Michael Gates

I don't bother with terra preta at all, but I'll dig up hifert if I run into it. It's cosmetic farmland!

When the documentation for this talks about not letting sunlight in, it's talking about direct sunlight, a straight path in where you can see the actual sun. The sort of indirect, ambient lighting you get down a corridor and around a corner isn't an issue. So, if your kitchen is an enclosed room, you've got a tunnel down to the cellar (or stairs), a solid door at the bottom, and then the cellar is behind it, that counts as "no sunlight." Multiple layers of material don't matter. When the game is looking at "how effective is this cellar?", it looks at the insulating surfaces that directly enclose the room; anything behind those gets ignored. You can actually mess up your cellar by adding decorative wood ceiling beams, even if the structure itself is solid stone.

Run south for a day or two, collecting flax, baskets, and flint and recording the local geology Start with initial 3x3 dirt hut. Farm first, with a full stack of medium fertility soil turned into "pier" fields sticking out into a pond. Then run around hunting for copper bits (mark those spots) while collecting crop seeds, stones, and more flint. Dig up a stack of clay and make pot, bowls, crucible, and hammer/pickaxe molds. When I get more than about thirty copper bits, grab some sand and pan until I've got forty, build my first pick & hammer, start a pro-pick mold firing, and go collect the underground parts of the copper I found earlier. At this point it's usually May 6 or 7. During evenings, this period, I'll usually turn my stones into cobble and start building a 7x7x3 cobble room. Build the pro-pick and second pickaxe and prospect for tin ores. One set or the other almost always turn up on the first day, if not on the second. Dig up tin ores. Now it's June 4-ish, I have bronze, I have some turnips or carrots just about ready to pick, and a big enough shed to start doing real work in. Things vary a lot from here on out. It depends on what resources are nearby. If there are pigs or wolves, I'll probably trap those. If there's lime or I've found a surface borax deposit yet, I set up leathermaking barrels. If I've got the seeds, I'll make another 64 blocks of piered farmland. Eventually I'll find iron, build a dutch door on my hut to farm drifters, maybe start in on some megastructure or other.

That's the one! DANG it's loud.

I have had the same problem as OP; some songs are just much louder than others. That said... how do y'all know the song names? I would have loved to be able to complain about that one tune that was new in 1.19 AND ALWAYS BLASTED LIKE THIS EVEN WHEN MUSIC WAS AT ONE PERCENT, but have no idea what it's called.

The game didn't used to tell you how many items a recipe would output, so if you tried to make enough mortar for a cementation furnace you would do this by accident. The bad part is that there's no way to take just a little of it out...

I usually keep a stack of these next to my pit kilns, because peat is measurably better than firewood for those. Uh, not usually that MUCH of a stack

Yeah, bushmeat is suboptimal. That said.. food isn't really meant to be that big a deal. It's just not hard to keep yourself fed, to keep two or three of the sat bars full. There's no Invincible Super-Food, and trying to min-max just never adds up to much. (Terra preta matures your grain crops about a day and a half earlier than regular medium soil. It's still two crops a year in temperate zones.) The system's designed to make it easy to grow and carry enough food to spend a few days out doing Stuff, and be fine. I believe there are mods that give you more options for your wolf meat; you might want to check those out.

This seems plausible to me? Having SOME kind of reason to turn these on might be interesting; right now I just shut 'em off during world creation.

SOMEBODY owns them, and they're probably for sale cheap. Likewise any other Hytale assets, not that I know what that looks or sounds like anymore (I peeked into it once a VERY long time ago, it wasn't ready to play with yet, so I wandered on and bumped into an early VS build )

This is a *good* thing-- an interesting problem given to you by the developers, with a clever solution you can figure out. Contrast with, say, "health bar for water," which is just "you lose an inventory slot forever because you're carrying a canteen."

Yup. Dutch doors on your house and a bronze spear are a great way to farm drifters!

Drowning is the best way for a day-one player to deal with bears. IIRC it was added a couple builds after they introduced them... same time they added being able to climb three-block walls, maybe? It sounds like they're getting a little less aggressive in 1.21, and I hope it doesn't ruin this tactic.

How do you walk over a mountain? You go around, that's how. Sometimes you go around by a couple hundred miles, sometimes it takes a couple of decades and dozens of lives to find a decent route, some places you still come across the shattered wheels of wagons that took what "looked like" a good pass or the minivan some Germans used to try and push through an uninhabitable desert. (It took another few years before anybody actually found their bones.) We still hear about Hannibal crossing the Alps twenty-five hundred years later because holy beans he did WHAT? Vintage Story is duplicating this real world effect, and the nature of voxel games is that it can't LOOK like the real world to do it. In the real world, no long slope is steeper than twenty-seven degrees; that's the natural slump angle. K2 is, on average, less steep than that. So is Everest. But in game, a twenty-seven degree angle is NOTHING, it barely slows you down from a run. It's like, two-and-up, three-and-up, two-and-up. To get the same level of hazard as, say, the Front Range of the Rockies (where I grew up), you need some cliffs, ten or fifteen blocks high, and you need a wall of those going a few hundreds of thousands of blocks. Some terrain is to walk through. Some is to go around, and it can take a while to go all the way around.

It's a shame we don't have ray-traced lighting, so you could stick that in a darkened niche someplace and wait for somebody to walk by with a lantern. Auuuugh, wtf!

I never could fight one of these things to victory, so nowadays I just make sure I'm equipped with da feets. (Seriously I don't know a practical way to kill 'em. Just wall them off and go on with your day.)

Two of the three "monster" mob types just got added in 1.19, so, they just DID that, and then there's this oceans-of-bowtorns problem that either got fixed a couple weeks ago, or else STILL isn't fixed and people are just turning off the temporal storms to avoid it. I dunno which. So definitely in process. Also they did show off a model of a crocodile a couple months ago, which is kind of on the border between "critter" and "monster" to my mind. Crocodiles, eek. Only worse thing to fight would be an elephant with the ability to grab you from (spear range + 1) blocks and pull you over to the stompy feet. That said, they're mostly prioritizing the story content in these past few releases. Decided there's finally enough game mechanic, time to write some actual game. There are apparently some boss things you can play with if you do the Resonance Archive and stuff.

You can do underground halls, living spaces, forges, and farms without trouble. (Hint for the forge: build in a mountainside! Stick out a windmill somewhere up by the peak!) I suspect you would not be able to get enough fuel to sustain things purely from coal; I usually keep about 100x200 blocks of space for my wolf-and-charcoal plantation, and I just don't see excavating that. Also, long range travel would be silly.

Interesting that the guy who wrote the original guide didn't seem to know that you can grind marble stones to get lime. Not that you generally WANT to, but you can!

You joke, but I've put up "NEXT RESIN COLLECTION DATE" signs by my house more than once

Not a thing. You can make a bronze helve, and use it to bang on steel, and it will last forever and be fine. It's just that every other tool in the game will only work on stuff one tier above its own, and people make the assumption.

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."