Michael Gates

A helve can absorb.. um.. it's a lot, of power. People sometimes do crazy things with gears and multiple windmill rotors and billions of sails and anvil go BRRRRR. That said, about 80KN gets you a usual "full speed" helve. So, two sails never gets you full speed. Three can, if the wind's good. You get better wind at altitude. Wind speed increases, I have heard, by 1% per block you go up, up to altitude 170. Dunno if that's exactly correct but it's not far off. Build your mill up on a hill, or make a tower for it, or one time I totally cheesed out and built just a ladder up into the sky and and a smithy at altitude. I tried to make it look like a nifty airboat, which completely did not work, but it DID run the helve pretty fast with two or three sails! Note that if you go up it also gets COLDER. Wintertime temps can be in the -20C range, easy. Here, this helps: Another thing you can do to compensate for a slow helve is, when you're processing iron blooms for it? Don't just feed the slag-covered lump directly into the machine. You can manually knock off up to nine voxels of slag with one hammer blow. So, DO that. Get all the big chunks off and then let the helve move the iron voxels, which it is more efficient at. That technique is actually useful even with a full-speed helve; it's possible to process about forty blooms in a long night with two forges going. After all this, it's "get more sails." That's a matter of running around more widely in the first couple weeks after world launch, and teaching your eyes to see flax plants at a bit of distance, and getting your farmland going quickly. Nothing magic to do there, just practice, and maybe running 5k blocks or so south of temperate start for your first base. (Flax seems to be most common between z=5-15k.)

They're just here to sell you Amway. Okay, seriously, either a temporal storm or a night on "High" rift activity after the first-summer grace period is over will get you this many drifters. Usually they'll all run off in the morning. If not, you can just open the door and run out past them, go a couple hundred squares, wait half a minute, and come back; they should be despawned.

Something I've been noticing for a while now: when I see a single nugget of whatever type (copper, lead, etc.) on the surface in 1.20, I still get a surface deposit, but deeper than used to be possible. Like, six or seven blocks down into the rock. Is this just me, or is it the new normal?

This happens frequently with iron. There's a fair chance there's a disc in there somewhere; it's worth dropping a few boreholes to check but don't be shocked if nothing turns up. Could be worse; borax almost never shows up as better than "Poor."

I've seen the food bar thing in... I don't keep track, but a couple three different 1.20 builds including whatever's most current. Also, not animals, but invincible drifters that don't do anything is a rare but known occurrence. Audio-- do you mean the thing where you run for several hours, and eventually it loses your footstep noises? That's been happening since at least 1.19. So yeah, most of these at least are Things That Happen. None of it makes the game unplayable, and none of it seems to lead to anything worse like crashes, so *shrug*.

Tower up! At altitude 170 two sails on a rotor runs the helve a reasonable amount of the time, three sails is "usually", and four sails, 256 string, is full-time. If only I were good enough at sculpting to make a decent-looking airboat hull, I'd be set for life. Also, if you go down to z=5-7k from a temperate start you will find two or three sacks worth of flax just from scouting surface copper, if you do it on grass.

One of the people I follow on other social media is a stonemason. He was just at the cathedral of Notre Dame during maintenance. They had to take the wooden door frame from one of the entrances to get at the actual wall, and he got photos. What's going on here is, this is a cut stone facade over what he calls "rubble construction" for the actual walls. He's got some interesting technical points to make, but for VS players the message is clear: even the most Serious and Fancy medieval buildings are made of cobble. It's not even good cobble, it's whatever they could dig up. Go forth, my children, and build impressive stuff out of cobble. (original post is at https://bsky.app/profile/jamestaite.bsky.social/post/3lpkznfyfok2l)

Wind is directionless; the VISUAL is always a west wind, but it doesn't matter what direction you point your windmill. Considering the extra weirdness they'd have to build to allow pivoting windmills I don't blame 'em.

Y'all gave wooden doors and trapdoors a proper animation a couple years back, but the iron doors still just, y'know, TELEPORT.

Without the loose change it isn't enough weight.

Something useful to do if you haven't found clay ever yet, is to start a creative-mode world and manually create some "Red Clay In Soil" and "Blue Clay in Soil" blocks. Give your eyeballs a chance to learn what the things look like; makes it a lot easier to find them.

Yup, I've done something like this with chiselling. Results aren't perfect but it looks good unless you jam your face right up into it. Also you can make mixed-stone cobble if you have the patience (I don't).

This is not normal, no. VS is just a Windows application, it doesn't do anything particularly weird when installing or running.

One of the good things about rotting \dough is that you can use flax. It's only half the food, but it gives you the full amount of ick! My things: Don't make a copper anvil. The time between Baby's First Pickax and Toddler's First Bronze is less than a week, doing a SECOND molded anvil is half a night all in itself, and the copper anvil stops being useful much sooner than the bronze one. Bronze spears are the best weapon vs. nearly every surface creature, drifters, bears, whatever. Use one for a while and you'll understand why there is no iron or steel spear. You can use a metal plate as the starter material for forging. It is the BEST way to make chain or nails & strips (use the 8-piece recipe). When processing blooms with a helve, use a hand anvil and hammer to knock the big chunks of slag off before you put it in the machine. Since you can knock off 4-6 lumps of slag with one hit, the total operation goes about three times as fast. Also, keep two or three forges going to heat blooms

I think the idea is that dairy is the steel of satiation bars. It's for the few, the proud, the idiots who don't mind being kicked in the head by a goat now and then. Goodness knows I've never managed to get a bucket of milk.

Fish pretty much suck. Honestly wolves are a better food source. Get good at digging the standard pit trap (3x5x2 deep) and pulling wolves into it. Two per day is just about enough to live on, if you eat some of the fat lumps. Remember to mark your pits on the map and come back every, dunno, couple months; you tend to get rabbits. A regular pit trap near crops will also grab the bunnies that might want to eat your turnips; animals run around randomly enough that they always end up falling into whatever pit is nearby. Really the solution to "my farm isn't grown yet and I don't have food" is to range more widely. You need to look at everything within a thousand or two squares of your house ANYWAY-- bees, surface mineral deposits, the various tree types, building up seeds for ENOUGH farm (should be about 64 squares to keep you alive through winter, maybe another 32 for more flax). You'll be able to find enough berries and wild crops if you just cover enough area.

1.20.10 seems to have broken the scythe animation. You're supposed to see it come down then swipe left/right; now it just comes down and sits still in front of you. It's kind of silly looking

"A portal to death has opened.. on you."

hang on, gotta set up an alarm in my phone for 2029... (but yeah, the massive necro-ing is a bother)

Now you need to sculpt a Mustang and a Trans Am...

You cannot insulate a room with windmill-driven machinery in vanilla VS. There's a mod out there that creates a "Wall With Axle Through It" block to deal with that. Personally I play without mods, so to stay warm while smithing I set up my helve hammer on one side of a wall, put a door in the wall so I can reach through and put things on the helve's anvil, and then me and the forges and my hand anvil stay on the other side in a warmed room. Looks like this.

*looks* ..huh. I wasn't aware that stone path CAME in slab. I wonder if that's new, or if I've just been ignoring it for years? Still guaranteed to look funny though

There's an option you can poke to enable underground farming. You'll need that, it's somewhere behind the "customize world" button on the world-creation screen. There's also a server command to enable it on an existing world, which I completely don't remember. Once that's on, a LITTLE bit of depth like what's shown here doesn't really do much, but the temperature does increase gradually as you go down. There's a multiplayer server that dug a Big Hole over the past few weeks -- like, LARGE Big Hole-- and they're planting tropical stuff on the lower terraces because it just never gets cold there. The Big Hole people have posted several videos about it over on r/vintagestory, the last one is at

yeah, slabs are just Bad for this. No speed bonus, expensive, and cobble does not look right. There are several better options. If you really hate dealing with stone path blocks, the wood path is easier and faster -- you make stacks of 'em in the craft grid and then lay them ON the ground. Doesn't give as much speed boost and you may not like the look as well. For REALLY cheapass path you can just place a stone on each square, which at least prevents grass growth and marks the spot. In open areas you can put up a dirt pillar every 30-50 squares.

Run support beams across to cover the lines in the stone, and maybe some diagonals? But really, warehouses LOOK like this. Huge blank wall with maybe one window in it, this is typical. If it were daytime I could walk over to the couple warehouses in the neighborhood and take photos for you, but they're incredibly bland and boring anyway