nail down the important details and principles. Identifying a North Star or South Star would be one goal. This means I'm also going to need to travel more to make observations from different latitudes. It's kind of a big undertaking and, from a gaming perspective, means I'm not going to run out of stuff to do for a long time. As for sundials, that's already been a possibility for a long time, and in fact the principle forms the basis for my next observatory design, because tracking the sun's position on a glass dome is inaccurate at the best of times, and often impossible due to cloud cover, but I've noticed that even on cloudy or overcast days objects cast pretty sharp shadows on the ground, so I can use that to establish the sun's position with much greater precision and in more weather conditions. I would appreciate some gadget like a sextant, but it's already possible to make a crude one. What you do is you chisel a piece of glass with inlaid calibrations of coloured glass, and you place it on a hay bale and observe the target star through the glass from a fixed position, and take note of where the star is in relation to the glass calibrations. This is a miniature portable version of the astronomical dome idea. As for cartography, yes please. I'd LOVE a way to put maps on parchment.

Oh, the shape of the world is a WAY more complicated problem than that. At least, if you assume that the sun and the stars (and, apparently, the moon, though I still have some kind of bug in my version that I can never see the moon at all) are actual objects in a three dimensional space, observed from the surface of the world.

I've been a bit prolific writing books in the multiplayer server I'm on. The first one I "published" (basically started selling copies on the Auction House) details the dimensions of a seraph, along with how I made these measurements. I figured that information might be useful to other players in chiselling stuff like furniture. So it's a reference work. I've also done one on the movement of the stars around the sky and how I made the measurements to calculate the celestial poles, except that's all obsolete since the update, so I have to do a bunch more astronomical observation and calculation. I've written a few on what I guess you could call philosophy, one that's also kind of a primer on panning, and I've recruited other players to contribute to original research (within the game world) into agriculture, weather, geology and so on. In time I expect we'll have collected and archived books codifying rules for some of the various player settlements on the server. Could be stuff like building codes and standards, contracts and receipts, correspondence and so on. Since the server's on all the time but most players aren't, dropping written parchments into claimed hopper mailboxes is a nice solution. I plan to write more how-to guides covering things that aren't in the handbook, sharing little efficiency tricks you pick up by playing for a while. Stuff like strategies to optimize smithing so it uses as little hammer durability as possible. And I'm sure there must be a market for cookbooks.

Yeah, I was lazy in my answer, sorry. Just noted that the links page referenced .net 8 rather than .net 7.

I had the same problem at first. Then I read the bit about the runtime file. They actually link to it on the page where you downloaded the game itself. Vanthrax mentioned it above, but now it's .net 8 instead of .net 7.

Well, I think the new clothes are just gorgeous! Such colours! Such quality! Such texture! And the fit, so flattering! The team has really outdone themselves. It's a shame these other players can't see and appreciate the craftsmanship here.

That's not what the game rewards. The game rewards you for being prepared, including being prepared to quickly improvise with whatever you have available. Your rewards would be even greater if, instead of digging your 1x2x1 hole, you'd prepared a secure base with water you could stand in to pan stacks of gravel you'd collected in advance, or a quern so you could grind limestone while waiting for the storm to break, or with a means to trap and safely dispatch drifters, etc. etc. I don't really object to enhancing the drops of some of the mobs, within reason. I very much like that they're having bowtorn drop bone arrows, for example. But I don't think that rewards should be tailored around the idea that fighting temporal nasties is normative. There are lots of stupid things you can do that do not deserve rewards commensurate with the risk. I tend to think that running out to fight otherworldly monstrosities is one of them. That's not to say there might not occasionally be really good reasons for doing so, but I'm okay with the current reward balance as it is. At least with respect to temporal storms.

What is the purpose of an incentive? It's to encourage people to do something you want them to do. So why do we want people to go out during temporal storms? I don't. I don't particularly care if they go out or stay in, but that's my point: I don't think the game developers really want to tell you you should or shouldn't go out in a temporal storm, either. You can if you want. Incentives in-game emerge organically. If you want to build something, you have an incentive to acquire materials. If you want not to starve or freeze, you have an incentive to go find food or fuel. And sometimes if you need Jonas parts or temporal gears, you have an incentive to brave a temporal storm. I think what you're asking for is not an incentive but a reward for something you already want to do. Killing drifters is how you want to spend time in the game, and you want it to be profitable to play that way. Okay, I get that desire. Maybe I'd like there to be an in-game reward for giving bony soil a proper religious burial, rather than panning it for valuables. Maybe I'd like there to be an in-game reward for serving a meal paired with just the right wine. Maybe I'd like there to be an in-game reward for mugging traders. But if these are things I WANT to do in game, my desire to do them shouldn't need to be reinforced by the game mechanics. Sometimes you can just do something difficult or dangerous for the bragging rights. If it becomes simply a rational economic choice, that kinda cheapens it.

Personally I do not see a need for this, as I don't think the temporal storms are meant to be a loot opportunity so much as a survival challenge. Storms are not difficult to survive if you prepare properly, and they can even be a source of some loot, but in the game universe, they're meant to be a bad thing. The drifters and bowtorn and shivers are pathetic, miserable beings corrupted by something unspeakable, consumed with hate for seraphs and all they stand for, and have nothing to live for but vengeance; we shouldn't expect them to be delivering presents. The reward for surviving a storm is that you survived.