Michael Gates

Waterwheels have one huge advantage over windmills: they're not ugly. A *lot* of the people who play this game make "I want a pretty little village" their primary goal in life, and the program supports those folks in a lot of ways (notably chiseling, but other stuff as well). But a functional windmill sticks SIXTY BLOCKS into the air, and looks hideous. I've done a lot of strange things in the past to try to make them look okay, but it's a fifteen-story tower! You have to turn it into some kind of monumental whatsis, and none of those fit with the "pretty little village" aesthetic at all. If I cared about this stuff my approach these days would be to mine out an iron ore disc, build a lousy windmill, spend three days up there slammin' out ingots and pulverizing baux, and then burn that fucker down because making it not suck would be THAT. MUCH. WORK. Or.. I could just build a lovely bucolic watermill.

It's December of Year Zero, and I've got a lot of wolf pits (2 blocks deep) around, which bears and goats can climb out of, and a few proper bear pits (4 deep). But since it snowed I've found TWO brown bears in the wolf pits, apparently stuck. I can handle that, but I don't think it used to work this way back in 1.21? Is it supposed to be like this? Are they trying to encourage us to go hunting in the cold? Also, there's a real tension here between getting a full set of brown bear armor to show off, and building up a pile of sturdy leather to get the good backpacks.

Borax being gated behind bronze is deliberate to prevent you from accessing the advanced armors&backpacks without Serious Metals. If you're stuck in the copper age you get the primitive versions (laminar armor and the "hunter" backpacks). But, yeah, it feels weird. They COULD make borax diggable with any pick, and then make it impossible to build a quern with less than a bronze chisel, and that would work. People would still complain about it though

Sn shows up from height 10-95 iirc, so that's just about average. In the longer run, the answer to every possible question about ores is to read https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Ore_Deposits/en# which precisely describes the depths and rocks and disc sizes and whatnot where every ore can be found. A good page to bookmark and keep looking back to for as long as you keep playing. Magnetite appears in... peridotite, right?...

EGGPLANT IS A VEGETABLE

This is a serious problem, yeah. It seems to affect the biggest pieces MORE than smaller ones, which makes it even worse. For the iron tongs in my current world I had to reheat 'em, I think it was three times, to get the last voxel in place; At least once I didn't get to do anything to it at ALL; I pulled the 750-degree work item off the forge, tried to put it on the anvil and it wouldn't go because "too cold to work."

So, I started building my usual windmill tower to 170, and above altitude 140 (~30 above ground) things got LESS temporally stable? Is this going to be everywhere now?

Un-mentioned QoL improvement: surface borax bits are now MUCH more visible. Look at this thing!

What, no war elephants? Don't you know this game is literally unplayable without war elephants?!? Seriously, daaang that's a lotta content+, and an impressive new release.

A thing I'm kind of wondering about is whether the guts of the dungeon generation system are available for modders. In an ideal world, "Better Dungeons" would be entirely plausible. Or add a couple of block types and make a mod for crashed alien spaceships.

It's because she's friends.

...wait, there's been a specific command to put toilet paper on Tyron this WHOLE TIME? OMG, the missed opportunities.

And yet it works all the way across a given geome, and I successfully exploit it when I go hunting small-disc ores. I once found a field of ilmenite discs several hundred blocks wide, all of them in the peridotite at 60, and in the higher slate stratum at 75-- didn't even WANT that much, just needed to see if it was happening for real.

I see a couple things here, so I'm'a drag them together.. This is because limonite only shows up at the top layers (chert, shale, basalt). All of the sedimentary-only ores give much lower numbers and descriptors than you would normally expect, because the reading for them in 90% of the rock column is zero! Also applies to coal, borax, lapis.. a couple other things maybe? If you go back to your mined-out ore disc, dig a lil' tunnel out maybe half a dozen blocks in a cardinal direction, and from there dig out some further one-block-high holes four blocks further and nodesearch at the ends of those, you will almost always find more. Ore gets placed in *fields* of discs, all at the same level. Sometimes they get shoved up or down by a block or two because the surface topography shoves the rock column up and down a little, but no further. This even works with iron; I once found three hematite discs in a row, right next to each other, and if there were anything I wanted to do with five or six hundred iron ingots I'd be in business.

They've been doing that, I think, forever. Bright light just doesn't bother them.