Tom Cantine

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.

This is an issue I've always struggled with in almost every RPG I've ever played: pleasure. How do you build into the game some way to reflect the sheer aesthetic pleasure of eating something that's just plain TASTY? We code in all sorts of buffs and bonuses to act as incentives to seek out the better foods, and yes, both Valheim and Vintage Story do provide decent incentives to vary the diet beyond just hauling around a stack of cooked porkchops. But the paradox is that these buffs and bonuses are inescapably utilitarian in nature; they let you perform game tasks more effectively. And while it's certainly true that being comfortable and well-nourished does increase your capacities in the real world, that's a by-product we have to explain and document to bean counters who imagine lean mean austerity as supremely efficient. It's not really why we enjoy good food or music or art. Valheim's comfort mechanic is nice, but it's an example of this mechanism. Once you've got your Rested buff, there's no longer any in-game reason to relax by the fire appreciating the subtleties of that tasty mead you brewed. I guess a big part of it is that the computer game only gives us actual access to two senses, sight and hearing. No tastes or smells, no tactile perception, just what we see on the screen and hear through our speakers. So we can actually enjoy the beautiful sunsets or autumn leaves, or the sounds of crickets chirping or birds in the trees, but we just have to imagine what something tastes or smells like. We get a jarring red overlay and howls of pain when we take damage, but we don't appreciate any tactile difference between a rawhide mantle and a linen shirt. Here's an idea for a sense of smell: First create a list of relevant smells: smoke, flowers, rot, etc. Assign each a colour. Then display on the status/toolbar a small pie-chart showing how much of the various smells are present at any given moment. This could be actually useful for things like hunting or foraging, in that you could find your way to ripe berries the way a prospecting pick can lead you to ore nodes. It could also alert you to danger. And it could, quite incidentally, become a kind of visual surrogate for the aesthetic qualities of olfaction: we'd learn to like or dislike certain patterns of smell display. Just spitballing here, of course.

How long have you set your months? I'm playing through in my solo world with 30 day months, and while it gives me a lot of time to forage, explore, mine and build up infrastructure, I'm anxious about the fact that I'm gonna need food for EVERY DAY of the long winter months. I'm also in an area where I've never seen a sheep, and only just saw my first boar today, quite far from my starting base. I'm always coming up with personal house rules that make the game more challenging, though it's usually because I want to make some aspect of the game more realistic. In Minecraft, for example, I adopted additional rules about tool tiers: a wooden pick could only break a block that had at least three faces exposed, stone could break a block with at least two exposed faces, and iron or better just needed one exposed face. This made it harder to find appropriate quarrying sites, and combined with another rule that I could only craft wooden tools (and had to buy higher tier tools from villagers) it multiplied the difficulty level. So you can always impose some additional limitations on yourself. Say, no watering cans allowed. Or only use them once you've dug a well, or built an aqueduct out of suitable materials. For the well-digging, make sure you enable lateral instability for dirt, sand and gravel, and allow cave-ins. Oh, and another highly limiting self-imposed rule: Settle within a tight radius from where you spawn, no matter how unsuitable it is. It can get really challenging then.

Don't bell peppers exist, though? And onions?

Something maritime. A fishing village, perhaps.

It would be nice if we could paste text into books. For one thing, it'd mean we could compose them more carefully elsewhere before importing them into game.

I'm also on a Mac, and you can do this with TextEdit. First you need to find the file clientsettings.json. It'll be in the fold Users, then under your user folder, and then in an invisible folder called ".config". It's invisible because generally speaking, non-technically savvy users like you and I have no need to see them and usually shouldn't be tinkering with that stuff. But to reveal that hidden folder, while in the Finder press "CMD-SHIFT-." That's the period key along with the twirly propellor key and the shift key. Then go into the .config folder, find the "VintagestoryData" folder, and in there is clientsetting.json. Open that with a plain text editor, use the search command to find "selectedBlockOutline" and change the word after that from "true" to "false". Leave everything else, including punctuation and such, unchanged. Hit save, then go restart Vintage Story.

Edit the file clientsettings.json, and change "selectedBlockOutline" from "true" to "false". I tried this and it worked for me.

There is a Discord post about how to fix this, though it involves turning off the wireframe for targeted blocks. Edit the file clientsettings.json, and change "selectedBlockOutline" from "true" to "false". I tried this and it worked.

The main thing I would like to see in a worldgen update is something I don't think can be done with the basic random noise model: rivers. That is, proper rivers that start somewhere in the mountains with snowmelt, and follow the terrain downhill eventually to the sea. The software seems to be able to handle ponds, pooling of water in depressions at various elevations, but that's on a very local scale, and easily computable within a few loaded chunks just as their generated, but a proper river could go for thousands of chunks. I have no idea how it would be done, but it's something I'd really like to see, complete with actual currents that would both affect sailboat/raft/item movement and provide a navigational guide to or away from the sea. And if something like this were established in worldgen, you'd finally have a place for those salmon to spawn!

In keeping with the vaguely medieval/renaissance feel and technology of the game, I would like to suggest a few sea mammals (in addition of course to more fish and perhaps crustaceans and mollusks). In particular, whales and seals were economically important as sources of oil, meat and skin. It's probably too much to hope for a Moby Dick experience for multiplayer servers, crews of seraphs pulling oars and hurling harpoons at enormous Physeters, but the industrial processes for butchering, rendering and otherwise processing even a small whale would seem to be a natural fit with the current game.

Never yet owned an elk, but as I understand it they have an ownership relation to a single player. Well, it seems to me there ought to be some similar kind of protection on servers for sailboats, so that they can't be stolen or dismantled. Alternatively, land claims should apply not just to building/breaking blocks within their boundaries, but also the use or destruction of sailboats.

It is a little curious that a cooking pot of gruel over a firepit never burns, but bread and pies char in minutes...

I could try that, I suppose, but I've been through several updates now, and as I said before, I have NEVER seen the moon in game, so it's something that's persisted through several versions. This also suggests that maybe it's some kind of setting I have unwittingly selected, though I can't imagine what it would be.

I was standing on the roof of my house, right next to my friend who was remarking on the moon. "There, between those clouds!" he said through Discord voice chat. I did not see it. We were standing in the same spot, looking in the same direction. I am mystified. I have NEVER seen it in any of my solo worlds, either.

Then my question becomes: Why is the moon not displaying for me? Is there some setting I need to change, or is there a bug on the Mac version, or what?

Any other Mac users wanna chime in? Is the moon a hoax?

I see how it's difficult, but frankly it never even occurred to me to see this as game-breaking. It's just... well, I hesitate to use the word but realistic. That is, it's tactically realistic, and a legitimate problem to be confronted with and have to figure out a solution for. And like many problems in VS and elsewhere, some problems are way, WAY harder to deal with if you haven't prepared for them in advance. A seige is a real thing. It can be really tough to deal with a bunch of skilled archers surrounding your house, but that's why the castle was invented. (Okay, I'm oversimplifying.) And I've found that, with even a moderately well-designed modest shelter (and a decent amount of spears/arrows) it's entirely possible to pick off bowtorn from cover, one by one. They take a little while to reload and aim, and you can hear their projectiles hit your wall, so you can have your bow drawn and step just into your firing loop to let fly an arrow and duck back into cover right away. Personally, though I'm not really a big combat player, I think the occasional swarm of missile-weapon opponents is an entirely legitimate challenge.

Seriously, has anyone else seen, or not seen, the moon in-game? Am I hallucinating its absence? Was my friend hallucinating its presence? I see a few mentions of the moon on the Wiki, and there's even a client command to tell the phase of the moon, but how come I can't see it?