Tom Cantine

I also play with the music off, again not because I dislike the music itself, but probably because I kind of got into the habit of playing Minecraft without any sound at all before I got hearing aids. Now, if I'm playing a game, I want to be able to focus on the game sound effects (to be aware of approaching monsters), or if I'm listening to anything that's not part of the game, it's usually a podcast or news.

I do not believe this is correct. The amount of any particular item he is willing to buy does not seem to be tied to the amount of gears he has to spend. There is an artisan trader near my base who occasionally buys beeswax, but he never buys more than 12 at a time (in 2 batches of 6 each). Once I've sold him that, he still has other stuff he's willing to buy from me, and he still has gears to spend. Yes, if he runs out of gears he can't buy anything more from you, but that's not the (only) limit on his purchases. As for replenishing, he doesn't necessarily buy or sell the same things every time he replenishes. Rather, I think he just generates a new random selection from the sorts of things that particular kind of trader deals in. We should not think of the traders as operating in isolation. The dialogue indicates that there are other people in the world, and so presumably when you're not looking, the trader is delivering or collecting stuff from them, and aggregating demand. When the trader is willing to buy beeswax, it's not necessarily for his own use; he may have an order from some off-camera artisan who wants the stuff.

I would definitely like to see some more uses for bones, and I think bone handled knives beyond flint make some sense, but not spears. Remember that a spear's attack range is quite long, implying a shaft of at least a meter or more. There's no bone in any of the animals of the game that comes close to being suitable for a spear shaft. Indeed, most of the other tools have hafts too long to be made of bone, as well.

May just be bad luck. I've played for ages in my solo world and never seen a goat, but plenty of sheep. (If I'm understanding your post correctly. I haven't put it through any translator app.)

More broadly, I think it'd be nice if there were a variety of maladies to treat (or prevent) with something other than just slapping on a bandage or poultice. Well, maybe "nice" isn't the word, but yeah.

Oh, certainly. (I've many friends in the SCA, also.) But this heat problem is also true of other armour as well. I have just a costume piece of scale armour, made from frozen orange juice concentrate lids riveted to a denim backing, and it reflects heat back into me like I'm in a Thermos. So yes, heat in VS should be as much a factor as cold. And if that's done, I think they'll need to include some kind of thirst mechanic as well.

I agree that it seems OP, but that's because historically gambeson was surprisingly protective. That is, more effective than we (especially if we grew up thinking of knights in shining armor) would expect it to be.

And garlic and butter.

Meanwhile, I have never ever seen the moon in any version of this game I've ever played. A couple of times, early on, I experienced the darkness of what I assume in hindsight must have been an eclipse, but the moon has never rendered.

I like it. I've seen some nice artwork done with chiselling, but the available colours are kind of limited since you have to use blocks of stuff.

I find I sometimes accidentally hit ctrl-B which toggles the info overlay for blocks I'm looking at. Not so much a bug as a consequence of keyboard mapping. (I also sometimes accidentally throw my falx on the ground in combat, as Q is right next to the maneuver keys WASD.)

Would it? if you spent long enough in any chunk to really take note of where things were, then there might be the occasional new flower or sapling or even a whole tree next time you came through. But the suggestion isn't intended to make massive wholesale changes to the landscape. Just to add some life to the chunks where players have the most impact (such as where they remove currently non-renewables like berry bushes, flowers and rhizomes). That said, it just occurred to me that fire would be another good candidate for an environmental mob like this, planting seeds of fireweed and other post-fire plants. (Some species of pine even rely on fire to crack open their cones so the seeds can grow.)

I wasn't even really thinking of unloaded chunks. This is something that would only happen live, while the player is within the area. I wouldn't expect you'd be able to return to a place you passed through years ago and find anything different. And bear in mind that the WHENEVER a player wanders through an area, there are going to be mobs doing their thing, so if the player's there long enough to make a significant difference to the terrain, then those mobs will also have been having their effects. So there will already be some seeds and saplings primed to update the next time the player comes through.

Well, it's not entirely FREE, in terms of processing, but it depends on how many of these mobs exist at any given time, and the main idea here is that you wouldn't have more than a handful of them. I figure that if there are already hares and bears and butterflies and raccoons wandering about, they can be put to work just adding a little occasional random act of planting to their behaviour. And spawning a couple of extra invisible mobs every so often wouldn't involve much more than spawning in any other animal. To be fair, I don't actually know how much processing is involved handling the various wildlife normally present. Maybe hares and wolves spend most of their time idle, just resting in the grass until a player activates them by coming into detection range. But the weather mobs I'm thinking of wouldn't involve much if any animation overhead, even when they are active.

(This is something I mentioned in a thread on tracking, but it occurs to me that it probably merits its own thread.) There are various sorts of things happening all across the landscape that, if properly simulated, would be incredibly laggy. I'm thinking in particular about growth of new vegetation besides just grass (and horsetails on fallow farmland), but there are other processes we could think of. So the basic idea here is to put existing mobs to work. Checking every tree, flower and berry bush to see if it drops a seedling or two would be pretty costly in computing resources, but if wandering mobs had a small chance to "plant" a seed/dropping object, the load wouldn't be much greater than the seeds a human player might deliberately place. This would also serve as an additional animal tracking clue: finding bear scat is a good sign you're in bear country. But this concept could be expanded to cover a great many other natural processes. For example, imagine in a rainstorm, spawning in a few rain mobs. Players wouldn't directly interact with these, and probably shouldn't even perceive them as mobs at all, but their function would be to do the sorts of things that flowing water does in an environment. A rain mob falls from the sky, lands on a hillside, and begins travelling downhill. It could pick up (or create) objects as it moves, depositing new sticks or stones or driftwood where the conditions are appropriate. Eventually it finds its way to a depression with no drainage, and waits there until it either dies when the sun comes out (not immediately) or is joined by enough other rain mobs to form a permanent puddle. Or maybe it burrows down through soil until it hits a rock layer and keeps following the same behaviour until it hits a cave and forms or adds to a stalactite. Strong winds could spawn wind mobs that generate sticks as they pass trees, and deposit them downwind. Or they could pick up a pollen flag from a flower they pass, and if they happen upon the same kind of flower later on, they carry a flower seed and deposit that further downwind. (This'd be a little less random than I'd like, what with the wind only ever going west-to-east...) Or it could pick up sparks from a fire and... well, that'd be bad. Or hey, how about if a wind mob picks up a SMELL tag from what it passes over, and when it passes a player, the player gets a message "you smell apple blossoms" or whatever... I'm sure lots of other applications could be dreamed up.

I like this idea, not so much because squirrels are cute (they CAN be kinda vicious, especially if you're a chipmunk), but because squirrels bury acorns, and I strongly believe mobs like this should be used to do some environmental work, providing a relatively lag-free way to regrow wilderness.

Personally, I do not find combat awful, except in the sense that I try to avoid it like any sensible person would. Someone could get HURT, after all! And in that sense, I find the system works just fine for what I want from the game. I'm not great at combat in games generally, but I learn over time and get better, which is exactly as it should be. The system is mostly intuitive, with fine tuning details to learn through experience and talking to more experienced players about proper tactics. My take on the OP's specific complaints: (1) Bowtorn. I can see finding these guys difficult, but I don't. Defending against bowtorn just takes some preparation, and not very much of that. A couple of hay bales will block their arrows. They will waste shots shooting at you while you're completely behind cover, and you can hear their arrows strike, which tells you when they're reloading so you can act accordingly. Seems to me that the complaint here is coming from an expectation that you should be able to just run out and beat them up, which you CAN, but you have to be smart about it. (2) Loot is insufficient? Seriously, why would you expect there to be material rewards every time you kill an enemy? In a real fight, your biggest reward is SURVIVING. And this is, after all, a survival game. Hostile monsters from beyond time try to kill you, and you think they should be bringing you GIFTS? Not every mob is a threat, and not every mob is a resource. If you're truly desperate for flax fibers, then sure, go hunting drifters, but understand that this is desperation. There are better ways to get things you need, and personally I LIKE that there are horribly inefficient and desperate alternatives available. (3) Yeah, that's a bit of a bug. I sometimes find it very difficult to find the hit box to skin a kill when it should be right there, dammit! But again, this is a survival game, not a loot/XP shootemup. The task of skinning a kill SHOULD take some time, and not be practical while you're still in combat. You need to exercise some tactical discretion, not expect all the drops to just poof into your inventory like in so many other games. (4) Yes, rifts are annoying and menacing. They're meant to be. Turn them off if you don't like the story elements. But to appreciate a story (ANY story) you need to buy in, accept the premises and go along with it. Like they say in improv, "yes, and...." This is the story we're being offered. (5) Never engaged in PvP on VS, so I can't comment on this one. Never found the system problematic the couple of times I've tried cooperatively to take down prey or fight off drifters in multiplayer. (6) Wolves unbalanced? I dunno, man, you ever seen a real timber wolf in the flesh? There's a REASON we have fairy tales about the Big Bad Wolf. They're pretty terrifying. But again, with proper tactics you can deal with them. I'm finally at a point in my solo world where I can confidently take them on, but it's still appropriate to have a healthy respect for them. I still avoid them if they're in a pack. I feel this balance is absolutely correct. (7) Slings. Hmmm. I'll have to try them. I haven't yet, but I've only ever played hunters or commoners. I find I miss fairly often with bows, when I was a crack shot in Minecraft. Still, it seems to me that this is again one of those things you need to "yes, and..." and adjust your tactics accordingly. You go into a situation KNOWING that your missile weapon has inherent inaccuracy, plan your attack around the possibility that your shot might miss. In short, it seems to me that the criticisms are based almost entirely on expectations developed from playing other games, but those other games are designed around different goals.

This is something I too would love, especially in the winter when I see critters tromping through the snow across a frozen lake. They should definitely leave a trail. Also, SERAPHS should leave a trail, too, so you can retrace your steps, or locate your friend who was just here a minute ago, without the artificial convenience of the minimap. I know there's something called the "decor layer" which is how things like wallpaper and rush mats are applied, so in principle there could be footprint overlays for different species, but you'd want them to disappear over time, and having thousands of these things all over the landscape might get a bit laggy. Wounded animals should leave blood trails. Another, perhaps subtler clue, would be to just automatically lower the grass level by one whenever any large enough mob (including the player) walks over it. Or create a couple of alternate "trampled" forms of grass which grow back into their untrampled form by the same code grass grows normally. And I often see mobs who haven't noticed me yet resting on the ground; a compressed bed of grass where this happens would be another nice marker. Actually, why not put animals to work maintaining the environment simulation? Wild crops, berry bushes, and most flowers don't respawn after you pick them, and new trees don't grow unless you plant them yourself. But many plants in the real world actually rely on having their seeds deposited in the droppings of animals who eat their fruit. So why not have animal mobs rarely place scat objects that are essentially planted seeds for some appropriate plant.

Heck, you could just code it to respond to emotes.

If you roll the mouse over some food item, it tells you how long it is before it spoils. This calculation would involve dividing by the spoilage rate.

Interesting idea. I rather like the idea of the nutrition bars going next after satiation, and there being some specific buffs/penalties for malnutrition. That said, that cacophony of torture serves a purpose that I quite appreciate. Starving isn't just losing hit points until you die; it's genuinely debilitating, and a constant distraction. The noise is a part of that, and I think rightly so. It should be harder to concentrate while starving. (Reminds me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut's short story Harrison Bergeron, where the Handicapper General requires people of above average intelligence to wear earpieces that randomly play loud, distracting noises to prevent them from taking unfair advantage of their intellect.) In my first world, playing sapiens, I died and got respawned a long way from my hovel in the dead of winter. After several such respawns, I finally ended up somewhere I had a chance to run home before sunset, where I knew I had a storage vessel of food. But I was starving and freezing by the time I got there, and it was dark because my fire had gone out long during my prolonged absence. Closed the door against the cold, and it was pitch black inside, so the urgency of groping around to find my firestarter, firewood and food, while shivering and starving, was quite compelling.

Well, yes. Cicadas belong to the order Hemiptera, and therefore true bugs.

I wonder if the soil fertility underneath the seed has any impact on the size of the resulting tree, or the seed drop rate?

Is that so? I have never tried dough, but if you've made a fruit press, the dry mash left over from making juice rots pretty darned fast. I put a reed basket outside so it wasn't in my cellar, and in only a couple of days I had more than enough to seal up a barrel of rot for compost. And you're still getting calories from the pressed fruit juice.

If there were a mechanic for rainwater or snowmelt to flow downhill and cause erosion or pool in places, and then for certain materials (say, packed dirt) to become unstable when adjacent to water, then advantages to investing in sloped thatch roofs would emerge organically.