RedPine

How do I find error logs? Edit: For those in the future who want to know, C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\VintagestoryData\Logs Note that logs are NOT found in Roaming\Vintagestory, you have to go up to roaming, then go to VintagestoryData.

Wind coming from the west isn't as weird as you'd think. That's actually the "default" direction of all wind on Earth due to it's rotation. At least at the midlatitudes, ignoring terrain, and even then only inbetween weather events, and even then only while the jetstream is behaving itself, and even then... <Insert Wall Of Text Here> ....but if you ignore all that, wind basically always comes from the west, regardless of hemisphere or continent. If you want a better explanation, look up "polar ferrel hadley" on youtube. It will blow your mind. Rant aside, it would be cool to have more interesting weather. The "normal" pattern is for the wind direction to slowly rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere, with the transition from southerly to easterly winds being associated with precipitation. That's another oversimplification, of course, because... <Insert Wall Of Text Here>

You could make the Temporal Spheres only improve stability by X amount each, so the worse the temporal storm or the worst the instability of the region (or both!) the more Temporal Spheres you would need.

Even after the 1.15 buffs, I can't think of anything a bow can do that using spears or running away can't do better. If we had more situations that a spear couldn't handle, such as skittish animals that would be hard to sneak up on, or more threats that had to be dealt with at long range, they would see more use. Bells are easiest dealt with from very long range, but it's even easier to just run away and come back after they despawn. You'd need a complete overhaul of how enemies spawn and despawn, and possibly create instances or dungeons, just to make the bow useful.

Currently, traders are obscenely common, restock every week or so, and only buy and sell very small quantities of useful goods. The optimal strategy is to find a spot with ~5 or more useful traders, build a road between them, farm the specific resources they buy, then do a trading run between them once a week. A more interesting gameplay environment would be 1/5th the density of traders, but each trader buys and sells 5x as much. The rarer traders are, and the more spaced out they are, the longer the roads and the bigger your trades would need to be. This would also heavily reward a translocator network. There's also the option of spacing traders out in time in addition to space. Traders that restock less often, or only show up in spring, or only after every other temporal storm, would reward creating "trading depots" next to traders. If the type of trader changed between storms, that would reward "scouting" traders once per season, followed by a rush to make trades before the season ended. This would be a bad idea on servers with long seasons, but it would make for more interesting gameplay as an option. Lastly, half of the trades seem useless. It definitely feels like the current version of traders is a placeholder. Artisans, for example, can sell fired crocks. A basic item you can make in any biome. You can sell them precious gemstones and useful clay... or easily mass-produced charcoal. Builders are even worse - is there a reason to buy anything other than glass from a builder? Who honestly needs to buy wood? Are any of you willing to sell lanterns - at any price? Hmmm... I wonder how hard it would be mod traders...

Archimedes screws require mechanical power, which can only be gotten from windmills unless you use mods.

Buggy behavior if you try to use the backpack slot while inside a claimed area like the trader wagons. After trying to take it on and off, I got weird behavior including but not limited to: Unable to switch held items (forced to hold reed basket). Rightmost backpack (a reed hand basket) vanishing Crashing

Necro for posterity: Light levels greater than 8 (9 or higher) prevent hostile spawns, UNLESS it is a temporal storm, in which case they can spawn anywhere. You can make "half hallways" out of slabs that prevent spawns even in temporal storms, as they cannot spawn "inside" blocks. I've used this method.

Oil lamps are the cheapest and earliest light source that never burns out. 1 clay bowl + 1 fat lump. It only has light level 11, but that still prevents spawns in a 2 tile radius, enough to protect a small room and roof quite cheaply. Torches are 14, like minecraft, and last for 3 days, which is plenty for caving. All other options require copper smithing at a minimum, but are way better.

Generally, there are 2 dangerous situations that good players encounter routinely. 1) Temporal Storm Solution A: Nerdpole and/or pit trap, stab everything to death with a spear. Bows not cost effective. Solution B: Jousting+Sword, requires expensive armor to be done safely. Bows not spammable. 2) Caving Solution A: Run away, wait for everything to despawn, run back, put torches everywhere. Solution B: Fall off a ledge by accident, engage in melee while the expensive armor prevents death. Because you need to walk up to corpses with a knife to harvest them, sniping enemies then rushing for their drops isn't viable. Worse, bodies despawn rather quickly, so you have to rush in eventually anyway. Even if drops don't matter, preventing enemy spawns with torch spam is more important than killing stuff. With all that said, I consider the +10% move speed trait on the Hunter class too nice to ignore... and if that trait comes packaged with a buff to bows, then I might as well use bows (and throwing spears - black bronze thrown spears have the highest DPS in the game AFAIK). I'm not sure how resource efficient it is to kill stuff with arrows, but it can't be much worse than the occasional hit to expensive armor that you get in melee - especially on Wilderness difficulty. Remember: most things can be dealt with by running away and digging pits. Weapons are a luxury for special occasions, so if you want to fight go ahead and use whatever style you enjoy.

Very helpful video. Do you consider the second prospecting mode as being a mandatory QOL feature? It's off by default, so I wondered if it was considered too cheesy for normal play. I didn't realize that surface rocks marked underground deposits. I kinda screwed myself by not marking those locations... I'll have to be careful when I survey new areas from now on.

That was far more helpful advice than I thought. After making the prospecting pick, I realized the cave that scared me off had twice the copper density of my previous lucky find. That gave me the courage to fully invest myself in conquering the daunting cave. Once I looked up a few spoilers and realized Minecraft rules still apply, it was fairly easy. Leave the zone to make enemies despawn, return, put torches everywhere, then relax and start mining... then hear noises and realize there was a dark branch I missed, then GTFO with a few thousand copper on me. If I didn't know about the despawn rules or the light spawn rules, it would indeed have been impossible. That's the sort of thing that should be in the survival guide.

I have a copper anvil, hammer, sword, and pick. How do I find enough metal to transition to mid game? The copper pick wears out faster than it can find copper ore at random (in a chunk that where I already found copper ore), the caves spawn an unending stream of drifters - rendering combat impossible under the best of circumstances, and I haven't found any traders that exchange renewable resources for tools. How am I supposed to progress? So far, I have two options: 1) Go on multi-day treks, scouring the surface for more stones containing copper. 2) Spend multiple IRL days sifting for ore. Both options are prohibitively time intensive, and wouldn't even make me strong enough to cave safely. The drifters spawn far faster than I can find ore much less kill them. Do I have to make walkways above the drifters to bypass combat entirely? Do I have to just run past everything, hope I don't get trapped and killed, in hopes of spotting ore? Nothing I can think of sounds feasible. Did I just get unlucky on ore spawns, and need to explore more? Is a nomadic lifestyle mandatory?

I'm a bit of a newbie, so this is just a work in progress, but it traps everything quite nicely. The half slabs look like full blocks, so they keep pathing up the stair (right behind the drifter) and falling down repeatedly. That said, it needs to be wider. Some drifters have enough reach to get one hit in when they come in from the left. After I've survived a 100% intensity storm I'll have a much more elegant and useful design, but for now this works. I don't even bother killing them - I just trap them in the morning to get them out of the way without needing to damage my weapons. Does NOT work on wolves! For wolves you need halfblock - empty space - halfblock, then can walk right over a mere halfblock - halfblock. EDIT: I have a ceiling to keep anything from dropping on my head, and a backup platform behind me in case my current platform is somehow compromised.