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.

Yep, this is the thing that happens now. Time to start using bloomeries for this, which have their own annoyances but are now *much* more efficient than a firepit.

Long, cold winters are just.. boring, unless you've got some particular indoorsy project like making a statue of Kermit the Frog.

My understanding is that brown bears became about 5% faster in 1.22, so just running in a straight line works poorly. The ways I know to dodge bears are to run past trees right next to them (the bear has to go around), dig a 1-block-wide pit 3 blocks deep and stand at the bottom, or go up a 4-block-high nerdpole.

*finds empty outpost* /gm2 /spawn ... uh.. *looks at pile* "Led Zeppelin Trader"

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.