Silent Shadow

Are you playing as nomads? That is the only time I have needed more space. What are you moving that 24+ slots isn't enough?

Smelt nuggets as usual.

Sort of. In this case we aren't really preserving the food itself (pickling, salting, cooking, drying, etc.), we are just storing it somewhere that prolongs the time until it spoils (shelf life). Taking the food out of the room will subject it to a faster spoiling rate. I was not taking care to differentiate the two above though.

Yeah, but this is ugly as sin. A larger windmill wood look way better, but should cost more to offset the reduced gears and axles required.

As that other person, I concur, but I will add that I have seen this over a few worlds (most pre-homestead update, but that shouldn't matter). As for finding bauxite, your best real option is to cover distance and hope to spot orange on the map. The game has geologic formations such as mountain ranges and continental shields, and sedimentary layers have the best chances of spawning in shields, but there is no good way to identify a formation until you map it, so this is kinda useless. You can also use the propick to look for Lapis Lazuli, as it only spawns in limestone (nice to have), the marbles (uncommon), or bauxite (the goal). This can be a quick check in flat areas where there are no caves, but you want to check for lower bauxite layers (not all bauxite has it though).

That is not what I found. Wood does indeed provide a bonus. Below is a comparison of an outside pot, and two 3x3x3 blocks with a pot inside, one wood and one dirt, at 15 C : Outside pot - (V)egetable: 0.41, (G)rain: 0.28x, (O)ther: 0.55x Dirt enclosed pot - V: 0.19x, G: 0.13x, O: 0.26x Wood enclosed pot - V: 0.2x, G 0.13x, O: 0.26x The shelf life of grain and meat placed in the pots mostly reflects the above numbers in its lifespan (keep in mind your "days per month setting" will alter the "years" a food lasts for): Outside pot: Grain - 3 years, Meat - 2.7d Dirt enclosed pot: Grain - 6.5 years, Meat - 5.8d Wood enclosed pot: Grain - 6.4 years, Meat - 5.7d Once at ~8 C, the difference was negligible between dirt and wood enclosed pots. Dirt: Grain - 6.5 years, Meat: 5.8 days Wood: Grain - 6.4 years, Meat: 5.7 days No real change in difference between the two pots' reduction stats after some time/seasons. Dirt: Grain - 4.7 years, Meat: 1.1 days Wood: Grain - 4.7 years, Meat: 1.2 days Once we look at higher temperatures (37 C in this case), the advantage of dirt/stone cellars becomes apparent: Outside: Grain - 74.8 days, Meat - 10.8 hours, V: 1.8x, G: 1.2x, O: 2.4x Dirt: Grain - 4.9 years, Meat: 5.2 days; V: 0.19x, G: 0.13x, O: 0.26x Wood: Grain - 1.6 years, Meat: 1.8 days; V: 1.47x, G: 0.38x, O :0.76x Looking at the data, it is pretty clear that blocks other than stone, dirt, and ceramics will give a bonus to food shelf lives. Stone/dirt/ceramics give almost an equal bonus at 15 C (a very common temperate temperature), but foods sheltered within "cellars" will not suffer additional spoilage due to higher ambient temperatures. Basically, stone/dirt/ceramic walls are only better than wood in hot climates, and wood does give a bonus to food preservation. That said, dirt is pretty much everywhere so you may as well build a cellar with it. You probably broke the game's recognition of the room, as having the pot in a room (cellar or not) about halves the spoilage rate. As for the slightly lower spoilage rate you got after putting in cobblestone blocks, the amount of sunlight reaching the cellar may have changed (either by you rearranging the entrance or a change in the sun's path slightly altering the path of sunlight to the cellar.) Try removing all doors and trapdoors and filling them in with solid stone/dirt/ceramic blocks.

The game Eco had dirt and stone ramps players could make for this purpose, but there is no real point to carts as carrying capacity is rarely a long distance issue.

Stone and earth are supposed to give better results than wood, but the main thing to account for is temperature. Stone and earth are better insulators than wood and so give a better bonus. The game seems to track temperature beyond just ambient climate temperature, but I am not sure if it is on a block by block basis or not. Keep in mind that cellars are only a benefit if the ambient temperature outside is 8 degrees or more.

The downside would be to remove one of few reasons players have to leave their base, and one of even fewer reasons to build a road. I do wish you could recruit people to live and work in your village though.

Well, history has plenty of examples where much of the metal smelted from an ore ended up in the slag rather than the ingot, so there is some basis for better smelting resulting in more metal from ore. Crushing ore, either by hammer or heave hammer, should not increase the amount of metal recoverable, and it should only reduce the amount of slag generated (which is entirely absent in the game) and reduce the fuel needed.

The realistic options are panning, which would only see nuggets from eroded ore sources (i.e. not most ores), or crushing and melting the entirety of all rocks/gravel/sand harvested at an enormous energy cost (fuel and player calories). Second option is not done IRL, as it is vastly inefficient, from durability losses of hammers from crushing rock/gravel (the whole point is to get metal, not lose it), the staggering amounts of fuel and flux required to separate and reduce the metal, and the massive amount of slag waste generated (in the game however, slag is not depicted). Probably neither is gonna happen, so you should just increase the amount of ore spawned. I like the idea, but disagree with changing prospecting, you can already find ores pretty easily and wood is pretty cheap. Even using logs every few blocks would not be that bad. Apart from ladders though, there is no real reason to invest in mine infrastructure. Most real mines invest in ventilation or moving rock by the tons, neither of which are an issue for the player thanks to no weight limit, the cheap mining bags, and the player's apparent lack of the need to breath. Blasting bombs are not useful because they do not save you any time, with the debatable exception of low value quartz. Theoretically they would be quite useful if used to counter a severely reduced mining speed, the player would only dig a hole and then place a charge in and blast the rest of the tunnel in seconds instead of digging it after some time. What defeats this idea though, is the fact that players do not need tunnels nor shafts wider than 1 block. Since blasting charges only serve to widen holes, their only reasonable application is to quickly blow apart ore deposit discs and they negate this advantage by deleting some of the ore (10%?). Perhaps a better idea would be to use the chisel and hammer to cut a 2x2 voxel hole 2 blocks into the rock face and place charges in it, this way players could blast tunnels out in a direction quickly instead of just widening a hole out,

Glass blowers can use molds to facilitate quick production. You would take the molten bubble at the end of a tube and place it in a 2 piece mold, and then blow the bubble into the mold to make items such as bottles or jars. Free blowing glass becomes quite complicated though, as it relies on spinning the workpiece and pressing mandrels or tongs into it, cutting it with pliers, fusing new glass pieces onto it, etc. Maybe the devs will introduce a "lathe" system where you build a type of workbench and when you right click on it, you automatically spin the item and you then have to press tools into it to form the item. Quite complicated, but it could at least to used in other industries.

The benefit of lamellar armor is that you can quickly make it. All of the other metal armors have to be forged whereas you can cast all the metal pieces in one go, assuming you have the molds. Also more fuel efficient as the ore is only heated once.

The game could use more movement options, but I would rather see the translocaters get more love as the fast travel option. I find that roads are enjoyable to build and use in this game, especially when the terrain is rugged or just impassable, but they are only worth it for a few reasons: traders and some mines. If you could fast travel from any trader to another, roads would cease to have any real impact. There is no point to boats unless you could bring a lot of stuff in them as your character can swim just fine. If this does become a thing I would expect a significant cost to doing it (20+ rusty gears per km or something similar).

So turn rocks into sand for more panning? Wouldn't mining the ores normally be more metal efficient and faster anyway? Why bother? I also don't really like how it passively rewards the player with "byproducts" for zero extra effort. If people want resources, they should have to work for them in a survival game. Just giving it to you is not going to make it valuable to the player, they should have to mine them as ores. If you want these available as early teasers (or gambling) for players just make the nuggets of the ores spawn in the ruins' loot pots. This system would also make players have to decide whether to keep these one or two special nuggets early on in their limited space or chuck it out for something immediately useful or more valuable (which I am fine with, but you may not be with the FOMO thing you said above) Doubling the ore just doesn't make sense as you said, but I do like the idea of crushing ore with the pulverizers, which would be nice if only to prevent having to replace the hammers I normally use in exchange for time and power. You would get to save the metal for the hammers for something else and it would be a nice function for an otherwise underused machine, but it would not break the game.

This is like saying zombies are overpowered in Minecraft or chickens are too strong in Runescape. Drifters are only a problem if you cannot maneuver or block them off, and it is easy to do either on the surface. Where to start? It is not like combat in Vintage Story is all that complicated. It takes 24 hits assuming you don't do what l33tman said and burn them, and you have a very fast attack rate with melee weapons (except spear thrust) to the point that killing one takes around 5 seconds. Not great, but if you set a patch of grass on fire and draw them over it, they will die much faster and you can hurt multiple drifters at once. If you want easy kills, jump into the water shown above (not anything deeper, unless you place a torch) and abuse their severely reduced speed to safely poke them to death with a spear (works on wolves too). If you are missing health, horsetail and reeds are easy to find in most forests. The lighter armors (even improvised) do wonders against the surface drifters too. If you find yourself running out of spears, just carry a club around or a small stack of flint spear heads. Each spear can kill 5 drifters with just thrusts, so two should see you through almost all fights. Any sword (like the one you have in your pictures) should be able to kill at least 75 surface drifters before breaking. If you need to stick in an area, then you can always (ugh) abuse the pillar strategy while marking your map or making a new spear. You can also make a safe area (fences are cheap to make) or sleep. If you are just passing by, then you can easily out pace drifters. I cannot remember the last time I lost half my health to surface drifters, let alone die, so I kinda wonder if you are just not very skilled in combat (which is fine, but don't assume everyone is playing at that level when making assumptions/assertions about the game) since you are struggling against packs of three drifters with an iron sword.

If you didn't enable node search on the prospecting pick then type this into your chat (t): /worldConfig propickNodeSearchRadius 8 Finding ores is much harder without it. In general, efficient prospecting goes like this: Figure out what the parent or gangue rock is for the desired mineral/ore; you can check from the handbook or from this handy table. This can help prevent wasting your time searching in areas that will never have it or helping find areas with the highest grades (poor, medium, rich, or bountiful; not % chance of finding them) of ores. Case in point, Galena (lead) and borax can only be found in sedimentary rocks which are always the top layer of rock (usually, basalt and other sedimentary rock layers can be on top too but this is uncommon), so if you want those minerals, you need to find one of the 8 sedimentary rock layers like sandstone or chert. If you want cassiterite (tin), then you should look in regions without a top layer of sedimentary stone layers to increase your chances of finding a deposit closer to the surface or of a higher grade. In a region with the right rock types, you can start doing prospecting samples (needs to be done on stone, with 3+ blocks between each sample in one axis {x, y, or z}). Record the results on the map and compare; you should be trying to first locate the mineral/ore you want and then trying to find the highest concentration of it you can find. (Optional) Once you find the highest point of concentration, you can do a grid survey around it to find out the ideal area to be looking through for ores/minerals. This makes it easier to dig in from a cave/tunnel/shaft that spawned naturally. Once you know the area you need to mine in, you should look at the depths the ores/minerals spawn at and get down to that level (keep in mind that some heights are based on distance to the top of the ground and others to sea level. Read carefully). Generally it is much cheaper to dig vertically than horizontally, as ladders are much easier to make than pickaxes are. You can use tunnels and caves you found to do that and save time and pickaxes, but keep in mind that you will have to deal with the dangerous denizens of the underground. Locating the actual ore/mineral deposit will consist of using the node search function of the prospecting pick (switch functions with f), which will detect any non-stone ores/minerals within 8 blocks. If you do not find a deposit, try digging a shaft or drift 16+ blocks away (twice the detection radius) and use the prospecting pick again. Eventually you will find the target deposit. If you want to save on pickaxes, try to dig with more vertical shafts than horizontal drifts as your character cannot traverse 1 block high openings. The ideal search method will resemble roots branching off downwards. The final step is triangulating the ore deposit. The prospecting pick will only reveal the amount of ores around it in an octahedron, so you will need to check how the readings differ along each axis (x, y, z) to find the deposit. When checking along an axis, you should keep checking until you read a change in the amount nearby. Mark the change with something (torches work well) and go in the opposite direction until you get the same change and mark that spot too. In between the two marks is where the deposit sits along that axis. Repeat for the other axis and you will find the deposit. Good Luck!

How? Even with the worst conditions (weak character, worst steel armor, no satiety hp bonus) he should have needed 6 hits to kill you. I usually take my armor off to heal unless I am almost dead and still fighting, but it is still fine to heal during a fight since their damage reduction matches your reduced healing. You can also save food by blocking off the entrance to the ore deposit you are mining out and taking off your armor while you mine. If you really want to save on hunger rate and movement speed, you can keep your armor off and in your hot bar. If you see/detect a threat, you can fully suit up in a second by selecting the three slots and right clicking. You will be vulnerable to surprise attacks though, so awareness (sound and constant visual checks) becomes essential to survival.

Tool Durability is in the game for the same reasons hunger, healing over time, having to fuel your furnaces and cooking stations, dark nights, and other aspects are in the game. They are challenges for the player to overcome but not in a "I did it" kind of way, but a "I built a system to overcome it" way. Temporal storms are a challenge on harder difficulties because of the increased creature damage and much bigger food cost to skipping them. Most people do not like them on lower difficulties because they do not add much to the experience. There are plenty of reasons to restrict choice in a game. Hard choices are much more interesting to make than easy ones, but they are only possible when the easy/best options are not available. Such things may not matter for a creative game, but for those who want a more survival experience, such choices are much more interesting to deal with. Players are also notorious for giving themselves a bad experience in order to proceed with a game as Rahjital said. Players have the choice of sticking with stone tools with a low investment or they can put the work in for better metal tools that out perform stone tools in numerous ways.

Good, anything that discourages a player from just standing on top of 2 blocks and not doing anything for a good while is a good thing. Players should be nudged towards activities more fun than standing around listening to drifter serenades. That said, I doubt many people do this regularly as it is so boring (but then people like panning, so what do I know). And a good thing for people who like ranged attacks. People cannot seem to agree on anything about combat except that it needs improving. Some people will be unhappy regardless of what is implemented. Not introducing a new feature that adds substance to the game for most players because some (ideally the minority of) people may be unhappy with it will only allow the game to stagnate. There is also the configurable nature of Vintage Story that enables players to tailor the game to their preference, so more options should always be good regardless of popularity. Doubt it, pillar strategy is the least attractive option and I bet most people only do it when they have no other options they are comfortable with (such as walking around in the night or forest). If they are not skipping storms already I don't see why they would when pillar strategy is gone. Also good, and though it depends on the ranged attack, you at least would have to work on your pillar a bit then or carry more materials around. If ranged attacks are not good enough then perhaps a floating ghost entity that can pass through all blocks would suffice as Thalius suggested. You could run or fight it, but pillars would not save you. It is a strategy in the sense that you are gaining safety at the expense of the most valuable resource: the player's time, and there are already simple strategies better than it that have apparently not eliminated it. It is a time wasting crutch for a bad player imo. Can't you make a structure with slab floors (offset from full blocks) that prevents them from spawning inside? If you make crenellations or arrow loops on your castle tower or fortress you could kill the drifters from range too. There are a few reasons to restrict players' options. Game balance: Being able to farm drifters for gears and flax upsets the balance of the game as items like temporal gears and rusty gears are supposed to be rare and flax fibers and their products are meant to be quite limited until you get a farm running. Farming gears should require either a lot of time to acquire (set up infrastructure to "farm" them via trade goods or spawns, or exploring for ruins to find them; otherwise, items the traders sell would also be too easy to get. Temporal gears should be rare enough that players cannot just drop spawn points often but maybe once every few IRL days, otherwise the fear of death is not an issue. in multiplayer this is more important as players will stop feeling the need to rely on each other so much as just depending on the ever present Protect player from not experiencing stages of the game: Having quick access to metal tools via traders and linen sacks/armors from flax fiber drops before having to make many stone tools or crafting the lower tier armors (wood lamellar for example) would skip entire phases of the game. Being able to cheaply (relatively, when farming gears) purchase everything from traders means you don't need to setup or upgrade the infrastructure for making the items traders sell. Maybe you would prefer to start in a later progression stage, but you can already do this by changing to creative mode and giving yourself whatever items you want and then switching back to survival. Maintaining a survival aspect: Being able to cheese a portion of the survival challenges detracts from the survival theme/mood (if you don't want to deal with it and just want to build/explore, that's fine but you should just disable the storms entirely and let it become a harder challenge for those who want it) and the accomplishment of overcoming it. Protect the player from themselves: The game will not seem very fun if you have to sit idle doing nothing while you wait on a pillar simply to not die. A better option is to force players into something more exciting so their time is not wasted by a boring experience, even if they die more often. Players can have the experience of learning and getting better or they can at least decide not to deal with it.

The pillar strategy would quickly be dropped if there were enemies with ranged attacks.

If you have an ingot, you are better off just forging it into the tool you want than remelting and casting.

I think it would be cool if sharpening were part of the crafting process. You take the tool from the mold/forge and put a finished edge on the tool. Durability should still decrease with use but there could be a separate property of tools: sharpness. Having a sharper tool/weapon would have a higher attack damage or harvest speed, but the sharpness level would fall with use and every time you sharpened it, the durability would be decreased. Players would have to decide between maximizing tool speed and weapon damage, or maximizing the tool's lifespan albeit at slower speeds. Recycling should be a thing, but the majority of the metal should not be recoverable, as it would reduce the amount of mining the players needs to do as well as all the supporting activities done to support mining.

Right now, I would say temporal storms only have an impact on the early phase of hard difficulty games. On Wilderness Survival mode, where creatures have 50% extra damage and the player has a 125% default hunger rate, temporal storms become much harder to ignore. If you want to skip it, you have to spend lot of food that may not be easy to gather in the early game. If you want to keep exploring, you have to be careful where you go and you may not be able to harvest all the resources you find. You can kill the high level drifters for the flax fibers and gears but at the risk of being killed and losing your stuff. Later in the game when those resources are easier to get by other methods, temporal storms become more of a tax on the player's time.

Just so you know, this also includes the cross hairs when not in your inventory or a container. You can look at a block in range and press shift + h and it will bring up the handbook entry on it.