Tom Cantine

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?

I can see that. As long as they haven't been fired, it should be possible to turn any clay item back into workable clay by adding water and working it for a while. In fact, a very simple way to implement this is to just borrow the system for washing rot from a pot: toss the unfired clay item into water, and it turns into clay again, perhaps with an appropriate loss of some material.

I think that the rarity of villages is kind of part of the lore, and so quite deliberate. (Still, there are some minor inconsistencies; one of the trader dialogue lines I think says something about how "most people" live in villages, but in my experience these scattered traders represent the overwhelming majority of the population. ) But my style of play also very much includes the sort of village-building you talk about, and I would just love to have something like that in VS. So I wonder if there could be some code that looked for the construction of roads, and analyzed them (sort of like the code that checks for whether something qualifies as a room or a cellar or a greenhouse). Here's one possibility: When two or more traders are connected by a valid road network, an area along that road becomes a valid destination for a village to form, and if you build a house and furnish it with some bare minimum of facilities, an innkeeper villager may move in after word gets around of the opportunity. How does word get around? Well, you interact with one trader, then travel along the entire road and interact with the other. If you achieve this without your feet ever leaving the paved trail, it registers as a valid road, and gives a new dialogue option or a new item for purchase (that might represent sponsoring a franchise for a journeyman from the Innkeeper's Guild to take up residence). That's just one mechanism that springs to mind. But it seems to me that roads (and perhaps coastal ports) should be an important part of creating and growing villages to repopulate this world.

Bowtorn can be a hassle, but I don't find they ruin the game for me. I enjoy a little sniper duel once in a while when I have a decent bow myself, but most of the time, I just sprint away, zigging and zagging, until I get far enough away from my base that they despawn (or temporally relocate, if you prefer), and then I come back. Admittedly, that's a more dangerous approach early game without armor, but everything's tough then.

It's strange. I have never seen the moon in the night sky in this game, but I was on a public server with a friend last night and he said he saw it. Is this a settings thing? Did I miss something in the settings? Or is there some difference between platforms such that a Mac doesn't show the moon?

MANY games have this kind of feature. I played for quite some time on a MUD (multi-user dungeon), entirely text-based, which implemented both a character's hearing acuity and their language proficiency to give every player in a room a custom echo for overheard conversations. People at the next table, speaking quietly in another language, you might pick up one or two words. Playing on the Official Server, language is already supported in that I see people in the chat using Russian, German, occasionally French and sometimes languages I'm not sure I recognize. There is support for group chat channels, but it'd be pretty inconvenient to have to create a new group and invite people to it for every random private conversation you might find yourself in. The thing is, VS already has the elements to make a local chat option utterly seamless. When you say something in the general chat, it ALSO appears over your seraph's head like a speech bubble. It seems to me it would take very very few lines of code to toggle whether or not your utterances also were broadcast to the chat, and that'd make it SO easy to just have a quiet conversation with someone who happens by your shop to admire your build or buy some cheese or whatever.

Sure, smash them open with a rock to eat them raw, or pry them open with a knife to get a little more sat, but if you put them in the campfire they'll open up on their own when they're done!

Textiles. Right now we have flax fibers that can just be crafted directly into twine and then linen in two steps, with no tool or workstation needed. I think it'd be interesting, though, to have spinning wheels, looms and such for the processing of cloth from flax and wool. Fishing, of course. I'd like to see not just fishing poles for catching one fish at a time, but also a way to cast nets into a school of fish, or to lay lobster and crab pots. Glassblowing could be a thing.