Michael Gates

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.

You can tell how you're doing with freezing damage by looking at your body temperature with the "C" configuration/clothing screen. You start seeing the frost overlay at.. I think it's 35 degrees? Start taking frost *damage* at about 33. It's not a fixed time, the effects and damage apply faster when it's colder out. This is part of what motivated me to figure out how to do smithing with a helve hammer in a warmed room, it gets to -20 if you're far enough up!

Oh, wait. Is this the "whuff!" noise than randomly goes off, at random times, for no reason? I know that noise very well, and I know enough not to bother looking for an in-game cause but every time I hear it I still try to figure out if it's my hair moving across my shoulders, or the cable for my headphones rubbing something, or... whatever. It never is. And then three or four days later it goes off again in a completely different situation. Anyway, yeah, a thing. And not the fault of any mod-- I play vanilla.

Surprisingly few animals will go through a one-block-wide opening. My standard bear trap is a 4-deep pit, with a one-wide passage leading off a couple of blocks and then a ladder up-- neither bears, wolves, nor moose will go into the passage, so it's safe to stand in there and spear everybody. If whoever wrote cows did their job, they *should* work the same way

You're getting smaller nests than I usually do-- I keep seeing this one five-room complex with a nest or two in each room. You still take the same approach with it, though!

I go after locust nests with a steel chain body and gambo hat & pants, and they're not much more than an annoyance with that equipped. Bronze spear or steel falx kills 'em in two whacks. As LadyWYT says, the nests drop Jonas parts, I usually get one from ... I'd say 20% of nests? So, about one per nest-complex. They also often guard translocators, which gives you something to do with the metal parts that drop from the nests. Well worth the trouble, once it's just "trouble" instead of "AAAA NO HALP *crunch rip tear* "

It's not the cobble that's doing it, it's the location! Some area are just temporally unstable; you can be standing in a field, and watch your sanity gear tick down. Very annoying. Whatever you build in those areas, you're still going to have the problem. Move a couple hundred squares over and you'll usually be out of the Bad Zone. And in general, look at what your sanity gear is doing before you build anything more serious than a quick dirt hut for a night's stay.

Just going to note that a steel chain body, with gambeson head and leg armor, is great for cave diving especially those little locust nests. Now if I only knew the right tool to break all the different nests...

Sows and ewes will slowly follow boars and rams, so once you've got the boy you're going to get girls now and then. It's not hard to set up an extra pen with an open gate, and a food trough inside; they'll end up in there, you walk up and close the gate, and then it's just a matter of merging the pens. Bears cannot reach up out of a 2-deep hole with fence around it, nor can they reach down into one from outside. I tested this on a flatworld, set up a pit with some sheep surrounded by bears, and a pit with a bear surrounded by sheep, and then going to survival mode. I've also caused it to happen in a "real" world, though that was more of an accident. Anyway, good times.

One of these days I might try the door trick in VS; in Minecraft it was an easy way to build underwater habitats.