BearWrestler

Not sure whether it would count as a new feature or the refinement of an existing one, since the game already has caves, so I didn't vote on the poll. I was just hit with brutal nostalgia for Beta Minecraft cave exploration, including the famous seed 404 challenge (which I find, is very much in the spirit of Vintage Story survival: you have to work hard for permanent sources of light, with danger at every corner). Guess I'm not the only one since older cave generators keep being ported to new versions. I think Vintage Story would greatly benefit from the occasional huge, vastly interconnected cave system. Those exist in real life (i.e. Gouffre de la Pierre St-Martin), and cavemen were known for spelunking, as we can tell from the very hard to reach places where we found cave paintings. The harder to reach, the more spiritually significant it was, no matter if it required swimming underwater through a siphon. So it fits with VS' stone age theme. (Side-note: I'm also thinking VS could play with animistic spirituality a bit... for ancient peoples, the spiritual and material blended into one. And Lovecraft often blends science and mysticism as the ways through which the Old Gods manifest their influence. So for instance, making cave art or a shrine to some long-forgotten deity could reduce local instability or delay the next temporal storm, for mysterious reasons. Of course, read the wrong ancient scroll or worship the wrong thing, and you probably make it worse...) Tech-wise, Minecraft 1.18+ has introduced very interesting new noise-based caves in the form of the "spaghetti" and "noodle" caves which let you make pretty interesting tunnels at a low performance cost. Even the "cheese" caves, while overdone, are pretty interesting - I believe Vintage Story already produces some of those, based on some world generation I've seen. I believe the tech is good, it's just that Minecraft kind of turned the dials to 11 and made huge cheese caves way too common, and allowed them to poke through the landscape too often. Finding the same thing if it was rare would be an amazing experience. So I'd really like this kind of tech to be adapted to Vintage Story and toned down as needed, so exploring caves can be a more interesting experience than running into dead end after dead end. Hopefully, with the introduction of the occasional safer area so the experience is not one of being constantly assaulted by respawning monsters, and you can admire some cave paintings, stalagmites or large crystal formations. Not to mention trying to sail/raft down underground rivers without dying.

The configuration for temporal storm spawns appears to be in: assets\survival\config\mobextraspawns.json And if you're interested, the code that loads and uses that data seems to be in TemporalStability.cs in the vssurvivalmod. I fooled around with mobextraspawns.json it a bit, and managed to unleash the terror of a large quantities of cute bunnies (and the elusive boss rooster) upon the player, with a much higher probability than drifters. (Not that impressive since they immediately flee.) Note that the creature names used such as "hare-baby" must include the variant, i.e. putting just "hare-male" will trigger an error and make the spawn fail, I think you'd have to specify "hare-male-arctic", etc. No idea if there's a way to use wildcards there.

From what I understand, a good technique when patching is to inject your own method call, so you can then work with a regular method instead of just IL. So perhaps, after this line: float chance = this.SurfaceBlockChance * Math.Max(0f, 1.11f - (float)depth / 9f); You can inject a line like this to override the value: chance = M; After which you are free to implement whatever computation you like. You can even pass this.SurfaceBlockChance as a parameter to your injected method if it's not easily accessible from your mod (haven't checked).

Try IBlockAccessor.SearchBlocks(). You pass it two BlockPos that delimitate the corners of the cube of blocks it should search. It also takes as argument a delegate (method or lambda) that will get called with the Block and BlockPos for every single block encountered. That's where you can abort the search if you found what you want by returning false, or tell it to keep going by returning true. Note that the bigger the region to search, the more costly it will be (obviously). You'll notice the game rarely searches an area bigger than 8x8x8 blocks, to avoid freezing the main thread for too long. If you have a very large area to search, doing it progressively on a worker thread would probably be a good idea... but I don't think the game provides ready-made thread-safe algorithms to iterate over blocks (although it would be worth looking at the particle code which works in an async manner), so that means copy-pasting some of the game's decompiled code and rolling your own, dealing with missing chunks, locking and unpacking chunks, etc, yourself.

I was looking for a way to receive a call when a BlockPlant is ticked, but there doesn't seem to be a clean way to do it. 1. I could subclass BlockPlant, and set my mod to load before the official Survival mod to register "BlockPlant" before it does, but it's not great: Annoying and confusing for mod users because it causes an error in the log when the official mod tries to load its own BlockPlant, when everything actually works as intended. Impossible to resolve conflict with anyone mod subclassing BlockPlant like me, or mandatory update if the base game introducing subclasses of BlockPlant which I'd need to subclass too, etc. Requires splitting my mod into two: one that loads super early to register my block subclass before official Survival does, and one that loads late to have access to all the assets. 2. I could monkey-patch the method to have a Pre or Post hook. 3. Adding a block entity to every BlockPlant would presumably work too, but would be a huge waste of memory. IIUC it's one instance per in-world block. But even then I'm not sure, because block entities seem to register directly for game ticks, not for block ticks. [The suggestion] So I'm wondering why the game doesn't add methods to tick BlockBehaviors (perhaps with an explicit subscribe to avoid wasting calls) whenever block type they're attached to is ticked. Actually, you might want to get rid of the non-composable Block classes altogether, and use collections of behaviors or an unlimited number of Block classes under the same id instead. (BTW If I missed another, non-monkey-patching way of intercepting block ticks for BlockPlant, please point it out.) --- Sub-suggestion: to make solution #1 above less painful, it would be nice to have a way to either: - Unsubscribe a block type, so you can just remove it from existence, or reuse the ID to subscribe your own block type. - Expand ModSystem.ExecuteOrder() so a mod can receive multiple callbacks, each at a different moment of the loading process (i.e. each callback has a different ExecuteOrder) - Allow multiple ModSystem classes per mod (it could be a SubModSystem) that can each have their own ExecuteOrder(). --- Thanks!

Thanks for the rideable animal and sailboat. Travel being very hard with most of your tech progress being rooted in place was a downer on the game experience. Exploration will be more fun, although better solutions to carry containers around are still needed, and we don't have the equivalent of a cart for overland travel. Caves Any chance of having an update focused on spelunking and caves soon? It is on your roadmap after all. Caves you can actually explore for a long time and that are sometimes beautiful is something I'm direly missing from Minecraft. I mostly played pre-Caves&Cliffs, and you could find some amazing caverns where water and lava falls mix creating beautiful scenery in that game. One of the main reasons I find it hard to come back to VS is that the caves are boring, hard to traverse and lead nowhere (not to mention the annoying amount of vertical shafts that want to kill you when you explore the surface), and when there's the occasional nice cavern, you can't enjoy the sights because of monster spam and that infamous gear turning left on your UI stressing you out. The discrepancy between the lackluster caves and the gorgeous and very explorable overworld is quite striking at the moment. Hope something can be done to allow for nice, contemplative spelunking while still keeping the depths or some challenge areas scary for players who are looking for a fight. I think a nice reference is Terraria with its corrupted areas. Regrowth I was disappointed to find out that even plants you'd assume would grow back over time are a finite resource placed during worldgen. Given how much the game encourages investing resources into costly building materials for settling in one place, I think the player needs to be able to rely on nature a bit more. It's a bit sad to walk around areas nearby to your base to find them stripped of berry bushes, reeds (because you had to eat), crops, beehives, trees, etc. Chunks could at least keep track of how many plants of each type they had initially, and very slowly regenerate them until they're back to the amount they had at worldgen... same with trees, although those are more complex due to being spread on multiple blocks. (I also wonder if you could make animals [and eventually birds] vectors of plant propagation like they are IRL. The wind and just roots extending underground are obviously more important to some plants, but animals have the advantage of already costing CPU to simulate... so attaching extra effects shouldn't be that bad.)

Hoping to see development resumed on this mod. IMO an interesting, explorable underworld you can get lost in is really what's missing in this game compared to Minecraft, and one of the reasons I haven't returned to VS in a long time. It would be nice to allow plugging in various generators, so we can experiment with e.g. Perlin Worms and other cave generation methods. The underground biomes are an extremely interesting idea. Perhaps if you don't find a way to fix performance for the layered biomes, you could have them organized in a similar way to the overworld so there are changes of themes as you move from area to area. Gases are a fascinating idea too. I wonder what it would take to make the proof of concept into something playable, challenging and fun. Otherwise the experience might often amount to being killed by something invisible you don't understand, without being able to do much about it.

IMO first of all they should restrict drifter spawn to challenge areas that have better loot, think the corrupted zones in Terraria. That would make figuring out proper spawning mechanics less of an emergency since the player wouldn't be spammed anymore whenever they put a toe underground. I seriously miss spelunking beautiful caves in Minecraft in relative peace, and it puts me off returning to this game despite the interesting crafting mechanics and nice overworld generation. There's an eventual cave update on the roadmap, but "richer caves" are going to be wasted if you have to play constant tower defense in them or "redecorate" them with fences and dirt blocks to stem the tide of garbage spawns.

Huh. You mean the cave generation straight up removes those ore blocks when "hollowing-out" the world, yet the chunk might still show up as "very rich" or whatever? That's annoying if true, with how hard ore is to find in this game already. It should instead simulate the erosion process and at least deposit that ore on the ground nearby (or lower down the cave) in the form of ore-rich pebbles or chunks, at least. Or some kind of ore-rich sand you can pan.

Blergh. This is why I can't really come back to playing this game. Crazy nonsensical wolf spawns have been a problem since forever, and seemingly (?) zero improvements have been done. Now I bet bears and mod-added animals have the same problem. Seems to me wild animal spawns should be prevented by a combination of a heatmap of player activity (you leave your "scent" on blocks you visit and nearby blocks, it's stronger the more often you pass by) and local concentration of 'civilized' blocks - i.e. blocks that are seraph-made and don't typically generate in the world. Light works well as a spawn mechanic in Minecraft because it's dead-easy to blanket the area in torches that last an infinite time... not so in this game.

A travel-focused update is great news in my book. Exploring is something I enjoy immensely, yet a nomadic lifestyle is not very well supported by the game at the moment. I haven't been following updates very closely. Did anything get done to fix wolves and the like spawning on your head and/or being so goddamn aggressive? Last time I tried the game with my group, we got quite frustrated by the inability to build a base where we'd be secure from wolves, the only solution was to settle outside any kind of forest. The game seemed to have two settings, "impossibly hard" or "laughably easy", with nothing in between... at least in terms of mobs. Perhaps you can use the travel focus as an excuse to make animals travel as well. And that would mean giving them purpose. The most sedentary would just move between their lair (the place they'd be most aggressive around), and eating/hunting grounds and watering holes. Others might migrate. It would be quite majestic to see a flock of migrating geese or a herd of travelling buffalo. Scratch that, it would be friggin' amazing and would push the game far beyond the kind of Minecraft-style "toy world" we're still stuck with. It would feel like the world has a life of its own and would invite you to watch in awe. Plus, from the practical side, you could even travel alongside a pack of buffalo or similar animals for a while. Provided you don't provoke them, they might act as a deterrent for other, more unpleasant wildlife. Another travel-related thing is cave exploration. Compared to Minecraft, I've found it a bit unpleasant in VS, because you have less nice scenery (Minecraft caves with both water and lava falls are hard to beat, as well as their new lush caves) and you constantly get harassed by mobs. I think recent updates have introduced more variation in mob density? But anyways, that something to consider. Letting the player have a cool underground exploration experience that feels more like Jules Vernes' Journey to the Center of the Earth than constant tower defense would be a net plus for the game. A sense of danger and occasional tough fights are both fine, but constant harassment by spam mobs which push you to exploit the building mechanics doesn't do much for the atmosphere of the game.

Oh gods, this again? When playing with my group of friends, I remember being incredibly frustrated by wolves spawning practically on top of us, inside the little cave we dug out to sleep in. We ended up never playing survival mode again. Now it seems bears are just making the problem worse. Hope something is done with animal AI and spawn mechanics soon. Catching butterflies is cool and all and the latest update added some stuff I'm genuinely excited about, but I feel like major issues of this game get ignored for way too long. Hope the devs think it fits within the "dejanking" category.

Honestly what you describe sounds horrendously boring to me and the complete antithesis of immersive gameplay, not to mention that you've ruined any enticing natural appearance the cave might've had after you're done "redecorating" to control drifter spawn. I really hope the devs are planning to cut down on insta-placing of blocks down the line, given how at odds it is with the more realistic crafting processes. At least during combat - I'm not as bothered by abstracting time away when everything is peaceful. Once they've taken away map-altering mechanics like fences and dirt spam, devs can actually focus on quality fighting mechanics, for instance modeled after King's Field/Demon Souls/Dark Souls where single enemies can be very challenging. There are a million more ways to make combat more interesting, which is why I'm so surprised to see you defend the status quo so desperately. For instance having territorial monsters that defend their abode, instead of charging you on sight. The game might need a massive redesign in some areas to make them work, but without such ambitions it will forever feel mediocre (in the fighting area, it obviously has superior crafting mechanics). As far as the resource gating goes, caves don't really gate anything useful except teleporters, which would gain from being accessible much earlier to encourage map exploration. Ore can be found more efficiently by systematically prospecting a zone to identify the best chunks, and then digging multiple vertical shafts which often don't run into a cave at all. The main challenges in cave exploration should be similar to real-life: darkness and treacherous, perhaps slippery terrain, the cold, getting lost, starving. A weight system limiting how much you can carry in such an expedition, especially when climbing ladders (and future ropes) and swimming in eventual flooded passages would go a long way in adding challenge. Dissociating enemy spawns from the dark and preventing the player from unrealistically spamming the whole place with torches would also improve the exploration mood a lot.

I never said that the underground should no longer be dangerous. I said that it shouldn't be dangerous everywhere, just in certain easy to identify regions of the map. Again, just like Terraria which has corrupted biomes which are way more dangerous than the rest of the map, and are even more dangerous the further down you get. This 100%. My group doesn't like using exploits either, or running around like crazy kiting drifters like you see some poeople on Youtube do. They don't make exploring the underground feel any better. Also some of them involve turning dirt physics off. Honestly almost anything spawning system you can think of would be better than the current situation with cave exploration. Doing enemy spawn exactly like Minecraft (especially now that it only spawns enemies on 0-light blocks and in spawners) would be a huge improvement, for instance. Even when playing a challenge where torches were forbidden and surrounded by multiple pitch-black areas, enemy spawns were rare enough that a creeper silently dropping next to you was a huge surprise, and infinitely more scary than drifter spam. Vintage Story is a slow, almost meditative game (see: crafting pottery). It's so weird that it turns into some kind of frantic tower defense as soon as you head underground. Spamming enemies is totally not "Lovecraftian" as the game claims to be. Something much more appropriate would be to make cave exploration a lonely, wondrous experience with hints of danger and dread, and the occasional encounter with something scary and dangerous. Making the world go deeper and having caves be much larger systems that you can really get lost and travel in (think Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth) would help in this regard.

I do believe there is a bug, that might be similar to the problems fixed in 1.15.2 with the foliage decay queue not being processed fast enough. I'm under the impression that there is a spawn queue that can take quite a while to process. So what probably happens is that the wolf/drifter spawn gets requested at the correct distance from the player, but by the time the spawn request is processed the player might've moved to the exact spot of the spawn, resulting in the often-experienced "spawn on top of your head". What seems to reinforce this theory is that I've recently experienced animals taking several days to appear in some locations. Coincidentally, the server was working pretty hard because all three of us had cranked our view distance to maximum to take screenshots and were exploring separate areas of the map. I think it's great to have mid-game and end-game challenge areas, but not so great to completely block players from serious spelunking until they are fully decked out. Exploring caves is one of my favorite activities in Minecraft (and doubly so since the magnificent Caves and Cliffs snapshots have landed), not so much in Vintage Story because of the endless hordes of drifters. Even with switching to Exploration mode to make them less aggressive and making them spawn only on light level zero blocks, they can be quite an annoyance. The best idea would likely be to have corrupted biomes like Terraria, which are a lot more dangerous, but also have areas with much lighter challenges where you can explore pretty deep.