Tom Cantine

Yes, this is certainly a problem, and it was definitely a problem on the MUD I played on (and was a builder there for a while). But it was exacerbated by the fact that the server ran 24 hours a day, and many players lived in different time zones and had different schedules. The Auction House ameliorates that a bit, but its distributed nature doesn't encourage running a SHOP where people can come to buy YOUR goods in particular when you're not logged in. I do like, however, that it includes transport costs and delays, which provides a modest advantage to centralized towns, but again, only when all the parties to the transaction or work are online together.

I have not, but I was in a MUD for quite some time. Entirely text-based, but surprisingly immersive. I'd love to play a role like, say, the village blacksmith, or a potter, or farmer. One of the nice things about VS is that it does, to some extent, reward specializing and the classes enhance that a bit. And that's something I'd like to see in an RP server, further reinforcement for the division of labour and cooperative play. I like TOPS, but still SO many people have their own windmills and smelters and all that. (And of course TOPS is 100% conscious of this being a server and not some strange world we've awakened in as seraphs with no memory of whatever personal history we may have had before...)

I have been into RPGs since the early 1980s, starting with Traveller. I very much enjoy playing a character in a fictional reality, and I've LONG wanted to have a good RP experience in MC, and VS seems to have a great deal more potential for that to be meaningful. That said, I've never been quite so enthusiastic about the RPG trope of the Quest or the Dungeon. Some of the most rewarding RP experiences I've had have been really quite mundane but powerfully immersive and real, like compelling personal dialogue against a backdrop of bringing in the harvest or cutting up vegetables with my in-game spouse. So the kind of RP I'd want in a VS server would emphasize the sorts of ongoing challenges humans have in growing and maintaining their communities. Raiding dungeons can be a part of that, but contrived quests don't really do much for me. I would also very much like there to be somewhat realistic communication constraints. Proximity chat, for example, rather than built-in shortwave radios in everyone's head. Something to make it more immersive.

That is just because the developer isn't on Apple's list of verified, trusted developers. I've ALWAYS had to go in and manually tell the security settings to allow VS to run anyway. Edit: Whitelist. Yeah. That's the word I was trying to remember before my morning coffee.

Oh, you did that on purpose, didn't you?

On The Official Public Server, someone created a separate chat channel specifically for the sorts of profound conversations that some folks don't like for whatever reason. It's an open group, so you don't need to be invited. Just type /group join PhiloCircle

Garlic is NOT obscure!

There are some issues I've seen come up in TOPS, and which I suspect are going to be pretty common any time you have a persistent server with many users. One such issue is abandonment. It's not uncommon for players to just drift away from a game or give up on it and never come back, leaving their claims unavailable for anyone still playing. Rather than having to pester the mods to intervene, it might be useful to build in a system that can be administered automatically or with player input, all configurable at the server level. Here are a couple of mechanisms I've been thinking about. First, each claim should have an "idle timer". This would keep track of how long it's been since it's been reset, and it'd be reset by one or more of the following server configured options: The owner of the claim logs into the game. The owner of the claim actually enters the claim. A player with permissions to the claim enters the claim. There should also be an "adverse possession" counter. This would increment each day someone who does NOT have permissions on the claim enters or attempts to enter an idle claim (such as by trying to break a block or open a door), and is reset to zero whenever the idle timer is reset. Finally there would be an "abandonment timer", which is triggered and starts counting down once the idle timer or the adverse possession counter reach a server configured threshold. (If this timer is configured to zero, then abandonment happens immediately.) When the abandonment timer is triggered, notices would be published to a configured audience, whether it be just the owner, everyone with permissions on the claim, or the entire server, that the claim is subject to abandonment in X days. (This should also be shown by /land info.) When the abandonment timer hits zero, the land is declared abandoned. Depending on server configuration, this could mean: The claim instantly expires. The land becomes "use" for all players, but the claim doesn't disappear entirely. A player entering* the claim is given the option to delete the claim A player entering* the claim is given the option to renew the claim on behalf of the original owner, thus reseting the idle timer. A player entering* the claim is given the option to take over the claim. *entering the claim would include attempting to open a door or break a block in the claim. It occurs to me that there should also be a way for the owner of a claim to just transfer ownership of a claim to another player, rather than having to release the claim and make the receiving player establish a new one, because that could be quite difficult in the case of claims made up of multiple cuboids weaving their way around other claims.

It should also be possible to paste them in from an external text editor. I do that with books I write, so I can make multiple copies rather than have to transcribe them all as scrolls.

Insects are pretty well represented in the game so far, though many of them are just ambience. Bees are economically important, and termite mounds exist (and can be a source of food). We see fireflies, grasshoppers and swarms of midges over ponds in summer. I'm told you can hear cicadas in trees in some biomes, though I've never encountered them myself. And with apologies to J.B.S. Haldane, "Tyron, if he exists, has an inordinate fondness for Lepidoptera." I have been disappointed that the only mollusks we find are the shells of dead ones. It'd be nice to be able to dig up clams or dive for oysters as a food source, and that goes for lobsters, crabs and crayfish as well. How do you think ants should be implemented, in game terms?

No no, it's The Original Battlestar Galactica. The one with Lorne Greene.d

May I suggest, instead of 4x4 grid, a 3x3x3 one? Assembling three dimensional components seems considerably more interesting than just bigger two dimensional ones.

I would think that if we wanted a potter class, a better way to do it would be to increase the number of voxels they get per unit clay when forming items.

It SORT of is, so long as you commit to knapping it into a particular form. Start knapping, and then just don't finish until you need it. But it takes up a whole tile.

I never leased it in the first place!

I appreciate how useful it is to be able to slaughter domesticated livestock so quickly, but isn't a cleaver mainly used in butchery? That is, carving up a carcass? So why do I need a separate knife for that task? I therefore suggest a slight tweak to the cleaver: make it usable for processing dead mobs. Maybe even allow for slightly better drops when using one, to make it worth having before you've bred gen 3 livestock.

It's not a step BACKWARDS. They haven't eliminated the existing salmon mobs. While I was (and am still) hoping for more catchable fish and various means to catch them (nets, lines, maybe weirs, lobster pots...), I'm very glad oceans will feel more alive. The grasshoppers and midge swarms add greatly to ambience, and it'll be great to have this in the seas as well. And eventually, I hope, bigger fish, and mollusks and crustaceans.

Except that spears are also used as missile weapons, and carrying several for that purpose is pretty common. The trade off is that (1) flint spears are fairly cheap but don't do huge damage, and (2) bronze spears which do more damage are constrained by the scarcity of the metals involved. Iron is so cheap (once you get to that level) that throwable iron spears would almost make people stop asking for guns to be implemented.

Well, they actually DO come out in his stories, the most common form taken by Nyarlathotep, for example, but also more generally the kind of sensibilities he espouses as normal and wholesome and proper in contrast to the eldritch horrors. Knowing what I do about his personal biases just weakens the strength of his fiction for me. It's like if someone described the taste of garlic as "evil", and then warns you that some person you're about to meet is evil: does he mean they're genuinely malevolent, cruel, and dangerous, or does he just not like them? I did hear an interesting take on this once, though, that a good chunk of Lovecraft's horror is contempt for himself for being such a fragile and intolerant pathetic little being, an awareness that he himself (or the protagonists in his stories) is indelibly tainted with monstrosity.

That happened to me at one of the story locations. It's so you don't just mine your way past obstacles and challenges. You've found a story location!

Musashi Miyamoto wrote that it is not good to have a favourite weapon, because you should be prepared to fight with whatever is at hand. But yeah, spears rule. There's a reason they remained the dominant infantry weapon well past the invention of gunpowder. And I agree that iron or steel spears would make sense, even if they don't do any extra damage. But maybe it's that iron is so plentiful that spears just become too cheap, once you progress to that point? Still, I find that kind of metagame balance rationale unsatisfying.

I always found the Lovecraft concept of some incomprehensibly alien and thus "unwholesome" (one of his favorite adjectives) reality beyond human experience kind of intriguing, but it got seriously deflated when I learned that he used the same kind of language to describe plain old human beings from other countries. Kind of an unreliable narrator situation. And a bit of a shame, too, because that eldritch-horror-from-beyond-space can be done well. But here's the catch: it must be done indirectly. That is, anything you encounter from the Beyond is going to be perceived through the medium available. For example, a "realistic" text description of a direct experience of the Beyond might be "fhoi7823 hfsw8e7RH^%nwyei", but that's not going to evoke any sense of horror. We just read it as a meaningless typo, or the author inadvertently pulling us out of immersion by reminding us that this is a text we're reading. The unspeakable horror must be conveyed in speakable words. And that's why the Rust Dimension must never be a place we can visit, and why drifters and bowtorn and shivers will always only ever be mundane physical monsters for us to fight or flee. We're working within the medium of a computer game, so everything we encounter in game must be portrayed through that medium. The Lovecraftian horror of it must be implied; it literally cannot be depicted.

They're quasi-mechanical, dropping fibers and gears when killed. Perhaps they're hurling bits of themselves, which would explain why some of them no longer have functioning legs. As for the OP, I genuinely do not have a problem with drifters throwing stuff at close range. Yes, it's annoying, but that's kind of the point of them existing at all, miserable hate-filled wretches. And as I have myself desperately loosed arrows at a charging (already wounded) bear as they got too close, I don't think it would be sporting to deny drifters the same option.

I agree, with some limits. I like the rarity of resin-producing trees, but for the most part I would very much like to see flowers and other bits of vegetation be a little bit more renewable. I mean, real plants do in fact grow and reproduce, and while overuse can render something extinct, it's a little odd that a whole new redwood tree can be grown while woad cannot.

Oh yeah? Well sometimes I