Michael Gates

You can make the black leather face mask, that uses up two whole leather bits AND makes you look like you're working on the whole gimp suit!

You seem to have failed to read the text I posted. My point is that you can get productivity improvements equivalent to several windmills worth of extra power just by leveraging your strengths and the helve's. If you like big gears and you cannot lie, I'm not here to stop you. But if what you want is to process a couple of ore discs worth of iron, it's faster NOT to grow four windmills worth of flax and enough pigs to make sixty axles and thirty resin for assembly and all the rest. I produced an estimate for it four or five years ago. It seems that a geared setup pays for itself sometime after the two-thousandth ingot, which is a pile eighty blocks high.

...and this is why I attach the helve directly to the windmill rotor. Y'all are willing to expend genuinely incredible amounts of stuff to save yourselves ten in-game minutes of climbing up and down a ladder. To make the helve go fast, let it do the part of the job it's good at! It is BETTER than you at that "move a voxel from here to way over there" thing; does it in one whack, where you have to go.. one.. space.. at.. a.. time. So let it do that part. But YOU are better at clearing big chunks of slag off a bloom or blister. Here, look at this bloom: You can see I did NOT clear every bit of slag off, nor did I do the tedious work of moving voxels over. All I did was whack off those chunks of slag where I could get more than one with a single click. In the left picture, you can see the mouse pointer resting on a voxel where a click took off FIVE voxels. If I were processing this bloom by hand, it would be about a quarter done, but FOR THE HELVE it is much closer to finished. I will barely have time to do this to the next bloom before this one is finished. It's about three times as fast as just setting untouched blooms on the helve hammer; it's practical to run three forges while doing this. Here, observe this plate: What I've done here is pile up two ingots, then used "Heavy Hit" to to punch five voxels right down the centerline of the ingot to place *fourteen* voxels where they need to go, then more heavy hits twice each in three spots on the left (center, two UP from center, two DOWN from center) to place another nine voxels, and then twice each in three spots on the left to place nine more. Seventeen clicks, thirty-some voxels. I never quite get it right because I'm old and tremula is a whole thing, but it's still about two voxels per hammer hit. Then, because every one of the remaining voxels would take between two and seven(!) hits to move into place by hand, I give it to the machine. If I grab the previous plate off the floor where the helve dropped it, I have just about time to make a chain section or an 8x of nails and set up the NEXT plate before the helve finishes with this one. Again, about three times as fast as handing it the whole job.

There's a thing to do, where you dig down through the gravel to the ore, dig out the one exposed ore block and grab it, then dig out a gravel from the bottom gravel layer NEXT to the hole you just punched in the ore layer.. one of the falling gravels lands in the hole so you only have to dig out one more to get to *that* block of ore. It still sucks, but it sucks slightly less?

Look at the hub and see if it shows power in kN; that displays for the rotor hub on a windmill, so the water wheel *should* do it also. If not... bug.

In my current world, I explored everything within about two thousand squares of my house before I found bauxite. It was the top of one particular smallish high mountain, nowhere else. Went all around the base of it, no baux anywhere. Fine, ladder up and spend a day pickaxing. Sometimes, stuff turns up in odd places.

*looks* ah. There are TWO recipes for wood ladder; one with planks for the sides, and one that's all sticks. If they keep both, that means we'll have both typed ladders and "wood," and I'll have to think of something funny to do with 'em. It should be possible to do "Snakes and Ladders" with a cliff face, some ladders, and ooh, water source blocks would be good...

I do wonder how we're going to get <wood type> ladders, when wood ladders are made out of sticks? Are ladders going to be made of planks, and thus gated behind saws now? I really hope not; gathering four full stacks of reeds to make a single rope ladder for Baby's First Mine is very time-consuming.

DO NOT TURN THE FISH INTO CANDY but seriously, this all looks great. There is so much pretty going on here! The decorated storage vessels, different red-clay color when fired, the fish, trader outposts.. just a ton of neat stuff.

The size of harvests scales with the month length iirc. With thirty day months you get a huge pile of stuff at the end. Which means that what you want isn't more farm, it's more CELLAR-- build yourself a lot of storage vessels. And also.. yes, you have that first crop to wait for, and dealing with that might require you to walk a far ways out finding berries and animals and stuff. Think of it as a chance to turn up some bauxite, limestone, maybe even a marble or halite outcrop.

It's like a rite of passage! Only, more of a rite of burnage

Regular, 1-high fences are fine for keeping animals on this side or that side, IN MOST CONDITIONS. The exceptions are: 1) Putting a raised block next to the fence. If you've got your fence, and there's a raised block on one side, animals can go over the fence from that side. This is useful sometimes, because you can make a fenced pen and then drive goats and stuff into it. 2) Snow. Snow can pile up so that animals can climb on the snow, and then walk over the fence. 3) Bears. Bears can *reach* over a 1-high fence to strike animals on the other side, even if they can't get to them. Cases #2 and 3 can both be prevented by using 2-high fence. I have never seen animals "glitch" through a fence.

Are you sure that's not just some of the chunks reloading improperly in the real world? It might happen, you never know.

Opinion: the food/farming system is not only fine, but very good exactly as it is, and nobody should even think of touching it until after a "final" release. No additional foods, no changing the values in the current ones.

Or we could just start calling them Who, What, and I Don't Know. It's traditional!

Throwing rocks at 'em from a pillar works. Bean one three or four times and it will decide that it doesn't need this crap and goes a few hundred squares thataway.

Time for my usual advice: if you're short on food in the fall, RUN SOUTH. Gather up a full set of new hand tools and an anvil and GO. Once you reach about z=16-17k, winter doesn't freeze anymore so you can still forage berries and plant crops, also you don't need the fur coat and stuff. It's enough easier to survive down there that it's worth the four or so days of running. While you're on the way you can watch for peridotite and bauxite rocks, so that when you're ready for steel you'll know where to get refractory brick ingredients.

I mean, it doesn't look like much!

Because until they made bauxite show up everywhere you had to make the long run anyway, so you could decide whether the world either had steel, or was cute enough to be worth spending a couple hundred hours in without it. And I'm a creature of habit. Which, yeah, just changing the little thing in the dropdown probably WOULD be more sensible.

You can usually plant in April, you start seeing berries again in late May, and nobody understands how much preparation winter takes until they've gone through one. Now you've seen the elephant, or perhaps the woolly mammoth. This is why I start every new world by running south for a couple of days-- you gain a month of growing season by hitting z=5k, and it stops ever freezing at about z=17k.

I haven't seen one? But given how many years I've been poking the voxels, if I haven't seen it yet it maybe needs to be louder and then, all this stuff, propick, chisel, smithing, clay, AND whatever I'm forgetting should all use the same mechanism.

As with all things there is a mod. This would be a good feature to add to the game itself though, perhaps with an on-screen indicator to tell you which mode you're currently using.

That's all. It's just way too f'ing loud. Like, several times louder than any other song. Every day at noon for about an hour, I can't hear a thing because it's playing and DEMANDS TO LET ME KNOW. To avoid that, I have to either turn the music off altogether which makes me sad, or go mess with the settings dialog twice a day which is ridiculous. It's not bad, but I'm trying to listen for wolf growls here.

ONE OF US ONE OF US Everybody does it once. Some do it twice. I don't know anybody who admits to three, but I know you're out there.

It's basically that nobody actually wants to climb up there... like, you'll do it once, look around, say "yup that's a lotta ice" and never come back. There aren't even any frogs. So adding more height to the map has very little utility while making everything take up more space in your computer memory.