Tom Cantine

Mixed feelings on this one. Being stuck in absolute darkness is debilitating enough; this'd make it almost unplayable. Moreover, some forms of crafting, particularly knapping and clayforming, depend a lot on the tactile. IRL, much flint knapping is actually pressure flaking and not whacking away madly stone on stone. That may be more difficult in pitch dark, but not at all impossible. In my first solo world, playing Homo sapiens, I died and respawned a long way from my hovel, in the dead of winter. After several deaths and respawns trying to get home, I finally managed to make it to my hovel as night fell, but I was freezing and losing health to hunger, and realized after closing the door my fire had gone completely cold in my absence. Pitch black. Fortunately the label that appears over whatever block or item I'm looking at allowed me to find reed chests, firewood, and the firestarter leaning against the wall. Very stressful several minutes, trying to get that fire started in the dark. I kind of cherish that moment as a triumph, though. And if I could get a fire started so as to have a source of light, while starving and freezing almost to death, why would I need light to do some basic knapping or clay forming. (Forging, if the metal is hot enough to keep working, it's going to be glowing a bit.)

It's usually windy near my house on the public server, so I can almost always hear when the game opens for me. But yes, a louder chime would be helpful. Don't know about chat. Wouldn't hurt, but I'm usually doing a crossword puzzle or sudoku or writing something in another window while waiting.

Maybe this already exists, but I'd like to be able to toggle on and off the general chat for my utterances, leaving just the speech bubble above my seraph's head. There are a lot of dialogs and conversations between players that don't really need to be broadcast to everyone on the server, and can scroll important notifications (temporal storm imminent) off the window sooner than necessary. One of many benefits to this would be making community meeting locations (coffee houses and pubs and lecture halls and private room) more attractive and engaging.

Picture a successful hunter, returning with a deer slung over her shoulder or a pair of rabbits dangling from a cord, or a fisherman with a basket of fish. They return home, and set about skinning cleaning and butchering their prize. In game, you can't do this: you have to process your kill wherever it falls, which is okay most of the time, but sometimes you kinda want to leave the area promptly. And it gets a little silly when it comes to fish. Why can't I catch the dead fish before it sinks out of sight, and bring it to the beach to clean? I get that the larger carcasses, say medium or bigger, shouldn't be able to just stack in your inventory, but there's already a mechanism for carrying live animals and populated skeps: they take up a backpack slot. SO here's my suggestion: HUGE sized carcasses (like bears) can be carried, but they take up all four backpack slots. So if you're going bear hunting and don't plan to skin your kill on site, travel light. LARGE sized carcases like bighorns take up three of the four backpack slots, so you can only carry one at a time but still have some inventory space. MEDIUM carcasses like wolves and boars take up two. SMALL carcasses like rabbits and foxes can be carried in inventory normally like other items, but don't stack. Small fish (currently the only ones in the game, those little white salmon) stack like normal items. All carcasses are perishable. Edited to add: Just occurred to me that this'd be useful on multiplayer servers, where it'd be preferable to have the carcass butchered by a player in the Hunter class, as they get a bonus harvesting animals. Promotes a little more division of labour and cooperation.

Fishing. Definitely fishing. I would love to see more in the way of aquatic resources, which have always been important to human survival. Angling, nets, digging clams, trapping crab and lobster, collecting mussels. Evaporating seawater to get salt. Fresh spawns of driftwood and seashells during high winds.

But it doesn't only occur in low light levels. It also happens during temporal storms that strike in broad daylight. And I haven't tried it yet, but presumably hanging around too close to a rift can also bring on the monstrosities. And yes, you're right that it is a very similar mechanic to mob spawning in MC, but also with a great many other games where creatures just sort of pop into existence rather than having a normal life cycle and migration happening off-screen. This is kind of a necessity at present, owing to the limits of computer memory and processing time, but most games don't even bother to try to integrate it into the world; they just expect the player to look the other way and assume that deer just wandered in from elsewhere. I kind of like the idea of engineering the lore to EXPLAIN why these frankly bizarre artifacts of the medium happen.

Certainly would've appreciated this for the months I went with only a couple of hens. I appreciated the fresh eggs, but I had nothing to write with.

Yeah, kinda seems to me to be a deliberate aspect of the world, or at least, the lore has been contrived to fully integrate these things. They're TEMPORAL storms, a warping of spacetime that gives access to points that normally shouldn't be adjacent, and things that shouldn't be here and now.

Bighorn sheep are native to North America, too. The European mouflon looks quite similar, though. As for mosquitoes and rats and snakes and other such, I'd like to see health expanded a bit beyond mere hit points. The chief danger from mosquitoes isn't the blood loss or even the itching, but the fact that some diseases are transmitted by them. Likewise rats: sure, they'll eat your crops, but they can also host disease-carrying fleas. And snake venom is, well, kinda like a disease. So maybe if there were ways to get infected with something that didn't necessarily cost you hit points, but added some kind of debuff in other ways. And there are LOTS of ways that can plug into systems that are already in place. * Some diseases or poisons can interfere with your perception, much like temporal storms distort vision and screw up aiming at blocks, and to a lesser degree drinking alcohol does. Various effects like this can also simulate just the annoyance/distraction of insect bites that aren't even carrying disease. * Nausea. Rather than just increase food consumption, you can make it more conspicuously an illness, by interrupting attempts to eat food randomly, not letting the player reach full satiety because they're having a hard time keeping the food down. * Coordination: altering the way the controls respond, with varying degrees of predictability. * Add an involuntary sickness emote. And maybe a voluntary one that gives some diagnostic information to any player nearby, giving them a clue as to what kind of treatment you need. * Speaking of treatment, we already have poultices and bandages for health points, and I understand sleeping in a bed accelerates healing, but it'd also be relatively easy to add some medicines and dietary treatments as well. Like, to get over a particular condition, you might need to max out your vegetable nutrition bar but get protein below 50%, for example. And you can see where some of this can be readily expanded to support a barber/surgeon class, though that'd mostly be useful on multiplayer servers and not quite so important in solo worlds.

I've really been enjoying the community on the public server, and the way the game tends to encourage a certain amount of specialization. But the potential is somewhat limited by the fact that we can't be online playing the game all the time. So what I'd like to suggest is some sort of shopkeeping system to allow a player to set up a storefront and configure specific trades that could be executed when another player comes along and interacts with the storefront. The interface (for the buyer) would be based on the one that the existing NPC traders use, and the shopkeeper player would of course need to stock it with the gears or goods offered in trade. I don't see this as likely to make the NPC traders obsolete, because they still offer access to goods that aren't really available any other way, and they also mediate the Auction House system which still would play a role. The NPC traders are scattered randomly all over the map, and that's kind of the point: to interact with them and engage with their trades (or the auction house), you have to physically go to their location, just as you'd have to go to a player's physical shopfront. More locations to visit, more ways for players to interact and contribute, more reasons to travel, build roads, etc.

I came here to suggest carts as well, but figured I'd just add to this suggestion instead. I think a good way to limit them is to make them wider than a single block, and allow them only to move onto road blocks, and then only at most up a half block onto it. This'd leave it as a bit of a mystery as to how those traders managed to get their own wagons into such improbably places, but maybe the wheels aren't really wheels and they're just decorative because they resembled gears...

I don't know about collecting them as a resource, but it would be nice to see some kind of tracking mechanism. Occasionally you find dead animals and evidence they've been partially eaten, and sometimes you hear a wolf howl, but I'd like to see something like footprints (especially in snow or sand), droppings or especially a blood trail if you've wounded a deer or something.

I do a lot of panning for resources, especially at night or in the winter when it's best to stay inside (I have a single water source block to stand in, for just this purpose), and this tends to produce a fair number of copper spear points. And flint ones, for that matter.

I noticed this when digging out a charcoal pit once. The unsupported dirt collapsed and vanished in a cloud of dust, which I think actually felt kind of realistic. Soil gets depleted sometimes.